In defense of jargon

Now and then you run into complaints that some people use too much jargon. Sometimes the complaint is that a person uses technical words without knowing what they mean and/or without their adding any value.

I’m fairly self-conscious about this myself, since my pedagogical style (and my way of thinking more generally) emphasizes concreteness, simplicity, avoiding the superfluous, and an “explain it like I’m five” approach. So I do sometimes hesitate over word choices.

Do I need to say “cognitive heuristic”, or would just heuristic suffice — what even are non-cognitive heuristics? Do I need to say “epistemic virtue”, or would just virtue do? Do I need to say “latent properties”? Do I need to say “causal effect”, for that is a somewhat redundant phrase?

Some people are annoyed if others have “learned a new word” and then sprinkle it around excessively and imprecisely. And admittedly (some) people do have a tendency to get excited about new words, and perhaps also a desire to fit in and therefore use the words used in certain circles. That also blurs the semantics of words, which is admittedly unfortunate.

(Did I need to say “semantics”, or would “meaning” have sufficed?)

Still, I think it’s good to use words like these. The main benefit I see is that it gets people to “look in a new direction”. If you repeatedly hear someone talk about “modeling cognition mechanistically”, you might end up thinking yourself a bit more carefully about what’s happening in people’s heads.

The annoyance may also sometimes be based on mistaken beliefs and assumptions. It can come as a surprise that some people really do use phrases like “epistemic disagreement” casually, without trying to show off — that some people’s environment and language just looks like that.

Likewise, people can be surprised by all the semantic baggage such phrases carry: there are, for instance, topics where I want to distinguish “causal effect” from “logical effect”, but if someone hasn’t run into logical decision theories, they understandably won’t pick up on this and might think “causal effect” is just bad usage.

(And one might further think “logical decision theory” means just the same as “it’s a good decision theory sir, trust me”.)

So I think it’s good to use rarer terms (and maybe even anglicisms when writing in Finnish) when they communicate the intended thoughts better. I at least do this, and I’m not going to apologize for it — it’s simply the boundedly-optimal cognitive algorithm.