Thinking up compelling or interesting ideas is difficult, so it is often easier to embrace complexity than to cut through it.

Abstraction means throwing away detail, getting rid of particulars. We begin with a variety of different things or events and by ignoring how they differ, we produce some abstract concept like “furniture,” “honor killing,” “social-democratic welfare state,” or “white privilege.” […] Incorporation is the reintroduction of particularizing elements, even though those particulars were what had to be thrown away to make the abstraction in the first place. To make a loose statistical analogy, it is a little like continuing to add variables to a regression on the grounds that the explained variance keeps increasing.

The tendency to equate a taste for nuance with intelligence as such is simply a tool of the connoisseur.

In addition to blocking new ideas and being obnoxious, nuance fails in the long run as a strategy for getting people to read and care about what you have to say.

Although often demanded and superficially attractive, nuance inhibits the abstraction on which good theory depends.

Healy argues forcefully against nuance-for-nuance’s-sake in academic discourse and demands that those critiquing theory do so on testable grounds. The article contributes more broadly to the philosophy of social science by articulating a concise theory for the value of Occam’s Razor.