Thanks for this Bud.
It looks like you may have been trying to justify your very loose use of English. In other words, you may be trying to defend your use of a "quantum English" (where sentences have perhaps several meanings which cannot be pinned down) - as opposed to a "classical English" (where sentences have clearly identifiable meanings).
But this really won't do. Nobody is going to understand you if you use "quantum English", and you'll be left isolated from your network. And then we'll all be sad. Here's a sad face to make the point: :(
Well, perhaps this is all rather ironic! One of the points, though, that I think Anart is making is: Is this actually externally considerate to the reader - especially to a reader whose first language isn't English? One of the most elementary things you can do is to ask yourself about any sentence that you write: How might this sentence be misunderstood by the reader? Now you're standing in the reader's shoes.
This is NOT to say that you may not be making some good points - and perhaps even some
extremely good points - if, that is, I've understood you correctly, or indeed understood you at all. Here are two further points which might be given in reply:
1. There is, of course, a whole branch of philosophy called "philosophy of language". Have you read anything much in this area? Recently I've been trying to get through Henry Laycock's book "Words without Objects". It's especially tough going. I got as far as page 45, and even that felt like reaching Everest Base Camp: a really tough climb, but still not the summit by
any stretch of the imagination. It's not an easy read, but then the subject-matter isn't easy either. I found I could understand, but only as long as I applied myself to it very thoroughly. Perhaps you may enjoy reading something like this? It is possible to write about abstruse things, which call for a lot of attention on the part of the reader, and
actually be understood. Such writers may give you some idea of how to proceed.
What I was particularly struck by here was the thought that in academic philosophy we may not have moved very far from where we were c. 500 BC. The pre-Socratics suggested that everything was in flux. Then Democritus came along, and philosophy, as we know it, started. But it may have been a false start. The point here is that Democritus was an atomist; he insisted that each thing can be subdivided until we reach a final thing, which can't be divided any further. (Obviously this was a purely philosophical position, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the sort of thing Dalton, Rutherford, and all those other physicists were working on in the early 20th century.) The point Democritus was making was that
things had boundaries, and could therefore be talked about, and also, by implication, controlled. That Democritus stands at the beginning of
written philosophy may also be particularly significant, because this whole approach is all about language too. Language calls for clear demarcation in meaning, so that we can understand each other. But these necessary limitations (i.e. demarcations) are also limitations in another sense: they limit what we can conceive of in our minds. They suggest that things are just things, and that's all there is to it.
And here is where it gets really exciting: we've got an impasse. We can no longer trust the way we think, because our way of thinking is itself constructed of discrete units. In other words, there are automatic self-imposed limitations in our thinking which are a direct result of (a) the wish to control things; (b) the natural wish to be understood clearly; and (c) a misunderstanding about the very nature of reality. This seems to be the final point that you yourself make. I cannot go further than this, and I don't think that Laycock goes any further than this, and I'd love to meet the individual who
has gone further than this. The pre-Socratics had suggested instead that there were, in the final analysis, no things: each "thing" was a part of something else, in a living, dynamic, ever-moving system. Nothing could really be pinned down. One had to move with the flux if one was to get any real understanding of how "things" really were. An analogy might be seen in an oak tree. There it stands before you: it's a thing. But have we really understood it by giving it a name, and saying, "There you are, that's an oak tree!" At a completely different level of reality it's actually something completely different: it's alive, it's the centre of an ecosystem supporting 1000 different species, each thing moving in crazy ways to make up the order that we can then symbolize by the term "oak tree". It's dynamic, rich, ever-changing, beyond our full comprehension.
So, this basic point in philosophy (the pre-Socratics versus Democritus) has never really been dealt with properly in the past 2500 years. It somehow eludes us - and this has to do with our general mindset, as you imply (I think). In attempting to understand (i.e. grasp the meaning) of everything, everything was broken up into discrete units. This did away with the absolutely essential links between things. I don't want to labour the point, but this is how we ended up with a situation where the universe was 'dis-enchanted' (i.e. the manifold links between things ignored) to pave the way for the scientific revolution, the triumph of technology, the divorce of ourselves from our natural environment, and the corruption of science, which could no longer see the wood for the trees.
2. I want to quote something from Professor Austin Duncan-Jones on the difficulties of language, which you might enjoy. Again, the theme of atomism in language is made the centre of attention. This is from his book "Butler's Moral Philosophy" (p. 31), where he discusses Joseph Butler's writing style, and explores some of the difficulties in writing about philosophical matters, which originate in the limits of language itself:
Duncan-Jones said:
Butler had certain clearly held opinions about the functioning of language. Of the meanings of words he took what is now fashionable to call a 'contextual' view: he held, that is, that words are not, as too great reliance on concise dictionaries might make us suppose, bricks or atoms of meaning, each of which enters without change of shape, size or mass into walls or molecules of meaning, whose properties can be deduced from those of their components. To amplify Butler a little, language operates in wholes of varying size and complexity, whose ingredients include people's thoughts, acts, and situations, as well as their words: and the whole contributes as much to the force of the word or idiom as the word to that of the whole. "I must desire the reader" (Butler writes) "not to take any assertion alone by itself, but to consider the whole of what is said upon it: because this is necessary, not only in order to judge of the truth of it, but often, such is the nature of language, to see the very meaning of the assertion" (Preface to the Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel (1729)). Thus, although Butler adopted from Locke the notion of the imperfection of language, he did not follow Locke in supposing that a few simple maxims of definition would provide a remedy.
So there we are. And perhaps we begin to understand, too, why philosophy of language became the frontier of modern philosophy - and indeed harsh, mind-bending territory too. It offers a challenge to how we express things, which further offers a challenge to how we
think about things. And it suggests that we may have got everything wrong.
So it's easy enough for misunderstandings to arise when writing about philosophy. Your problem
seems to be that you're not even considering that there might be a difficulty. Your posts often read like wiseacreing for this very reason: you seem to think that lack of clarity is just a natural part of any presentation in philosophy because the subject-matter itself is unclear. But this is surely just to invite disaster. You
can make your presentations clear enough for people to understand what you are saying - and indeed you should find that it's actually fun trying to put your thoughts into clearer English.
If you don't achieve some level of clarity, there really is very little reason to jot your thoughts down here; you might be better off just putting them in a private journal. This of course is not to suggest that you might not have some good points to make - but without more effort at achieving clarity (which boils down to external consideration) your points are largely without value because they lack that most important thing of all: humility.
Hard words, I know. Of course I'm conscious that my own words in this very post are probably somewhat incoherent, which is all rather ironic. The point, though, is that it's useful for everybody to at least
try and be as understandable as they possibly can be.
Please let me know if anything remains unclear.
I especially appreciate those who let me know they stopped reading my posts. That's really helpful info since I need to know what I'm doing wrong.
