Why Clarity Matters

It's bad to be unspecific

I’ve been criticizing continental philosophy recently, with special ire directed at the postmodernists and poststructuralists (I promise I will soon move on to other subjects). I’ve complained about their unclarity, leading them to produce sentences like these (selected at random from Gender Trouble) “A displacement or substitution can only be understood as such in relation to an original, one which in this case can never be recovered or known. This speculative origin is always speculated about from a retrospective position, from which it assumes the character of an ideal.”

Now, maybe you can get some meaning out of that, but surely that is not the clearest sentence you’ve ever read. Clarity comes in degrees. With some sentences, you know exactly what they intend to communicate. With others, you have a fuzzy outline, and with still others, you haven’t the foggiest clue. That sentence clearly falls into one of the latter two categories.

But what’s so important about clarity? What’s wrong with continental philosophers, critical theorists, and the like taking a bit of poetic license, and writing sentences like that one? Poetry and art rarely have a single very specific meaning, and yet there’s nothing wrong with them. So why can’t continental philosophers, critical theorists, and the like be doing the same thing?

The answer is that unclear writing tends to go hand in hand with unclear thinking. If one is not communicating specific and precise truths, then odds are very good that you should not be persuaded by them. You should not be persuaded by vibes.

Arguments very often go wrong in quite subtle ways. For example, here is Berkeley’s argument for idealism (paraphrased by Huemer):

1. If x is inconceivable, then x is impossible. (premise)

2. It is not possible to conceive of a thing that no one thinks of. (premise)

   • Explanation: if you conceive of x, then you’re thinking of it.

3. Therefore, [a thing that no one thinks of] is inconceivable. (From 2)

4. Therefore, [a thing that no one thinks of] is impossible. (From 1, 3)

5. If there were objective reality, then it would be possible for there to be things that no one thinks of. (From meaning of “objective”)

6. Therefore, there is no objective reality. (From 4, 5)

The argument commits a subtle logical error. As Huemer writes:

Here, I will just point out the equivocation in (2). In analytic speak, it’s a scope ambiguity. The problem is that 2 could be read as either 2a or 2b:

2a. Not possible: [For some x,y, (x conceives of y, and no one thinks of y)].
2b. Not possible: [For some x, (x conceives: {for some y, no one thinks of y})]

Reading 2a is needed for the premise to be true, but reading 2b is needed for 3-6 to follow.

This is a fairly hard error to catch. It’s easiest to see if put into analytic terms. And there are many errors like this—subtle and non-obvious, but quite demonstrably mistaken. These things aren’t too hard to spot if arguments are precise.

But if this argument was put in continental prose, nothing so precise would have been present. There would have been a confusing wall of words, where you sort of get the gist, but can’t precisely articulate where the logical error lies. In such a situation, it is very difficult to spot subtle errors like scope ambiguity. And when you do, continental practitioners will insist that you’ve misunderstood them. Searle recounts:

Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?” And he said, “He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the terrorism part.”

This is the first reason that clarity is important. When one is not being clear, it is easy to make bad inferences, and very difficult to spot bad inferences that people have made. If you get a gist rather than anything very precise, subtle errors become impossible to discern.

There is another deeper reason why clarity is important: it hedges against confusion. Confusion is the ailment that most commonly afflicts non-philosophers (second only to heart-disease). The most common way of being wrong is simply to be confused—to have one’s thoughts all mentally muddled and imprecise.

For example, I recently spoke with a fellow who seemed to think that noting that we eat shrimp is somehow a defense of the practice. He kept saying that shrimp are “considered only as food,” as if that meant that it was perfectly alright to eat them (that this is a bad inference should go without saying—Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims were considered to be food, but his murderous cannibalism was morally subpar). This fellow didn’t seem to grasp why it doesn’t follow from “A is considered B,” that “A is B,” and would randomly start saying other things when the fallacy of the inference was pointed out, before later repeating the earlier debunked point.

Similarly, when people say that abortion is healthcare, as if that settles the moral question, that is confused. Whether some service is administered by the medical system surely has no implications for whether it is moral. Infanticide administered by planned parenthood would also be healthcare in the same sense, but it wouldn’t be permissible.

