The precise, explicitly argued, analytic style of exposition with numbered premises and conclusions promotes the meticulous scrutiny of the ideas under discussion. That is why I sometimes write this way. I know it offends some. There are creatures of darkness and murk who seem allergic to any intellectual hygiene. These types are often found on the other side of the Continental divide. "How dare you be clear? How dare you ruthlessly exclude all ambiguity thereby making it impossible for me to yammer on and on with no result?"
Ortega y Gasset somewhere wrote that "Clarity is courtesy." But clarity is not only courtesy; it is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of resolving an issue. If it be thought unjustifiably sanguine to speak of resolving philosophical issues, I have a fall-back position: Clarity is necessary for the very formulation of an issue, provided we want to be clear about what we are discussing.
So we should try to be as clear as possible given the constraints we face. (In blogging, one of the constraints is the need to be pithy.) But it doesn't follow that one should avoid, or legislate out of existence, topics or problems that are hard to bring into focus. It would be folly to avoid God, the soul, Mr. Bradley's Absolute, the meaning of life and all the Big Questions just because it is hard to be clear about them. To give up metaphysics for logic on the ground of the former's messiness, makes no sense to me: the good of logic is intrumental not intrinsic. (See Fred Sommers Abandons Whitehead and Metaphysics for Logic.) We study logic to help us resolve substantive questions. If all you ever do in philosophy is worry about such topics as the logical form of 'Everyone who owns a donkey beats it,' then I say you have not been doing philosophy at all, but something preliminary to it.
Clarity, then, is a value. But it ceases to be one if it drives us to such extremes as the logical positivist's Verifiability Princiople of cognitive signicance, or the extreme of a fellow who once said that "If it cannot be said in the language of Principia Mathematica, then it can't be said." My response to that would be: so much the worse for the language of Principia Mathematica.
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