I am sure that “gadfly” is apt. And I don’t mind if certain people are annoyed by me.

I agree, the suggestion that Brennan owes me something is silly. But no one has made that suggestion. If anything, he owes it to himself to safeguard his credibility.

Something else silly is your (mis)understanding of the situation. Brennan made the “suggestion” (that CRT is pro-racism) in explaining why “calling CRTs a ‘klan’ is a way of properly mocking them for their badness.” The suggestion was not the joke, but was part of the explanation for why his prior comment was a joke. It is silly to think he wasn’t claiming CRT to be pro-racism.

I don’t understand. But all that matters is that, if he made the apparently ridiculous claim but is unwilling or unable to substantiate it, he apparently holds a ridiculous belief and thus loses credibility.

I have no clue why you say I’m deflecting.

Yes, academics often have quirky interests. I care more about truth and credibility than the proprietary of political commentary within a joke. If that makes me appear foolish to some, I’m OK with that.

I understood the joke, but I was more interested in something else. And I didn’t just let it go. Regarded as foolish or not, I’d do it again.

I mean, of course he was claiming that CRT is pro-racist. That’s the joke in calling a group of CRT philosophers a klan!

I hope you’ll go around to all the other comments on this thread with the same gusto—“you say a “murder” of utilitarians! This is because you think utilitarians endorse murder. Substantiate your claim, or risk appearing foolish! Otherwise you are just spouting nonsense.” Norms of discourse are at stake! We can’t have people expressing undefended beliefs on this joke thread!

… of course, that might be a little silly and time-consuming …

Oh I see. The fact that it was Brennan, someone who elsewhere mistreated others online, gave me a further reason respond. So I wouldn’t go at other fools in the same way.

I would’ve checked out the usatoday thing. But I have no subscription. So I have nothing to say about it.

I’m not very familiar with the political position implicitly behind the joke. Probably because I usually try to avoid foolish people, whatever their political position.

Can you be direct? What about my response are you criticizing? What is so troubling about what I’ve done? Is it that I’m creating division? Is it that my response indicates a failure to care sufficiently about what typical people care about? Is it that my response indicates a lack of concern for the interests of those on the right? What is it?

But that’s inaccurate. I haven’t missed the point. I’ve understood and appreciated the joke. I simply care about something else. For that reason, I then made a separate point. Apparently, this is very difficult for you to understand. Once you’ve understood it, you can stop because you’ll have recognized your mistake. Yet, you continue.

Well, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drunk.

Right, especially when you obscure the water once you get the horse there. Since you can’t bring yourself to reveal the water (your point) to the horse (me). I’ll do it for you.

This is your point: given the context of this conversation, a forum for delighting in humor and light-hearted banter, any response to a joke other than appreciating it or delighting in its humor is to miss the point of the joke. From this, it follows that my response of questioning a premise of the joke was to miss the point of the joke.

But you are incorrect: even in this context, one can question the premise of a joke without missing the point of the joke. This is what happened in my case.

Perhaps now you can finally recognize your inadequacy.

The unclarity is a result of the many differences between the actual situation and the situation you use in your analogy. First, my response didn’t occur in a comedy club, where most stand-comedians perform, but a forum for philosophers and would-be philosophers. Since there are different norms in different contexts, this is relevant to the propriety of my response.

Second, my response was not in response to a stand-up comedian’s joke, but a philosopher’s joke. The standards for the beliefs of comedians are different from those of a philosoper. This is relevant to the propriety of my response, as philosophers are expected to hold sensible beliefs even if comedians aren’t.

Third, my response wasn’t a heckle, as heckles typically occur as interruptions to a comedian’s set, but the questioning of a joke’s premise after the joke had been made and explained. This difference is relevant to the propriety of my response, as it’s not improper to question a philosopher’s premise even if it is improper to question a comedian’s premise during the set.

Fourth, the response wasn’t a gripe about politics, but a complaint about the apparent ridiculousness of calling a theory “pro-racism” when its main purpose is to clarify the relationship between racism and laws/government in order to make progress toward the elimination of racism and its effects. This difference is relevant to the propriety of my response, for a mere gripe about politics is a result of a minor disagreement whereas my complaint is not.

There are likely more, but these four will suffice to make my point.

These differences have the result that the analogy obscures your point. They make it difficult for highly imaginative people to know what features of the actual situation are relevant to your point and your criticism. This is true even if they know why heckling a comedian over a political gripe is improper, or why heckling sometimes misses the point.

Now that I’ve substantiated my claim, I’ll stop responding to you about my questioning of the joke’s premise.

