Juan Comesana has a post up on philosophers who like to find the best in all theories, show that everyone is kind of right, aim to have us all go home happy, and generally behave in ways that are sickiningly sweet. Juan describes them as being ecumenical, and contrasts them with partisans who “take clear sides on as many dichotomies as they can, and enjoy having in sight a view that is clearly opposed to theirs.”

That distinction is all well and good, but then he goes on to describe yours truly as being ecumenical. Nothing could be further from the truth. When I say that the true theory contains a little bit of X and a little bit of Y, I don’t mean to be saying that X and Y are both kind of right, I mean to say that they are both wrong. I’m the philosophical equivalent of the Third Way politician. I don’t mean to be showing how capitalist pig dogs and bleeding heart socialists can just get along, I mean to annoy both of them while (by) stealing their constituencies and promoting views both sides find appaling. I enjoy having every view in sight being clearly opposed to mine. Usually.

This all reminds me of a passge from Geoffrey Pullum’s Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. This is from the intro to his article on Linguistic Inquiry.

Since what I wrote received not only criticism from the defenders of MIT’s house journal but also hostile comments from people who thought I had been far too lenient with the journal and its editor, I assume that here we have a rare instance of my having achieved that most boring of properties in a commentary, balance. I can only apologize. Nothing was further from my intentions than a mealy-mouthed, on-the-one-hand-this-but-on-the-other-hand-that assessment.

Perhaps it is not too late for me to atone, by making it clear that I regard Linguistic Inquiry as a miserable trash-stuffed rag of a journal through which the pathetic blitheriings of an army of knuckle-dragging intellectual toadies are shepherded to prominence by the unprincipled back-room machinations of a pea-brained lackwit of an editor whose fawning subservience to the power clique that controls modern linguistics is matched only by his contempt for civilized standards when dealing with the work of those whose integrity fprevents them from prostituting their scholarship by kowtowing to the self-ordained guardians of a baseless pseudo-theoretical hegemong. I can’t imagine, frankly, why I still subscribe.

I’ve probably said this before, but you really should get that book.

I was going to conclude by saying that I have just as high an opinion of internalist theories of evidence (and non-Weathersonian externalist theories) as Pullum has of LI, and concluding that I don’t know why I still read them. But that might be misleading. I might think those theories are lighthouses in Fodor’s sense. They provide lots of illumination, and very good guides to where you don’t want to be. That would be misleadingly negative. Possibly.

So all I can say is that unlike Juan I’m a partisan on the partisan side of the ecumenical/partisan debate. But perhaps I’m not always strong willed enough to conform to my values.