The Fantasy of Stylelessness

In virtually every guide to philosophical writing, there comes a point when the seasoned author implores the budding philosopher-writer to please not try to make their writing literary or elegant or sophisticated or distinctive or really anything that might draw attention to it as writing. “The purpose of (non-fiction) writing is to communicate,” claims Michael Huemer’s A Guide to Writing, “It is not to make art or to impress the reader with your sophistication.” The “First Commandment” of Adrian Piper’s Ten Commandments of Philosophical Writing is “Thou shalt not obscure thy ideas with turgid prose. In the Anglo-American analytic tradition of philosophical writing, we show respect for our ideas, our readers, and ourselves as committed intellectuals by attempting actual communication, not just verbal self-expression.” In Jim Pryor’s Guidelines on Writing a Philosophy Paper—my own entrée into the genre—the message is more plainly put (fittingly): “Don’t shoot for literary elegance. Use simple, straightforward prose. Keep your sentences and paragraphs short. Use familiar words. We’ll make fun of you if you use big words where simple words will do. Don’t write using prose you wouldn’t use in conversation: if you wouldn’t say it, don’t write it.”

When I think of the predicament in which academic philosophy finds itself today with the advent of large language models (LLMs), I think first of its indifference, bordering on contempt, toward writing as anything more than a means of information transmission. In the world of what I call “Points Philosophy,” the dominant model of academic philosophy today, the singular aim of philosophical writing (and indeed philosophy writ large) is to Make Points. Writing that is not obviously in service of that aim is distracting fluff. Even worse, it indicates something defective about its author: that they are engaged not in philosophy but in pretense. According to the doctrine of Points Philosophy, attention to writing as such can only be a mark of vanity: of “appearing to have a sophisticated writing style” or attempting to “wax profound.” A good writer of philosophy knows that you must “[u]se overly simple and concise language”; you must “[a]ssume your audience is extremely dull.”

The attitude is, of course, dubious on its face, since writing in philosophy and other humanistic disciplines could never merely serve to transmit results but is rather itself constitutive of the “result.” This is something that philosophers should appreciate better than most, given that the hallmark interventions of their trade are essentially based in attention to the subtleties of language—for example, intuitions about terms and concepts, interpretations of arguments and texts, carefully drawn distinctions. What’s more, throughout the history of philosophy, they have been embedded in a variety of literary forms, which are integral to the inquiry itself: Plato’s view of philosophy as fundamentally multivocal as captured in the dramatic structure of his dialogues; Augustine’s account of desire through exposés of his own in his Confessions; the aphorisms of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, which comprise a therapy of grammatical “reminders.” And yet it remains nevertheless the case that philosophers these days seem to care little for how philosophical issues are themselves worked out in words.

This is not to say that contemporary analytic philosophy does not have a style. For his part, Manuel Vargas claims in his essay How to Write (Not Terrible) Philosophy Papers, “The house style of the discipline of philosophy is writing that is BORING.” But I would not simply call philosophy’s house style “boring” (though it often is that). If style is not just a matter of affect but also a marker of identity, then the dominant philosophical style today is stylelessness: a mode of writing that attempts at effacing the fact that a work has a creator at all. But while the fantasy that underlies stylelessness might have appeared fifty years ago as a mostly harmless expression of the philosophical aspiration to objectivity, it appears rather more ominous today. A technology which seems to speak from everywhere and nowhere on any issue, instantly, is now here. How can the Points Philosopher possibly resist?

Doing Philosophy

Indeed, in arguably only the first or second year of competent “writing” by LLMs, AI “assistance” in philosophy is already not merely permitted but warmly welcomed, even encouraged by many philosophers. Real data on usage is hard to come by, and most philosophers are concerned enough about their reputations to not publicly disclose their own AI practices, but find yourself among philosophers for long enough, and a picture of broad use will quickly become clear. Tell a philosopher that you’re currently doing any bit of work that is perceived to be lightly tedious and chances are that he’ll ask you why you aren’t using ChatGPT. Get to any bump in the road during a conversation, philosophical or not—Has anyone written on this? What did so-and-so say about such-and-such? How long does it take to drive to LaGuardia Airport?—and there is a high likelihood that someone will pause things to ask Claude.

It is uncomfortable against this backdrop to reveal that you do not, in fact, use AI to do philosophy. To say that you might not need it is to suggest hubris. To say that you positively do not want to use it is to invite charges of Luddism and moralism. To say that you just simply have not gotten around to incorporating it in your work is to look stupid and outmoded. A colleague of mine once compared my continuing to work without AI to an insistence on asking Jeeves, in the age of Google. Here is a tool brimming with competence and capability, just waiting to help answer my query, if only I’d get over myself and just let it.