Comment by keiferski
5 days ago
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.