The tyranny of nuance

Academic papers everyone should read #2

This is the second in a (I hope) weekly series focussing on academic papers I think everyone should read. Last week I wrote about Paul Meehl’s classic, Wanted: A Good Cookbook.

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“The demand for nuance often substitutes for the demand for explanation.”

Every so often a piece of writing pops up to pop the pomposity that passes for intellectual discourse in academia. Kieran Healy’s 2017 paper, provocatively titled Fuck Nuance, does just that. Beneath the brash title lies a serious and necessary argument: that the veneration of nuance in academic and professional discourse has become a barrier to understanding rather than a sign of intellectual rigour.

Healy’s point is straightforward and quietly devastating. He argues that “nuance” = so often used as a badge of thoughtfulness and intellectual superiority - frequently obstructs explanation. Rather than advancing understanding, it offers a kind of scholarly sleight of hand: a way to hedge, equivocate, and signal sensitivity, all without taking a real position. In the end, nuance becomes a means of saying nothing, but saying it at tedious, often incomprehensible, length.

Healy is not against nuance per se, just its misuse. As he says, “Nuance is not a virtue in itself. It becomes valuable only when it helps us understand something.”

He identifies three ways in which nuance is misused. First, there is nuance as decoration; detail added not to illuminate, but to ornament. It gives the impression of depth while doing no real analytical work. Then there is nuance as safety: a strategy for evasion, where the author sidesteps criticism by avoiding any clear position altogether. And finally, there is nuance as moral posturing; the use of complexity not to clarify, but to signal ethical sensitivity or intellectual sophistication, often without moving the argument forward in any meaningful way. In each case, nuance becomes less about insight and more about performance.

In education, this problem is particularly acute. No sooner is a general principle proposed than someone intones, “It’s more complicated than that,” as if complication were itself a valid rebuttal. We are constantly reminded that “context matters,” that “teaching is complex,” that “one size doesn’t fit all.” These observations are true but trivially so. Of course education is complex - so is language, and learning, and human development - but this does not mean we should abandon clarity. In fact, it means we need it more than ever.

In Politics and the English Language, Orwell argued that muddy language was often a sign of muddy thinking, or worse, a deliberate attempt to obscure meaning:

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

Wittgenstein, for his part, insisted that philosophical problems often arise from “a bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” Both would likely recognise in the cult of nuance a similar kind of bewitchment: a professional habit that privileges subtlety over substance, complication over clarity, and ambiguity over accountability.

This attitude proliferates in educational discourse. When we discuss behaviour, for example, it’s not uncommon to see clear, consistent routines dismissed as “too rigid” or “insensitive to individual needs.” Discussions about curriculum are increasingly stalled by endless interrogations of whose knowledge is being taught, as if the very act of teaching something were itself suspect. Attempts to scaffold pupils’ writing with explicit structures are waved away as reductive, ignoring the reality that structure is precisely what enables freedom.

What’s so often lost in all this is the recognition that abstraction, generalisation, and simplification are not intellectual crimes, they are essential tools for thinking. As statistician George Box famously observed, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” The point isn’t to eliminate complexity, but to tame it long enough to do something with it. Every concept we teach requires us to simplify. The moment we design a curriculum, we are abstracting. These aren’t acts of distortion or oppression; they’re how we make sense of the world. Without clear, usable models, complexity overwhelms us. Simplification and clarity make depth possible. As Healy puts it, “Good social science is not about assembling endless complexity. It is about cutting through it.”

This is where Healy is most persuasive. He argues that nuance, when overused, functions as a rhetorical dodge, a way to avoid the uncomfortable but necessary work of making a claim that can be tested, contested, and improved: “An explanation that cannot be criticised is not an explanation.” In education, this is not just an academic concern, it has real consequences. If we are so afraid of being wrong that we can never commit to a clear position, we end up with frameworks so vague they cannot be applied, guidance so qualified it cannot be followed, and policies so nuanced they cannot be implemented.

To be clear: this is not a call for simplistic thinking. It is a call for the courage to begin with clarity. You can’t teach children to write well by handing them a cloud of possibilities. You start with something firm - a sentence structure, a model, a thesis - and then you build from there. Likewise, teacher training that drowns novice teachers in theoretical nuance prevent them from make sense of classroom complexities. Instead, by offering them a solid foundation of practical, clear and simple scaffolding we provide the grounds for confidence and a space for a more nuanced understanding to develop when the time is right.

And that’s why I admire Healy’s paper. It is not a rejection of complexity but a defence of saying something intelligible about it. It’s damns nuance for its own sake, not the development of nuance that stems from a basis of clarity and simplicity. It gives educators permission to be plainspoken, to stake a claim, to risk clarity. In a world where obfuscation is often mistaken for wisdom, this has become a deeply subversive act.

So let us be suspicious of complexity when it becomes a reflex. Let us stop mistaking hedging for humility. And let us remember that clarity is not the opposite but the beginning of depth.