I should also add: I think a handy reference list isn’t a bad thing, it’s just not a priority when you’re Marx trying to just get the main body of work out before you die. I also think it’s easier now than when he was developing his methodology simultaneously with applying it. That doesn’t lend itself easily to such simplifications for easy congestion.

The first time you learned what a cosine was, how did your teacher explain it?

‘The cosine of a non-right angle in a right triangle is the ratio of the length of the cathetus adjacent to the angle to the length of the hypothenuse’.

That is a perfectly workable definition for that case, and it allows you to actually find cosines of non-right angles in right triangles. The faux-definition that I provided in the previous message doesn’t actually allow you to find what people call ‘cosine’ in any situation that I can conceive.

Was it a mathematical proof listing the assumptions of number theory, 2-D planes, and simultaneously capturing it’s geometric, graphical, and algebraic representations in one big swoop?

A definition is not a proof (roughly speaking).
It was a definition that satisfied as much rigour as it could in the context of pre-tertiary education where you don’t get to learn fundamentals of geometry.

I’m not sure why you are bringing up covering a lot of topics aside from the definition ‘in one big swoop’. The basic requirement for clarity is to outline the definitions that you are introducing, and to be literal when you are introducing them.

You learn cosine first in one of the ways (usually simple geometry as the relative lengths, and the teacher shows a triangle and doesn’t explain its limitations to 2D because you’re still learning), then says "and here’s how this looks algebraically, and lastly “now let’s plot the values of it” sometime later and you learn about trigonometry as graphical representation

Okay? And? The way philosophers seem to do, or, at least, have done so is introduce cosine as something vague, like ‘an angle is its cosine, and its cosine is something that is realised in the length of one of some triangle’s sides’. Answer me, can you calculate what people usually mean by ‘cosine’ of any of the angles of the standard Egyptian triangle with sides 3, 4, and 5? I guarantee you, that you won’t be able to.

What was the point of this exercise? Why didn’t your math book just make a 1 A-4 length list of assumptions, graphs, and images to get you up to speed in 10 minutes?

Because that is not required to provide a definition in this case. I’m also not asking philosophers to do what you seem to think I’m asking them to.

I’m not at all sure why you think that literally all definitions require more than a short paragraph to provide. Here’s an example of an actual well-regarded textbook giving a definition:

The definition in question is 4 sentences in total, taking up the space of a simple paragraph, with most of it just being due to separating the axioms by line.

My only guess for you assuming that definitions require a lot of space to be provided is because the reader needs to be aware of the context. In that sense, the context is provided before the definition. In the case of cosines, you usually aren’t provided them the moment you step foot in school - you are first taught material that is prerequisite to understanding the topic. In that sense, you are given lists upon lists of A4 paper in assumptions prior to being given the relevant definition.

In the cases with more complicated definitions, such as, for example, when one first tries to study probability theory, one does get several relevant definitions, such as what a sigma-algebra is, or what a countably-additive measure is. That’s not really an issue for students and for teachers.

Furthermore, we aren’t talking about a textbook for children who are going through secondary or tertiary education. We are talking about a supposed study of economies at a high level, one which is notoriously difficult to understand. There is no excuse for not introducing clarity in your writing in this case.

Also, I’d like to ask you, consider a constructor-engineer who develops some complicated device and provides blueprints for engineers who will be responsible for making parts for the device, and for assembling the device. The constructor, however, decided to, instead of producing unambiguous blueprints, leave a lot of important proportions of the device undefined, and provided contradictory - or even obviously impossible - instructions for other parts. The other engineers now have to play a guessing game of what the constructor meant in each of those cases, which leads to an improper assembly of the device, with badly made fitting parts. I guess, I could also make a joke here about engineers splitting into several groups by their interpretation of the blueprints, with those groups calling each other ‘revisionist’.

