Pedantry with Arnoud Visser

Introduction to Pedantry

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Host Introduction

1:43Hello, and welcome to Overthink. The podcast where your two favorite pedants talk about philosophy and everyday life. I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson. And I'm Dr. David Peña-Guzman. All right, so nobody likes to be called pedantic.

2:15The figure of the pedant has an unquestionably negative connotation.

Historical Pedantry

2:20The author of the book we're going to be talking about today, which is aptly called On Pedantry, defines the pedant as somebody who exhibits an excessive display or use of learning. And so the idea here is that the pedant is a very learned individual, but they misuse their learning. They often lord it over other people. They use it in an annoying fashion. The pedant is not somebody you want to be stuck at a party with. They're the know-it-all of the group.

2:52They're the grammar Nazi, the person who's always nitpicking at everything everybody says, and behind their back, everybody wishes that they weren't invited to the party in the first place. And social groups tend to have a pedantic character. And so if you don't know who the pedant in your social group is, who knows? Maybe you are the pedant in your social group and you just don't know it. Okay, I will say, David, maybe this is pedantic of me, but I don't think that's true. So one thing is that- That is pedantic of you. Yeah, so one thing that Arnaud Visser, the author of the book,

3:24talks about at length, and we will talk to him about this in the interview,

Masculine Pedant

3:27is that the pedant is usually a masculine figure. And so he says, like, the most common figure of the pedant in the present day is the mansplainer. And another common pedant that one finds today in public discourse is the person on social media who corrects somebody's grammar or use of a word. And I think that there is, like, obviously a time and a place for such corrections. An example that comes to mind for me, which I think is an example not of pedantry,

3:58but of a righteous display of learning, was on this last season of The Traitors, where Rob, everybody's favorite traitor, I loved him, he's like a Love Island reality TV star. So not particularly associated with higher learning. He corrects another contestant, this, like, awful, really obnoxious, mansplaining guy named Michael Rappaport. He corrects Michael Rappaport's use of a word. And he's like, can you please stop using this word that way?

4:32This is in a roundtable discussion. This is actually the definition of that word, and you're using it wrong. And it was just, like, such a great moment because it was this guy who was on a dating reality TV show and therefore, like, kind of assumed to be a himbo who was, like, talking to the mansplainer and being like, I actually know what this means better than you do. I was like, yes, go for it, Rob. But so I have a question for you about this, because I wonder to what extent that does not get experienced as pedantic because of the stereotype of him being a himbo.

5:04I wonder if he was, like, a nerdy character who was, like, a lawyer or who had a more, quote-unquote, intellectual profession, whether the same thing would have landed very differently with you and the audience. Yeah. So I think that's fair.

Pedantry and Social Groups

5:18And I think this prefigures some of what we'll be talking to Arnaud about, which is the fact that what gets defined as pedantic is very much a question of what the definer experiences as an excessive use or display of learning. But back to what I was saying before, I feel like I slightly lost my train of thought. But we've got the mansplainer. We've got, like, the grammar Nazi online. And so the pedant is often pretty masculine coded. And I have to say, when I read this part in the book,

5:50I was like, yes, this makes so much sense. And so I want to say in groups of women, I don't usually experience there being a pedant. At all? No. You see what I said earlier? You're the one, Ellie. You just don't know. I mean, certainly my friends know that I, like, have a PhD and I'm, like, really intense about grammar if I'm grading a student's paper or something. But I learned my lesson when I was an annoying, pedantic kid on the playground who actually did.

6:21David, this is, like, one of the least appealing stories of, like, my entire life. I'm so ashamed of this. But, you know, I grew up quite Christian. I was very serious about religion when I was a kid. And I was also very serious about learning. And I was the nerdiest kid in my third grade class. Like, absolutely. If you ask somebody who the class nerd was, like, it was me and my best friend. So luckily we had each other. But I used to go up to people on the playground and quote Bible verses at them. Oh, my God, that is a know-it-all biblical proportions.

6:55Yeah. And so I was, like, I was, like, no wonder nobody liked me. Like, I sucked. So now I don't do that anymore. Actually, now I'm very cautious. Unless it's, like, in an academic space where certain displays of learning are welcome, not to be annoying in that fashion. So I really like the image of a Christian pedant because one of the things that Visser points out in the book is that historically, actually, Christians were sort of opposed to learning. And they often had this distrust of people who were too learned because it would move them away from living a good life.

7:29And so you were living the good life and also embracing learning. Yeah, but there's also a very long Christian intellectual tradition, especially in medieval Catholicism, that is associated with higher learning. So I think it's oversimplified to say that it was, like, Christian versus secular pedant because Visser also talks a lot about how monastic schools in the Middle Ages were places where people were learning, like, really arcane, you know, Latin and other forms of knowledge. And so they're still Christian. But then they became targets of the accusation.

