The summer months make clear what the winter ones won’t: nothing stays the same. The sun that rose between the branches outside my window weeks ago now rises farther to the south, and the view is no longer the same for me. The leaves on that same tree flutter in even the calmest breeze, and the birds, well, when exactly do sparrows sit still? All this moving about and changing places, this being something from one perspective and becoming something else from another—all this plays havoc with rationality, and it’s enough to make one wonder whether anything permanent can ever really be found to rely on.
If the phenomenal world will not stand still, the rational world, our mind’s world, pulls for the very opposite: clear definition and stable, consistent meaning. The clear thinker’s and articulate writer’s creed goes like this: I have a noun for every possible thing I could ever wish to talk about, and every time I use that noun and attach a predicate to it, I’m referring to the same thing, unless and until I tell you otherwise, whereupon we take a different angle on the subject, move into another world. and see what we might discover together there. That’s the doctrine of logic, and its demand for stable meaning is not so much a contradiction of motion as it is its complement. Stability and movement, the static and the dynamic, both need each other for each to be what they each are. Movement alone is hot chaos; stability by itself is cold death.
To be clear and critically minded about what we want to say means that we must watch the whirling world closely—and then turn away in order to place our observations into rational language, which means, for the most part, into the language of prose, not poetry or song. And placing, I think, is the right word, because we are trying with words and phrases and clauses to re-present, to conceptualize (the best word is prosify) living movement in unmoving language, where a word must mean what it has been defined to mean through the discourse in which it is being used. In his short, fine, and eminently readable guide to clear thinking entitled Being Logical, D. Q. McInerny makes the point this way:
The process of definition, the mechanics of it, is the way we relate to a particular object (the object to be defined) to other objects and thereby give it a precise “location.” In defining a term or word, we relate it as rigorously as possible to the object to which it refers. There are two immediate practical benefits of carefully defining terms. Our own ideas are clarified, and, as a result, we can more effectively communicate them to others.
McInerny goes on to say that terms like wisdom and justice and beauty are in special need of being clearly defined because they can be understood in so many different ways in differing contexts. And not just those terms: what about the freedom and democracy we hear so much about? A good measure of the political acrimony all around us arises not just from these terms being poorly defined, but from the fact that their definition often changes as a heated conversation proceeds. The study of logical thinking—and writing conscientiously is how we acquire that skill—includes the study of illogical thinking, its myriad forms being called fallacies, literally something which is deceitful or deceptive, whether deliberately so, or not. One such fallacy, which is around us at every turn, is called equivocation, and it breaks the heart of clear and stable definition—just what we so desperately need to make sense of all that incessant movement, political or natural, around us.
Among the many technical terms the study of logic employs to keep our thinking straight are the off-putting univocal and equivocal. A univocal term (the word, pronounced on the second syllable, means one voice) has one and only one meaning. Most such terms occur in the sciences, where the context is rigorously restricted. Univocal words, however, can also be found in the common world: a house or a coffeepot are what they are in just about every situation, even though each may take on many different shapes and sizes. On the other hand, an equivocal term (meaning same voice) has a meaning that will differ entirely according to the context in which it is used. A table, for example, can refer to a piece of furniture in one universe of discourse, or to the orderly presentation of data in another.
Most of the words we use are equivocal, and that is why we must be on our guard to avoid ambiguity, particularly so—and here is where the naturally occurring equivocal turns into the fallacy of equivocation—when it appears in the midst of an argument in which we are trying to convince someone of our position. As it happens, an old logic book on my shelf (A First Book in Logic by Henry Bradford Smith) has this unexpectedly pertinent example of equivocation:
When we buy in a foreign country, we get the goods and they get the money, and when we sell in a foreign country, they get the goods and we get the money. How much better, then, to buy and sell in our own country, for in that case we retain both the goods and the money.
That all sounds right and inspiring, but in fact the writer is using the pronoun we in two quite distinct senses. The four instances of we across the first sentence mean a party to a transaction, whether as producer or consumer. But the same pronoun in the second sentence, where it stands as the subject of retain, means fellow citizens, all who reside together in a particular country, whether a party to a transaction or not: same pronoun with different meanings in the same context. The rich thought of language depends on equivocal words, but when such words benight us into confusion, whether knowingly or unknowingly, discord will ensue.
That timely textbook example was published in 1922, which illustrates the point of these observations: nothing seems to stay the same—and yet it apparently does. That’s not a contradiction but a complementarity, and only our minds, made clear and critical with language, will be able to see all that incessant change for what it really is.
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hot chaos and cold death, indeed.
Henry Bradford Smith, the logician writing on foreign exchange did, one might ask, benight confusion and discord. He wrote in 1922. The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act was signed into law 1930. The Great Depression followed in short order.
Perhaps I overspeak. No one, I dare say, has ever suggested that grammar caused the Depression. But as politicians pontificate and bloviate, might they be mindful of grammar? Would they mind their nouns and verbs more and equivocate less.
I remain convinced that should we be “clear and critical with language” we shall “be able to see all that incessant change for what it really is.” Writing smartly, indeed.