Technical essays often strive for simplicity and clarity. However, we should not confuse striving for clarity in arguments with desiring conclusive outcomes. Some concepts are inherently ambiguous.
Some cultures and languages have created room for such ambiguity to thrive. Luis Frois, a 16th-century missionary in Japan, wrote in Topsy-turvy, that “We avoid vague expressions” while Japanese “set a high value on the ambiguous”. He wrote, “We write letters in great length, they write brief ones”. Maybe Frois was right. Perhaps he was wrong about his conclusion. Can we let this one be ambiguous?
Ambiguity is not “known unknowns”. When I think of known unknowns, I think of unknowns that we can’t be sure about, but it is possible with more and more information, such unknowns become knowns. Such as the proclivity to inherit traits that are social. We know for sure that there are traits that are inherited, but about some traits, we remain knowledgeably unsure.
Ambiguity is different. Ellsberg famously argued how people are averse to ambiguity in a theoretical sense (as their actions do not follow from axiomatic expected valuations). In real life, ambiguity is not always avoided.
There are conditions when ambiguity — remaining deliberately unclear — is a tool of human evolution. Sometimes we don’t know whether a person is welcoming. Are they making your presence unwelcome? Not really. They are saying the correct things, interpreted these words usually mean warmth and welcome. Yet, in body language, they are being ambiguous and hard to read. Poker-faced. They are willfully creating conditions for ambiguous interpretation.
I think that there is a conceptual ambiguity in many things we do. Some actions, like personal conversations about feelings, leave a ton of room for ambiguous thoughts. It is hard to codify and tabulate what strategy works in what conditions. Seeking an obvious outcome when things are ambiguous, is a failure of imagination, by people who seek certainty, like researchers who seek recommendations from machine learning through data.
Some people believe actions are the ultimate truth-teller. Revealed preferences, they say. But this is precisely the gap where the ambiguity lay.
We can’t map back the thought space from actions alone. It is folly to think we can. Because actions are constrained by our physical disabilities, norms, and noisy evaluations of the cost of our actions. We capture much of this in how we speak, even without words for those ambiguities in our language.
Such ambiguities must, in any language, pass between the words. The strongest love is not expressed in epic poems but the silence in the spaces. Those moments are ambiguous to except those who are in love.
All the kamikaze pilots who flew flights into mayhem and engaged in inhuman warfare. Why did they go that far? Perhaps, a deliberate ambiguity gave them room to dictate to themselves the necessity of their actions. Ambiguity therefore far from being confusing, can actually be convincing.
Writing needs vehicles to express ambiguity that exists in conversations. It is unclear how to express ambiguity in print, without being mistaken for muddled thinking. I wish I knew.