The English prose employed by analytic philosophers has grown steadily more ugly and clotted over the last twenty years. (Or has it? Was always like this?) A part of the blame rests, I am sure, on the formal languages that analytic philosophers use: complex logical structure is very important in their philosophical environment, and not easy to display gracefully in ordinary English. Even so, one should remember that some of the most powerful logical thinkers also wrote beautifully clear prose: Frege, Russell, Quine, Goodman, Kaplan, Kripke, and (John) Perry come to mind (among many others). Nobody can say that these philosophers are easy to understand; nobody can say that their prose presents obstacles.
The problem has become more acute because English has now become the lingua franca of scientific philosophy (as I like to call what many call “analytic philosophy”). Give a paper under this rubric in Paris, or Munich, or Tokyo, or Delhi and you will give it in English. This means that now, by contrast with fifty years ago, scientific philosophy is being practised, in English, by many whose first language is not English. As anybody knows who has learned a second language in adulthood: nestings, passive voice, abstract nouns, and sloppy grammar are extremely difficult to follow in a language you haven’t grown up with.
A while ago I gave a paper to an international audience with a handout. I had been having some trouble with Powerpoint presentations, and I thought that the talk + handout format would be a good alternative. A distinguished American philosopher took me to task for this: Powerpoint is mandatory when speaking to such an audience, he said. "But what about the handout?" I pleaded. "Didn’t it help?" No, said a young French woman, who was sharing a taxi with us: “The handout just increased the cognitive load.” Listening and reading at the same time is not easy.
Much the same sort of thing is true of clotted prose. It is hard enough for native English speakers, but painfully difficult for those for whom English is a second language. We really ought to spend time making sure that our prose is simple and straightforward.
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