On Being Longwinded

Don't let your question (or your answer) run on forever.--David Chalmers "Guidelines for respectful, constructive, and inclusive philosophical discussion."

Most of Chalmers's "guidelines" are sensible suggestions for the smooth runing of public philosophical discussion. It's sobering to look at them and recognize that I violate a number of them regularly without even thinking about it. Even so I have some qualms about some of the guidelines. (In what follows I leave aside the risks associated with the heavy handed emphasis on civility that is growing in popularity among university administrators and some of my peers. For discussion, see Johnson and Kazarian and Leiter.)* In particular, throughout the guidelines, time is treated as a scarce resource and the norms appear to be designed to guarantee a fair allocation of it (see especially the section on "procedural norms"). But more important than temporal equity is quality. And it is not obvious that temporal equity serves quality. More important, it is by no means obvious that brief (or brief-ish) questions really serve inclusivesess. Let me explain.

If one shares a language and there is considerable mutual trust, then one can be brief, even use short-hand, and still expect to be understood. Brevity or to-the-pointness is, then, a skill that can be developed in the context of a lot of background agreement, philosophical as well as social. I call it a 'skill' because it requires considerable expertise and practice. It is easy to forget once one has mastered it, but it is very difficult to ask a focused philosophical question in real time. So my first criticism is that this norm may well be exclusionary in practice, especially toward novices and those that are not quick on their feet. (Obviously, a lot turns on what it means to 'run on forever.') This criticism can be accomodated by a wise and informed moderator (who can recognize the inexperienced and slow-thinking in our midst).

My second, more important, criticism builds on a feature of the first, but is really distinct. Sometimes one's position on an issue, or more general philosophical sensibility, is very different from a speaker's. But, even then, it may still be mutually illuminating, especially if there a students presents, to have a dialogue between outlooks that are at odd with each other. In such a circumstance, a question may well require considerable 'stage-setting,' in order to make a precise and even focused question possible. Sometimes the 'stage-setting' alone can be already very illuminating to others in the audience. Not all philosophy needs to be about challenging each other's foundational premises or the exploration of alternative frameworks, but it strikes me as a shame if we codify a set of norms that unintentionally, but predictably, makes such an event, which would be a paradigm of respectful, constructive, and inclusive discusssion, even rarer than it already is.

Comments

[David Chalmers]

thanks, eric! i confess that this norm is the one that i violate the most frequently. i agree that sometimes there are good reasons for a question to take a long time, and that on occasion those exchanges can be extremely productive. on the other hand, the questioner is not the greatest judge of this, and by letting in the good exchanges we'll also let in a lot of plain-long-winded exchanges. in any case i think the norm should at least be given weight -- that is, recognizing that there's some cost to a long question, especially if time is limited and there are many questions. maybe that could be conveyed better by a ceteris paribus formulation, or by "Try not to let your question (or your answer) go on forever".

of course as you say, a lot depends on how "forever" is cashed out. presumably the boundary falls somewhere in the 1-10 minute range. i'd say questions of up to two minutes are usually fine, 2-4 minutes is getting long (or at least toward interruptable territory, as a later proto-norm suggests) and above 5 minutes is definite forever territory. in my experience it's very rare to see students getting into that territory -- it's almost always senior people. i was somewhat embarrassed to see a video of me at a recent workshop asking a five-minute question, though at least there was a small group and a fair amount of time. at the time i thought it was justified (of course we all usually think our long questions are justified), but in retrospect three or four minutes would have sufficed!

[Matt]

I know that when I have been the person _being asked_ a question, a big problem I have with "long" questions (I'd agree that five minutes seems like a good marker)is that I find them much harder to answer - either because they are really multi-part questions, or else I cannot keep them in mind, as I start trying to think about them as they are laid out. If I'm not alone in that, this would be one more reason why trying to make shorter, more tightly focused questions could improve discussion. But, perhaps others don't have this problem.

As for myself in asking questions, I have found that if I try to write the question down, even in outline, before I ask it, it is usually a huge help in making the questions more tightly focused and less rambling.

[Cressida]

Nice point Eric. I have always struggled with keeping questions short (I'm hopefully improving a over time). This is one of the rules that has been applied a lot both by chairs and other audience members. The problem is that as a student I often felt too unconfident to ask a question in the designated question-time because I was worried I wouldn't be able to formulate it quickly enough. The experience of being told mid-question to hurry up or being cut off can be humiliating if not handled well, particularly as it is in front of a crowd. I would have felt much more support and confidence if, in my slow-thinking novice days, people had sometimes been a bit more accommodating. And I suspect that the extra practice I would have got if I had been more confident may well have improved my ability to ask well constructed questions.

[Miles Rind]

In other words, don't be a . . . BALLOON!!!