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Ryan Heuser
@ryanheuser.com

"Ordinary Style Philosophy", by Jonathan Ettel & me, is out in Paradigmi. We argue that analytic philosophy's commitment to "clarity" over rhetoric ironically produced an easily detected rhetoric of its own—of modals, copulas, dep clauses, etc—and trace its history. www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.30460...

Ryan Heuser@ryanheuser.com

Analytic philosophy can be distinguished from literary criticism with 90-95% accuracy via syntax alone. Moreover, a classifier trained to separate them in early C20 does better predicting future separations than a C21 one predicts past ones, suggesting philosophy syntax narrows/specializes in ~C21.

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D. Hicks
@danhicks.bsky.social

How is that ironic or paradoxical? Opposition to sophistry (in the way philosophers understand that epithet) isn't the same thing as opposition to having a distinctive writing style

D. Hicks
@danhicks.bsky.social

To me, the popularity of James Pryor's "Guidelines on Writing a Philosophy Paper" suggests analytic philosophers are pretty intentional about teaching their writing style

Ryan Heuser
@ryanheuser.com

Pryor recommends a particular style while claiming it’s the absence of style; it’s just writing clearly. The irony here is historical, that a century of “clarity” has created a rhetorical style through pleas to remove style.