Jiggery Pokery Trumpery

Graham Harman has found a perfect term to describe a maneuver that's only too common in our world: trumpery. I tell you that your ideas are far less sophisticated than mine by pulling out a pseudo-counter-intuitive trump card. Viz. my favorite (least favorite) one from Continental philosophy: “Of course you would be totally naive to think that there is a continuity between humans and animals. That would be mere Darwinism, a dreadfully unsophisticated mistake.” I can also think of dozens of examples from Dennett and Dawkins et al.

“Trumpery” is a great term. It has a hint of something like effrontery or mockery (because of the sound of the word), a kind of affected importance.

Harman holds trumpery responsible for some of the terrible pickles we've gotten ourselves into and I think he is definitely on to something. His example:

“Contrary to the gullible masses of readers who all think Heidegger is straightforwardly anti-technology, it’s not really that simple.” This is trumpery: a deceptive, misleading trump card based on false sophistication.

Or this from phenomenology:

Correlationism does this as its essential gesture: “The naive are trapped by the pseudo-problem of ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ or ‘outer’ and ‘inner’, when in fact we are already outside ourselves in our very inwardness.”