I won’t use my real name until I’ve secured tenure at a top R1. But using my real name will not diminish my inclination and willingness to remark about credibility or inadequacy. The inclination occurs in response to the behavior of (and often mistreatment by) others toward myself or others. My remarks concerning your inadequacy are the result of the condescending, patronizing, or mocking tone you’ve taken with me despite your inferiority:

“But it’s pretty silly, it seems to me, to suggest that Brennan owes something to a pseudonymous gadfly in a blog thread devoted to quips about common nouns for philosophical specializations.”

“But you’re deflecting at any rate, as no one else has appointed herself the judge of what he owes anyone.”

“I hope that, in the calm reflection of one’s study, the claim that “people can see Brennan for what he is” on the basis of what he’s said here will be scoffed away at the turn of the page. So let’s agree to keep this thread in place!”

I already told you that I usually try to avoid foolish people.

I agree with everything you wrote, except what you wrote about the rule. Let me explain why.

I think some good general rules in all cases are:

1. A contributor is to never be overly confident.

2. A contributor is never to be imagination-lacking.

3. A contributor is never to be unduly condescending.

4. A contributor is never to be foolish.

Unfortunately, these rules are broken by the majority of people who contrbute here in conversations about divisive topics, whatever their political affiliation. (David Wallace is a notable exception.) This leads me to propose an additional rule:

5. A contributor who violates any of the above rules is to be called out for it.

Since compliance with this rule might result in reprisal if using a real name, pseudonymous compliance must be allowed. This conflicts with and trumps the rule you propose.

You misunderstood. (And importantly for the point I’ll go on to make, your comment did not misunderstand.) You say you agree “that there are good grounds for calling out comments that are inaccurate, unfair, condescending, etc.” This betrays your mistake.

I didn’t propose calling out *comments*; I proposed calling out contributors. And not for their comments, but for their being foolish, for their being overly confident, etc. I did so because the person can be the proper object of criticism. By exposure to their contributions, we can learn that contributors themselves are foolish, overly confident, etc., and not merely that their comments are. After a contributor (say) repeatedly misunderstands clear and direct prose, and those misunderstandings are conveyed by the person’s contributions, we can learn that the person is foolish, not merely that his comments are. Or (to your point regarding Stovall) when a contributor takes a condescending tone toward someone who has failed to understand his point due to his own repeated failures to clearly and directly express the point, we can learn that he is foolish, not merely that his comments are. So, a person can be the proper object of criticism because of his comments, even if none of his comments is.

Perhaps you can now understand why calling a person out for being foolish might be called for even if “[h]e didn’t seem to say anything foolish” or make a foolish comment. For it is clear that the foolishness might be properly attributed to the person, not to any particular comment(s). It might be that the person’s comments aren’t themselves foolish, but that he himself is because of his condescending treatment of another.

The conversation might be improved by call out such things because it can influence contributors’ behaviors. Calling them out can reduce the propensity of some to comment without due forethought. It can also fuel a desire to write clearly and directly, as well as a desire to reason carefully. Finally, it can reduce the likelihood that people will be overly confident in commenting, and that people will be unduly condescending.

I’m tempted to take your silence as concession. Have you understood yet? Or is this merely temporary silence as a result of an attempt to be more careful when trying to understand clear and direct prose?

Thanks, Justin. I appreciate the effort. I used to be more worried about people’s perceptions when I shared a view, but I’ve gotten over it as I’ve learned to speak up on these things, for the most part. So I’m comfortable with what I’ve said here, how I’ve said it, and the attitudes I’ve expressed in saying it. And I trust in the ability of readers to sort the wheat from the chaff in the conversation, or determine just where there’s need for more intellectual humility. If we all chose to remain pseudonymous until we had, as Jen says of herself, “secure[d] tenure at a top R1”, there’d be much less interesting conversation taking place in venues like this. 

Still, thanks for chiming in. I suspect the public spaces in the profession would be healthier if more level-headed people were pushing back on the rather fanatical pronouncements given voice in some quarters. And my sense is that personal invective doesn’t gets much uptake in the profession. 

All the same, it’s disappointing to see condemnatory admonishments like those directed at Brennan above. And the call to remove Brennan’s comment, on account of it’s contribution toward an “unwelcome atmosphere” and an “unpleasant space”, strikes me as almost satirical. If I hadn’t seen so much of it, I’d worry about a case of Poe’s Law. 

Anyway, I suspect a person would find that concerns of the sort Jen’s articulated in defense of her decision to remain pseudonymous tend to fade when one begins speaking in one’s own name. And those worries fade, in part, because one is adopting a self-regarding mode of cognition in which what one says is filtered through, as it were, an active perception of oneself from the standpoint of one’s interlocutors, knowing that they will recognize you. 

I think it’s something close to the essence of the human being qua rational animal that one’s good-faith effort to cultivate that kind of stance, as a public performance, does wonders for helping us better express what we feel, think, and intend (the transition from the singular to the plural first-person pronoun was intentional). It’s something like a natural collective habitus, or a capacity we readily acquire (as individuals living in communities we identify with) in the course of normal human development.  And by modelling this stance in the public sphere, we both develop our own fallible capacity for it, and help others recognize and pick it up more readily. 