But that’s not what the philosophers are doing, they’re being the teachers

Whom are they teaching? If they are only teaching each other, then what use is this ‘teaching". If they want to teach other people, they should learn to communicate better - by not lying to their students’ faces and by speaking unambiguously, - and to do that, they can adopt tools that have been in use elsewhere in the academic environment.

Furthermore, teachers actually do provide outlined definitions.

If Marx just threw out at once every contradictory way that commodities exist

No, that’s not what I’m asking if you mean ‘If Marx just ignored the dialectical contradictions in how commodities exist’, as, otherwise, this piece of your reply makes no sense.
What is being asked is for Marx to clearly define what a commodity is, instead of contradicting himself after initially introducing what a commodity is. A commodity is initially said that it is anything that satisfies a need, which I don’t see how it can be interpreted as anything other than ‘a commodity is anything that has a use-value’, but then, a few paragraphs later, he says that every commodity has a use-value, but not everything that has a use-value is a commodity, which is a very clear issue with what he says.

nobody would have a goddamn clue what was happening

Okay, if you do have a clue what is happening here, then explain - with proof in the form of citations of Marx - what is a commodity by Marx, and how something might have a use-value but not be a commodity, but also for a commodity to be anything that satisfies a need. Can anybody do this?
It seems to me that this case is very clear - either we should accept that a commodity is anything that can satisfy a need, or that something might have a use-value - i.e. it can satisfy a need - and not be a commodity. In either case, Marx is wrong somewhere by virtue of contradicting himself.

Other academic fields manage to work with definitions just fine. Literal language, outlined structure, consistent usage of words all help to make text less ambiguous and more understandable.

His writing tries to get you to follow the thought process, through the contradictory stuff, to the kernel of truth represented by each of them are to greater concept

It would be much, much easier if, instead of speaking in riddles, one would just clearly state what they want to state, without contradicting themselves, or engaging in other such nonsense that makes the meaning of text ambiguous and forcing the reader to play a guessing game regarding what the author meant.

Like, I have encountered a bunch of people at this point who claim to have read Capital, and it’s pretty clear that they not only do not understand economics in general, they also do not understand Capital, and they also don’t have a clue about how definitions work.

For your development as a person and thinker, it’s much more useful than throwing out only “empirically proven” lists of claims

This is honestly silly. We are talking about a supposedly-academic work of research. If a work is neither rigorous by the standards of logic, nor provide claims that are empirically tested, its academic value is that of a common kitchen talk.

If an academic work is more concerned with the reader growing as a person and a thinker, it can be structured in a better way than making itself hard to read for no good reason.

I unfortunately think that the position you’re staking is strongly correlated to the Western anti-intellectial and pro-STEM-lord bent that is preventing development in a lot of areas

And I’d argue that that is an incorrect conclusion for a few reasons:

• What I’m asking for is not to abandon some line of study, but to do it rigorously in some capacity, and to make the relevant speech unambiguous. The place for riddles and contradicting what you yourself assert is in the areas of entertainment and the like.
• At least a usual STEMlord would have been complaining about ‘liberal arts’ and ‘women’s studies’ being academic disciplines/fields/etc., etc. I don’t.
• I actually don’t think that the stuff that I want to eventually do for a living - studying math - is all that useful for other people. I actually think that art is more important to society than what I want to do, despite the fact that what I want to do falls firmly under STEM.

If you have to go and argue with others about what is meant, that is better than just being able to accept/dismiss everything on an “empirical” whim

It seems that you meant to say something other than you intended to say here, but I’m not sure what it is that you intended to say.
Not sure what ‘empirical whim’ is, either. What I said when I even brought up empirical studies was that there isn’t much academic value in research that is backed by neither logic nor empirical testing. We might as well accept all kitchen talk as academic research that should be published now.
If you think that it is wrong for somebody to ask what somebody else meant when what they say is self-contradictory and/or ambiguous, then I’m not sure how you can claim that philosophers want other people to grow as people, given that they do not communicate anything of note, but just provide text that other people can project their what they want onto.

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