It is precisely true that the Ancient Greek philosophers are always with us, bidden or unbidden.

I am warily engaging with various AI platforms that are storming about the epistemic stage.  I have had some fantastic experiences with some platforms and have had some experiences which support being cautious.  They are tools that need to be understood in order to be used well but they are tools which are evolving so quickly that it is not possible to work with the same version long enough to know how to use them optimally well.  By the time you begin to get a feel for it, you realize you are eight versions behind.  

Heraclitus is still with us.

You cannot step twice into the same river.

Whether flux is eternal or not remains to be seen but it certainly shapes our present.

One of our current challenges is that increasingly open and accessible digital domains are a breeding ground for sloppiness and cognitive pollution.  People dash things off without consideration or precision.  If it is done artfully, it is picked up and circulated.  The market place of ideas is more open and inviting than it ever has been but it is inadvertently the source of much cognitive pollution.  

This morning I am reading in Quotulatiousness an excerpt from Theodore Dalrymple, “Controlling Thought”, New English Review, 2020-06-09.

Too great attention to the use of language is a distraction from the essential and easily becomes mere pedantry; but to pay too little is to risk being deceived or manipulated by those who use language wrongly. Words, Aristotle said, should not bear more precision than possible; but neither should they bear less than possible.

Words have connotations as well as denotations, and one way of insinuating an untruth into someone’s mind is to disconnect the two, so that the denotation and the connotation are at variance and even opposite. An excellent example of this is in the use of the word austerity as applied to certain government economic policies. Frequently one reads, for example, that the difficulties of countries such as Britain and France in the matter of responding to the Covid-19 epidemic were caused by previous government austerity, that is to say, failure to spend more. But irrespective of whether, had the governments spent more (and France already devotes a greater proportion of its GDP to healthcare than the great majority of countries at the same economic level), the epidemic would have been more easily mastered, their policies in restricting their expenditure cannot be called austerity, because they still spent more than their income: as, in fact, they had done almost continually for forty years.

I am in agreement with Dalrymple's point.  Words have agreed meaning and accidental or deliberate departure from those received meanings are always a red flag suggesting either deception or error.

But did Aristotle really say:

Words, Aristotle said, should not bear more precision than possible; but neither should they bear less than possible.

The idea behind it, yes.  That precision must be fit for circumstance.  I'm not attempting pedantry.  I am genuinely curious but I also don't want to spend a lot of time digging in to it.  This feels like a loose and modern rendering of an Aristotelean idea rather than an actual quote.  And I am alert to the irony of querying the precision of a quote in an article about linguistic precision and the Aristotelean idea of precision within the context of suitability (how much precision can the topic bear.)

Dalrymple is a learned man and an excellent writer.  Because he does not use quotes, I suspect he is simply paraphrasing in a fit for purpose fashion.  But I would love the literal interpretation to be true, for Aristotle to have said that "Words should not bear more precision than possible; but neither should they bear less than possible."

How about Grok.  Two seconds to craft the prompt.

Did Aristotle said, words should not bear more precision than possible; but neither should they bear less than possible.

Grok, in two seconds, blew past my typo (said/say) and gave me the answer to my low-investment query.

No, Aristotle did not say (or write) the exact sentence “words should not bear more precision than possible; but neither should they bear less than possible.”

That modern-sounding formulation is a paraphrase that circulates widely on the internet (often attributed to Aristotle without a source), but it does not appear in any of his surviving works.

The closest genuine Aristotelian ideas are found in two places:

Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, chapter 7 (1098a26–33) He discusses the principle that we should not demand more precision in a subject than the subject-matter allows (μὴ μᾶλλον ἀκριβολογεῖσθαι τοῦ πράγματος ἐπιδεχομένου). This is the famous “Aristotelian principle of precision”: ethics and politics, for example, admit only rough accuracy, whereas mathematics admits very high precision.

Posterior Analytics and Metaphysics He repeatedly insists that different sciences have different standards of exactness, and one must match the degree of precision to the nature of the object being studied.

So the spirit of the viral quote is Aristotelian — seek exactly the degree of precision that the subject permits, neither too much nor too little — but the neat symmetrical wording (“not more … but neither less”) is a modern summary, not a direct quotation.

A more accurate rendering of Aristotle’s actual position would be something like:

“It is the mark of an educated person to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits.” (Nicomachean Ethics 1094b23–25, tr. Ross)

or

“We must not expect the same degree of exactness in all departments of knowledge, but only in each according to the subject-matter.” 

The elegant modern version you asked about is therefore a useful mnemonic, but not an authentic Aristotle quotation.

Everything in the response comports with my prior knowledge and my general sense.  I could spend an hour double checking everything but for my purpose that looks like a sufficiently accurate answer.  The only improvement I could make is right at the end.  "A more accurate rendering" sounds like Grok is paraphrasing Aristotle more accurately.  But what Grok offers are actual quotes.  The distinction is important and useful.  "A more accurate rendering" could be changed to "Aristotles' actual words were . . ."

In checking whether they were actual quotations, I realize that the first quote is a fragment.  The whole sentence is:

It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.

Which neatly brings us back to the sloppiness of the open accessible marketplace of ideas via the internet and social media.  We cannot easily match the speaker to the subject and the corresponding degree of precision.  Is this a know-nothing speaking badly about a subject that admits low accuracy or is it a real expert speaking well about a topic which affords great accuracy?  Or some variation?  

We typically don't know and even can't know.  That is how you end up with a lot of seemingly credible slop.  I.e. - Cognitive Pollution.  

These are wonderful times offset by the anxiety of continuing flux.

And this has to be one of the most accidentally Ancient-Greek-philosopher posts in this blog for a while.