The "need for clarity" again

I came across a recent talk from Surrendra Gangadean on the topic of Clarity. There are lots of issues I take with the preamble (he makes lots of substantive assertions!), but in an effort to keep this note brief, I'll be focusing on what I take to be the central point of departure between me and team-Gangadean namely, the claim conclusion that "some things must be [epistemically] clear." The argument (a purported reductio ad absurdum) for this claim begins at around 13:28.

(1) Nothing is clear (assumed for reductio) 

(2) If (1), then no distinction is clear.  

(i.e,. basic distinctions between true or false, good or evil, being and non-being are not clear).  

(3) If (2), then no distinction is meaningful.  

(4) If (3), nothing is meaningful.  

(5) If (4) then necessarily,  nihilism (the loss of all meaning) follows. 

If you've been following this blog, then you can probably anticipate where I see the major sleight of hand. Somehow Gangadean went from talking about epistemic clarity (what we can know for certain) in premise (2) to talk about meaning in (3). Without the move from (2) to (3), we see that the argument is invalid (although it's invalid for other reasons, too).

But why should anybody think that we need clarity of basic distinctions in order to have any meaning? Just why is nothing meaningful (including basic distinctions) if we can't have Gangadeanian certainty/clarity of our basic distinctions? Well, this argument is supposed to prove that the loss of meaning follows logically from the lack of clarity. But notice how the move from premise (2) to (3) presupposes that meaning (of basic distinctions) follows from the lack of clarity (of basic distinctions). That's a textbook example of assuming the very thing you need to prove. This is very bad philosophy.

Finally, while I'm officially agnostic about whether or not anything is "clear" in the Gangadeanian sense, I want to add this note for those that might not be so agnostic. Suppose we can't have the kind of Gangadeanian certainty about anything, including about our basic distinctions. Then it's uncertainty, "all the way down." But so what? Importantly, this isn't to deny metaphysical distinctions. We're talking about clarity, which is an epistemological notion. Hence, to deny clarity through and through is merely to accept that our beliefs about such distinctions is less than certain (in the Gangadeanian sense). Such a person can consistently believe that there are distinctions between true and false, good and evil, being and non-being, it's just that their beliefs would be, strictly speaking, less than certain (in the Gangadeanian sense). I see no contradiction or inconsistency, here and it's on the Gangadeanians to prove otherwise.