Mind Your Peas and Kews
Here’s an amusing bit of serendipity. I just added a quotation to Quotations and only after posting it (and doing various other tasks) realized it’s highly relevant to a little argument we were having the other day about the importance and value of precision in language. My colleague posted a Comment which made much of the difference between saying ‘a something’ and ‘the something.’ He also pointed out that ‘Precision of language matters, if you want to be understood.’ That seems like such an obvious, incontrovertible statement, doesn’t it? But people do attempt to controvert it. People in fact actually mocked the idea of making anything of the difference between ‘a’ and ‘the’.
Very well. Behold that Stanley Fish quotation (and he’s a US academic, last I heard, so maybe it’s not a US-UK thing. As I said, I certainly hope it isn’t.):
Everything follows from the statement that the pursuit of truth is a — I would say the — central purpose of the university. For the serious embrace of that purpose precludes deciding what the truth is in advance, or ruling out certain accounts of the truth before they have been given a hearing, or making evaluations of those accounts turn on the known or suspected political affiliations of those who present them.
Italics his. So…he seems to think there’s a difference, a difference worth remarking on in an interjection, a difference worth emphasizing with italics – between a central purpose and the central purpose. He doesn’t seem to think it’s obsessive or peculiar to notice the difference.
I’ve seen a couple of other good remarks on the value and necessity of precise language in the past couple of days. One is somewhat indirectly relevant, but it’s suggestive. It’s by Robin Dunbar, in The Trouble with Science (page 106). He’s talking about strong inference, and the way it has accelerated the progress of science in various fields.
Precisely formulated hypotheses are compatible with a very much narrower range of empirical results than more loosely formulated ones.
He’s not actually talking about language there, but the point is the same. Woolly language allows a much wider range of meaning, which can be nice in poetry (though precise meaning can be very good in poetry too) but is not nice at all in substantive discussion.
The other is from Susan Haack in Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate (page 53). She is discussing Peirce’s view of science and inquiry.
…’studying in a literary spirit’…implies a preoccupation with what is aesthetically pleasing that diverts attention from inquiry and pulls against what ought to be the highest priorities of philosophical writing: not elegance, euphony, allusion, suggestiveness, but clarity, precision, explicitness, directness.
So there you are. Keep the wool for knitting sweaters and guillotines, and be precise when using language.
Well, did anyone say it was possible? Not that I know of. We did say precision of language matters, but that’s not exactly the same thing.
“There is simply no substitute for the efforts of interpretive understanding.”
Very true, no doubt. But what follows from that? You’re always making these oracular pronouncements without making clear what follows from them. (And then not answering when I point that out, so that we never do find out what follows.) What follows from that? That people should speak and write as loosely as possible in order to give “interpretive understanding” something to do? Why can’t we use interpretive understanding on language that is already reasonable precise?
I’m not talking about jargons and formalizations, for Christ’s sake. The difference between ‘a’ and ‘the’ is hardly jargon!
“Logical errors are, I think, of greater practical importance than many people believe; they enable their perpetrators to hold the comfortable opinion on every subject in turn.”
Bertrand Russell, ‘A History of Western Philosophy’, p. 93
Just be glad this language doesn’t have more articles than it does.
We may never get rid of all the ambiguities and vague spots, but it seems we can make a good try. Hey, it just might help that interpretive understanding…
Good quotation.
“it seems we can make a good try”
Well exactly. There is a big difference between saying we can achieve perfection and saying we can do better – obviously. Obviously language can’t become the exact equivalent of math, but it can certainly be more or less woolly or precise, vague or clear. That’s one of those bogus dichotomies that rhetorically inclined people love to resort to – between language that’s 100% exact and language that’s as fuzzy and obscure as any given speaker wants it to be. Those are not the only possibilities.
A sufficient degree of clarity to make one’s point is obviously desirable. But beyond that, “clarity” is no more than a stylistic matter, equivalent to elegance, concision, elaborateness, steepness, etc. “Clarity” certainly does not equate with truth, nor even sense, and can equate with superficiality,- (as with the Bertrand Russell title cited above.)
The idea or project that natural language needs to be improved upon by means of logic with respect to exactitude and clarity, else it leads astray and is a source of error and confused thinking is an old one, as with Leibniz’ notion of a “characteristica univeralis” and Frege’s “Begriffsschrift”. But it attempts to reduce language to a purely informational or cognitive function, ignores the question of the variety of things one *does* with language and all questions of context, and sets up an inverted and insoluable “problem” of reference. Such a “logical” ideal of language distorts rather than “perfects” consideration of how sense is made. Logic is just a subset of semantic inferences, concerning relations of categorial inclusion and exclusion; it neither accounts for where our categories derive from in the first place, nor for the total set of inferences we use in making sense of a matter. Making sense is prior to and more fundamental that logic and, if one is possessed of a formal logical set of inferences, it is by no means always clear that they are the same as the natural language inferences we actually use. Words are, obviously, not “names” for things, but labels for bundles of relations, which are combined with each other through the complex interaction of different sets of rules to yield inferences and implications by which sense is made. Reflection on language and meaning or sense is *a* central topic for philosophical reflection on the nature and limits of reason. What does or does not make sense can not be determined in an a priori fashion.
The difference between a something and the something may be quite trivial. It is only if “the” is taken to mean “sole and exclusive”, that an antithetical position is likely to be generated.
