Even if my first response was apparently off the mark and without appropriate substantiation I will attempt to flesh out where my response came from and outline further what worries me about this "serviceable clarity" thesis.
Cheerskep says he feels frustrated when "smart people use words carelessly", I take this to mean he feels frustrated by people he believes clearly have good ideas about which they are speaking when their manner of speaking betrays their "real" thought, or notions. Perhaps that frustration also comes from not immediately comprehending such speech due to the fuzziness. My suspicion is that the former is the primary source of that frustration as made evident in his complaint about William's usage of "synthesis". Where I caught a glimpse of the "clear and distinct idea" undercurrent was in the sense of separation of language and the "notion" Cheerskep always talks about. He says that the discreteness of words leads us to confusion about the discreteness of notions, or what seems to me what is meant by the singular "notion", the constantly shifting notions incompletely distinguishable from one another, that are in turn referred to by words. But again if fuzziness of language is remediable through sharper attentiveness by us in our selection of words to correspond to current notions then it must be possible for us to differentiate clearly between one word and the next and moreover that we have a legitimate concept of both, especially those with subtle differences (the sort we label as synonyms in thesauruses). >From another post: "The word then acts as an anodyne, a Valium, that quells the fussing, the sense that our notion isn't sharp enough." Speaking of sharpening notions and bringing fuzzy language into focus to better serve the communication of our notions points down the path of a theory of concepts in which they must have clarity and distinction as evinced by our expressions concerning them. So here did I mean to place my example of a negative concept. How could we obtain a sharper notion of a negative concept? My point regarding infinity was that our concept of it is entirely vague and the notion cannot be sharpened in isolation, rather it continues to serve us at all by its definition as what excludes it (and developing is indeed possible but only by developing just those concepts it excludes). Beyond quick examples of negative concepts, complexes of ideas constructed across crafted sentences can appear either ambiguous or unnecessarily obtuse, but in those cases language is serving disambiguation because the idea conveyed is not a positive concept (or notion). It must develop out of the text or conversation. This is when language shows the significance of its concreteness, that "carelessness" in formulation can flash forth insight. I am not attempting to read false ideas into Cheerskep's position here to then attribute to him directly, instead I am trying to address what I did read in some of his comments and its problematic implications. Where words appear to be atomized and language understood as serviceable and for utility, without any further elaboration, in a theoretical framework, I, perhaps wrongly, assume language and the movement of thought have been falsely divided. Language and thinking are ineluctably entwined. The very possibility of language, and further, communication, is based on structures of thought and so human thinking within a linguistic context in turn is structured to a significant degree by language. We do not "think directly in linguistic terms" but the structure of thinking is altered through the development of language. Nothing is more obvious to a translator than that one language cannot be treated merely as a cipher for another. Not only is expression lost but also (objective, social) meaning. Of course the words in-themselves do not mean, but we commonly understand the social origin of language and that it is the result of a developmental process in and through communities of thought and practical activity, this is how its elements obtain objectivity. Languages, as developed through "usage", are frameworks (modes, even) of thinking. Thought, if we consider the basic capacity for categorization as was discussed to be thought in some basic sense, is primary, but it bears repeating that language and thought determine one another. It is a fantasy to believe that we properly think (really "think") purely at some basic level but the content of that thought is ruined by translation into this communicative tool, that it is just one direction from thought to an act of communication. The very reason I introduced dialectics into the discussion is to present what many believe to be empty rhetorical play, where one might think ambiguity is introduced to cover up inconsistencies instead of sifting through them to obtain greater precision. This is a misunderstanding of dialectical thinking and admonishments to clarify philosophical language, especially where the philosophy is pursuing a thought dialectically, are deleterious, indeed philosophy that wants to say only "what is the case", captured in concise positive language can all too effortlessly turn into an enemy of philosophy. -Brian -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, March 29, 2008 2:26 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Fuzzy writing, fuzzy reading. Comfortably for Brian, he evidently missed my repeated posts asserting that ALL notion is indeterminate, indefinite, multiplex and transitory. Plus my many remarks about how language misleads by "discreting" -- that is, since words are discrete -- i.e. "distinct" one from another, and you can see their "borders", their beginning and their end right there in front of us -- we tend erroneously to assume the notions they allegedly label are also discrete. But even without reading those, he had all the evidence he needed, right in the post he was commenting on, to show I was perhaps the last person on the forum to champion "clear and distinct ideas". In that posting I remarked on the frustration I feel when I see smart people USE words lazily, carelessly, fuzzily. My major complain in the post to William was the proclivity too many of us have to use a word that doesn't convey our notion -- because we simply don't stop to consider what a variety of notion the word has the potential to occasion in our readers' minds. In William's post I cited the words 'perception', 'synthesis', 'relationship', and 'explained'. William, for example, said "perception is the synthesis of" a painting and its contemplator. This, I maintain, is a deceptively foggy assertion, a kind of fervid, dreamy locution written by someone who hasn't really worked to make his own notion serviceably clear. In the posting Brian is commenting on, I explicitly urge speakers to sharpen their "notion into as clear a degree as you can manage". It didn't occur to Brian to reflect on why I don't say, "sharpen them until they are clear and distinct."
