We've been over this before. Spinny lied a whole lot in the process,
but the basic executive summary is that there exists at least one sense
of "clear" which implies "leading to knowledge", and at least one sense
of "knowledge" which is "justified true belief". Spinny simply ignores
all the other senses of the word "clear". He also commits a category
error; he can't distinguish between justified true belief about a message,
and the message's content being a justified true belief about reality.
The other senses of the word don't apply to texts: here they are
(Compact OED)
2. Transparent (clear as glass not meant as a metaphor)
3. Free of obstruction (the roadway was clear but Seebie smashed his
Dad's car anyway)
4. Free of disease, contamination or guilt (Seebie's conscience is not
clear)
5. Not touching: away from ("Stay clear away from Seebie-Weebie")
The only sense that applies to a TEXT is 1:
1. Easy to perceive or understand
Therefore, Seebach said in a self-contradictory fashion (one that is
consequently necessarily FALSE) that Herb's book was either "easy to
perceive" (which makes no sense unless referring to its type style) or
"easy to understand". The first definition of "understand" is
"perceive intended meaning", the second, "infer from information
received", and the third, "be sympathetically aware of".
But: if you perceive-or-understand my meaning you have justified true
belief. Your knowledge that it is false is nice to have, but DON'T
break your arm patting yourself on the back. You know a negative fact
similar in fact to the stupid "undefined" assertions many of you like
to bandy. You know little in terms of logical strength.
I am saying something innovative and philosophical over and above the
dictionary. It is that anyone who says something false hasn't said
something understandable, since in communicative v instrumental
reason, where in communicative reason (cf Habermas) the goal is always
to share truth, our job is not only to parse what another person is
saying. It is to make a good faith effort to assign it an
interpretation which makes it true, and to give up (without having
"understood" in this sense) only after that good faith effort was
made.
Whereas the childish game here is to find falsehoods because that way,
in a zero-sum game, the children who play that game build little
careers, not by acquiring academic preparation, but by ruining
reputations and standing of people who have!
It is well known that it's easy to write bugs. It's the reason
"structured walkthoughs" were invented in the past, and why open
source is a collective effort today. But overall, one has to ask
whether the bugs are life-threatening as in the case of a buggy auto
chip or CAT scanner, the software for which is developed in all cases
by groups. Herb worked on his own because he and McGraw Hill did not
agree with Kernighan, who'd written (in "The Elements of Programming
Style") that printed programs must or should be bug free. A noob could
try the buggy code out and learn a lot by fixing it. An experienced
programmer of a CAT scanner would be actionably committing malpractice
if he blindly copied code from the book.
In short, given the phrase "pink elephants", he can't comprehend that it
can be clear that this denotes pachyderms in a pale red, without it being
In all cases, a literate person understands "pink elephants" as a
metaphor for something that does not exist, not a red pachyderm. Only
CHILDREN have problems with figures of speech, esp. children with
autism.
true that such things exist. Even if we grant his cherry-picked definition,
it is obvious to everyone else that the "justified true belief" would be
about the semantic content of a given piece of writing, not necessarily
implying that the semantic content of the piece of writing describes the
world.
If Herb codes a bug, as anyone can, we know it's wrong. But what you
so pretentiously label the "semantic content" of what you know, all
other things being equal, is just that it's wrong, and this is no
thanks to Herb.
A related error is your belief that "knowing" that constructs are
"undefined" is valuable knowledge.
But he'll doubtless be glad to explain all of this to you; if you play
your cards right, you should be able to quote the exact dictionary he claims
to be quoting and get him to tell you it's crap and only the dictionary he
named is any good.
At the end of the day, to call Herb "clear" and then to charge him
with error is not careful writing. It's corporatese, where the back-
stabber masks the back-stabbing with superficial flattery. You needed
only one extra word ("apparently", the adverb, modifying "clear", the
adjective: adverbs not only modify verbs, in case nobody told you) to
sound half-sensible, and you did not use it because you were writing a
careless and offensive document.
Indeed it is when someone is unclear that it becomes