i have no idea what you're talking about
January 10, 2022 11:11 AM   Subscribe

In 2019's Dismissive Incomprehension: A Use of Purported Ignorance to Undermine Others, Matthew J Cull explores the common rhetorical tactic of pretending that someone has not made sense but has uttered "gibberish," in order to discredit their argument. How does the tactic work...and what can be done to counteract it?
posted by mittens (22 comments total) 34 users marked this as a favorite
 
Ex:

"People keep 1) saying they don't know what 'genderqueer' means then 2) asking why we added it to the dictionary." —Merriam-Webster
posted by BrashTech at 11:33 AM on January 10, 2022 [54 favorites]


This is something I saw constantly in my Criminal Law class: judges who refused to take seriously complaints from women and people who are marginalized, because they couldn't relate to the complainants' experiences of the world and so treated them like their complaints were impossible.
posted by bile and syntax at 12:03 PM on January 10, 2022 [36 favorites]


This was a very interesting read for me, because I have thought of this tactic as a tool to be used in conversations when someone, say, makes a racist joke. "I don't understand what you mean by that." "I don't get it—where's the joke?"

Really interesting, then, to see how it's used institutionally against marginalized people. Not surprising, but I hadn't thought about it from that perspective before.
posted by Well I never at 12:13 PM on January 10, 2022 [16 favorites]


Going to get this out here early in the thread for people like me, as I leapt to wrong conclusion: "Dismissive incomprehension" in this context is a bit different than what I'd call "feigned ignorance."

Feigned ignorance as the sort of thing Socrates did in the dialogues. "I don't quite get what you mean by justice here, can you define it a little better?" Then he goes through picking at any definition, never accepting any answer, but usually pretending he's open to the idea. This rhetorically is as obnoxious as hell and you can find all sorts of examples online. It's similar to, maybe a subcategory, of sealioning.

But they are talking about something else, the definition is:
Some speech act by some person B that suggests ignorance on the part of B with regards to the meaning of utterances by some other speaker A. Such a speech act has the intended perlocutionary effect of dismissing some utterances of A as meaningless in order to dismiss A more generally in the eyes of some audience
My bold. Examples:
Scientists overheating with their efforts to find more gibberish to talk about
or
*Every word* is gibberish: ‘Towards a Post-Neoliberal World Order: Rebuilding Human Rights-Based Multilateralism.’
They make the point that for this to work person B is suggesting (and the listener needs to understand) that B is an authority on the issue at hand. They use the language of incomprehension to communicate that they have great understanding.
posted by mark k at 12:14 PM on January 10, 2022 [8 favorites]


As the article says, "there are times when dismissive incomprehension is just." The article gives the example of crystal healing. I'd describe that as an example of something that's "not even wrong." The speaker is working off assumptions that are so clearly wrong that they cannot be (or should not be) argued with. The same applies not only to intellectually worthless arguments but also clearly immorally arguments. (As Well I Never notes, when someone makes a racist or sexist remark, pretending you don't understand is a useful way of either forcing them to explicitly state their biases or withdraw the remark.)

But that doesn't resolve anything. The crystal healing community will find a dismissive remark to be inappropriately dismissive. Believers in scientific consensus on climate change (like me) will find a statement mocking that science to be inappropriately dismissive.

So dismissing or mocking arguments that shouldn't be dismissed (especially those proposed by people with less power or social standing) is wrong, and dismissing those that should be dismissed is right. I agree, but I don't see what useful information that provides.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 12:31 PM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]


You could call it real-time inverse gaslighting, but I'm afraid that wouldn't make any sense.
posted by Rhaomi at 12:39 PM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]


But in the case of the racist joke, the point is, "I'm confident that if you explain what you are saying you will just make apparent that it is stupid and evil," but in the case of climate change the point is, "I'm going to try to get everyone to laugh at you so they won't listen to what you are saying."

One is saying, "I don't get it. I dare you to explain." The other is saying, "There is nothing to get. I will not allow you to explain."
posted by straight at 12:46 PM on January 10, 2022 [20 favorites]


I had no trouble with words in this article like "perlocutionary" but had a hell of a time keeping A and B straight. Just a quirk of my mind, I think.
posted by Well I never at 12:50 PM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]


That's why cryptographers use Alice and Bob as placeholder names instead of A and B.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 1:26 PM on January 10, 2022 [15 favorites]


Footnote 4 is illuminating:
4. Indeed, when first writing this paper I was inspired by conversations with (fellow) analytic philosophers who seemed to use this sort of speech act in an attempt to dismiss continental philosophy. I take it that anyone who has spent time in any Anglo-American philosophy department has heard such dismissals – and indeed perhaps took them seriously as an impressionable student in the face of an authoritative senior philosopher talking about the field in which they work.
I’ve encountered this particular rhetorical trope most often when talking with people educated in philosophy departments that subscribe to analytic philosophy. I remember once talking about the fairly simple concept of intertextuality, and once the graduate student in analytic philosophy I was talking with realized I was referencing a concept first put forth by a French philosopher, started acting as if what I was saying was total gibberish.

