every angel is terrible & yet, alas, I invoke you

The thing you're saying.

That that thing is worth saying.

That is, speech/writing has a cost to it, in the form of energy and time expended doing it, in the energy and time taken by others to listen to/read it, and the thing you are communicating is implied to be sufficiently valuable to worth that trade-off.

E.g. if you meet a woman and she says, "Hi, I'm Becky, I was born on a Thursday," it would be an odd experience because even if 1 applies, 2 clearly doesn't (unless you are running some kind of day-of-birth study or something ig). There is a hidden meaning of, "you should be aware of the weekday of my birth because it is important," that seems to make no sense.

And yet people will often defend something they have said on the basis of it being strictly true, which is unsatisfactory because it only justifies half of what was communicated by the act of saying it.

If Becky comes along to a queer event and says "Hi, I'm Becky, I'm AFAB," you have to understand that that is not just a neutral statement of fact, it also communicates something like this: "I am aware that if I looked and sounded the same but my sex assignment was different I would be treated differently. I am informing you of my sex assignment right now so that you treat me appropriately hereafter."

And that is just straight-up transmisogyny, both in displaying uncritical acceptance of how prevalent transmisogyny is in queer groups, and in demanding exemption from it. It sounds absurd on the face of it that a cis woman describing herself using entirely true statements can be doing transmisogyny, even in the absence of any transfeminine person or any mention of transfeminity at all. But it's true all the same.

I got a lot of responses saying it was well-explained, helpful, etc, which was nice. But I also got a lot of replies essentially saying "This is just Grice's Maxims!" sometimes followed by an explanation of Grice's Maxims. And maybe this is salty but those replies kinda irritated me and I've been trying to work out why and if that irritation is justified.

For clarity, I had never heard of Paul Grice or his maxims before this. I did study Philosophy formally from 16-18 but never Philosophy of Language. I found Philosophy honestly frustrating to study because it turns out when you study Philosophy you are often really studying the History of Philosophy, which is not quite the same thing imo. I don't personally think it is valuable for me to spend weeks learning about St Augustine's proofs of God's existence when their flaws could be easily pointed out by a six-year-old. Basically everything we covered was "Old white man thought he was right but he wasn't" and I just felt like we could maybe skip all the Philosophy that was obviously wrong.

It felt like a lot of Philosophy was just announcing: "This is the person who first came up with this idea," when often they were presumably just the first person to come up with the idea who had sufficient power in the Academy to get their name associated with it. And I was in academia long enough to know that the person who gets the credit is basically never the person who actually makes the discovery. My own PhD supervisor got a Professorship out of a Nature paper I wrote that he didn't even contribute to, while I had to leave academia due to chronic illness. That's just normal in academia though, that's how it works.

So, anyway, I find the veneration of dead white men through naming conventions a little off-putting, because so often behind that dead white man is an underpaid student, or a long-suffering wife, or even a random stranger at a neighbouring table at the pub, who gave him the idea. And so often the idea is quite mundane anyway, and there is no way he was the first to think it up. Bertrand Russell's cosmic teapot is a good example. It's a counterargument to religious people who ask you to prove God's non-existence: you can reply by asking them to prove anything's non-existence, like a space teapot orbiting the sun (this was in the days before that was actually possible). But I simply can't believe Russell was the first person to think of this, because the idea is just that belief in God isn't special, it's just belief in "a thing" and you can swap in any "thing" as an analogy to point out issues with belief in general. Surely someone had thought of that before, right? It's the kind of thing most people would just think up on-the-fly in an argument over a drink and then not make a big deal out of it. Russell just wrote it down and because his social standing was so high everyone told him he was a genius and now we name it after him (I know Russell did have some great, genuinely original ideas, I just don't think this was one of them lol).

I also find the instinct to name things a little off-putting too. If I am talking to a Christian and they ask me to prove God doesn't exist, and I jokingly ask them to prove the toothfairy doesn't exist, then someone pops up to say "isn't this just Russell's teapot?" then goes into a lengthy explanation of Russell's teapot, what has been achieved? My point was already very clear, it didn't need elaboration. All you have done is (1) sidetrack the conversation from one of Philosophy into one of the History of Philosophy, (2) credit a dead white guy with the thought I just had, like some intellectual property lawyer, (3) show off how much you knew about the History of Philosophy, and (4) actually obscure the point I had already made clearly.

Often naming can be a way to obscure an idea rather than clarify it. I can well imagine my interlocutor understanding my point about the toothfairy, but as soon as a space teapot and dead Mathematician are introduced to the discussion they get completely lost. There is a long history of academics using deliberately obscure language to pretend their thoughts are deeper than they really are, and I think naming things is one of the ways this is done. It implies that if you don't know the name you are ignorant, even if you understand the idea all the better for not knowing the name the Academy has agreed on.

I think perhaps the underlying issue is that, if I have explained something in a manner that is useful and clear, it is frustrating when someone says or implies "a man thought of it before you did". I don't think my thought was particularly deep, I don't think you need to think that hard to work it out for yourself, I wrote that post while leaning against the wall at a loud and overstimulating train station and I didn't know what I was going to say before I started writing. Having since read Grice's Maxims, I don't think they are particularly deep either, and I don't believe no one had thought of these things until the 1970s, though I can believe no one had bothered to write them down and give them A Name. The idea that saying too much, telling lies, saying irrelevant things, and saying unclear things, that these are counter to cooperative dialogue, is hardly a radical thought, and I do kind-of object to crediting this to yet another dead white dude in the long long list of dead white dudes we basically uniquely celebrate in the western canon. Some thoughts (like Russell's teapot) are so mundane they don't need to be credited at all.