reject reject reject reject rejecting

October 29, 2009 8:59 PM

I am trying to write a philosophy paper, and I am discovering that everyone is "rejecting" each other's principles this way and that! What are some scholarly ways to say "reject", "criticise", "affirm" (as in "affirmation of life"), "similarly", and other rudimentary philosophical words? Oh, how I've used the thesaurus already.

Does this happen to anyone else...after realising you've written "And similarly, ..." and all its synonyms for the 200th time, you just don't know what to do?

posted by lhude sing cuccu to education (15 comments total)

Oh, and "assertion".
posted by lhude sing cuccu at 9:00 PM on October 29

reject: disagree, refute, rebut, dissent, counter, argue against, challenge, dispute, demur, differ, object to, take issue with

affirm: agree, accept, concur with

similarly: in the same way, along the same lines
posted by jedicus at 9:12 PM on October 29

Agree / disagree. These two are really the essential part of what you mean when you use all those words, I think.
posted by koeselitz at 9:12 PM on October 29 [1 favorite]

Contest
Denounce
Address
Refute
Repudiate
Claim
Likewise
Counter
Deny
Acknowledge

Those are off the top of my head. I keep running lists on a post-it or white board and cycle through words when I'm working on a project that requires a lot of synonyms.
posted by lunalaguna at 9:15 PM on October 29

"seems implausible"
"it's hard to see why"
"it can't be true that"
"seems suspicious"
posted by smorange at 9:18 PM on October 29

lhude sing cuccu: Does this happen to anyone else...after realising you've written "And similarly, ..." and all its synonyms for the 200th time, you just don't know what to do?

Yes, I notice this happens to me a lot when I'm writing. After considering the problem, I finally figured out where it was coming from: the books I was reading. Look around at your course material and I guarantee you'll find some writer who writes with a limited vocabulary or in a stale way, just like the rut you find yourself in. Most often the culprit is either a boring professor or an unimaginative translator.

When you figure out who it is that's influencing you to write like that, keep it in mind; being conscious of the problem helps. And if you've got a protracted writing assignment, I find the absolute best remedy is to read an imaginative or interesting short story or two every morning while I'm writing; the worst thing about most philosophy writing is that it retreats into its own world and ends up in a corner with a vocabulary of fifty words or so. Reading a bit of light, fun fiction every day – even just a little – can introduce a whole new set of words, and sometimes that's just what you need.
posted by koeselitz at 9:19 PM on October 29 [2 favorites]

Does this happen to anyone else...after realising you've written "And similarly, ..." and all its synonyms for the 200th time, you just don't know what to do?

I often find myself with this problem.

The solution is to stop starting sentences with these kind of joints. You're getting lazy and sloppy.

There are lots of ways to introduce new points and connect them to your previous ones without needing to start each sentence with "And this next sentence talks about something similar to the last sentence".

Just say what you need to say and stop poncing about.
posted by Netzapper at 9:23 PM on October 29 [5 favorites]

On asserting: don't be afraid to just say "says"; it's generic enough that you can get away with saying it over and over. Also, if you start out with "X says/asserts that P", then you can just go on to say that Q, R, etc., and it will be clear from context that it's X, not you, who says these things. So sometimes you don't need "asserts" or "says" at all.

On rejecting: instead of "X rejects P" you might say "denies that P" or "disagrees with Y" (the person who said P), "says/asserts/claims/argues that not-P", "says/asserts/claims/argues that [something that obviously incompatible with P]", etc.

On criticizing: I think you rarely need to say that X criticizes Y for saying that P; just cut to the chase and start talking about why X thinks that P is false: "Y says that P, but X points out [all these bad things about P]." Normally, criticizing is for people, not claims; you and your readers are more interested in the claims than in who said them.

Netzapper is right. If one point is clear similar to the next point, your readers will notice, so you don't need to tell them. If the similarity is non-obvious and important, then you should say why.

