“Every theory is a program of perception.” (Pierre Bourdieu)

I recently stumbled on the DoctoralWritingSIG blog (HT Julia Molinari). “What does it mean to ‘theorise’ research?” asks Cally Guerin in a recent post . This is something I happen to have a lot of ideas about, so I posted a quick comment about what  I tell students and researchers: “Theory” is really just the expectations you share with your reader about your object, or at least the expectations you shared with them before you analyzed your data. In your theory section, then, you are setting your reader up for an artful disappointment. You are reminding the reader of what they expect, well aware that what you have found will challenge those expectations and therefore occasion learning.

In classical hypothesis-testing approaches the theory would serve as the basis for constructing the null. The hypotheses that are constructed are normally sought to be confirmed, not disappointed. That is, the “artful disappointment” comes from the rejection of the null, not the hypotheses. Though I don’t pretend to be an expert here, theory can, as I understand it, be used in a similar way by Bayesians (like Andrew Gelman) to construct the “prior”. In both cases, “theory” includes the empirical results of past studies, which allows to estimate effect sizes. That is, theory is not just a set of causal laws, but also some generalized initial conditions.

But a “softer” approach to theory-as-expectation can also be taken to qualitative research. The theory provides a schema of expectations. So, by announcing that you are deploying, say, Genette’s theory of narrative, you are fostering an expectation that the analysis will identify the order, frequency, and duration of events, and provide an account of the voice and mood of the telling. The theory section will be written with a presumption that the reader is familiar with Genette’s narratology, and with what past applications have found “works” (and does not work) in particular narratives. As in statistical analysis, the theory gets us to anticipate anticipate “effects” in the material to be analyzed.

Given only the theory and description of the data (in the methods section) the properly trained (“peer”) reader should be able to form a qualified opinion about what the analysis will show. That opinion should, preferably, be shown to be incomplete in the paper. But I should stress that the importance of publishing null results is becoming increasingly clear in many fields.

In fact, I need to rethink this view of nulls, priors and expectations in light of the growing “replication crisis” in social science. An important guiding insight here, which has been with me for a long time, has come from Ezra Zuckerman, who emphasizes the importance of constructing a “compelling null”. And here we have to keep in mind that what we find compelling is always changing. So, in the early days of research into so-called “priming” and “implicit bias”, the null was supposed to be that such effects did not exist. Today, however, the orthodoxy (albeit one that is somewhat besieged) is that such biases do affect our thinking. Now, the question is: how much and under what conditions?

The general point, I dare say, still holds: our theory structures our expectations of our object. And those expectations are shared, communal. Our research, likewise, should be designed to challenge those expectations, but they should probably be published even where their challenge fails and the expectations hold. I guess there’s a sort of meta-theoretical twist here: although our theories tell us what to expect, we also expect that all theories leave something to be desired. In a sense, we expect to be disappointed. Some people, and especially students, sometimes forget that and let the disappointment, when it inevitably comes, frustrate them. What has actually happened, like I say, is that they learned something.

“And what is good Phaedrus, and what is not good — Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?” (Socrates, as used in the epigraph to Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)

Nothing has been subject to greater mystification than the notion of “quality” in writing. It is ironic, perhaps, that Robert Pirsig’s famous novel has inspired generations of writers to think that it is impossible to say what makes a text good or bad, or even, perhaps, whether there is any such thing as good and bad writing. Pirsig’s point, after all, was, not that we can’t talk about these things, but that we don’t really have to. Though the virtues of a text are many and varied, the quality of a text is obvious. We don’t need to ask anyone to tell us about it. It’s right there on the page of a well or badly written text.

