Comment by atoav

> Academic philosophical arguments are enormously wordy.

They can be, and often they are, but not always¹. Sometimes I would be in anger over an author when I discovered that their incredibly verbose, roundabout argument using the rarest of words, with some of them redefined in their meaning, boils down to a very simple statement that could have been made in a single paragraph. As if the author wanted to obscure the obviousness of the point by making the language so complicated that the reader has to suspect there is more to it, while many of the points are just semantics. Much of academic philosophy falls into that category.

But not all of it. In some cases the reconfiguration of language, the introduction of new words etc, genuinely brings you to the edge of what is thinkable within that language with some truly novel angles as a result. This is then often very precise and rigorous thinking and the verbosity is a result of that.

The problem is then of course how to tell the two apart, since you have to follow the thought to decide into which category any given text happens to fall. With rationalist writing the issue however can be that sometimes there is no discernible train of thought to begin with.

I also studied philosophy.

--- ¹: Edmund L. Gettier: „Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?“, in: Analysis 23 (1963), H. 6, S. 121–123. This is just 3 pages long, many more such examples.