I think it is bad practice (and can clutter thinking) to condemn jargon as such. There are contexts and contexts and in some it would be foolish NOT to use jargon (i.e., a special vocabulary for special purposes.) Capital is confusing enough as it is; it would be unintelligible had not Marx coined certain terms for particular reasons. Consider "non-productive labor"; even some skilled readersof Capital fail to understand this as jargon, and for that reason become confused on a great deal in Capital, including its core subject matter, an "ideal average" of capitalisms. And discussions of Marx ought to stick to his essential jargon, defining it if necessary, but not trying elegant variation. Unproductive labor is _probably_ irrelevant to what Albritton calls the third level (down) of theory, History, the study of the current economic situation. I say _probably_; some pretty shrewed economists, not mere ideolgoues, have made use of it for such study. I'm not competent to judge, since my knowledge of "economics' is very thin. But I think it's illiterate to merely condemn it as jargon.
And in the physical and biological sciences it can be argued that the jargon IS THE SCIENCE. To drop the jargon is to substitute something else (perhaps itself useful) for scientific knowledge.
In one of his essays (years ago) Gould remarked that the brain that could compose symphonies had come into existence with homo-sapiens, but had probably been useless for "survival." That was interesting, but I only grasped its importance years later when I encountered the jargon for it: it's a spandrel. (That's jargon Gould & Lewontin borrowed from the jargon of architecture and introduced into the jargon of biological science. Leave out that technical term (jargon) and you will blur your understanding of Gould's evolutionary theory. And I found when reading through his _Structure of Evolutionary Theory_ that I needed a dictionary of biological terms - so I purchased the Oxford Dictionary of Biology (paperback) & listed the terms on a rolodex file as I went along. A translation of Gould's book leaving out the jargon (through elegant variation) would at best blur it as useful knowledge for either scientists or non-scientists. His essays have permanent worth I think: they are things of both beauty and wisdom, but they do not give the scientific knowledge that his last book does. Some parts of it were beyond me for the most part (e.g., Hox [hoc] genes). Perhaps had I completed my second reading before my eyes went some more would have become intelligible. But I doubt very much that getting rid of the jargon would help. It would merely substitute some other kind of knowledge for knowledge of evolution.
The question of jargon, lie almost all questions of style, cannot be answered abstractly but must be worked out in reference to each text as one comes to it. For centuries the finest verse paragraphs in English have been ignored or sneered at by Miltonists simply because the style of Paradise Regained is so radically different from the style of PL, and everyone sees the difference as boring. PL makes sense read aloud; my experience so far is that with the loss of my eyesight I lost access to my favorite poem. It belongs on the printed page. And that's a bit odd, since Milton was as blind when he coposed PR orally as he was when he coposed PL orally. I always wanted to write on PR but could never find a handle.
But to get back to my subject. I wonder if non-physicists can ever get a grasp of physics, since so much of its "jargon" takes the form of mathematicl expressions??? But one jargon word from physics will exemplify my general point: Mass. I really can't grasp that, and it seems clear that if one substitutes "weight" on is corrupting actual physics. But if one can't grasp _mass_ (as used by physcists), then our understanding of Newton's theory of gravity is crippled. I would not claim to understand that theory for this reason, but it would never occur to me to complain about the use of jargon in it.
Carrol
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