From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Reply-To: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: gift/talent/aptitude/skill/ etc
Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2008 20:42:57 EDT
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.
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