I like Brian's elegant, clear and useful statement. Boris Shoshensky -- "Brian Jenkins" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: All of this reads like a defense for a doctrine of "clear and distinct" ideas. Perhaps not for Cartesian purposes, owing validity only to those notions that can find clarity and distinction, but intimated in the accusation that "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" is the presumption that distinction is always possible.
I began to elaborate about how most of what you point out here addresses linguistic incapacity measuring some against others demonstrating that capacity to articulate ideas coherently, but I halted this process, as I think all of that is obvious, to continue my first thought. To do so, I invite you to think of the concept of infinity. Infinity is "understood" by almost everyone, you might even label "infinity" as one of your serviceable notions. But it is entirely a negative concept. Nobody really grasps infinity. Our capacity to abstract is such that we have a concept of something that is endless continuation, but not continuation because it is always "at once" endless. Our structure of thought and experience prevents us from really understanding this concept unless we negate its definable opposite. Infinity is a vague concept (if you think you have a strong grasp of it you're tricking yourself, otherwise you've more likely simplified it into having properties. Think of definitions of God, always defined with characteristics, performing actions in space, etc). But without our negative concept, we would not have developed calculus. In the end though, even in mathematics, we need to round. (Otherwise Zeno will always perplex us) Whereas in religious considerations we round with metaphorical attributions or magical incantation. Admitting metaphor is inadequate though, to disambiguate such concepts we ostensibly introduce more ambiguity, such as dialectics. The analytical minds think it's just more metaphor, but in momentary defense of dialectical logic, it realizes something essential about negative concepts and by extension concepts in general. They are more precisely understood as they mediate others. The experience of dialectical logic is the understanding, not the "here is the object, here is my concept of it for all eternity" moment that follows the Cartesian impulse. Sometimes metaphor reveals dialectical relations, other times it arrests them for better or worse. To many it seems dialectical logic obfuscates, but if followed and thought through it is more precise philosophically. It may apply terribly to differential calculus, but philosophies concerning (aesthetic) experience, for example, fold without it. -Brian -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2008 9:18 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: prizes 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