7:59Like, the scholastics were the embodiment of pedantry in the Middle Ages. Yeah, but they're still Christian. It's Christian against, it's Christian on Christian accusation here. Yeah, fair. And so a lot of people can be pedantic.

Intellectuals and Pedantry

8:12One thing that comes out of the book also is the association of pedantry with just somebody who commits to the life of the mind. And that's something that you and I both have done as college professors. And I'm wondering whether you have ever been accused of being pedantic by somebody that you care for, or whether that accusation and the possibility of it has been in the back of your mind. I'm not sure if it counts as an accusation of being pedantic, because as I mentioned, I'm actually pretty careful not to display

8:46too much learning in a lot of contexts. Which is interesting in itself, right, that you're conscious of it and go out of your way not to be perceived in that way. Yeah, and I think that's because I spend a lot of time in my life in Los Angeles with non-academics. And so I'm aware of the possibility of seeming annoying. And that is kind of a bummer, because I like to nerd out. But it's also fine. I think I remember when I was a young grad student, learning from an older philosophy professor that a lot of senior philosophy professors

9:17actually don't love to talk about philosophy when they're in their free time. And I was shocked by it. I was like, why would you want to do anything else? And now I totally get that. And I feel like that's very much the situation for me. I will say, I do get accused by Trevor of being too principle and logic-oriented. Oh, I accuse you of that myself. I will corroborate. OK, but like, for instance, he never lets the microwave go down to zero seconds.

9:47He just, like, stops it at, you know, anywhere between 12 and 3 seconds or something of that sort. And I get so frustrated by this, because I'm just like, just let the microwave go down to zero. And I have two reasons why you should let the microwave go down to zero. One, if it doesn't go down to zero, it displays the amount of seconds that are remaining rather than the time. And so if you're using the microwave as a clock, which I sometimes do, that function is rendered moot by you leaving some seconds remaining on the microwave. And two, I have to press the button an extra time

10:17when I put my thing in the microwave in order to get it back down to zero before adding time. So those are my two reasons why you should put the microwave down to zero seconds. I love that you enumerated Reese's for the microwave clock going all the way down. I think those should convince him. But instead, he says, you're just OCD. And I'm like, no, there's a difference between having principles that you enumerate. And like, you can offer counter reasons why you think you shouldn't put the microwave down to zero. But you're not going to convince me otherwise

10:48unless you provide those other reasons. And it's really unfair of you to reduce my reasons to just like a personal preference, or in this case, actually a pathology. Yeah, a vice, a moral vice. No, so I really relate to your claim that you have to think about it and that you have to be conscious of other people's perception of you as a potential pedant. Because that's something that I, after reading this book, realized I've been doing for a long time. And I think there are two, also talking about enumeration,

11:19there are two ways in which this has played out in my life. One, I left Mexico as a teenager, and I came to the U.S. and then I became a student, a graduate student, and then a professor with a PhD. And in Mexico, there is this suspicion that academics are removed from the vital life of the community, that they are hiding away in their office among dusty books, and that they think the world of those books is more real than the real world that surrounds them.

11:50And so there is a stereotype of the intellectual who has removed his connection from the life of the people. And even in Spanish, the term that we use for somebody who has a PhD is catedratico, which comes from the Latin catedra, which is the chair that a bishop sits in, in the church, like an armchair. And so literally, when somebody asks me what I do and I tell them and then they figure it out, they often will say, oh, you are a catedratico,

12:20meaning you are sitting on your armchair, philosophizing from way up high and talking down at the rest of the people, almost like a bishop or a priest. And to be honest, I've been petrified by the possibility that other people see me that way to the point that sometimes I conceal what I do. So when people ask me... Well, luckily, you're already petrified in virtue of being an idol professor sitting in an armchair, so I don't need to worry about that. No, but when people ask me at a bar, what do you do? I won't say I'm a professor.

