Rule 19 for history of philosophy: Beware of jargon

Posted on 22 April 2016 ..

Rule 19 for history of philosophy: beware of jargon

This is, I think, good advice for all kinds of writing in the humanities but it's especially relevant for philosophers and historians of philosophy. Contemporary philosophy, both analytic and continental (to use some terminology that in itself is questionable), bristles with off-putting jargon and also technical tools like logical notation to abbreviations and numbered propositions. There's certainly a place for this: philosophy is, among other things, about precision and rigor, and formal languages and jargon can be very precise. But analytic philosophers often make things unnecessarily hard on their readers by using technical symbols when normal language could say the same thing quite easily, or expecting the reader to bear in mind what lots of numbered theses stand for. (I recently read a book for the podcast that had so many numbered propositions in it that it needed a several page long appendix to list them all, meaning the reader must constantly flip back and forth between the main text and the appendix.) As for "continental" philosophy, the scandals of parody articles being accepted for peer review speak for themselves. Every time you introduce a new piece of terminology, abbreviation, or tag (like referring back to some philosophical claim as P, or 4*) you make it harder for the reader to stay with you, and an accumulation of these devices will make your text almost impossible to read. Of course their use is often justified, and what is incomprehensible for a general audience is often straightforward for a specialized audience. But the rule should be: don’t formalize, or use jargon, unless the gain in clarity, rigor etc is worth the burden you’re placing on the reader by doing so.

There are two reasons that this point is especially relevant to history of philosophy. One is that the use of contemporary technical tools and jargon brings with it the risk of anachronism (and by now you know how I feel about anachronism). My favorite example is the use of the “backwards E” or existential quantifier (Ǝ), for instance Ǝx which would be read “there is an x.” You can readily find examples of this symbol being used in work on ancient philosophy. Of course such notation was not used then, but that isn’t the problem. The problem is that one can have a long debate about whether ancient thinkers had a notion of existence that would correspond to the use of this quantifier, where anything can be put in for “x”. I would say not: just imagine what Aquinas would say if you insisted that God, a created substance, or a created accident must all “exist” or “be” in the same sense, because they can all be substituted for x in Ǝx. Similarly, using bits of jargon from contemporary philosophy can cover up the interesting fact that earlier thinkers lacked precisely the concepts or presuppositions behind that jargon. Again, I’m not saying it is never warranted, and I myself am willing to apply a term like “compatibilist” or “physicalist” to, say, the Stoics. But you have to be very clear in your own mind what these terms mean and whether they truly apply.

The second reason is that historical texts have their own jargon (see rule 9: learn the terminology). Of course using these terms is not anachronistic, unless you apply a term from one period of history to another period. But again, it is a barrier to understanding for the reader. I hate it when people write about Aristotle and use untranslated Greek, or about Avicenna with untranslated Arabic. This is like putting a note at the top of the piece that says “if you can’t read these languages, I don’t want to talk to you.” And same with unexplained bits of technical language (say, using “supposit” in a discussion of medieval philosophy without explaining it). Here too of course, the rule is not absolute. You might be writing a detailed discussion of the original terminology, which inevitably presupposes that the reader knows the original language. Or you may intend to write only for other specialists in medieval thought, who are just going to be annoyed and bored if you tell them things they already know. My suggested rule of thumb though is to err on the side of aiming at a broader readership, and not to erect unnecessary barriers to understanding.

Thomas Mirus on 14 May 2016

So true about untranslated

So true about untranslated Greek! That's a pet peeve of mine - or, more specifically, untransliterated Greek which means I can't even Google the term.

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