Comment by ViscountPenguin
4 days ago
> Yeah I’m gonna guess 99.9% of people making that criticism against academic philosophy don’t know those names.
The majority of people who hold just about any viewpoint are going to be uninformed, so arguing against the average holder of any idea is going to be pretty trivial as long as you know a bit of the subject matter. The value of an idea is surely roughly proportional instead to the strongest argument for it.
I’m not arguing against the average holder of the idea.
I’m saying that the argument that “academic philosophy is verbose and obscure on purpose” isn’t a good argument, and is most often repeated by people with little knowledge of the field, so often that it’s become something of a culture war trope. At the very least it’s a well-known quality of LW and similar spaces.
As in the comments above, there is often no actual paper, no argument, just vague assertions and a couple random name drops, as if that’s an argument.
How would you prove something is overly verbose?
Provide a counter-example where you restate it in less-verbose language without losing critical nuance.
This would, however, typically require developing expertise in a field, and then actually reading and understanding the thing being accused of being obtuse and verbose.
If you can demonstrate that you can do that for any arbitrary paper in a field, then sure, you'll convince me that its practitioners are long-winded gasbags.