Consider the art that Pirsig’s title alludes to. Though his book is arguably more famous and, for many, the original exemplar of the phrase “zen and the art of…”, it was of course derived from the title of a book that was more famous at the time: Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery. The archer either hits the target or not, or gets some measurable distance near it. There is no mystery about what it means to be a “good” archer, though there is much artistry in the process of becoming one. The spiritualism and mental illness of Pirsig’s hero notwithstanding, his message is very similar when it comes to writing. Don’t let someone else tell you whether you hit the mark. Pick a target and try to hit it. “Be the arrow”, if you must, but don’t be in doubt about what you are trying to do.

For a long time now, I’ve been engaged in trying to demystify the problem of prose writing. And I’ve come to the (not very original) conclusion that the greatest obstacle to progress is the attitude to writing that is cultivated in our schools. Students are learning to “do assignments”, not to write well. Nothing similar happens in athletics or music or art, where “quality” remains a familiar result of mastery. Even someone who is not good at playing the piano, or running 100 meters, or drawing a hand, is able to recognize a competent attempt when they encounter it. We are all able to be immediately impressed at these things.

I assert that the same is true of writing. We can evaluate the quality of a piece of writing independent of context and content just as easily as we can detect a good pianist independent of whether we like the music or feel it is appropriate to the occasion. (I personally think Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is a beautiful song but completely out of place in a church service, no matter how beautifully it is sung.) We can, and often do, acknowledge that a particular writer is very knowledgeable about a subject but has little control over their prose. We know how to distinguish a good gymnast from a good basketball player. We may not know much about art but we do, in fact, know what we like.

We have to return to this basic, immediate appreciation of quality in writing. We have literary sensibilities that we don’t need anyone to establish for us. But, like any other sensibility, we can certainly sharpen it. The problem should not be “What is good writing?” but “How can I write better?” There is work to be done. Pirsig was probably right to say that the real machine you’re working on is your self. But that should not make the process of gaining mastery more mysterious. It’s the most familiar thing you know.

This is a wonderfully lucid (and somewhat surprising) discussion of the role of abstraction in research. Chomsky reminds us that mathematics isn’t literally a language. The sentence I’ve used as my click-baiting title comes in his very clever analogy between (I presume) long jumping, chicken flight, and the flight of eagles. (It starts at 4:35.) He points out that people can jump about 30 feet (the record is in fact under 25 feet) and chickens can only manage about an order of magnitude (about 300 feet) more than that. Eagles, meanwhile, can stay in the air for hours.

It’s true that humans fly more or less like chickens and neither are like eagles. But that’s not the way it works. Chickens fly like eagles and humans don’t fly at all.

That is, humans “fly” (metaphorically) almost as well as chickens, but eagles (literally) fly much better than chickens. Similarly, we might compare pidgin languages, i.e., “chickens” (not “pigeons”) with Eagle … sorry, English. One is more of a language than the other but both are, as Chomsky points out, natural phenomena. Mathematics is a deliberate human invention. So, it’s true that mathematics is a language more or less like pidgin and neither is like English. But that’s not how it works. A pidgin is language like English and mathematics isn’t a language at all.

(I’m happy discuss my stretching of this metaphor and the quality of my puns in the comments.)

You may have been struck by Chomsky’s matter-of-fact denial of a meaningful concept of the “physical” as something distinct from the “mental”, saying there just is what there is and some of the things there are are thoughts. I like that way of approaching it. It’s an approach to a problem I took up a while back about the facts and “propositional states”. It’s sort of liberating to just talk about facts and things and how they are related and not worry about thoughts and concepts as some weird other kind of “stuff”.

We must recognize that all our thinking about things, and certainly all methodical inquiry, is really about “abstract objects”, not things as such, separate from our mental life. The things are simply part of our mental life. Idealization, as Chomsky points out, thereby gets us closer to reality by making us more precise. It lets us understand specific aspects of the world more clearly. By the time we can apply a mathematical formula, we’ve made things sufficiently simple, very precise, that’s all. I think there’s much to learn from this.

