Dear John Harvey, Gary Moore: Absolutely excellent! "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." This is perfect! Ambiguity, established within a locating context, is therefore necessary for communication per se. Establish the context precisely and you sizably decrease, but never eliminate, the ambiguity. If what you say is important enough, at some time you must enunciate your thoughts to a wider, broader community. Peirce uses the term “prime necessity” as if it were a very precise scholastic logical term. And yet an explanation for “prime necessity” is not to be found anywhere in the Peirce sites nor in any major philosophy resource like the Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosophy. If, on the other hand as I advocated, we had the literal Latin phrase he was referring to, I would have no problem locating at least a context in which it is used as “prime necessity”. Peirce praises it by saying, “He could not have sought out a more technical phrase” as it “strictly means”. And yet it is impossible to find except in this paragraph in “The Ethics of Terminology” (EP volume 2, page266). So it is hardly a model of intelligibility considering its lack of context and its near total lack of use.¶ -------------------------------- Gary Moore: I. A. Richards I am mainly familiar with as a literary critic, obviously with a command of philosophy and logic. However one communicates in English, one uses literary or, better, rhetorical tropes that, while not necessarily being precisely logical (but not hindering it either), none the less state the existential fact a human being who is in a certain situation is making a statement. If done well, all parties, with their appropriate usage of ambiguity, can more or less correctly understand each other. Abuse the ambiguity as Peirce can do in a purely arbitrary fashion, people think, because he has said something extremely obscure, that it is extremely brilliant because either no one understands it or everyone is afraid of saying “The emperor has no clothes on,” that the great ‘truths’ are merely very ordinary pedestrian sideswipes.¶ ------------------------- Gary Moore: “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 doctor is now being legally forced to explain why an x-ray is necessary and what it can and cannot do in common, though un-precise, terms. Instead of what? Instead of just doing the x-ray to legally say he did an x-ray to cover himself from legal suits without necessarily being of any use to the patient even from the most outlandish of possibilities, while at the same time economically harming the patient with a needless very expensive charge. As Churchill said of politics, “America and England are divided by a common language.” Well, he had to break down and learn American context if he was going to get American money and weapons, did he not? No one was going to give those things to him simply because he wanted them.¶ --------------- Gary Moore: Herein perfectly fits the following, “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?" “Further inquiry”, though, can only proceed from ambiguity as what is at hand to any possible precision.¶ ------ Gary Moore: “"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." It has been a while since I have dealt with Kleist’s essays on marionettes and Immanuel Kant. Has a better format and treatment of his essays occurred I do not know about? Regards, Gary Moore
From: John Harvey <johnhar...@earthlink.net> To: Peirce-L <peirce-l@listserv.iupui.edu> Sent: Saturday, May 12, 2012 10:28 AM Subject: Re: [peirce-l] ORDINARY DISCOURSE AS THE FINAL CAUSE OF ALL INTELLECTUAL ENDEAVORS 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." --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message to lists...@listserv.iupui.edu with the line "SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L" in the body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to PEIRCE-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
