Philosophical Insults (Frances)

Thanks to Joe for the invitation to communicate.

Nowadays philosophers rarely call one another idiots in print (things tend to get a little nastier in private). But this doesn’t mean that they don’t insult one another in their publications. I thought it might be fun to catalogue some of the insults from recent literature. I’d like people to share their favorites in the comments.

My favorites are the more subtle ones. Suppose Jones publishes a criticism of Smith and then Smith responds in print. Smith can insult Jones in many ways. One common way is to use the phrase ‘It is curious that’, as in ‘It is curious that Jones thinks that my view includes the claim that P’. What is often (not always) meant is this: ‘Jones is a f**king idiot. He thinks I said that P, when any fool can see that I said no such thing’. Similar points hold for ‘It is interesting that Jones thinks that I said that P’ and ‘The proposal that Jones makes on my behalf is very strange, even borderline incoherent’ and ‘I am surprised that Jones says that P’.

Here’s a rather different way to insult: ‘In a useful article’, as in ‘In a useful article, Jones considers the claim that P’. What is often (not always) meant is something like this: ‘Jones wrote a largely boneheaded article on the claim that P; however, by working through his confusions we will be able to see the important points more clearly.’ I hope it’s legitimate of me to point out that Davidson did this in one of his classic articles, although I can’t remember which one. When I was a beginning graduate student at Minnesota, and full of myself, I did it as well in a paper written for a class. My professor, Joseph Owens, drew a line through the phrase and wrote in the margin ‘Out’. It was clear that I wasn’t going to get away with such nonsense.

I don’t want to imply that these insults are never deserved. On the contrary, on many occasions the author is responding to some jerk. And even when one isn’t responding to a jerk, the insult can be non-personal in the sense that the author is such a lover of the truth and hater of the false that he or she hurls invectives not at people but merely at ideas that strike her as false. I once had a colleague who often publicly destroyed visiting speakers, but it was plain to most of us—and often enough the visiting speaker—that his target was the ideas he thought were false. It was never the person advocating the ideas. This made the behavior more tolerable, even admirable.

The insults noted above seem a bit subtle. But maybe that’s the wrong predicate. Perhaps not subtle but restrained?

Baker & Hacker insulted Kripke’s interpretation of Wittgenstein with real gusto. Hacker also insulted the recent history books by Soames, who like Kripke is a rather mediocre philosopher. But their insults are usually unrestrained. Over the years Dennett and Searle have traded many insults, or at least remarks that looked pretty insulting. But I’m not sure that all those were real insults. Dennett has a good sense of humor, and it comes out in his writing. So perhaps he wasn’t really insulting Searle, although his Journal of Philosophy review of Searle’s Rediscovery of the Mind seemed pretty tough to me. I can’t speak with any authority about Searle. Of course, in that book Seale seemed to be telling us that just about everyone in the philosophy of mind had been making terribly elementary and boneheaded mistakes for many years.

As any child will tell you, being ignored can be quite an insult. In that vein, I recall a footnote in an article on the nature of belief by some moderately famous person. He noted that perhaps he should consider what Dennett’s theory would do with the example being considered in the body of the essay. But he declined to make the probe, saying that in reality Dennett’s exceedingly vague remarks could hardly amount to anything like a view worth considering. Ouch!

So: what are your favorite examples—restrained or not? Please don’t reveal the identity of the insulter, at least if he or she is still alive and isn’t already well known as one who insults opponents. I realize that it is easy to thumb through Nietzsche, say, and find some pretty potent insults. But I’m more interested in contemporary writers, not least because I think it might be fun to try to figure out the identity of the insulter!

It also might be interesting to note which famous contemporaries never insulted any of their many critics. For instance, did Rawls or Lewis ever insult any of their critics?