Question Why do most philosopher's talk in language incomprehensible to normal people? Do philosophers study 'the' because they know there are a few million other words that they can study afterwards, and therefore be philosophers forever?

Accepted:
September 10, 2009

Comments

Thanks for your questions. I'll address them separately since they're quite distinct.

Question 1

I'm not sure that *most* philosophers talk in language incomprehensible to normal people, though I agree that some do. There are a number of reasons for why some do.

(1) Some topics in philosophyare technical. You simply can't get very far these days in certain areas of metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science (especially including subfields like phil of physics and phil of biology), philosophy of language or even ethics without mastering a lot of jargon. I don't think there's much that can be done about this, since these discussions need to make use of clearly defined technical terms to avoid confusion. In this respect the situation is not so different from math or biology. Here's a big qualification, though: In these cases the discussions are not *incomprehensible*. That would imply that they cannot be understood. Rather, they *can* be understood, but this just requires patience and determination. Just because some of these discussions might seem forbidding at first doesn't mean they're incomprehensible.

(2) Some philosophers do write in ways that are obfuscatory, and that is due in some cases to conscious intention and in other cases to sloppiness. Foucault is reported as having said on one occasion that unless at least 10% of what he writes is incomprehensible, French people won't take him seriously. (!) The idea seems to be that you can only be taken seriously if you get people to think: "S/he must be really smart, since I can't understand this at all." I happen to think this is not a good way of establishing one's own or one's field's credentials, but you were just asking for an explanation of the practice. I suspect Foucoult is not alone, though he might be unusually self-aware.

I should mention that the great majority of phil0sophers I know, and all those I work with, place a high value on clarity, and on being, wherever possible, as accessible to as many readers as possible. I personally spend a lot of time reviewing what I write to make sure it's as clear and as accessible as I can make it, and I'm constantly bugging my students about this also.

Question 2

Philosophers don't study 'the' for the reasons you suggest--or at least, I've never met a philosopher who gives that reason as her reason for doing so. Instead, 'the' is important because--not that one would have guessed this before l0oking into the matter--studying it helps us to see lots of subtleties and power in language that might not have met the "unaided eye". This word, a trigger to what is called a "definite description" can't effectively be understood as having its meaning in terms of referring to something. Rather, many theorists (and that now includes linguists and not just phil0sophers) think that 'the' is really a kind of "quantifier", and is not in the business of referring. Working that out takes a lot of machinery, though. For instance, working that out requires looking at lots of features in the so-called context of utterance (what speakers are presupposing as their common ground, what is salient, and so on) and not just bare relations between names and things. Also, getting clear on how 'the' works has been shown to resolve (or better: dissolve) some ancient metaphysical quandaries about what exists. Bertrand Russell opened up all this a bit over a century ago, and we've found that it's an impressively rich line of inquiry. For a relatively "state of the art" collection of essays on the topic, see Reimer, et al (eds.) _Descriptions and Beyond_.

Mitch and I posted our responses simultaneously! I agree very much with his ...

I'm not sure it is true that most philosophers talk in a way incomprehensible to non-professionals -- at least when they are trying to address them! After all, there are many, many, dozens of well-written, accessible, thoroughly readable books by philosophers written for beginners.

And even if books by philosophers written for other philosophers are difficult to understand, that isn't usually a matter of the language used: the trouble is more that the books tend to contributions to long-running debates, and if you don't know the background you probably won't grasp the point of what's being said.

As to 'the': why do philosophers of logic and language want to know how "definite descriptions" like "the present Queen of England", "the tallest man", "the woman in the corner drinking a martini" work? Well, it's part of a larger project -- understanding the way referring expressions of various kinds (proper names, definite descriptions, demonstratives, ...) hook up to the world. And trying to understand how our words relate to the world is surely a worthwhile and rather central philosophical project (that goes back to Plato and before).

Question Why do most philosopher's talk in language incomprehensible to normal people? Do philosophers study 'the' because they know there are a few million other words that they can study afterwards, and therefore be philosophers forever? Accepted:September 10, 2009

Question Why do most philosopher's talk in language incomprehensible to normal people? Do philosophers study 'the' because they know there are a few million other words that they can study afterwards, and therefore be philosophers forever?

Accepted:
September 10, 2009