sometimes, I just don't know what they're trying to say

[aryanhwy]

One thing I can find very aggravating about philosophical papers is that the writing sometimes appears to be almost purpusefully obfuscatory. Here is a good case in point:

"The monadic frame of the mind must explode."

I simply have no idea what the content of this sentence is, much less the truth value. (This is the first place in the paper where the word "monadic" appears, so I don't even have context.)

Comments

[tedeisenstein.livejournal.com]

It happens elsewhere, too. Long ago, I came to the conclusion that the higher the amount of obfuscation in any particular field, the less they had to say of substance. Physics, for example, may have papers that are discovered to be wrong, but at least you know what they're talking about. You can't obfuscate; if you do, you're quickly discovered to be wrong. ("Hmmmm. That equation looks too long, and I don't recognize that term. Where's my calculator? Ahhhhh. The equation's just plain wrong. . . ") On the other end of the spectrum, I've found certain soft "sciences" to be high in obfuscation - sociology, and certain flavors of women's/gender/men's studies, for example.

There's something called the Fogg Count, which is an equation that uses the sentence length, number of syllables in each word, paragraph length, and the like, to come up with a number. The higher the number, the greater the amount of persiflage, obfuscation, and, well, mental fog generated. EB White, for example, has an extremely low Fogg Count: he writes clearly, concisely, elegantly, in prose that can be understood by anyone who can read English.

Fogg Index

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

The formula is (Average Sentence Length + % Long Words) x 0.4

ASL is determined by dividing the total word count by the number of independent clauses.

The percentage of long words is determined by diving the number of words over three syllables in length, excluding proper names, compound words and words that become more than three syllables by the addition of a prefix or suffix (eg. un-, -ed, or -ing), by the total word count.

However, FOGG does not address the type of obfusication at work in your sample sentence where there is only one "long" word in a single clause, but it is an uncommon word used in an unclear context.

[ursula]

I sense you're not a string theorist ;)

[ursula]

Well, you could read the newest Neal Stephenson bricklike series, which goes on and on about monads . . . (I read the sentence as "We can no longer view reality as made up of decisions made by individual free agents", but context would sure be nice.)

[sharikkamur.livejournal.com]

Serious amounts of empathy here! Earlier this year I found myself at a cognitive science workshop that turned out to be far more focussed on philosophy than cognition, and I came across this one:

Power, in the analyses which I have proposed concerning the temporality of existence and of individualisation, is what I have called epi-phylogenesis; that is to say, power is the tekhn interpreted as that which underlies and transmits the pre-individual milieu which the "I" and the "we" inherit.

Forgive me for being a simple physical scientist, but obfuscatory seems a perhaps a little generous when dealing with BS of this sort.