Incoherent Style of Academic Writing

[Kron3007]

I have a friend who does this in their facebook posts.  I struggle to understand what they are saying half the time...

I always assumed that perhaps this is just how philosophy people write (I am in STEM), but you have given me hope that perhaps it is just him and not the whole field...

[Puget]

All this makes my thankful to be in a science field the prizes clarity and concision of writing. Having strict word/page limits for papers and grants helps I think, as does the explicit aim of clearly articulating the basis for your hypotheses based on past research, and communicating what you did and found in such a way that others in the field can replicate and extend it (that is, the idea that science should be cumulative). Major problems with clarity do not make it through peer review. By the time they are published, our papers may be dry, but they are generally clear.

Lack of clarity (in thinking and writing), poor organization, and over-wordiness are problems we try to tackle explicitly at the undergraduate and graduate level. Good, clear, writing can certainly be taught, if a field is motivated to do so.

There's the problem. You expect some sort of objective analysis is possible, so that others can replicate your findings. The reason a lot of the bad writing exists is to avoid the possibility of anyone having the chance to refute any of it. If they don't understand it, they can't challenge it.

The idea applies in the humanities in a modified form. I tell students that I know I'm reading a good undergrad paper when I start arguing with the author as I read it. If you've got me muttering "well, actually couldn't that also mean x" or "but, really, if you look at what z says, couldn't you interpret it as meaning..." it means that you're actually making an argument, using evidence to support it and the whole thing is compelling enough to engage me.

Bad papers never get there. There's usually nothing to disagree with.

See, the difference is in the sciences the authors are supposed to raise those possibilities themselves-- if the reader can think of a different plausible explanation for the findings, the authors should also be including it in their discussion section, and pointing out ways for future research to test these alternative possible explanations. They should also be pointing out the limitations of their work (there is nearly always a "limitations and future directions" section of the discussion section). If the authors have not done so, the peer reviewers most definitely will contribute a long list for them to incorporate ;)

[Parasaurolophus]

I mostly agree with you about the origin of the conflation between quality with difficulty. But whenever I've looked at texts in philosophy I've also noticed that they don't make things any easier on themselves because they delight in doing really tortured turns of phrase that do not have any meaning, and seem to be shoehorned into the text solely for the purpose of using a turn of phrase. Like 'This not only a classical problem, but in fact problematizes classification' or 'The origin of nature is also naturally original'. I've made up these examples, but they represent a really tiresome stylistic habit that I only see in philosophy. Yes, very cute, you've kept the same roots but swapped their order and part of speech. But it doesn't mean anything!

Does this show up anywhere besides philosophy?

Yeah... a lot depends on where in philosophy you're looking. There are several distinct, very different ways of doing it, each with their own preferred style of communication. And while work in the 'analytic' tradition is, on the whole, clearer and easier to follow (because clarity of exposition is explicitly prized), it also has its excesses and its own particular way of being obscure (e.g. the so-called Rutgers-MIT style which needlessly emphasizes logical formalism).

The language appears to make it very difficult for the philosophers to communicate. Some years ago, the Berkeley philospher, John Searle, won some big prize. I was curious what his contribution had been to philosophy, so I went to Wikipedia. There one can read that "Searle's early work on speech acts, influenced by J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, helped establish his reputation. His notable concepts include the "Chinese room" argument against "strong" artificial intelligence."

I felt no more informed than when I arrived. The definitions of speech acts, Chinese rooms and Strong AI were no more informative.

Could the wiki editors perhaps write a few sentences to help out the educated non-philosopher who just wants the gist of this intellectual contribution? The Nobel committee seems to manage that for some pretty abstruse advances in other fields, so I know it can be done.

So I checked out the Talk page (this old version since most has been archived since). Page after page of argument about every sentence, with the editors completely speaking past each other and none heading in the direction of comprehension. I think of that discussion as a good record of the communications morass in which they find themselves. Unfortunately, that morass dooms them to cultural oblivion regardless the profundity of their thoughts.

Yeah, but those are problems with Wikipedia rather than Searle's prose. If you want a better idea of how philosophers explain these things, check out the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy instead; the entries there, at least, are guaranteed to be written by actual philosophy PhDs. (The quality is variable, of course, and it's written as an encyclopedia rather than as an article presenting original research, but it's at least more representative.) Here's the speech act entry, for example, and here's the Chinese room entry.

That said, Searle's work is kind of shit anyway. It's the kind of stuff you could get away with in the hyper-uncompetitive world of the '60s, '70s, and '80s, but which frankly doesn't cut a lot of mustard today. It's okay, but I wouldn't write home about it if I saw it in print today. (Note: that's just me, though. Other opinions are definitely available.) Also, he's a serial sexual harasser and a pretty racist and awful landlord. So, fuck him.

