A young philosopher writes:
Recently, I have been commenting on a number of papers (from students as well as some professionals), and often the quality of writing is disappointing. I have encountered the kinds of errors that Professor Boghossian mentioned in his reply to Fish: “the sloppiness to which people not trained in philosophy are sometimes prone, [e.g.,] giving non-equivalent formulations of what they take to be the same view” (see fn. 1). Other such errors include, e.g., failing to explain key terms, using imprecise language (such as “x involves y,” where it just means something vacuous like “x bears some relation or other to y”), etc.
It seems it could save time if there were a shared list of such infelicities, which students could be directed to, and manuscripts could be (partly) evaluated by. Yet since I am clearly not the sole authority here, perhaps your readers could contribute other examples of such errors? (It might be a start at articulating what the professional standards are for philosophical writing.)
Thoughts, links etc. from readers?
