Against the ‘this is nonsense!’ objection

Carolyn Dicey Jennings has a post up discussing the unfortunate implications of criticizing a person’s views in terms of their presumed (lack of) intelligence. I agree with much of what she says there (though I don’t think the issue is exclusively or even predominantly about criticism of women and members of other disadvantaged groups, even if impacts these groups to a greater extent). I want however to bring up another aspect of Brian Leiter’s criticism of Carolyn’s analysis, namely his use of the adjective ‘nonsense’, and connect it to what seems to be a pervasive but somewhat questionable practice among philosophers.

In fact, I was thinking of such a post even before reading Carolyn’s post. The idea was prompted by a conversation with Chris Menzel over lunch last week in Munich. Chris was telling me about some of his thoughts on Williamson’s Modal Logic as Metaphysics, and how Williamson describes the actualism vs. possibilism debate as ‘confused’, i.e. as something that he cannot make sense of. So technically, Williamson is (here) not accusing specific people of holding nonsensical positions, but according to him this is a nonsensical debate, as it were. (Chris Menzel is working on a paper on this material where he objects to Williamson's diagnosis of the debate.)

The notion of ‘nonsense’ has an interesting philosophical (recent) history, dating back at least to the Tractatus, and then later appropriated by the Vienna Circle. (I’d be interested to hear of earlier systematic uses of the notion of nonsense for philosophical purposes.) So, to be sure, it is in itself a philosophically interesting notion, but I think it becomes problematic when 'this is nonsense!' counts as a legitimate, acceptable move in a philosophical debate.

The ‘this is nonsense!’ objection and its variants (‘this is silly!’, ‘you can’t possibly mean that’, ‘I can’t get my head around it’ etc.) is viewed in many philosophical circles as a legitimate move in the game of philosophical debating. (I associate this practice in particular with Oxford-style philosophy, but I may be wrong on that, and at any rate it is present in many other places.) This is a sociological observation, and thus ultimately an empirical claim, but one that I think most people would agree with. It is not of the same level of personalization as remarks on one’s presumed (lack of) intelligence, but in my opinion it is problematic for a number of reasons.

Firstly, there is of course the significant difference between saying that a position, or statement, is wrong, and saying that it is nonsense. The idea of nonsense suggests that the position in question does not even deserve to be engaged with; it is hopeless from the start. A nonsensical position does not deserve to be a voice in the debate: it falls out of the space of reasons, and as such has no potential contribution to make (in terms of the productivity of dissent defended e.g. by Mill). Thus, the ‘this is nonsense!’ objection effectively acts as a silencer (in much the same way as the more personalized criticism that Carolyn discusses in her post). It is basically a conversation-stopper, not a move that facilitates the fruitful exchange of ideas and views.

Secondly, the ‘nonsense’ objection shifts the burden of communication too much (and unjustly) towards one of the interlocutors. In a dialogical interaction, the burden of communication is shared between the participants; senders must ensure that they convey their messages in a sufficiently clear way, but receivers must also make an effort to engage with and interpret what is being said in a fruitful way. By describing a given position as nonsense, the receiver is effectively disavowing her responsibility to be cooperative in the communication. The move basically amounts to: ‘It is entirely your responsibility to formulate your position in a way that is fully intelligible to me.’

Naturally, I do not want to say that describing a position as ‘nonsense’ is never to be permitted: presumably, some positions are in fact 'nonsensical' in some sense or another, for example if they entail contradictory conclusions. (But even inconsistent positions may be interesting and non-trivial, as paracosistent logicians have been telling us for decades now.) It is one of the goals of a philosophical conversation to expose incoherent positions as such (going back to the idea of an elenchus in ancient Greek philosophy). But I want to suggest here that the ‘this is nonsense!’ objection is permissible only if the objector takes it upon herself to show why the position is nonsensical. It is not enough to say ‘it is nonsensical because I don’t understand it’; in fact, to truly establish that a position is nonsensical, arguably one must first understand it quite well. In other words, I submit that the burden of proof is on the objector to show that the position is nonsensical, not on the proponent of the position to show that it is not.

More generally, this is a plea for a more restricted use of the ‘this is nonsense!’ objection as a dialectical move in a philosophical debate. The best philosophers I know are those who are perfectly capable of ‘demolishing’ a position with arguments (though I hesitate to use the bellicose vocabulary here), i.e. by actively engaging with a position, rather than dismissing it as nonsense and incomprehensible.