Frances reports that Peirce wrote:
"Philosophy has a peculiar need of a language distinct and
detached from common speech, with a vocabulary so outlandish that loose
thinkers shall not be tempted to borrow its words. ... The first rule of good
taste
in writing is to use words whose meanings will not be misunderstood; and if a
reader does not know the meaning of the words, it is infinitely better that
he should know he does not know it."
This sounds good in principle, but it fails in practice. I know through
personal experience, and Peirce himself is reported late in life to have
lamented
his style of writing because it made so much of his work "unreadable".
Twenty years ago I wrote a book in which I purposely invented neologisms for
key, novel concepts. I defended my strategy sturdily. "Familiar-looking words
inevitably are smoking thuribles trailing the incense of former confusions and
"meanings" -- i.e. associations. In poetry this can be great; in argument
it simply makes the eyes water."
The first time I used a neologism, I described as clearly as I could what I
had in mind. I even created a twelve-page glossary so all the reader had to do
when encountering a neologism for the second time -- and finding he couldn't
quite remember the "definition" I had given -- was flip to the back of the book
and look its "meaning" up.
To no avail. As the neologistic phrases piled up, the difficulty in
remembering the unique notions behind them became overwhelming -- somacluster,
prelibation, gad, gad-receptor, initium, gustant sensibility, salivant
sensibility. I
compounded the problem -- as Peirce did, despite his statement above -- by
using familiar words but demanding that the readers entertain unprecedented
notion whenever they read them: character-circuitry, axiom, accident. I drew
"nice"
distinctions between, say, 'situation' and 'circumstance', and I actually
expected the reader, upon seeing the words thereafter, would conjure solely my
new usage-notion and not the notion they had associated with the words all
their
lives.
It all made for horrifically hard reading. Still, the book hung around in
print, and, two years ago, a publisher asked me if I'd like to write a revised
and updated edition. I seized the chance, cutting the neologisms down to a
minimum. In truth, if I had the time and opportunity, I could rewrite it
again
now, improving it to some degree by at least removing still more confusions and
errors.
The Peirce quote at the top continues:
"This is particularly true in logic, which wholly consists, one might almost
say, in exactitude of thought."
So philosophers, "mathematical logicians", spent half a century or so
devising several systems of symbolic logic. As Peirce anticipated, such systems
had a
virtue: Learning these strange new symbols was like learning a foreign
language, a foreign alphabet. The student memorized the one and only notion the
logicians wanted them to entertain when they saw a given symbol. This
eliminated
the problem of readers conjuring all sorts of varying notions because each
individual had a head uniquely stocked with varying associations accumulated
over lifetimes of varying experiences.
But -- big, big fault: If the one-and-only notion was itself muddled, then
ensuring that that notion was the one that arose each-and-every time the symbol
was used was no virtue at all. And mathematical logic is riddled with
ultimately indefensible notion.
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