Clarity

[Scotch78]

I've been rereading some of my textbooks and came across an important point that this forum generally avoids. The quote is from the third edition of Introduction to Philosophy: Classical and Contemporary Readings, edited by John Perry and Michael Bratman.

"Imagine going to the ballet. You are impressed with the ballerina, and decide that you want to become one. The day of your first ballet lesson arrives. You have visions of a whole new world opening up to you; you imagine yourself gliding across the floor, spinning, jumping. But you find that your ballet lesson isn't like that at all. You spend a lot of time stretching and doing exercises that you don't remember anyone doing when you saw Swan Lake.

Your first experience writing philosophy is going to be like that . . . . As a novice philosopher, your motto should be 'Truth, Profundity, Clarity, but the greatest of these is Clarity.' The reason is this. Our language is built around familiar ideas and situations. Philosophers often need to express thoughts that push the limits of language, because they want to consider unfamiliar ideas and odd situations. When doing this, it's relatively easy to sound profound, but very difficult to be clear. But if you are not clear, you cannot be sure that what you say is true, nor can you get the help of others to figure out whether it is (5)."

Scott