12:52I'll say I'm a teacher. Yeah, you have talked about that before, actually. Yeah, and so now I realize that it comes from this anxiety of being seen as pedantic. Yeah, but I think what you're tracing is interesting because it allows us to draw a distinction between the ivory tower intellectual and the pedant. And I'm not saying that you're not talking about the pedant here, but I also think there's a construal of what you just said that is maybe more accurate for the ivory tower intellectual. The pedant, although oftentimes, you know, also an ivory tower intellectual, is really somebody who conveys their learning

13:24too readily and in an unwelcome fashion to a broader public. And so they're sort of like the bad side of the public intellectual, the wrong face of it. If what we try to do on Overthink is make challenging ideas communicable to a broader audience in a way that's like engaging and empowering for people, the pedant does it in a way that is belittling and obnoxious. And I think the charge of pedantry has more bite to it than the ivory tower intellectual bite

13:56because there are good reasons why people might defend the idea of an intellectual as not always coming into the fray. We've talked about this in our intellectuals episode, whereas it's more difficult to defend the pedant. Well, the pedant is inherently negative, whereas the intellectual is more neutral. Yeah, but I think the reason for that is that the pedant is essentially in relation to people to whom they're trying to communicate their ideas, whereas the ivory tower intellectual may not be. And I think perhaps more substantively than that, the pedant to me,

14:27even though it is usually associated with somebody who is an intellectual, very often shows up as the mansplainer or the grammar Nazi, that is as people who show an excessive display of learning, but who don't necessarily actually like work in academia or have a PhD. So I might want to disambiguate those because when I think about whom I experience as the most pedantic, it is like somebody's husband at a dinner party who wants to tell me about

14:58the most recent evolutionary psychology thing he read that I'm just like, or sometimes I experience the reaction of another person, usually a man, to what I do as unwelcome because they think it's an invitation for them to like share their hot take on my area of expertise. And I just don't think that lends itself to a productive discussion. I do also think there's an aspect of this where in as much as the pedant tends to skew masculine as a figure,

15:31if I come across as pedanting in a conversation with a man, it's going to come across as especially annoying to them because it's at odds with gender presentation. And so I'd rather just like talk about Love Island than talk about Nietzsche. Yeah, but you know, I still can imagine a world in which somebody might listen to our podcast and experience it as pedantic. And that's the kind of relative nature of the charge of pedantry. Yeah, but then luckily they don't have to listen to it. Whereas the pedant is usually somebody who's like holding somebody captive. Yeah, I'm not sure that that's an inherent,

16:03like that's a necessary definition, but I do agree with you that there is a power move that is perceived in the character of the pedant. The pedant is making a display of their knowledge, not simply for the sake of educating others, but for the sake of raising themselves above others and positioning themselves above their social station, right? Like the pedant is talking down at other people and doesn't see other people as peers or equals. And so it has to do almost with a combative understanding of conversation

16:34where it's about who has more knowledge. And I think that's what rubs so many people the wrong way. And when you are dealing with a conversation in which different members of the group have different levels of knowledge or expertise, it's very difficult to avoid that imbalance because that's in the nature of expertise, right? That it's not democratic. And so you and I as experts in philosophy risk automatically being seen as pedants when we talk about our area of expertise. Yeah, although Visser points out

17:05that actually the figure of the pedant has become less associated with professors with the increasing influx of women professors. So in his chapter on professors, he talks about the kind of 1960s, post-1960s stereotype of the professor as an egghead, as kind of shabby dressed in like a corduroy suit, which I actually didn't know until reading this book was traditionally a working class signifier. And so there's a sense in which the professor is self-styling as an ally of the working class

17:35while also being part of the intellectual elite. And that's experienced as pedantic by the much more revolutionary, post-1960s revolutionary students, especially if you think about like the May 68 protests where there were some professors in the fray, but there were also some professors famously hiding in their offices. And so there we get this idea of the professor as pedant, but he says that doesn't actually have that much cultural purchase anymore because now there are so many more women professors

18:06in the university. I know, not women's presence automatically making things better for them in the profession socially. Take that, that columnist who wrote the feminization of the workplace article last year. Well, after I accused you of being a pedant

Personal Experience with Pedantry

18:20early on in our conversation, but it's actually thanks to you that I can get away with that being seen as a pedant. Another aspect of pedantry that I think is really important to point out has to do with neurodiversity and the way in which pedantic speech is often associated with autism. Yes. And you know, like people- It's funny you say this. I was thinking about that too. It doesn't come up in the book because that's more of a cultural history, but I'm so glad you're mentioning this because I was wondering about that. Well, it didn't come up, but I read a couple of articles that talk about this and they point out that people with autism

18:52are often seen as pedantic because of their precision with language and especially their prosody, like the rhythmicity of their speech and their fast speech. And when we see that level of precision and control over language, especially in young children, so this connects to the professorial part, it makes those children seem like little professors. That's the expression that the researchers used. And that often leads to social exclusion, of course, of those children in the playground, but even by adults who experience those children

19:26as eerie or uncomfortable because it mixes categories in the minds of the adults. Am I dealing with an adult who speaks with high precision or am I dealing with a child? Like, why is this kid mansplaining to me? Yeah. But yeah, and also I want to mention special interests. So the tendency of at least, you know, some people with autism to have special interests that they then want to tell other people about whether or not that audience is a welcome one and kind of a challenge sometimes knowing in what context sharing that knowledge is welcome or not.

