{"id":2823,"date":"2020-11-13T15:13:11","date_gmt":"2020-11-13T15:13:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2020\/11\/13\/clarity-and-content-in-philosophy\/"},"modified":"2020-11-13T15:13:11","modified_gmt":"2020-11-13T15:13:11","slug":"clarity-and-content-in-philosophy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2020\/11\/13\/clarity-and-content-in-philosophy\/","title":{"rendered":"Clarity and Content in Philosophy: Two Principles of Method"},"content":{"rendered":"

A commenter enunciates two principles:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

1) The guiding principle of analytic philosophy \u2013 not always observed \u2013 is that the author has a duty to be maximally clear. <\/span><\/p>\n

2) The guiding principle of Continental philosophy \u2013 always strictly observed \u2013 is that the reader has a maximal duty to understand.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Here are my principles:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

A) One guiding principle of serious philosophy is that the writers of it have a duty to strive for as much clarity as they can muster and as much clarity as the subject matter allows, but without loss of content and without evading real problems and genuine obscurities. In addition to those two caveats, it needs to be said that clarity is not enough. "Clarity consistent with content" is my motto.
<\/span><\/p>\n

B) A second guiding principle of serious philosophy is that the readers of it have a duty to try to understand the author in a spirit  that is open-minded and charitable. A good-faith effort ought to be made to understand the author in his own terms and from his own tradition despite the hours of effort this typically requires.  Only then is critique and even rejection justifiable. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Commentary on the Principles<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Ad<\/em> (A).  "Reality is messy," a student once said in response to my drawing of distinctions. I replied, "True, but it doesn't follow that our thinking about reality should be messy." Clearly, we ought to strive to be clear. But 'ought' implies 'can.'  There cannot therefore be any legitimate demand that one be "maximally clear." That is unachievable by us. And it may be unachievable in itself.
<\/span><\/p>\n

The subject matter sets a second limit to our quest for clarity.  In his Nicomachean Ethics<\/em>, Book One, section 3, Aristotle famously writes,<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Our discussion will be adequate if it achieves clarity within the limits of the subject matter. For precision cannot be expected in the treatment of all subjects alike . . . .<\/span><\/p>\n

For a well-schooled man is one who searches for that degree of precision in each kind of study which the nature of the subject at hand admits: it is obviously just as foolish to accept arguments of probability from a mathematician as to demand strict demonstrations from an orator. (1094b 10-25)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Aristotle was discussing ethics and politics, but the principle holds across the board. Consider the philosophy of logic. If  you stick to logic proper, things are very clear indeed. But if you dig beneath the formalisms and schemata, obscurity soon rears its ugly head. No logic without propositions. But what is a proposition? And how are we to understand the unity of a proposition? There are competing theories, none of them "maximally clear." The prosaic pates who cannot tolerate any degree of obscurity had better stay clear of these questions.
<\/span><\/p>\n

But the great philosophers have never done that. They were not put off by the penumbral. They dug deep.  A great logician, second only to Aristotle, if second to anyone, felt moved to write, in one of his seminal papers, "The concept horse<\/em> is not a concept." Is that clear? It smacks of a contradiction. And yet Gottlob Frege had excellent motivation for saying it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ad<\/em> (B). <\/span>A mistake many make is to <\/span>think that what is not immediately<\/em> intelligible to them<\/em> is unintelligible, period, or perhaps even a product of willful obfuscation.  One expects this mindset among ordinary folk. Unfortunately one finds it also among philosophers, assuming they deserve that title.
<\/span><\/p>\n

The Australian positivist, David Stove, somewhere takes umbrage at a passage from Heidegger and pronounces it gibberish, when the passage is not gibberish at all. The miserable Stove, unwilling to to do his homework, and with no understanding of Heidegger's intellectual antecedents, dismisses as gibberish what is not immediately intelligible to his shallow positivist pate. He displays this attitude throughout The Plato Cult<\/em>.
<\/span><\/p>\n

He  polemicizes churlishly against his spiritual superiors in much of his writing, so I am simply giving him, or his shade, a taste of his own medicine. <\/span><\/p>\n

When it came time to die, however, his empty polemics and miserable positivism left him in the lurch. His son, who, mirabile dictu<\/em>, converted to Catholicism, caught him reading the Bible near the end.<\/span><\/p>\n

Apparently, curmudgeon Stove forgot to consider that philosophy might have something to do with wisdom.<\/span><\/p>\n

Related: Edward Feser, Can Philosophy be Polemical?<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A commenter enunciates two principles: 1) The guiding principle of analytic philosophy \u2013 not always observed \u2013 is that the author has a duty to be maximally clear. 2) The guiding principle of Continental philosophy \u2013 always strictly observed \u2013 is that the reader has a maximal duty to understand. Here are my principles: A) … Continue reading “Clarity and Content in Philosophy: Two Principles of Method”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-metaphilosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2823\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}