Philosophy's Problematic Nomenclature
As a student, I find it rather cumbersome, if not confusing, when instructors use different terms to describe the same concept. For example, some instructors refer to direct realism as naïve realism, perhaps because they oppose the view. So, in a glossary, you’ll find entries like “naïve realism: see direct realism”. But the madness doesn’t stop there.
One instructor might like to talk about the normative/descriptive distinction, while another goes on about the, wait for it (drumroll): evaluative/descriptive distinction. So, what’s going on?
Well, for one thing, it can’t be entirely due to childish infighting, though that might explain some of it (e.g. direct/naïve realism). But other examples seem to be motivated for different reasons, like disambiguating our nomenclature.
Philosophers can be very picky about the words they use. For example, some philosophers (like Mike Huemer) prefer to use the term indirect realism instead of representationalism, because the latter term is more ambiguous. So this preference for a less ambiguous terminology seems perfectly sensible. But there’s another problem facing our nomenclature: it’s not standardized!
Attempts to disambiguate our nomenclature seem limited to individual philosophers and their students, who might later go on to study at some other school and encounter philosophers who use the more ambiguous terminology. And, there’s probably nothing more annoying for professional philosophers than their students having to constantly remind or correct them about terminology.
This state of affairs is avoidable, but it’d require a general initiative for standardization across the discipline. Philosophers don’t really care though. They’re more concerned with trying to score points for their own side, so I don’t expect it will ever happen (and neither should you).
Academic philosophy would definitely benefit from a profession-wide standardization meeting every say, 10 years. Unfortunately, I don't see this happening as even defining "philosophy" in the context of a Philosophy department seems to be increasingly out of reach, especially as the analytic vs. continental classification slowly becomes less relevant. The closest thing I've seen to a unified terminology is in philosophy dictionaries. Routledge, Cambridge, etc. put out new ones every so often.
Great observations. Personally, I wonder if this leads to duplicated efforts in the discipline more broadly. Just anecdotally, I feel like analytic philosophy has a huge problem with 'new' articles basically rehashing the same positions as old articles with little to no additional insight offered. I think other factors likely play a bigger role in this (e.g., in publishing a philosophy article, the author is not limited by the tools at their disposal to the same degree as in the experimental sciences) but I imagine this makes it difficult at all steps of the process from authoring to reviewing.