But that stakes out commitments in the metaphysics of rationality, personal agency, and human nature, while this is a board devoted to quipping on common nouns for different philosophical positions, so I’ll leave it there. Take care!

“Also, I have to say, my interest in engaging people in conversation drops considerably when they speak as though the only way one could disagree with them would be to fail to ‘understand’ them.”

I suppose you think I’ve done this. Is it because I wrote this?

“Perhaps you can now understand why calling a person out for being foolish might be called for even if ‘[h]e didn’t seem to say anything foolish’ or make a foolish comment.”

I hope not. I wrote it in response to what you wrote:

“But I don’t see why you also need to call out the *people* who make the comments, especially when you are using a pseudonym that makes it impossible for others to do to you the damage you may do to them by calling them (not their comments) out…I just don’t see why that’s called for. [Stovall] didn’t seem to me to say anything foolish, but being a ‘foolish person’ is much more than that.”

I take it that as many do, you used “see” to mean “understand.” So I haven’t here written “as though the only way one could disagree with [me] would be to fail to ‘understand’ [me].”

Enough, Jen.

What you said was: “I’m tempted to take your silence as concession. Have you understood yet? Or is this merely temporary silence as a result of an attempt to be more careful when trying to understand clear and direct prose?”

Let’s look at what’s going on there.

Look at that sentence: “Have you understood yet?” It commits the complex question fallacy. If the answer is ‘yes’, then it follows that you are right and I have now understood the truth of what you say. If the answer is ‘no’, then it follow that you are right but I have failed to understand the truth of what you say.

What about the possibility that you are just wrong? Your question leaves no room for that possibility. It seems that you are not even allowing for the possibility of error. In your mind, you are clearly correct, and the only question is whether I am capable of understanding the truth you possess or not. It doesn’t seem to dawn on you that you might be the one who lacks understanding. A worthy interlocutor would acknowledge the possibility that the other person understands but disagrees.

Then you wonder whether your supposedly wise responses have led me to become enlightened to the point where I have decided to “be more careful when trying to understand clear and correct prose.”

This is remarkably condescending. You are not some master at whose feet I have chosen to study. In your own mind, no doubt, your prose is not only clear, but *correct*. This is a cheap move that any arrogant, narcissistic or bullying person can play, with the same results: just take for granted that you are right and the other side is wrong. Once again, it shows a failure to take seriously the possibility that other people can both understand you and reasonably disagree with you.

Let me say this again: I do not find what you said to be correct or plausible. I have given my reasons for some of it. Your behavior in this exchange, including in the passage I just discussed, makes it seem much less likely to me that you are the sort of person it would be profitable to have a conversation with.

You are of course free to think that everything you said is clearly correct and that only a lack of enlightenment can account for my not being persuaded by you. I, and other readers here, may reach our own conclusions. Whatever those conclusions are, I don’t intend to contribute more to this discussion.

No doubt, given how you have acted so far, you will be inclined at this point to add yet another comment making clear how dense I am, and how little I am capable of understanding. Rather than respond to such a thing, I will be inclined to leave this for you in advance: I suggest that you refrain from writing such a thing, since many no doubt are getting a stronger and stronger impression that you, and not I, are intellectually immodest having a hard time understanding things you disagree with.

But why should you care? You’re not here under your own name, and these narcissistic moves don’t have the usual reputational costs. And that, really, underscores the problem.

Enough.

Assuming you’ve understood my comments up to this point, I will now return to your argument. It’s this.

1. Calling out contributors using their own names (not merely their comments) sometimes damages their reputation.

2. If it does such damage, it should not be done.

3. Therefore, calling out contributors who use their own names should not be done.

The second premise is not plausible. The contributors who are to be called out in accord with my proposed rule have violated rules against being overly confident, unduly condescending, foolish, etc. It follows that they are overly confident, unduly condescending, foolish, etc. The reputational costs to such people are reductions in their prospects for jobs, conference invitations, networking opportunities, etc. So calling out contributors in accord with my proposal reduces the likelihood that people who are overly confident, unduly condescending, foolish, etc. will occupy positions conferring influence over students and the philosophical community. Overall, this is a good outcome, not one to avoid.

Additionally, calling out such people will have a positive influence on the conversations in fora like this one. Calling them out will fuel a desire to reason carefully, write clearly and directly, exercise intellectual humility, etc. As a result, conversations in these fora will be better than they currently are. This is a further good outcome of calling out contributors (not their comments).

The conclusion to be reached, therefore, is that if calling out contributors using their own names (not their comments) sometimes damages their reputation, then it should be done. Your second premise is implausible.