For the avoidance of doubt

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And to this end they built themselves a stupendous super-computer which was so amazingly intelligent that even before its databanks had been connected up it had started from “I think, therefore I am” and got as far as deducing the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn it off.

—Douglas Adams, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

A solicitor — one who is licensed in the practice of semantic precision, after all — can scarcely indicate unconditional surrender to the demands of the English language more clearly than by using this abominable phrase.

“You had one job”, so the saying goes, and as an officer of Her Majesty’s courts, that job was to craft your prose in a way that didn’t contain doubt in the first place. For what is the point of a contract if not to clear up the confusion so readily left by the primordial grunts, nods and inarticulate mumblings of merchants as they interact with each other?

This is how it usually plays:

The Chargor assigns and agrees to assign absolutely, subject to the proviso for re-assignment on redemption, all of its rights in respect of the Assigned Receivables, together with the benefit of any security granted to the Chargor thereof (and together in all cases, for the avoidance of doubt, with the proceeds thereof).

Speaking of God, it is a little known fact that Descartes’ epic metaphysical tract Discourse on the Method was a spirited attempt to define the expression for the avoidance of doubt. Descartes started by asking, “what is doubt? Can we ever be sure that what we think is doubt, is, actually, doubt? And if there is some doubt about it, how should we feel about it?”

Indeed, what is doubt? What is this existential flummery, that fogs our interior on even the sunniest day? Whence that numbing smoke that more thickly fills our mortal cockpit, day by day?

The JC likes to rush in, as you know, where fools fear to tread. So let us try to achieve what Descartes did not. If you cannot avoid it, at least put a name on it. And let us at least do it properly — for the avoidance of doubt — thoroughly define what we mean by “doubt”:

For the avoidance of doubt, “avoidance of doubt” shall mean the removal of (or outright refusal to face up to) any doubt, imprecision, ambiguity, double-entendre, alternative way of looking at things or other cognitive dissonance of any type, kind or nature whatsoever including, without limitation (and for the avoidance of doubt):

(A) wilful, inadvertent or innocent misunderstanding on the part of any person, whether as the result of ambiguity, syntactic confusion, metaphor or innuendo;

(B) insecurity, unease, lack of confidence or similar want of conviction about one’s ability, prospects of success or place in the universe, whether or not arising only during moments of weakness, darkness, tiredness or inebriation (and whether or not such insecurity can be easily cured by sobriety, daybreak, a decent lie-in or a hearty walk in the woods);

(C) lack of certainty as to

(a) the existence or occurrence of any other person, place or thing when not personally (or, in the case of a tree falling in a forest, hypothetically) observed; or

(b) one’s own physical existence (it being acknowledged that one’s intellectual existence as a “thinking thing” (res cogitans) is beyond rational scepticism);

(D) causal scepticism, casual scepticism or casual causal scepticism including

(a) suspicion as to the necessary connexion, brought about by their apparent conjunction, between an outcome and its putative cause; and

(b) any tendency to smugly point out others’ confusion between correlation and causation;

(E) undecidability, incompleteness, uncertainty, irrationality, strange-loopiness, circularity, superposition, the requirement in one’s cosmology for unobserved dimensions or nested universes or any other paradoxes produced by theoretical physics or mathematics now or any time in the future (whether and howsoever “future” may be defined, and irrespective of the then-prevailing space-time geometry);

(F) hesitation, procrastination, reluctance, lack of resolve or outright denial of plain facts of life; or

(G) any other analogous neurological state that either party, acting in good faith and a commercially reasonable manner, determines to have materially compromised its ability to articulate itself a sensible and practical way.

See also

• profound ontological uncertainty

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