I’m not trying to construct perfectly clarified propositions or concepts (What Russell first thought Witt was doing in the Tractatus). I’m also not starting from the assumption that ordinary philosophical claims are mostly devoid of sense. That isn’t my view. Ordinary language works quite well in everyday settings. The problem arises when we take familiar words such as truth, belief, certainty, proof, evidence, and knowledge, and move them into philosophical argument without noticing that they have different uses.
So the aim isn’t to purify language. It’s much more modest than that. I’m trying to distinguish uses that often get run together.
Take certainty, for example. When someone says, “I’m certain,” that may simply express conviction. But that isn’t the same as saying that the claim is epistemically certain. A person can be subjectively certain and still be wrong. Or take proof. We sometimes use proof in a loose inductive sense, where the evidence is strong enough to establish a claim for practical or epistemic purposes. But we also use proof in a stricter deductive sense, where the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises, as in mathematics or formal logic. Those aren’t the same use. If we move between them without noticing the shift, the argument can appear stronger than it is.
That’s the sort of thing I’m trying to clarify. I’m not trying to replace ordinary words with technical substitutes. I’m trying to keep track of what we’re doing with the words we already use.
So I don’t see this as a move toward artificial insignificance. In fact, I see it as a way of staying close to ordinary use. The question isn’t, “Can we replace ordinary words with purified ones?” The question is, “How is this word functioning in this context?” That seems to me to be the opposite of artificiality. It’s an attempt to prevent confusion by paying attention to actual use.
On your second point, I agree that there’s always a danger of creating jargon. But that’s not what I’m trying to do here either. I don’t want to create a new theoretical vocabulary and then force everyone else to speak it. I want to make the ordinary vocabulary less slippery. There’s nothing wrong with continuing to use words like knowledge, belief, truth, certainty, and proof, provided we’re alert to what the word is doing in a particular context.
Will that require occasional recentering? Yes, probably. But I don’t see that as a defect. In philosophical discussion, part of the work consists in noticing when a word has shifted its function. If someone moves from subjective certainty to epistemic certainty, or from proof in a loose inductive sense to proof in a strict deductive sense, or from mere possibility to explanation, then pointing that out isn’t linguistic maintenance for its own sake. It’s part of keeping the argument clear.
So I’m not trying to create a sealed theoretical corpus. It’s closer to a usable map. The map may be imperfect, but it can still help us see when we’ve moved from one use to another without noticing how the role of the concept has shifted. That’s all I’m after at this point in the thread. Not final definitions, not certified propositions, and not a new jargon, just a clearer view of how these concepts function when we use them to talk about knowledge.