Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Crampton on perspicuity

I'm posting some things I said in recent email regarding Crampton's view of perspicuity vis-a-vis his incompetent review of Anderson's book:

Given a Scripturalist epistemology, the Bible is simply unknowable. In toto. Not even an object of knowledge. In part or in whole.

So Crampton is in no position to invoke the perspicuity of Scripture when, on his view, we can't actually know a single verse of Scripture, or know if that sensory object we perceive is a Bible rather than a bathtub.

In addition, Crampton's version of perspicuity conflates two distinct issues.

There's a rudimentary difference between claiming that:

i) Something is a clear medium of communication

And claiming that:

ii) What is communicated is clear

A speaker may be a clear communicator, yet the truth he communicates may be difficult or obscure.

For the nature of the truth, thus conveyed, is completely distinct from the nature of the medium.

Gödel's incompleteness theorems may be models of logical clarity, yet they'd be wholly unintelligible to a non-mathematician.

On a related note–isolated ideas or individual propositions might be lucidly clear even though their logical interrelation is less than clear or even opaque.

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