Geoff writes: "I can understand a German-speaker's belief that no English word quite expresses what he understands in the German word "X"."
If you know three or four people fluent in both English and German, ask them how they would translate these four words: Cigar, soap, tooth, shoe. See if every one of them doesn't say: "Zigarre, Seife, Zahn, Schuh." Go on to prepositions and conjunctions. Don't expect any of them to claim 'und' is not synonymous with 'and'. Words are my turf. I'd love to see them all glorified as unique. But that's baloney. In truth, I hate how custom made, specialized, the philosophers have tried to make their language. It makes stuff inscrutable to non-academics, and that shouldn't be. I'm pleased to notice what I think is a sharp decline in recent years in the use of the symbols of mathematical logic in philosophical journals. But wait, am I being inconsistent? "Be rigorous but be readable?" No, I don't think I am. It's hard, but it can be done to a useful degree. An essential required gift is good ability to see where the reader can go wrong. I used to say in a self-aggrandizing way, "I work and work and work on a piece till I've got it where it seems like it took no work at all." (Not the pieces on this forum, I admit!) What I was largely aiming at was silently side-stepping confusing verbal misteps while discussing complicated notions. Some of the best philosophers are celebrated for their writing "style", and that's the way it should be. David Hume, and, often, Bertrand Russell, were none the less rigorous for making their work "accessible" to the layman where they could. I honestly believe that the pursuit of linguistic "rigor" has often been literally counter-productive in philosophy, and, paradoxically, perhaps most woefully in academic philosophers themselves. The devising of "terms of art" like 'epistemic' and 'the aesthetic' (where 'aesthetic' is a noun) has made for more muddlement than clarification in philosophy. The later Wittgenstein, despite putting forth some of the most bizarrely novel philosophical ideas, worked hard, and often successfully, to frame them in something very like "kitchen-table" lingo. If he often failed, it had less to do with his language than with the fact that certain key notions of his were muddled or incomplete. But all of us have those. ************** New MapQuest Local shows what's happening at your destination. Dining, Movies, Events, News & more. Try it out (http://local.mapquest.com/?ncid=emlcntnew00000002)
