A funny, and instructive, anecdote, courtesy of Mark Lance (Georgetown):
A long time ago my colleague Terry Pinkard said that the actual function of words like "obviously" "clearly" etc was as a stand-in for "I have no argument for the following". Ever since I've told students that a good way to find an easy paper is to read one by a famous philosopher, find the sentence that begins with one of those words and challenge it. This has in fact yielded a good dozen published papers.
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