The term 'eyeballing' (originally David Hockney's invention) is typical of Martin Kemp's vocabulary. A vocabulary which is down-to-earth and yet precise, shifting meaning whilst, at the same time, describing. The confidence displayed in his writing is reflected in a playful and creative oscillation between specialized and common language. In his introduction to his book, Seen Unseen (Oxford, 2006) Martin writes of specialization: Someone who inhabits any territory of specialized knowledge will inevitably and properly entertain opinions on matters at lesser or greater degrees of remove from that territory. A bricklayer has as much right to express deeply held views about goodness or venality of his or her fellow human beings as the most erudite of moral philosophers. The philosopher should be able to draw on a range of references and articulate arguments about what is considered good in a way that the bricklayer could not and would not need to do. The apparent academic superiority of an academic's philosophical discourse over the robust assertion of a worker in the building trade does not mean that the latter cannot pose a challenge to the former. A hands-on worker may address something from a practical perspective which the most sophisticated philosopher can ignore only at his or her peril.

Another frequent expression used in Kemp language is 'looking like.' By talking of what something 'looks like,' I am not referring to the image on the retina of the eye, or even to some kind of image compounded in our brain as a kind of 'photograph' of what is out there. What I am talking about is the collective result of an incredibly complex interaction between the buzzing confusion of visual stimuli, the optics of seeing, the neuro-physics of sensation, the cognitive systems that come into play, and the huge baggage of experience, knowledge, assumption, context, and directed interest that sets structured parameters on how we operate the processes of determining what something 'looks like.' (Seen Unseen, p.79).