It is possible to use clear language without resorting to either kitchen table talk or technical philosophical terms. Phrases like kitchen table talk evoke rather picturesque images and don't help clarify much at all. Foe instance, my kitchen table and chairs were made for me and so an allusion to them would signify something rather unique, not common.
This list is not the domain of ordinary folks with their folk languages and myths. I'd say that almost all, if not all, are well informed laymen when it comes to language, usage, and the like. We don't need folk talk unless we are pushed to ridicule something in which case it is, as always, quite effective. I suspect Cheerskep may not be the only "trained" philosopher here at least at the undergraduate level. I was "trained" in philosophy as an undergrad and was even named to Phi Sigma Tau, or something like that, the Philosophy Honorary Society . Admittedly. I am not on a par with Cheerskep in that field but I know how to read philosophy. I think Michael is pretty well informed too. An Saul. And others. So I think Cheerskep can allow us to graduate to the next grade where we can dispense with folk phrases like kitchen table talk, fuzzy, muddled, and other vivid picture terms. For all his faults even Descartes knew that philosophy by pictorial analogy was misleading. Ambiguity is a well known term. It refers to layered meanings, not fragments of meanings, and it proposes that those layers are interrelated or harmonize in some ways. Ambiguity does not refer to disconnected thoughts but to thoughts that can amplify one another. This is an important issue in aesthetics. Take the St. Louis Arch as an example of a monument having ambiguity. Many symbolic attributions come to mind with the Arch: modernist materialism, the "triumphal" spirit of Manifest Destiny; its name Gateway evokes allusions to the Big Sky of the American West, the shape of covered wagon top spars, engineering that "does the impossible" and still more. Each one of these allusions evoke still others, public as well as private. There was a recent PBS film re the Arch. I've been to the Arch and rode in to its top viewing area (a claustrophobic ride in a very tight elevator!) If we can't deal with ambiguity in art and aesthetics we are not confronting the problems of knowing what art experience can be. WC
