Siris on Clarity

Siris has an interesting post on clarity. Following from Nigel Warburton's claim that "[c]larity is expressing yourself in a way that allows readers to follow what you are saying," Siris raises the important question: who are the readers? Can I take any clear account in analytic philosophy, walk the streets, give it to any randomly chosen passerby, and expect them to say, "Yeah, this is clear; I know exactly what they are saying!" No, since understanding and seeingly clear what another is saying depends on the background familiarity of the reader.

Ricoeur talks about this in terms of mimesis₃: "the intersection of the world of the text and the world of the hearer or reader; the intersection, therefore, of the world configured by the poem and the world wherein real action occurs and unfolds" (71). It is the point where the understanding of the reader, including the kinds of texts, disciplines, and ways of thinking that they are familiar with, comes to bear on the text and influences how it is seen. This is seen particularly in literature, but also in the sciences: a proponent of string theory will approach a text on quantum physics quite differently from one that follows a Copenhagen-type approach; a philosopher of science and scientific history will read the same text in a different way, as different aspects of the text will be more salient than others.

Siris brings up the question of taste, which I think is relevant. Gadamer, in Truth and Method, gives a similar account (also relying on the Scottish philosophy): "The concept of taste undoubtedly implies a mode of knowing. The mark of good taste is being able to stand back from ourselves and our private preferences. Thus taste, in its essential nature, is not private but a social phenomenon of the first order" (36). Gadamer then goes on to recount how taste became a "subjective" thing, particularly through Kant. The essential tie to both ethics, epistemology, and, Heidegger and Gadamer both argue, ontology is lost in the wake of modernity's subjectivism and individualism.

Many readers decry Heidegger's enigmatic writing style, stumbling over neologisms and such. But once you really dwell with his writings and get a feel (or a sense) for both what he is saying and, perhaps more particularly, how he is saying it, then it is much clearer (though still not easy). The same must be true of analytical texts: it takes time, it takes developing (literally) the skills to see what the author is saying so that, even if the sentence structure is not spot on, you can still understand what they are saying. Then, when asked to demonstrate that we are reading correctly (that we really have this sense of the text), we will eventually be pushed to (a variation on) Wittgenstein's claim: "This is simply what I [sense]."