You've probably already poked around and gotten these answers, but just in case:

The Chinese Room: This is a thought-experiment designed to elicit the intuition that there's a difference between understanding something and spitting out the right answers. So: an input-output device can perform really complex operations that make it seem like it 'knows' what it's doing, when it fact it doesn't. It just breaks the task up into a series of steps, and doesn't have any kind of special overall insight into the thing. So the idea was, if you're a native English speaker with no knowledge of Chinese, but you're given a sufficiently detailed set of instructions, you can translate English sentences into Chinese with perfect accuracy. But you still don't know Chinese.

Strong AI: The idea is just that a sufficiently sophisticated computer really does understand how to play Chess, the natural languages it's been programmed to use, etc. Weak AI, by contrast, just says that computers mimic these human capacities, but don't actually have them.

Speech acts: the kinds of tasks you perform by using language. In formulating a request like 'please pass the salt', for example, you're both telling someone you want salt, and also asking them to do something. Or, you know: when the officiant says 'I now pronounce you husband and wife' (or whatever they actually say; i don't know), they're not just saying things, they're also doing things with those words (viz., marrying people). So: speech acts are linguistic actions. Speech act theory gets pretty complicated pretty quickly, but Searle's contributions are mostly refinements of work by Austin and Grice.

I have a friend who does this in their facebook posts.  I struggle to understand what they are saying half the time...

I always assumed that perhaps this is just how philosophy people write (I am in STEM), but you have given me hope that perhaps it is just him and not the whole field...

Definitely not! All people know about philosophy tends to concern the historical 'greats', and most of them are pretty bad writers, especially those from the 20th century, some of whom were explicitly trying to be vague or modelling themselves on Hegel and the German Idealists. Contemporary analytic philosophy is not at all like that (and, in fairness, history of philosophy usually isn't, either, although it has different goal and guiding principles; continental philosophy has strands which are more or less committed to obscurity and forcing the reader to work hard, largely as a result of where they're located in the discourse). You could check out work by contemporary people (not the old people, but middle-aged or younger). Jason Stanley writes a fair bit of public philosophy, for example. I'm out in the world, so I don't really have the time to cast around, but if you're interested I can find you some examples.

For some of the progenitors of the contemporary style, you could have a gander at David Lewis or Gilbert Ryle (those are links to actual articles). Those are from ages and ages ago, so they're not really 'contemporary' any more, but they're by philosophers widely recognized as excellent stylists!

[mleok]

My professors told that the subject is so deep and profound that it cannot be made clear.

That BS, I subscribe to the viewpoint that numerous physicists and mathematicians have expressed, that if you can't explain something in simple terms, you don't really understand it.

[ergative]

All this makes my thankful to be in a science field the prizes clarity and concision of writing. Having strict word/page limits for papers and grants helps I think, as does the explicit aim of clearly articulating the basis for your hypotheses based on past research, and communicating what you did and found in such a way that others in the field can replicate and extend it (that is, the idea that science should be cumulative). Major problems with clarity do not make it through peer review. By the time they are published, our papers may be dry, but they are generally clear.

Lack of clarity (in thinking and writing), poor organization, and over-wordiness are problems we try to tackle explicitly at the undergraduate and graduate level. Good, clear, writing can certainly be taught, if a field is motivated to do so.

There's the problem. You expect some sort of objective analysis is possible, so that others can replicate your findings. The reason a lot of the bad writing exists is to avoid the possibility of anyone having the chance to refute any of it. If they don't understand it, they can't challenge it.

The idea applies in the humanities in a modified form. I tell students that I know I'm reading a good undergrad paper when I start arguing with the author as I read it. If you've got me muttering "well, actually couldn't that also mean x" or "but, really, if you look at what z says, couldn't you interpret it as meaning..." it means that you're actually making an argument, using evidence to support it and the whole thing is compelling enough to engage me.

Bad papers never get there. There's usually nothing to disagree with.

See, the difference is in the sciences the authors are supposed to raise those possibilities themselves-- if the reader can think of a different plausible explanation for the findings, the authors should also be including it in their discussion section, and pointing out ways for future research to test these alternative possible explanations. They should also be pointing out the limitations of their work (there is nearly always a "limitations and future directions" section of the discussion section). If the authors have not done so, the peer reviewers most definitely will contribute a long list for them to incorporate ;)

Yes. In my field it's very common in the discussions section for a writer to address alternative explanations, often with a footnote or even an explicit statement of the variety, 'An anonymous reviewer suggested that . . .' or 'I am grateful to a referee for this suggestion.'

[Hibush]

My professors told that the subject is so deep and profound that it cannot be made clear.

That BS, I subscribe to the viewpoint that numerous physicists and mathematicians have expressed, that if you can't explain something in simple terms, you don't really understand it.

Has that viewpoint been expressed by any string theorists?

