Is it always better to be clear?

Reply to Purple Pond Sorry, could you be a bit clearer? :smile:

Reply to TWI How do you want me to be clearer?

Reply to Purple Pond Reply to Purple Pond It's OK, just joking :wink:

Is it always better to be clear? Here, in a philosophy forum, I would say yes, it is. As clear as you can manage. But clarity is sometimes more than just being clear. :chin: It depends what someone is trying to express. On occasion, there is an element of art in prose, and it can contribute to overall clarity. On other occasions, artistic flair works against clarity, and is best avoided. For simple factual communication, it is nearly always better just to be clear. :up:

If we're doing academic work, yes.

If we're doing art--writing poetry, writing lyrics, writing fiction, etc, no.

Quoting Terrapin Station

If we're doing academic work, yes. If we're doing art--writing poetry, writing lyrics, writing fiction, etc, no.

:up: And if we're doing philosophy...? :chin:

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It is always better to be precisely what the object of study demands and nothing less. Clarity is a pleasant bonus in the pursuit of that.

In my firmware designs (admittedly a quite different 'target'), I pursued simplicity and clarity, usually above all else. And it always paid off when I did. More usefully: it rarely paid off when I didn't. I don't know exactly how much of this translates into this discussion. :chin:

Quoting Pattern-chaser

In my firmware designs (admittedly a quite different 'target'), I pursued simplicity and clarity, usually above all else.

Aren't these two, simplicity and clarity, mutually exclusive? To state something in a simple way is always to allow for ambiguity, and to state something in a clear way requires the inclusion of complexities.

Reply to Metaphysician Undercover The watchword here is: as simple as it can be, but no simpler. The same for clarity. :wink:

Reply to Pattern-chaser
So you shoot for a balance between clarity and simplicity, as much (or little) of each as is deemed necessary?

If we're talking about firmware design now, then I would say that simplicity takes precedence, and clarity is maximised as much as the real world permits. But it is second only to simplicity in importance.

Simplicity isn't added 'as deemed necessary', like an ingredient in a cake. Simplicity is something that helps us not to get drowned in complexity, as we create programs that come very close to being too complex for us to understand. Simplicity is more fundamental than something we add 'as necessary'. :smile:

Hi guys, there's another such argument going on in another discussion. From that, I can only conclude that perhaps we should be as simple and clear as is readily acceptable to those we wish to express ourselves to. Sometimes, philosophers fail on this account due to overuse of complex vocabulary and derived terms whose meanings are not readily evident to those less philosophically inclined.

Regarding the reasons 1 and 2, I find this to be an interesting phenomenon when it comes to philosophy. Hardly any beginners to philosophy ever start from reading works that are considered to be complicated. More often than not people go through something more or less simplistic and/or at least one book or multiple videos to get a short introduction of general concepts and get them simplified and broken down into "understandable" statements. However, reading an interpretation, a simplified one at that, will never hold the same value as reading the actual work.

What makes the need for those simplified explanations to grow then?

An often heard complaint is about the complex vocabulary philosophers use, which excludes them for an "elite" group of some sort. However, that exact complexity is used to make the point clearer (clear as possible to be more precise) - the complex words are used for a precise and specific concepts and replacing them with simpler, more vague ones will eventually mean misunderstanding the ideas proposed to a certain extent. In the end, it's the very same goal to be as clear and precise as possible that leads to many's confusion. I think it goes back to the question whether or not one wants and is willing to risk misunderstanding the idea in order to have it simplified and whether or not one would prefer spending a lot of time reading and studying in order to widen their vocabulary and have the clear image of the proposed idea.

Reply to Purple Pond Deception is another reason. When speakers/writers try to deceive they become perfectly UN-clear.

Quoting Purple Pond

As for number 3, I don't know if it's even possible to be completely unambiguous. That being said, I see no reason to strive to be as least ambiguous as possible.

Without doubt clarity is basic. Unless you view philosophy as some branch of light entertainment, then it is about critical thinking applied to life and the world. And critical thinking is about producing counterfactually-clear statements. The ideal is to offer the choice: it is this, or it is that.

The world in itself is rife with ambiguity and possibility. That is what inquiry deals with foundationally. We don't need to add to the confusion. It is the already freely available resource.

Critical thinking is then the skill of parting the seas in the most economic fashion. You want to ask the question that delivers the most information. And that then leads to the familiar bivalent pattern of logic. We seek the option that can be true because it could have been false, yes because it could have been no, present because it could have been absent.

