Dear fellow philosophers,
I was engaged in a long and excruciating conversation this afternoon with a philosopher who insisted on pronouncing key terms in her position as if they had hyphens. For example, ordinary terms like responsibility, interaction, remembering, and correspondence became "response-ability," "inter-action," "re-membering," and "co-respondence." She apparently took the hyphenization of the terms to be doing some philosophical work, but I couldn't get her to help me figure out what that work is.
I've noticed that this kind of thing is becoming more frequent. Does anyone out there understand it? In any case, shouldn't there be a word for this?
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I've only encountered this with respect to "re-presenting". I've run into more than one person who does this, and they seem to think they can crank out a substantive metaphysical point out of a lame bit of etymology. Are classical empiricists right that all ideas are sensory impressions or copies thereof? Maybe they are and may they aren't, but only a fucking retard thinks that giving the word "representation" a hyphen implant settles anything at all.
Regarding what the word for this should be, how about "re-tarded"?
Most egregious I've heard (no, I'm *not* making this up):
"Descrates sought the cogito of being. Derrida seeks the cogito of forgetting ... [dramatic pause].... *fore-getting*."
As I understand this phenomenon, it evolved in continental philosophy, especially out of Heidegger's neologisms: "In-der-Welt-sein" (Being-in-the-world) and "Sein-zum-Tode" (Being-towards-death). The English translations of other Heideggerese terms like "zuhanden" reproduced hyphenated terms like "ready-to-hand."
This was all whatever it was (bad enough) when Heidegger did it, but became trendy and much worse when people started doing that type of "Heideggerian Reading of X" thing so prevalent in and *as* continental philosophy.
The hyphen is supposed to assist clarity in understanding adjectival phrases--should help one know the difference between, for instance, a) "dank-brown shoes" and b) "dank brown shoes." (a) 'dank' modifies 'brown' (b) 'dank' modifies 'shoes'. As you can see, this is actually helpful.
The (tortured) hyphenation in "response-ability" would have to mean the 'response' modifies 'ability' under the correct hyphen usage. But it has no clear meaning, since without a full sentence that requires disambiguation. So, it amounts to a neologism-someone making up a word and getting to say whatever they want to say without having to be clear about anything. The words for this practice, I believe, are "Humpty Dumptying (Lewis Carroll), or, just as good, "BullShitting."
Nice comment, 729. "Humpty Dumptying" and "BullShitting" are nice labels. Another that comes to mind is "Begriffsdichtung" or "concept-poetry".
729:
This is very helpful. And it raises my suspicion that once the hyphen is implanted, we're tracking a different concept from the one without the hyphen-- viz., we're not introducing a new *conception* of, say, responsibility, but changing the subject from responsibility to *response-ability*.
That's fair play, I suppose. The problem, of course, is that it seems that the person who introduces the hyphen takes herself to be proposing a new conception, rather than changing the subject. That is, *response-ability* is introduced as a way of *correcting* the typical conceptions of responsibility-- it is introduced as a competitor to some given responsibility.
But if the hyphen indeed changes the concept rather than introduces a new conception, it *cannot* be seen as offering a *correction* to anything. So it's a dialectally impotent move. Right?
"Begriffsdichtung" = More German that I care to know.
I think that's right...the hyphen move, whether it's "Being-in-the-World" or "response-ability," changes the subject, creates a new word. The new word might have a stipulated meaning about correcting something about the meaning of 'responsibility,' but that's a stipulated meaning for a technical term. An etymological claim about the historical uses and origins of a term isn't the same at all. And conceptual analysis could reveal some tacit meanings of a term. Neither of these approaches require a neologism to correct anything, but could do exactly that.
729:
Seems right. So, then, hyphen-introduction is changing the subject, simple and plain. If it's elucidatory, it elucidates some concept other than its non-hyphen counterpart.
Sounds like a verbal version of (respons)ability, inter/action, and other twee pomo Continentalisms.
It's called a "Pun"
Seriously. It's kind of obvious.
(Yes, A year and a half late. I found this on google, looking for something else. But interesting thread.)
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