A curious convention has taken (0) HOLD of contemporary scientific writing: the ritual performance of humility. No serious paper now concludes without a paragraph of limitations, in which the authors the modesty of their findings with an elaboration that can the claim itself in length. On one view, this is progress — a welcome corrective to the overconfident declarations of an earlier era. On another, it is a new rhetorical whose function is precisely the opposite of what it pretends: by enumerating every conceivable caveat in advance, the authors reviewers of the tools those reviewers might have used to criticise them. The limitations section, in other words, has become a kind of pre-emptive defence, and the humility it performs is less a disposition than a This is not cynicism about the authors, who may be wholly sincere; it is an observation about how a convention, once established, strategic use regardless of anyone's intentions. The solution, if there is one, cannot lie in yet more paragraphs of self-qualification. It must lie in a rhetorical culture that confidence and limitation in the body of the argument itself, where their can be assessed by the reader rather than rehearsed by the author.