19:57Yeah, I think we have to be careful about these accusations of pedantry from that neurodiversity perspective. And I will say, I think there has been a lot of positive attention that public discourse has placed on this recently. I will say even my own classroom, I think people are like a lot more accommodating of such an expression of neurodiversity than maybe they would have been when I first started teaching over a decade ago. Yeah, and what I was going to say also is that in the 1990s, this notion of pedantic speech was even proposed as a way of differentiating what used to be called Asperger's

20:27from high-functioning autism. Now we don't use that term. Now we just use autism spectrum disorder as an encompassing term. But the idea was that that's what differentiates somebody with Asperger's is that you can make that distinction based on their manner of speaking and the degree to which it is experienced by others as pedantic. But it's not officially part of the diagnostic criteria. Yeah, well, now that would have been changed anyway. Yeah, and I just thought it would be good to bring up this angle

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Interview with Arnaud Visser

23:09Arnaud Visser is a historian and professor of textual culture in the Renaissance at Utrecht University and director of the Huizinga Institute, which is the Dutch National Research School for Cultural History. He has written a number of books on the Renaissance and the Reformation and is the author of the book we will discuss today on pedantry, a cultural history of the know-it-all. Hello, Arnaud, and welcome to Overthink. It's a pleasure to have you on. Welcome. Hi, hi. Thanks for having me. Well, I have to say, your book was a pleasure to read,

23:41the history of pedantry, the philosophy of pedantry, all things pedantic. And so as a way of beginning, let's just get clear about what it means to say that somebody is pedantic on your view. So I want you to define pedantry for us and also tell us who has been considered a pedant throughout history and at various points in time. Yeah, that's, of course, already quite a pedantic activity, trying to define something precisely. Probably it's most familiar to people

24:11to start with the current use. The dictionaries today would say that pedantry is about a fussy use of knowledge marked by an obsession with details or rules, a very formalist approach to knowledge. People often tend to think about specific kinds of knowledge in particular, like grammar or spelling. But actually, there's a much longer history to the term, which also shows different meanings. So the term itself arises in 15th century Italy,

24:43when pedant actually originally just meant teacher. But quickly, it gained all sorts of negative connotations that had to do with negative aspects of teachers. So an overbearing style or arrogance, also useless knowledge became associated with the term pedant. And it all indicates irritation. So the use of knowledge that provokes irritation. And if you look beyond

25:14this history of the term, you can see that this phenomenon is actually much older. So already in classical antiquity, we can see that teachers provoked irritation with particular styles of teaching or intellectual habits. So my take, my definition of pedantry is about the phenomenon, not just about the history of the term itself. That's part of the history. But I define pedantry as being about an excessive use or excessive display of knowledge,

25:46in particular learning, this more higher learning type of knowledge. And that means that what is exactly excessive, what marks this idea of excess, is in the eye of the beholder. And it can also differ per context and per time period. So it's historically specific. That also makes it interesting. You can see shifting views of what actually is excessive in the use or display of learning. Yeah, maybe you could tell us a little bit about some of those.

26:16Like, what are a couple of the characters? Because I found your breakdown of different moments in history and like the stereotype of the pedant to be really fascinating. The intellectual can take many different guises, of course. So in antiquity with the soffits, I think that's an intriguing case because those were teachers, traveling teachers, who were very successful in the 5th century before Christ in Athens and earned a lot of money by teaching, well, for instance, how to speak effectively, but also created

26:47a lot of irritation with certain other intellectuals who thought that this was not the way to go about teaching proper knowledge. So they were deemed pedantic for philosophical reasons, you could say. So for teaching the wrong style of thinking, also for lacking a moral compass. Yeah, because they were just sort of trying to tell people, like, here's how to win an argument, right, or something of that sort. Yes, well, at least this is the perspective, of course, that we have thanks to Plato.

27:17So it's not the most friendly of perspectives. And interestingly, to make things a bit more complicated, there were also comedians, writers of comedies at the time who all heaped these philosophers on one, put these philosophers on one heap and criticized Socrates along with the other sophists for the same faults. So there you can see that irritation was provoked by people who were intellectual, but that we would now classify as philosophers.

