Clarity and Cuttlefish Ink

In the last post, I talked about what an argument is in terms of reasoning, and how people often don't even make real arguments in debates. And even when they do make them, they can be hard to spot, because they're usually embedded in a tangled of metaphors, examples, asides, emotional appeals, and other rhetorical flourishes. That’s a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it makes real-life arguments far less clear than my examples in the last post. It makes the logical structure harder to see, and therefore harder to evaluate. Sometimes that’s done on purpose. On the other hand, language that’s nothing but bare-bones argument would be cold and uninviting, like a chair without upholstery. Humans aren’t going to get rid of the upholstery of language, and we wouldn’t want to--at least not completely--but we need to be able to see under it, to determine if it has a strong underlying structure. Or if it doesn’t.

Clarifying Language

Cuttlefish Ink: Wordiness, Jargon, Euphemisms, and Dysphemisms

So how do we go about clarifying arguments? First we clarify the language, and then we clarify the structure. I'll take about structure later. For now, let's look at language, which can be unclear in many ways. It can be overly wordy and redundant, as in sentences like: “It is requested that all visitors proceed to the closest adjacent exit”. It may be full of unnecessary jargon. I once read an academic paper about “canine ludic behavior”, which in normal English means “dogs playing”. Like many kinds of language, jargon can be used for good and for ill. Sometimes it’s acceptable and even necessary. In this blog, for example, I’ve thrown out ten-dollar words like “heuristic” and “enthymeme” and talked about the difference between epistemic and instrumental rationality. None of these words are everyday English, but they’re necessary for clarifying basic concepts in critical thinking. In other cases, jargon makes language less clear. Sometimes that’s accidental, but other times it’s done to hide meaning, paper over unpleasant facts, exclude outsiders, or conceal weak reasoning behind big words and long sentences. As George Orwell once said, “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”

Other sources of cuttlefish ink include euphemisms and their opposites, dysphemisms. Like jargon, euphemisms can be acceptable in certain circumstances. If your friend’s beloved aunt just died, you may want to lessen the blow by saying she “passed away”. That’s not deceptive; it’s just compassionate. But other times, euphemisms serve to obscure the truth. This can be merely irritating, as when an apartment is advertised as “garden level” when it’s really in the basement, but it can become truly sinister when it conceals ugly truths. When a general tells Congress there was “collateral damage in the civilian arena”, it’s because he doesn’t want to say that innocent civilians were killed and maimed, even though that’s what happened. In the pre-Civil War south, slavery was called the “peculiar institution”, to make it seem less horrible than it was. These euphemisms are not harmless.

While euphemism tries to put ugly things in a nicer light, dysphemism can be dishonest by putting reasonable things in an ugly light. For example, the Civil War was called the “War of Northern Aggression” in the south to make it seem less justified than it was. As a southerner myself, I know that southern people can still be a little too tricky with their words. I once worked with an aristocratic southern woman who came to work and said she had been “over-served”. She was actually just hungover. Bless her heart.

Vagueness

Two other enemies of clear language are vagueness and ambiguity. The distinction between the two is subtle, but important. Vagueness is simply a lack of precision or specificity. Here again, it’s not always a vice, and it can even be desirable in some cases. The framers of the US Constitution were deliberately vague about certain phrases, such as “cruel and unusual punishment” and “high crimes and misdemeanors”, to make it flexible enough to handle future challenges they knew they couldn’t foresee. On a more mundane level, if I say to a friend, “Sorry I didn’t return your email sooner, I was running errands”, there’s probably no need to specify the exact errands. In fact, my friend would think it was weird if I did. But if a parent asks a teenager where he’s been with the car for the last 12 hours, “I was running errands” probably isn’t going to cut it. It’s clearly an evasive answer in that context, and context is crucial.

Language is often vague because many concepts and categories can be relative, or have fuzzy boundaries. If I say, “Look at that huge spider!”, the word “huge” is relative. A huge spider is far smaller than a tiny horse. If we want our language to be clear, then, we need to use the right amount of specificity for the context. If you tell someone you have a really fat cat, they probably don’t need to know his exact weight. But if a vet is giving your cat a prescription, you might need to confess that he weighs twenty pounds.

Fuzzy boundaries can be tricky, too. I have a receding hairline, but it’s arguable whether I could be described as “bald”, because there’s not a clear line between “bald” and “not-bald”. A freshman philosophy student might argue that because “baldness” is a concept with fuzzy boundaries, it’s meaningless. But it isn’t. Yul Brynner was clearly bald. This is a harmless example, but people can use similar arguments in sinister ways. For example, the attorneys for the police in the Rodney King trial argued that acceptable use of force varies according to how violently a person is resisting, so there’s no easily defined line between acceptable and excessive force. That is reasonable, but then they concluded that nothing can clearly be called excessive force. And that’s no more reasonable than saying Yul Brynner wasn’t bald. This kind of argument is a fallacy (the drawing the line fallacy), but it helped convince a jury that officers caught beating a man on video weren’t guilty. Once again, bad thinking has bad consequences. 

Ambiguity

I once had a boss with a gift for mangling words, and he occasionally told me that “We should avoid ambiwiggity”. And he was right, assuming he meant "ambiguity". But what exactly is ambiguity? It just means that a word or sentence could be interpreted in multiple ways. If you tell me, “There’s a bat on the sidewalk”, until you say more than that, I won’t know whether you mean it’s a small flying mammal or a club for hitting baseballs. “Bat” is an ambiguous word. Whole sentences can be ambiguous, too, as in the following newspaper headlines:

Kids Make Delicious Snacks

Lawyers Give Poor Free Legal Advice

Queen Mary Having Bottom Scraped

Ambiguity can be hilarious, but it can also cause big problems. Like vagueness, it can lead to fallacious thinking. For example, somebody might tell me: “You say people need to get better at making arguments, but I think people argue too much these days. So I think you’re wrong.” If you’ve read this far, you can probably see what’s wrong with this argument: it confuses two different meanings of the word “argument”. As we’ve seen, an argument in the sense of “a set of statements offered in support of a conclusion” isn’t the same as an argument in the sense of “a verbal quarrel”. When the meaning of a word shifts in the middle of an argument, it’s a fallacy called the fallacy of equivocation.