[Caracal]

See, the difference is in the sciences the authors are supposed to raise those possibilities themselves-- if the reader can think of a different plausible explanation for the findings, the authors should also be including it in their discussion section, and pointing out ways for future research to test these alternative possible explanations. They should also be pointing out the limitations of their work (there is nearly always a "limitations and future directions" section of the discussion section). If the authors have not done so, the peer reviewers most definitely will contribute a long list for them to incorporate ;)

Yes. In my field it's very common in the discussions section for a writer to address alternative explanations, often with a footnote or even an explicit statement of the variety, 'An anonymous reviewer suggested that . . .' or 'I am grateful to a referee for this suggestion.'
[/quote]

Yes, my field too. I was talking about standard undergrad papers-in a thesis-never mind a book, you'd want a student to learn how to see and address contrary evidence.

Depending on how strong the point is and its relevance, it is often a good idea to bring it up in the text too. Its a basic principle of good argument that you need to address counterarguments and explain why you think your interpretation makes more sense. Of course, just like in science, that doesn't always prevent someone from seeing something the author didn't. That's sort of the point, after all. It would be embarrassing to miss something painfully obvious or that you would have picked up on if you'd read more in the field, but often it is just what happens when people with different ideas and knowledge read something.

[Sun_Worshiper]

Fortunately I'm in a branch of the social sciences that discourages incoherent writing, but certainly I've read my share of it as a grad student and as a reviewer. Authors should, at the very least, start with a simple explanation of the thesis before they dive into the dense and difficult prose. I'd also love for more reviewers to demand clarity from authors.

[mleok]

My professors told that the subject is so deep and profound that it cannot be made clear.

That BS, I subscribe to the viewpoint that numerous physicists and mathematicians have expressed, that if you can't explain something in simple terms, you don't really understand it.

Has that viewpoint been expressed by any string theorists?

Haha, that's a field which I think exemplifies the wisdom of that statement...

[phi-rabbit]

I mostly agree with you about the origin of the conflation between quality with difficulty. But whenever I've looked at texts in philosophy I've also noticed that they don't make things any easier on themselves because they delight in doing really tortured turns of phrase that do not have any meaning, and seem to be shoehorned into the text solely for the purpose of using a turn of phrase. Like 'This not only a classical problem, but in fact problematizes classification' or 'The origin of nature is also naturally original'. I've made up these examples, but they represent a really tiresome stylistic habit that I only see in philosophy. Yes, very cute, you've kept the same roots but swapped their order and part of speech. But it doesn't mean anything!

I'm in philosophy, and I can honestly say that I have never seen that kind of thing in any philosophy I have read and I have certainly never written anything like it.  I'm not well versed in contemporary continental philosophy, however, so perhaps it happens there.

[hazeus]

Some interesting examples of the problem with journals that encourage this kind of bad writing.

The Sokal affair

The Grievance studies affair

I have ambivalent feelings about the Sokal and Grievance Affair scandals. Detractors often point to both as evidence that the more "lefty" circles of humanities/social science are bullshit, but the closer you look at the details the less impressive both incidents appear. Like with the Grievance Studies Affair, I believe only a small portion of the submissions were accepted, and even smaller portion were accepted into actual journals (there was only one on the list that I remember being a legit journal). Furthermore, I don't think peer review is built to identify hoax papers as it's presumed that if a researcher says they did xyz or found abc data, they actually did so. Fabrication usually has a way of coming out one way or another.

That said, I appreciate the spirit and sentiment of the projects. I read a few of the proposed papers and had a good laugh.

[aginghipster]

(Most of this whole thread is written in bad faith.)

[hazeus]

(Most of this whole thread is written in bad faith.)

how so

[kaysixteen]

Bad writing, full of intentional obfuscations and/or unintentional ignorance, is bad, and usually is used to cover up for the fact that  the author has nothing much to say.   But let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater, and try to make serious scholarly writing look like stuff from a tabloid newspaper.   Adverbs and adjectives, properly used, add clarity, nuance, etc., as do more complex sentence structure.   Of course, it is true that classicists often do end up writing like Latin or Greek.

[ergative]

Bad writing, full of intentional obfuscations and/or unintentional ignorance, is bad, and usually is used to cover up for the fact that  the author has nothing much to say.   But let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater, and try to make serious scholarly writing look like stuff from a tabloid newspaper.   Adverbs and adjectives, properly used, add clarity, nuance, etc., as do more complex sentence structure.   Of course, it is true that classicists often do end up writing like Latin or Greek.

Yes, I agree. The problem (from a teaching perspective, at least) is that the opaque and transparent varieties of academic writing look very similar to students who are still learning the actual content beneath it. And so the writing they see is almost universally obscure, either because the writing is bad, or because, even if the writing is good, the content is hard. So there's this constant reinforcement that academic=obscure. And that stratum of experience underlies a lot of current academics' formative years in their fields.