27:47If we look in another cultural context, for instance, that of the Middle Ages, you can see that irritation has to do something, has to do with the setting that learning was guarded by the church. You see a tension, a clash between Christianity and intellectual pursuits, and that the excesses have more to do with the fact that they are associated with improper handling of learning from a perspective of Christian. Yeah, and it seems like what the pedant has in a lot of these historical cases is a lack

28:18of sensitivity to etiquette and the norms of social interaction in a particular context. And thinking about the sophists, the philosophers would criticize the sophists for violating certain norms of ethics. You know, like they will teach you to win arguments and to engage in this kind of intellectual sparring for the sake of winning and not really for the sake of enhancing your wisdom or ethically aligning you in some way. But I have to say that I really like your appeal to Aristophanes, the comedian who presents

28:48the philosophers as not that different from the sophists because that's often been my view. When I read Plato describing the life of Socrates, I get the sense that Socrates is really pedantic. And more importantly, I mean, I think he's really annoying and unbearable in many cases. But I also get the sense that the idea that he differs from the sophists because he is doing what he's doing for the moral edification of others, I'm not sure that that's entirely clear. So I kind of agree

29:19with Aristophanes a little bit. And so I want you to say a little bit more about this because one thing that has bothered me for a long time about Socrates and that is also my source of fascination with him is that we don't really know what he thinks about anything. He just goes around asking people to define terms, but he never really puts forward philosophies or theories of his own and that seems like the ultimate pedantic activity. Yeah, I think so. This elusive feature,

29:49I think, is also why it is helpful to take irritation as a heuristic device because that shows you when the problem arises. And in the case of Socrates, we of course have this interesting evidence that he was convicted to death because of his habit of asking all sorts of annoying questions that were deemed subversive. So that only goes to show the fantastic trick that Plato pulled off in turning Socrates

30:20into an intellectual martyr, a hero, and turning the sophists into the bad guys. And so for you to be pedantic is, as you mentioned earlier, kind of in the eye of the beholder, right? So David might think that Socrates is a pedant. I would say no, Socrates is not a pedant. I buy his claim that he is seeking after truth in a way that the sophists are not and they're sort of logic chopping and encouraging a different kind of relationship to philosophy

30:50that I don't think is worthwhile. But maybe I've just been Plato-pilled because you talk about how there is a lot of hate on the sophists that we get through Plato in addition to the ancient Greek comedians. Something in what David said a moment ago I think struck me because, David, you mentioned that the pedants violate etiquette. So they're annoying. They irritate us. It's like, come on, I'm at a dinner party. I want to have a good conversation. I don't need you to correct my grammar right now or I don't need you

31:21to ask for a clarification on a specific use of a word or the specific meaning of a word that I'm using. That would be a very Socratic move. And so, although the pedants certainly violate etiquette, I think there's a question that we might ask about whether they also violate morality or ethics. And I think I see in some of your analyses in the book that kind of suggestion too. When we call someone pedantic,

31:51we're not necessarily just criticizing them on the basis of etiquette, but also at least sometimes on the basis of ethics or morality. We're saying not just that you know too much and it's annoying, but also that you're abusing your knowledge. For example, you mentioned during the medieval period some drama around this, and specifically we see Christians accusing pagan philosophers of being too bookish and worrying that scholarly pursuits undermine Christian piety. And then of course in ancient Greece, as we were talking about a moment ago,

32:22the sophists were accused by Plato and other philosophers of being great debaters but lacking a moral compass. So how might we describe the moral flaw of the pedant? And I'm especially curious about whether you think we should hold on to this moral concern today or whether we should just explain pedants as people who make others feel irritated because they make them feel insecure about their knowledge. What's the line between the etiquette and irritation and, you know,

32:53the moral compass question? I'm not sure if I see a clear contrast between morality and etiquette. Sinning against rules of etiquette can also denote deeper vices and that's, I think, very often the suggestion in anti-pedantic criticism. So what these intellectuals perceive were their ideas is often regarded by those who find fault with it or are irritated by it as behavior and as behavior

33:23that reflects certain vices. For instance, social vices such as pretension, arrogance, pride, those are very strong moral flaws in this pre-modern context. In a medieval context, the one that you mentioned, for instance, there's a significant religious dimension where pride also becomes very dangerous dangerously aspiritual, right? That sort of thing you can see, for instance, in the case of the philosopher Abelard, the irritation

33:53that he provokes also has something to do with that his enemies see him as really a dangerous thinker who overestimates his human capacity to understand. So there, I think, what starts as etiquette or criticism against trespassing against etiquette really reflects conceptions about moral flaws. Another interesting example in this case is the 16th century philosopher Montaigne who offers an essay about pedantry or pedantism

34:24as he calls it and in his view pedants reflect a lack of judgment. So they're not just annoying in their behavior but it signals a lack of judgment and he calls them, in fact, he associates pedants with professional teachers and those are