Elegant Ignorance and Two Pet Peeves

Elegant ignorance, according to Kant, is a transcendental amphiboly. A major annoyance, for me, is a word defined by itself. A quick app lookup (within Google Books), told me that amphiboly is defined as amphibology and amphibology is defined by amphiboly? This circularity makes my head spin. What does this tell me? Absolutely nothing! Besides another instance of categorical peverley. Complete and utter nonsense. Let’s settle on grammatical ambiguity.

Since all words in the dictionary are eventually defined by itself the exercise in defining definition is circular. Concepts are the only way to flavour the meanings with clarity, not the absolute. Probability and games of chance are the methods for making sense of an entropic world.

I doubt I think, therefore I am. Descartes is so often truncated in his cogito, ergo sum by leaving out the initial element of doubt. This is my second pet peeve. Come on everyone, let’s clean this up a little.

BTW, the Oxford English Dictionary give the following example for amphibology, “She sees more of her children that her husband”. In a certain context, the meaning might be clear to participants of the conversation. Ambiguity is present. But is it a gift? The flavour of a conversation is it’s beauty. Relativism is beautiful but reality is more so! Hierarchy shouldn’t be Jordan Petersoned; it shouldn’t fall victim to the apologist rhetoric. Strip out the compatibilist positions with religion. The morality extracted from the Bible narrative should be done without the dogma and religious choir music.

Another way to look at this is politically with the allocation of wealth. I am not going to go into this now but the arguments are complicated, fascinating and worthy of living.