Elizabeth V. Spelman:

At a certain stage in their careers — not only when writing their dissertations or entering the job market, but also simply when on the philosophical prowl – many philosophers we know, maybe even love, maybe even recognize in the mirror, assume, probably quite rightly, that in order to display their professional chops they’ve got to provide ready and palpable evidence of their skill at defining territory and then covering it.

One widely used and reliable approach is to make the territory very small (“The wild dog pack’s territorial nature leads its members to claim an area large enough to support them and any offspring, but not one so large that it requires excessive energy to adequately defend it”) and then corner it, seal it against possible intrusion — a little spray here, a little spray there, a little spray everywhere (Milani). The only way to prevent such intrusion is to anticipate every conceivable question that might occur to your thesis advisor, or prospective employer, or one of those philosopher-vultures (to change the animal metaphor briefly) who perch in the back of conference halls and live off the conceptual carrion of unsuspecting speakers. You better make sure to cover the territory, and to indicate that you know full well where intruders might slip in. Your territory may be a small territory, it may be a territory very few people actually want to occupy anyway, even if they enjoy trying to leave their own scent here and there, but by gum you know every blade of grass, every little once-unturned stone, every chipmunk hole, and you aren’t going to be surprised by anybody who would suggest there might be something in your territory you hadn’t seen or anticipated. It’s your territory and you’ve got it covered.

Whatever ends might be served by presenting one’s philosophical findings or explorations in this way, there wouldn’t seem much — apart from parochial disciplinary rituals — to recommend it as an invitation to a conversation or an inducement to engage in a joint examination….

Hmmm. Who are those philosophical enemies, those potential poachers? Well, for individual philosophers, among the likely candidates for enemy status is that motley crew of fellow “wisdom lovers” I alluded to earlier, lying in wait to expose the gopher holes you’ve failed to notice, tsk tsk tsk. For the whole posse of philosophers, especially the teeth-baring disciplinarians in the front lines, the enemy includes nonphilosophers (some of who somehow, some-where managed to slip into the profession, like slinky felines under the fence) who think they have the right to roam the territory without knowing how to cover it correctly (“Oh, what do those literary critics think they know about Wittgenstein, for God’s sake?”).

But sometimes it seems as if the real enemy the territory-covering activity is meant to subdue is language itself, the primary tool of the philosopher — as if the very medium of our expression carries with it some awful threat of uncontainability, is contaminated with the possibility of untamable sabotage or betrayal. Martin Jay recently has resurrected an example of such philosophica nervosa in Michael Oakeshott’s examination of “experience”: according to Oakeshott, “it must be the ambition of every writer reckless enough the use the word [i.e., “experience”] to escape the ambiguities it contains”(1933, 9). Covering the territory involves not only traversing it, but doing so in such a way as to keep unwanted semantic growth from popping up. I’ve got to know the meaning, indeed every possible meaning, of each word and phrase I use; only then can I control the language I use in such a way that I can mean just this, nothing more, nothing less. Only with such semantic omniscience and omnipotence can I prevent your claiming with any justice that something I said maybe doesn’t mean quite what I think it does, or that it is ambiguous or open to an interpretation I hadn’t imagined.

(Elizabeth V. Spelman, “Philosophical Doggedness”)