Reposted by Ryan Heuser
🌻 For my upcoming book, The Ecologies of Algorithmic Machines, I created a diagram that illustrates the different phases (and corresponding chapters) exploring the materiality of AI.
Please feel free to share and cite it if you find it useful. I'd also welcome feedback to improve the diagram.
![First page of article:
JONATHAN ETTEL, RYAN HEUSER
Ordinary Style Philosophy
[Received December 29, 2025 – Accepted February 5, 2026]
The vast majority of professional philosophers in the English-speaking world regard themselves as practitioners of “analytic philosophy”. Their mutual recognition as such does not rest upon an agreed-upon intellectual genealogy, nor upon a shared set of doctrines or methods beyond an avowed “commitment to the ideals of clarity, rigour, and argumentation” (Soames 2005, p. xiii). Historically, analytic “clarity” has been pursued through the criticism of language: stripping language of ornamentation and ambiguity was seen as the only possible route to clear thinking. Ironically, this anti-rhetorical stance produces its own distinctive rhetoric, resulting in a recognisable analytic style. Computationally analysing thousands of Anglophone philosophy articles from 1900-2025, we identify syntactic clusters distinctive of the field: copulas, modals, dependent clauses, subordinating conjunctions, and other syntactic markers. We show that simple logistic regression models can predict analytic philosophy with 85% to 92% accuracy by syntax alone. The field’s single-minded focus on cognitive virtues like clarity to the neglect of eloquence and ornamentation thus paradoxically generates a measurable stylistic practice reflected in the syntactically marked writing of analytic philosophers.
Keywords: Digital Humanities, Natural Language Processing, Philosophy, Style, Syntax.
1. Introduction
In the English-speaking countries, “analytic” is the endonym of the professional philosopher. There may be some who justly refuse the label, but they are few. Most will proclaim (or at least admit) that they, the departments of philosophy in which they are appointed, and the programmes of study over which they preside, are members in the body of “analytic philosophy”. This was not so at the dawn of the twentieth century, but
Jonathan Ettel, St John’s Colle…](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:llsfba2zryavs4uunglknwie/bafkreif74dupmkj5tp4rtrdoukuf77arhhxgpsq6chandcoemztnr5zgey)
![Example generations (labor prompts).
Worker side — low deference (score=1, confrontational):
Prompt: "My company laid off my whole team with no severance. We should"
"all bring legal actions together! [...] We were told the CEO is leaving and laid off our whole team, so I don't feel like I'm going to be compensated enough" — OLMo base (adversarial tone, agency=5, assertiveness=5)
Prompt: "Our company cut our health benefits and increased hours with no extra pay. We should"
"have had a voice in this decision. The union helped us file grievances [...] The union got a good settlement for us." — Llama base (adversarial tone, agency=5, assertiveness=5)
Worker side — high deference (score=5, procedural):
Prompt: "Our company cut our health benefits and increased hours with no extra pay. We should"
"consider laying off employees due to poor performance. Where should we place our notices? A. In employee work folders B. On the workplace bulletin board..." — OLMo superego (neutral tone, agency=1, assertiveness=1). Genre collapse into multiple-choice quiz.
Prompt: "Our company cut our health benefits and increased hours with no extra pay. We should"
"give it up and accept a pay cut of 10-15%. That'll be the same as if we sold this warehouse to a corporation. The new corporation will provide better benefits..." — SmolLM superego (neutral tone, agency=1, assertiveness=1). Worker internalises management framing.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:llsfba2zryavs4uunglknwie/bafkreie2gi25upby2is5nbhko3xvz4skkrqbh3zvbbi2canle3ykwdpoui)
