There’s a certain brand of incompetent online commenter who thinks I am especially prone to not understanding people. This appears to be predicated on my advocacy for the unintelligibility thesis (UT), the position that irreducible normativity is a meaningless pseudoconcept.

For some reason, my stance that this particular bit of technical jargon fails to refer to any coherent concept has somehow convinced a small contingent of trolls (or at least people who act like trolls) that I have some general difficulty with understanding people.

Somehow people morphed the position that a handful of technical philosophical concepts are nonsense—not an especially novel or radical thesis, at least in my estimation—and began parroting this silly narrative that when I discuss matters with people I don’t understand most of what’s being said. These people are unable to provide examples of this and usually, when I do question whether something is meaningful, unable to convey what it means. And, ironically, they reliably exhibit a very poor understanding of my own views.

In a later comment the say this:

Lance generally has two modes on his Substack; “I don’t understand what this person is saying” and “I don’t even get why anyone would believe this.”

This is absurd, and this person would be unable to substantiate this claim. I don’t know where these people come from or how they become this confused, but it’s disappointing that there are people who can have an entire blog like mine available to them and be this mistaken.