Of all the unexamined premises rhetoric took over from serious philosophy, clarity has perplexed the most. Since Aristotle it has figured as a central goal for verbal expression. Theorists, without giving the matter special thought, seem to have considered clarity a property of the text. Yet clarity describes many styles and audiences. The most intellectual, conceptual, scientific virtue of style turns out to be entirely emotional.
Clarity is at least partly, and often predominantly, a temporal phenomenon, a problem of period.
One century's brightness becomes murk for the next. Clarity no more permits objective standards than custom itself' . By utilizing a function of our term agent , we can transform this problem into a solution. But our ideas of cause and effect are derived from the nature of the mind' . There is another strategy of definition, usually interwoven with the contextual sort, yet susceptible of separate observation.