So sure, reality itself might not be black and white. It may actually be vague or ambiguous as a fact. But philosophical inquiry still seeks to impose the counterfactuality which will deliver the most information about what might be the case.

Of course, there really is a lot of modern "philosophy" that wants to be some kind of light entertainment or poetry instead. It is characterised by its love of paradox - the apparent confounding of crisp counterfactual thought. If you can't top the clarity of the thinkers that came before you, then spinning pretentious confusion can seem like an excellent career alternative. Eventually whole academic schools of this kind will emerge.

So clarity is an algorithm we apply to messy existence. It is a procedure designed to maximise the information we have about what is the case. The entirety of modern civilisation has been build on the trick of counterfactual rigour.

And yes, the deepest thinkers realise that binary logic can go too far. Reality may actually be vague or indeterministic in some degree. That understanding then becomes part of the logical clarity if they know what they are doing (I'm thinking CS Peirce here).

But then the very existence of a model of clarity, an exemplar of critical thought, brings with it the fertile ground for mischief making and cultural vandalism. If you can't beat the clarity of what has already been said, then there is the academic plan B of celebrating confusion at enormous wordy length instead.

.Quoting Purple Pond

So is it always better to be clear?

Reply to apokrisis

I agree mostly with Apo's post above, so I'll just add what maybe he's not emphasizing. A simple example: a linear model is simpler than a quadratic model, but it might not fit the data as well. Sometimes a lack of clarity is just the difficulty of the content. Clarity is great, but I have so often heard good philosophers damned for not being fast food. (Maybe other philosophers are justly damned after a single french fry.) So beware bunk and beware impatience.

I've read some the French big-shots themselves confessing that making things difficult is sort of game they play to be respected. So intention obfuscation is out there. What else is out there? Accidental obfuscation. Was Hegel actually clear on what he thought when he rushed to finish his famous first book? He had to rush for economic reasons. I think people also know that they are on to something and just rush the mess of their thinking out to the public.

It is hard work indeed to really grip it all with the right words. There's the notion that every great philosopher has one thought that they spend a lifetime trying to finally just Say.

Something that hasn't been mentioned yet is the non-pretentious use of unclarity. Does philosophy too have its dog whistles?

Quoting macrosoft

I've read some the French big-shots themselves confessing that making things difficult is sort of game they play to be respected. So intention obfuscation is out there

The value of a piece of information in part relates to the % of the population who can understand that piece of information. We should strive for Occam's razor-like communication of ideas. Deliberate obfuscation is a crime.

Reply to Purple Pond

I don't believe clarity is always necessary even for philosophy. I think being poetic is quite okay for some areas of philosophy, especially ontology, where being is subjective.

Take for example what Einstein said about reality. It's stranger than our language can even get at. Furthermore, physicists say that logic appears to break down when looking at the very small. (Perhaps that's why one of my physics professors at NYIT wrote poetry.)

I think poetry is often more informative than Anglo-American analytic philosophy in getting at some aspects of reality, so, no, being clear is not always appropriate imho.

Quoting Devans99

Deliberate obfuscation is a crime.

Sometimes the point is that it is not quite a crime.

I take the point that obfuscation is OK for poetry.

Elsewhere though information is the live blood of human progress. Its free, unpolluted flow is vital to continued progress. Think of the human race as a giant supercomputer with each node working in parallel to process information and solve problems. Obfuscating information means nodes take longer to assimilate the information and may not assimilate the information at all.

I think it's sometimes ok not to be clear because other times it happens what you didn't expect.

To be vague or in other ways to leave their space for interpretation can be useful sometimes. Especially in diplomacy, a multilateral agreement might intentionally be left open for interpretation in order to get all the parties, be they more adamant or more flexible, to sign the agreement.

I remember a classic story from Imperial Russia. An Intellectual had been detained by the police in a remote city in Russia and the police chief had inquired from St. Petersburg instructions on what to do with the detainee. The telegram answer came back and it said: "mercy no siberia". Seeing this the chief said: "The instructions are clear: Mercy no, Siberia!". The detainee politely responded: "I beg your pardon sir, but the telegram obviously states: "Mercy. No Siberia."

Quoting Devans99

obfuscation is OK for poetry

[quote='W. B. Yeats']They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds. (link to original)[/quote]This is obfuscation? :chin:

Yes, but what is it obfuscating?

Why would an Irish hero be stuck in an afterlife with murderers sowing a shroud and singing with a bird like voice? Certainly the poet seems to have some apprehension over the after life.