“The fecundity and the importance of a literary form are often measured by the trash it contains.” (Albert Camus)

Literacy is the ability to read and write. Academic literacy is the ability to read and write at a university level. We expect academics to be not just literate but outright scholarly, which implies a particular kind of competence with language, or “facility with words” as Orwell once put it. They are not merely entertained by the things they read, nor do they provide their readers with diversions from their everyday lives. They are engaged in the communication of knowledge.

Importantly, however, they are not just communicating what they know to people who don’t know. They are sharing what they know with other knowledgeable people. Often these people know as much about the subject as they do themselves. This is what gives academic writing its “critical” edge. In an important sense, academic writers are not just telling their readers what they know, they are opening their knowledge to criticism from their peers. Likewise, academic readers are not just learning when they read, they are engaging in a critical practice. Academic discourse is an ongoing comparison of the various things different scholars know, or at least think they know. In the confrontation of what I know with what my reader knows we offer each other an opportunity to correct our errors. That opportunity for criticism is what academic writing has evolved to occasion.

So being academically “literate” requires more than merely grammatical mastery. It means understanding that a text always stands in a particular relation to its sources, and that those sources can be located and compared with the text we’re reading. That is, being “able to read” at a university means being able to use a library, which is an increasingly “advanced” technology. Meanwhile, “being able to write” also means being able to present ideas in stable prose paragraphs that commits the writer to ideas that are meaningful objects of criticism. Even errors should be instructive when they are uncovered. They should move the whole knowledge enterprise forward.

As if to repeat the history of literacy in general, i.e., the history of written communication, academic literacy is spreading. Writing academically was once a very rare skill, reserved for a small segment of the population. As more and more people seek university degrees, more and more people will likewise also require academic literacy. Of course, this will also increase the number of “bad” academic writers. The history of our progress from orality to literacy necessarily turned a great many non-writers into merely passable writers. As more and more people become academics, we’ll have to accept the conversion of people who wouldn’t previously have considered themselves academic writers at all into academic writers who just aren’t very good at it. That can’t be helped.

Hopefully, however, we can maintain a certain standard. It is important that the prose that carries the knowledge we share as a culture be well-written. Otherwise it will not be properly open to criticism, it will not afford us opportunities to learn from our mistakes. The pursuit of truth will be greatly hindered.

I want to begin thinking about the nature of prose again. Actually, I’ve been thinking about it a great deal for a long time, of course. I want to think out loud about it, I guess. I want to write about it. I want write prose about it, in fact.

I guess it’s almost a joke to say that prose is an ordinary thing. When we say something is “prosaic” we mean that it is ordinary. But it’s actually both the ordinariness and the orderliness of prose that I want to consider. Prose not only uses words in their ordinary senses, it tries to present ideas in an orderly way. It is, to be sure, able to say some entirely extraordinary things when it needs to, but its means are largely unremarkable.

In his preface to The Unending Rose, Borges said that “the mission of the poet should be to restore to the word, at least in a partial way, its primitive and now secret force.” We might say that the prose writer takes that secret force for granted. A truly “great” prose writer, we might even say, is trying to keep the secret. They leverage the force of language by a kind of a sleight of hand. We think we’re just seeing one word after another, just as we think the card magician is shuffling an ordinary deck of cards. But then, suddenly, the hair on the back of your neck stands up.

I have a worry about prose. I worry that prose is going out of style. (I guess that’s almost a joke too.) It is being replaced with a strange sort of jargon, in which a number of “big words” end up doing all the work. Writers have stopped producing effects by a combination of small, familiar words, a series of ordinary rhetorical “moves”. Instead, they invoke big and cumbersome concepts that the reader is asked to swallow without question. Indeed, these concepts are often combined in stock phrases that operate almost like words in their own right.

What I want to do over a few posts is to get back to the basic operations that make prose what it is. Of course, I want to think about this mainly at the level of the paragraph, which is the unit of scholarly composition. I want to look at a how a standard, academic prose paragraph works. Or, rather, how it should work.