In general: avoid extra words. Don't write a word because you think there needs to be a word there; write it because it contributes something important to your argument. And don't be afraid to repeat words if you really do need to express the same concept repeatedly.
posted by k. at 11:15 PM on October 29 [1 favorite]

Scholarly fancy-pants way to say "X rejects Y's theory of blah blah blah "

X holds, contra Y, that not blah blah blah.
posted by dersins at 11:52 PM on October 29

I reject your assumption that varying your word choice will improve your paper!

If you are writing a philosophy paper, you don't really need to worry about making it sound fancy and scholarly-like. Keep it simple, use words repeatedly if need be, and make your points as concisely as possible. Philosophers value clarity, so use the word that means what you want to say, not another one with a similar meaning. Just picking some examples from this thread, if you write that philosopher A refutes, challenges, denounces, or contests philosopher B's principles, when you mean simply that s/he rejects them, you aren't communicating clearly.

It is always easy to tell when an essay writer has been dipping into the thesaurus and it doesn't add anything to their essay. Save the flowery stuff for English essays.
posted by ssg at 11:57 PM on October 29 [1 favorite]

I reject your assumption that varying your word choice will improve your paper!
I agree that the high-school-essay take on the use of synonyms is not automatically transferable to scholarly writing. A good look at one's aims is necessary for suitable decisions. Writing is research, if you write about research you do it wrong.

In some cases, I'm sure, you might altogether go without the "x rejects this notion" phrase and just write what x says. In others, you might be fine with "x diagrees: [powerful illustrative quote]".
In yet other cases, a concise description of some individual's disagreement will tell you (the researcher-while-writing), and the readers, not only the content of the disagreement itself but a lot about that individual's manner of positioning her/himself in the field or in the discussion at hand. You'll have to find adequate words to convey the exact quality of the disagreement, the manner of positioning, and the field.
In other words you'll have to access these concepts with a scholarly question, to be resolved by a more precise description through better chosen terminology. This might actually improve your paper in the most substantial manner.
posted by Namlit at 3:19 AM on October 30

Philosophy is also a self-imposed construct... meaning that you don't have to reject something to not include it in your world view. Simply constructing a model which has different tenants, different theories, which does not explicitly reject prior work in a similar field may not actually reject it - it may just be outside the design constraints.

Now if they do outright reject something, there's a reason. How does the rest of their model break up if they did include. How does the original world view change when put through the secondary world construct.

I'd reccommend taking a look at Gin and Tacos to see some pretty execellent disection of rhetoric, politics and arguments. Take a special look at the sidebar. The areas specific to logical falacies and cognitive bias might provide you with interesting ways rephrase "rejects."

Also 'disputes' is always a good term when there is explicit rejection.
posted by Nanukthedog at 6:14 AM on October 30 [1 favorite]

If you are writing a philosophy paper, you don't really need to worry about making it sound fancy and scholarly-like. Keep it simple, use words repeatedly if need be, and make your points as concisely as possible. Philosophers value clarity, so use the word that means what you want to say, not another one with a similar meaning. Just picking some examples from this thread, if you write that philosopher A refutes, challenges, denounces, or contests philosopher B's principles, when you mean simply that s/he rejects them, you aren't communicating clearly.

ssg's advice is excellent. If a student brought this worry about word choice up with me in my office hours (in my previous life where I held them), I would take it as an indication that the student was missing the point. Philosophy papers shouldn't be a string of book reports on the views of famous philosophers and the ways in which they interact-to the degree that you're boring even yourself with the way you're describing them.

It's probably worth sitting down and asking yourself, 'what is the point of my paper?', and then considering whether and how describing the terrain of views and disagreements that famous people have had advances that point. I don't mean this to be a harsh criticism-it's just part of the distinctive, somewhat shadowy skill set that needs to be developed to write a good philosophy paper, and lord knows that I'd tossed out plenty of work in my day when I couldn't answer the question about what the point was to my satisfaction.
posted by Kwine at 7:15 AM on October 30 [1 favorite]

Check out Philosophical Terms and Methods by Jim Pryor. Particularly focus on his section of Philosophical Terms for Beginners. This was an excellent resource for me when I took my first ethics course.
posted by handabear at 7:18 AM on October 30

Eschew.
posted by StickyCarpet at 10:03 AM on October 30