I think that this particular rhetorical trope, more than anything, left me with the impression that analytic philosophy is long past saving as a movement within philosophy, but articles like Matthew J. Cull’s, make me think that there might be some hope for it yet.
posted by Kattullus at 1:35 PM on January 10, 2022 [4 favorites]


Hear hear, BrashTech.

Cf. “MY definition of racism doesn’t include structural or implicit bias, and even though I’ve heard about those things and know many other people explicitly include them in their definitions of racism, I don’t think I should have to consider my participation in them, and so I CANNOT understand what you mean by ‘racism’ even when ask me explicitly to consider and discuss structural and implicit biases in addition to explicit racial animus.”
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 1:44 PM on January 10, 2022 [2 favorites]


When I've dealt with this, I like to ask: "Do you really not comprehend, or do you just disagree?" (Somehow, using "comprehend" shifts the tone back to the other person's information-processing ability.)

If they still claim ignorance and I'm in a mood, I've also been known to reply that "Just because you can't follow what I'm saying, doesn't mean it's not valid."
posted by yellowcandy at 1:54 PM on January 10, 2022 [43 favorites]


Or, “I can explain to you but I can’t understand it for you.”
posted by sjswitzer at 2:09 PM on January 10, 2022 [21 favorites]




...left me with the impression that analytic philosophy is long past saving as a movement within philosophy

You might enjoy this blog post:

Analytic philosophy suffers from a triple failure of confidence, especially among younger philosophers. People are not confident it can solve its own problems, not confident that it can be modified so as to do better on that first score, and not confident its problems are worth solving in the first place.
posted by thelonius at 4:35 PM on January 10, 2022 [4 favorites]


Jordan Peterson once rewteeted a criticism I had of him with the words "word salad," of course inviting his followers to mock rather than respond to what I had said, which I thought was an interesting tactic for a striver, hustler and failed intellectual who relies exclusively on content-free gish gallops when challenged.
posted by maxsparber at 5:58 PM on January 10, 2022 [16 favorites]


I think this is the whole "I'm not a climate scientist" trick used by the US Congress to avoid acting on climate science.
posted by eustatic at 6:17 PM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]


∨, ∧, ↔️,⊥, ⊄,
posted by clavdivs at 6:58 PM on January 10, 2022 [1 favorite]


When I visit my family, they often want to bait me into conversations, ask-a-liberal style, to challenge me on shit they've heard on Fox news or through other conservative outlets. There's a real disconnect there because these are infotainment outlets which traffic in stories that simply are not part of my information/entertainment world. Our algorithms are keyed to completely different harmonies. What I often say is, "Wow. That sounds pretty upsetting. I have never heard anything about that. Because I don't watch the same channels as you, I haven't come across that. If you really want to talk about it, I'll need to do a little research because that's just completely not on my radar." I think this is a fair way to say: you're talking complete horseshit but if you want to ambush me, we're gonna need to go interrogate this horse.

Also, as I was raised in a conservative community by conservative parents (pre-Fox News), this kind of sealioning, undermining, othering, authoritarian language and gambits are very familiar to me. It puts yourself on a pedestal of intellectual superiority while appearing to be self-effacing. It's quite a trick. It also makes me think of the frequency with which very smart/intellectual (are these the same?) people get conned. They get conned just as much as the less-smart or savvy person does and sometimes for vaster sums because they think they are too smart to get conned. They think they are just as smart as the professional con-artist just because they believe themselves to be so.
posted by amanda at 8:45 AM on January 11, 2022 [14 favorites]


there might be cases of individuals uttering ‘I don’t understand’ with the intent of soliciting a response which helps them understand, but who end up undermining the speaker unintentionally

I tend to do this sometimes, by saying 'I don't know what you mean' or 'I don't understand what you're saying' because, well, I just don't understand, even though I want to. I can see that this sometimes undermines what someone is trying to say. I sometimes speak a bit abruptly, which exacerbates this, although I generally see it as my failure to comprehend rather than the speaker's failure to explain properly. I do think there's a difference between saying 'I don't understand' and saying 'you're not making sense', though. I've been trying to be clearer by adding "I think you mean x, is that correct?' but this paper tells me I need to be more careful in conveying that my lack of understanding is the problem I'm trying to solve.
posted by dg at 4:26 PM on January 11, 2022 [1 favorite]


I had someone pull this on me re the term "self-medication". It was like they were insinuating that this was something I had just made up, or that the idea that people abuse substances in an effort to ameliorate their mental health suffering is somehow controversial. Probably they like to think of that as "an excuse".
posted by thelonius at 7:46 AM on January 12, 2022


Narcissistic people do this allll the time.
posted by Professor_Fancypants at 8:13 AM on January 14, 2022


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