The Stanley Fish quote was him doing his usual schtick of arguing that academic freedom and professionalism are unto themselves self-sufficient “justification” for such matters; that’s how he defends pomo clap-trap.
I sometimes wonder if the virtual loss of the subjunctive tense from the English language lends the language its matter-of-factness and tends to condition its native styles of thinking.
“A sufficient degree of clarity to make one’s point is obviously desirable. But beyond that, “clarity” is no more than a stylistic matter, equivalent to elegance, concision, elaborateness, steepness, etc.”
Well, that’s either a tautology or false, depending on how one defines the various terms. Which is one reason – not the reason, one reason – clarity is useful.
“The difference between a something and the something may be quite trivial. It is only if “the” is taken to mean “sole and exclusive”, that an antithetical position is likely to be generated.”
Nooooooo kidding!
Useful point about Fish though. I did wonder at the time of that article, if I was missing something; it appears that I was.
Dear subjunctive. I do my best. Long live the subjunctive.
“Well, that’s either a tautology or false, depending on how one defines the various terms.”
Speaking of tautologies…..
“Nooooooo kidding!”
Well, that was the apparent grounds for an objection to R.L. You’ll have to pardon my lack of close-reading ability. I did try to respond over there, as to why “ubiquity” might tell over against dissent, but I received such a pedantic response that it was not worth replying to. Still, one has to read for sense before one assesses truth-claims. Otherwise, one ends up denouncing senseless truth-claims. That all secularists are Maoist cannibals is a different matter from the notion the compassion makes for good historiography. The former is a product of psychotic over-generalization; the latter is a proposition worthy of criticism.
How very odd to find over here the celebration of hyperbole matched with a demand for precision in choice of articles. How very odd to read the claim that someone said “all secularists are Maoist cannibals” from the celebrants of linguistic accuracy. “Psychotic generalization”? Is this projection? Does it derive from gazing too long in a mirror? Who knows? But how _very_ odd of those who write this drivel to call what someone else writes “weird”!
Oh, lordy, here we go again. Ralph, please calm down and read carefully if you’re going to comment. One, that’s not a ‘celebration’ of hyperbole, it’s an admission, a mea culpa. I did say I sometimes have to clarify my meaning. Two, your quotations are from comments by a reader of B&W, not by one of its editors, so I don’t see what’s odd about reading them here. Three, the quotations are from comments by a reader who disagrees with me about linguistic accuracy – he’s not a celebrant of it at all.
However, I have deleted a couple of impolite comments from this thread.
In response to this series of postings I first considered the subtlety of articles. For example, the phrase “the subtlety of articles” is in some ways less precise than the phrase “a subtlety of articles.” The latter indicates a single subtle quality that hopefully will be explained in the following phrase. While the former can indicate a single quality, it can also imply a range of qualities.
Then I went on to the importance of metaphor and other “poetic” comparisons.
Consider the phrase, “all secularists are Maoist cannibals.” Taken at face value, it is a double metaphor. Maoists are equated to cannibals, and then that scrumptious image is equated with secularists. Like all poetic comparisons it assumes a certain level knowledge from the reader: in particular the excesses of Mao’s regime in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The more you know of the horrors the angrier the effect of the statement.
However, that degree of anger is what allows the statement to be used sarcastically, in this case as a paraphrase of another person’s statement. The original statement was a bit too sweeping, if I remember correctly (sorry Ralph), and the “cannibals” paraphrase underscored that questionable sweep by taking it to the nth degree.
Now whether that nth degree was deserved or too over the top (another metaphor) to be fair is another question.
Articles are indeed subtle – which is part of what makes them so interesting (to those who find them interesting, at least). I’ve been thinking about the subject too (obviously enough), and I’ve noticed that I often self-correct when writing. I frequently use a phrase (because I frequently have the thought) like ‘X is the reason I am interested in Y’ – which I then correct to ‘X is one reason etc’ – because as I form the phrase, the thought occurs to me, ‘But there are probably other reasons too – I don’t know for sure, I don’t know what they are, I don’t want to stop and try to think of what they are right now because that would be a digression, but I bet there are – so make that one reason, not the reason.’ I don’t really have the full thought, of course, just an abbreviated or compressed version of it – just a mental tweak or nudge – other reasons too – so I adjust the wording.
And I think this kind of thing is interesting because mental processes are interesting, language and its interaction with thought is interesting – and so on.
Metaphor is also highly interesting, needless to say; figurative speech in general is highly interesting.
Well, just to let the perpetrator of the crime speak for himself, of course, that was in the mode of sarcastic-parodic hyperbole, but the distance between “psychotic” and “paranoiac” is not all that great and the latter literally applied to the source. But the operative word was “overgeneralization”, and the topic was whether clarity or any other stylistic marker (or technique) was sufficient unto itself to identify (or produce) such fallacious overgenrealizations. My argument was that, beyond a baseline of adequacy with respect to clarity and specification, nothing can obviate the burdens of interpretation and the latitude it must grant. Secondarily, the logical idealization of language, with which demands for “clarity” of style, as if that were itself a marker for thought, are often associated, is itself a source of such overgeneralization.
True enough about the literal bit.
“beyond a baseline of adequacy with respect to clarity and specification, nothing can obviate the burdens of interpretation”
I know. But that still seems to me either tautologous or false. Or to put it another way, perhaps we have a different view of that baseline of adequacy. Or even, perhaps we don’t, perhaps we don’t disagree at all. Who knows.