From: gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Writing and Responsibility
Date: 17 Apr 92 19:04:32 GMT
Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson

In article  <1992Apr17.123829.11218@husc3.harvard.edu> Mikhail Zeleny writes:
]In article <owens.703192469@tartarus.uchicago.edu>
]owens@tartarus.uchicago.edu (Christopher Owens) writes: 
]
]>In <1992Apr13.011832.11030@husc3.harvard.edu> 
]>zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes: 
]
]MZ:
]>>You completely misunderstand the argument.  Try reading it again, using a
]>>dictionary next time.  Good luck.
]
]CO:
]>Try writing it again, using a little decency toward someone who
]>enthusiastically and respectfully seeks to discuss your ideas with
]>you.  If some genuinely interested person misunderstands your
]>argument, try meeting him halfway with an explanation of the sticky
]>parts.
]
]It so happens that I am sympathetic with the plight of an amateur reader,
]insofar as I like to venture in my research outside of the area of my
]primary expertise.  However, in this case I find your plea for "decency" to
]be utterly misguided...

I'd like to make an observation in defense of Mikhail.  At one time I
would have agree with you that he tends to use too much technicaleze,
making his postings inaccessible to the (large) majority of readers.
But since then, I've had experiences arguing with too many people who
demonstrably did not know what I was talking about (or what they were
talking about for that matter).  Technical jargon has the advantage
that it (usually) prevents people from thinking they know what you are
talking about when they don't.

People see words like "knowledge", "conscious", "meaning", "mental",
"exist", etc. put together in sentences that don't quite make sense if
you understand them in the naive sense, and then assume that the
author is saying something wierd when the real problem is that the
reader does not understand the sense in which the word is being used.
This often leads to pointless arguments, and usually by the time the
author realizes that the reader just doesn't understand the terms, the
reader already has an antagonistic attitude and is not willing to
except anything the author says, so the author cannot clarify the
reader's misunderstandings.

If the author had in the first place used technical terms that the
reader could not confuse with non-technical terms, then the
misunderstanding would never have arisen.  I'm inclined to suggest
that one of the biggest problems with modern philosophy is the
tendency to appropriate non-technical words and give them technical
meanings that are too closely related to the non-technical sense.
This leads not only to the problem above, but also to the problem that
people read philosophical literature and think that it is vacuous or
ridiculous because they misunderstand the terms, and that this leads
to the extremely bad reputation that philosophy has among the
population at large.

Compare this to the medical profession where Latin terms are used to
refer to things even though they already have pretty good English
equivalents.  Although folk medicine is rampant, and everyone has an
opinion about medical issues, there are few people who would argue
with a doctor about these issues.  I'll bet that if medical doctors
would use terms like "shin bone", "bleeding" and "cancer-causing"
instead of "femur", "hemoraging", and "carcinogious", then there would
be a lot more medically illiterate quacks who were perfectly willing
to contradict trained profesionals with no more backing than a couple
of magazine articles and Grandma's universal cure.

The down side of technical jargon, of course, is that it takes extra
training to become familiar with the jargon.  If doctors used the
English terms instead of Latin, medical students would only have to
remember the more restricted technical meaning of terms they already
understood.  Instead, they have to memorize large numbers of words
they never heard before.
-- 
					David Gudeman
gudeman@cs.arizona.edu
noao!arizona!gudeman
Xref: sparky sci.philosophy.tech:2100 comp.ai.philosophy:4270