This is, in fact, the most common way for non-philosophers to go wrong. When discussing abstract concepts, it is very easy to get in a tangle. Michael Huemer put it well in Knowledge, Reality, and Value:

Studying philosophy helps you think better... I saw it happen to myself, and I have seen it happen to students over the years. I came to the subject, at the beginning of college, in a state of confusion, but I did not then comprehend how confused I was. I had some sort of thoughts about great philosophical questions, but these thoughts very often, as I now believe, simply made no sense. It was not that they were mistaken, say, because I was missing some important piece of information. It was that I did not even really know what I was thinking. I used words but did not really know what I meant by them. I confused importantly different concepts with each other. I applied concepts to things that they logically cannot apply to. I might seemingly endorse a philosophical thesis at one moment, and in the next endorse a related but incompatible thesis, without noticing any problem.

The best analogy for this kind confusion is dreaming. When you make errors in dreams, it’s often not about specific factual propositions or being unaware of strong counterarguments. It’s a deeper kind of muddle where your thoughts just don’t make any sense. Similarly, non-philosophers are often confused in this way where their thoughts, at some level, just don’t make sense.

One of the easiest ways to be confused is to get attached to a vague word which one thinks elucidates one’s position. For example, infinity is a confusing thing. But people can cover up their own confusion when they say things like “infinity is not a number but a concept.” Now, this isn’t right—a concept is an idea of something. Infinity isn’t an idea. The idea of infinity is an idea, but that is a much less interesting claim. But it’s very easy for people to feel like they understand the infinite by declaring it a concept.

Similarly, the Sorites paradox is the fact that the following three things are inconsistent:

1. There are heaps made up of grains of sand.

2. If something with some number of grains of sand is a heap, then if you took away one grain of sand, it would still be a heap.

3. If you took away all the grains of sand from a heap, it wouldn’t be a heap.

This is confusing! All three seem obviously right, and yet they conflict (for if taking away grains of sands never makes a heap no longer a heap, then if you took away all the grains of sand, it would stay a heap). But it is easier to feel as if you’ve solved the paradox if there is some applicable word that you can swing around. So lots of people feel as if they’ve solved the puzzle by declaring that it’s vague when one is a heap (which, of course, does not explain which of the three premises are false). This is an error, and quite a common one.

When the word one is fixating on is specific, it is generally not too difficult to talk one out of one’s confusion. If a person thinks that infinity isn’t confusing because it’s a concept, or the Sorites paradox is easy because it’s vague when something is a heap, you can explain why that doesn’t work. But if one is using vague terms and thinking unclearly, then it will be impossible to talk them out of their view. They always have the muddled concept to fall back on. They can always say something amorphous about social construction and act like the problem goes away. Perhaps, then, it is no surprise that the postmodernists blunder about constantly making embarrassing scientific errors, as Sokal and Bricmont have conclusively demonstrated.

This is, I suspect, why continental philosophers don’t get convinced much by good arguments. They will sometimes change their mind, due to being hypnotized by big words. But it’s rare that a continental philosopher will become vegan, or a Longtermist, because of the arguments for those positions. This says something dismal about the field.

And this is no surprise. If one is writing in the unclear way continentals do, could they even communicate the arguments for fanaticism? Could they express Norcross’s argument for veganism? The style lends itself well towards communicating a sense, but very poorly to communicating a precise argument.

If one is thinking rigorously, one should often learn all manner of surprising things. Continental philosophers often think they’ve learned something surprising, but it’s typically the kind of irrationalist drivel that one would expect them to believe at the outset. It rarely tells them surprising things that they were dispositionally averse to believing. But being told what you don’t want to hear is a hallmark of reasoning correctly.

Now, as a final purely aesthetic matter, I find postmodern prose hideous and revolting. Good writing is concrete and specific. Orwell famously gave six rules for good writing:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Could there be a more obvious breaking of these rules than the typical sentence from Judith Butler or Lacan? Good writing is clear, specific, and precise. Continental writing is nothing of the sort.

Unclarity thus lends itself to confusion, bad writing, and masks subtle (or even not so subtle) errors. If you want to believe and communicate true things, you should strive for precision and clarity, above all else. Getting an imprecise gist is not enough.