It's fun, this -- spotting sources of fatal fuzziness in forum arguments.
Makes me feel like a hospital inspector in the nineteenth century after
Pasteur
discovered the pernicious effect of germs. "Sir! There are germs on your
apron!
On your hands! On your instruments, your bedding, yourb&."
I could do without 'fuzzy', but in truth I cherish it a bit. (Insider joke
for William!) I could use blurry, foggy, cloudy, muddy, muddled, as I stride
through the operating room, the ward, the bathrooms of philosophy.
There's no question there are smart people on our forum. The frustrating
aspect of the germ-hunting assignment is not that others lack intellect. It's
getting smart people to grasp the necessity to stop and examine the notions in
their minds that they are trying to "articulate". Yet another danger of
language is this: When we're fussing around with a blurry notion, very often
our
effort turns to finding a word or phrase to "express" the blurry thing before
we've cleared up the focus to a serviceable degree. Often what we settle for
is a
familiar word that has been used before to convey "something like" the notion.
The word then acts as an anodyne, a Valium, that quells the fussing, the
sense that our notion isn't sharp enough. It's one of the causes of inadequate
poetry -- and muddled, vague, ambiguous philosophy.
William writes:
"So there is, let's say, a specific Delacroix painting,
the object and then there is me, the perceiver, the
subject. Perception is the synthesis of subject and
object and that relationship can be judged, and in
metaphorical ways, explained."
As hospital inspector, I'm content to accept the word 'perceiver' -- but I
cite as a germ the word 'perception'. And also: 'synthesis', 'relationship',
and 'explained'. The words can be germs in the mind of the speaker in that
they
veil very foggy notions, but it's possible they don't -- i.e. sometimes the
speaker can have a serviceably clear notion but choose a word to convey that
lands in a very germy way in the other guy's mind. Each one of the germ words
above can be associated in a listener's mind with all sorts of different
notion.
The speaker may have one fairly useful notion in mind, finds a relieving word
that he can persuade himself will "say" it, and he happily utters (or writes)
it without nearly enough attention to how germly ambiguous it can be in the
listener's mind.
Which adds a second requirement for smart folks: After making sure you have
sharpened your notion into as clear a form as you manage, take pains to grill
each word you're considering to convey your notion. Picture yourself as the
casting director for a play or movie. It's not enough that the auditioner have
great head shots, and look the part. He has to be able to project the
character.
William writes:
"Excellence is a singular perception of a subject of an
object. It is an experience that makes us most human,
as my new best friend Schiller argues. It is the same
as beauty."
"You, Billy! You stay away from that Schiller boy! He's a bad influence! Come
inside. I'll make you a nice cup of cocoa."
Williams writes:
" Cheerskep is like the 2nd grade teacher who raps a
budding Mark Twain with a ruler for saying "ain't".
Now, William, it ain't fair of you to say that. Look back in the archives and
you'll see I've often used 'ain't' -- at which time I should have had my
knuckles rapped -- not for using bad grammar but for trying to be "cute
William again:
"I offer that everything is fuzzy and blurry, that nothing is so clear as to
be without the sin of fuzzy edges." I agree with William here, whether what he
has in mind with 'nothing' is the word or the notion at the moment (or even
an object in the non-notional "real" world). But it's a matter of the degree
of
sinfulness. Some arguments are doomed from the outset by fatally muddled
vocabulary chosen. Words abet the mind in its many muddling proclivities. For
example, words discrete and stabilize. You can quickly see something
potentially
suspicious in a phrase like 'the river'. 'River' is a discrete and stable
word,
and 'the' conveys a feeling of definiteness. Medicated by the vocabulary,
we're happy to accept 'the river' as labeling something discrete and stable.
But
it doesn't, because the river ain't. Still, 'the river' can be serviceable,
and in fact it usually is. "You can go from Albany to New York by boat on the
river." Fill in your own examples of where 'the river' can be can be
contentiously ambiguous or vague.
William writes:
"Cheerskep might do well to tell us himself precisely
what achievement and excellence denote."
For what its worth, it's meritorious to indicate the mention of a word (as
distinguished from its use) by single quotes. Boston has 700,000 people.
'Boston' has six letters. As for "denote" (double quotes because I'm quoting
you
there; single quotes would have been okay, but I'm focusing on the fuzzy,
blurry,
cloudy uttering: "denote". There's an essay's worth there, but luckily I don't
have the space here. I'll confine myself to this: Nothing, ever, "denotes".
Bertrand Russell's entire famous paper, 'On Denoting', is based on several
deeply fundamental errors, one of which is a failure to realize that words are
inert, they don't DO anything. Our minds, contemplating a given word,
immediately
summon up notion that education and experience made us associate with the
word. 'Denote' suggests to many people the absurd notion that a word
points-at,
picks-out, "refers to" an object, usually a non-mental one. Feh.
'Achievement' and 'excellence' are both the occasion for, let's say, a river
of various notion in our various minds. It's absurd and deluding to think they
"denote" anything.
William writes:
"In fact language is all about separating things one from
anotherb&" I hope that again you fell for the first phrase that quenched the
flame of verbal groping, and that you don't really believe that's what
"language is all about". John Ellis, whose book Derek champions, also claims
language's first function is to "categorize", but at least he concedes it
arose in
minor part from the impulse to "communicate".
(Ellis is wrong. Language rose primarily to communicate. Long before language
arose, man -- and other creatures -- "categorized" in the sense that a
wildebeest registered, without words, this sort of thing: that thing creeping
up on
us is a tiger, a "category" of creature that eats things like me, and I better
beat it the hell out of there. It was this inclination to "categorize" that
devolved into Plato's horrifically muddled notion of mind-independent "forms"
and "qualities", and led ultimately to the guys who devised "set" theories --
i.e. notions about why something "is" a "member" of such-and-such "category",
why philosophers from Plato and Aristotle right to the present day would
assert, it "IS" a such-and-such.
Finally William suggests that Cheerskep forgets "that
the positivist mindset is finally out of fashion and
human feeling -- fuzzy-wuzzy -- is hot stuff again." There's very little
strictly positivist in what I've said in this thread. And what is going out of
fashion very quickly is "fuzzy logic", which didn't celebrate fuzziness, but
simply tried to "handle" fuzziness. Statisticians have largely rejected it as
a
usable system by now, and philosophers find it much too narrow to "handle" any
of the basic issues of language.
Wittgenstein was a would-be Pasteur of philosophy. But his interesting brain
ran out of penetrating energy far short of the goal.
**************
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