Gary, Phyllis, list,
The use of "ambiguity" and "precision" or "clarity" as antonyms is what
I. A. Richards might have called a "killer dichotomy"[1] which doesn't
recognize they are all on the continuum of discourse academic as well as
ordinary. Before a more precise term can be used by more than one
person, someone has to define and explain it in the less precise (i.e.
more ambiguous) vocabulary that is already understood by others. The
limited communication which ambiguity provides is a hermeneutic path
toward more understanding. In other words, ambiguity is a tool for
achieving greater precision.
The x-ray example is a good illustration of a situation in which
"ambiguity" and "precision" both have economic, health, ethical and
semeiotic costs and benefits.
The question isn't, "Is there perfect precision?" Some of the questions
are, "Is there enough precision for the situation or context?" and when
necessary, "How does further inquiry increase the precision and clarity
of our understanding?"
Regards, John
[1] Berthoff, Ann E., "The Mysterious Barricades: Language and Its
Limits" (1999), p. 15-17.
"The Mysterious Barricades makes the case that escaping the enthrallment
of recent theory in literary criticism and the philosophy of language
will be impossible so long as the meaning relationship is conceived in
dyadic terms. Ann E. Berthoff examines certain "dyadic
misunderstandings," including the "gangster theories" fostered by
Deconstruction and its successors, and offers "triadic remedies," which
are all informed by a Peircean understanding of interpretation as the
logical condition of signification."--BOOK JACKET.
"The remedies come from a logician, the inventor of semiotics (Peirce);
a rhetorician who reclaimed practical criticism (I.A. Richards); a
philologist who became the first to develop a general theory of
hermeneutics (Schleiermacher); a linguist - some would say the greatest
of the century (Sapir); a philosophical anthropologist who sought to
define what we need to discover if we are to appreciate the role of
symbols in building the human world (Susanne K. Langer); and an amateur
semiotician novelist, and religious man who defined the capacity for
symbolization as the power which sets the human being apart from the
rest of Creation (Kleist). All have seen that pragmatism is the chief
consequence of a triadic view of the sign. All have seen that the powers
of language are contingent on its limits, whether linguistic or
discursive. All recognize the heuristic power of limits, seeing them as
"mysterious barricades."
"In a concluding section, Professor Berthoff turns to the idea of a
"fall" into language by way of a discussion of Kleist's essays on
marionette theatre and the shaping of thought at the point of utterance."
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