I’m doing a seminar later today, and I just wanted to reflect a little on my opening remarks. The purpose of my Writing Process Reengineering seminar is to help writers think about their process as a manageable one. I want them to see “the problem of writing” as one that can be solved, almost entirely separate from “the problem of knowing”, i.e., their substantive research problem. Obviously, it won’t be satisfying for them to be able to write if they’re not also knowledgeable, but the truth is that everyone knows something. So I can always help you train your writing, even if you don’t think you know enough in some absolute sense.

Most importantly, the problem of writing is not solved once and for all. It arises every time you learn something new, every time you discover something that might make a contribution to your field. How do I write this down? How do I tell my peers about this? That’s the question. That means that I’m not actually helping you solve the problem of writing, I’m helping you to become better at solving it in particular cases as they arise. I’m showing you how to approach the problem … as an ongoing and practical one. That’s important to keep in mind. A healthy prose style is not an automatic process that produces representations of what you know as you come to know it. It’s a capacity you have. A problem-solving capacity. The problem is communicating your results to others for the purpose of discussing them.

My title is the somewhat overconfident answer to the question I posed in a previous post. If you are reading this on an electronic device, it is a fact that the device is turned on. It is also a fact that this post is being displayed on your screen. You can, presumably, turn off just the screen. The first fact (that your device is on) will remain the case while second (that it is displaying this post) will cease to be. Or you can simply close the browser. What’s interesting here is that you will now again have destroyed the fact that the post is being displayed, but you will have done it by a different means. The screen is still on, after all.

I know this sort of philosophizing can seem tedious. I was very careful not to say that the fact is “true” or “false”. Truth is not a virtue of facts–they simply are or are not, they “obtain”, we sometimes say, or don’t–while statements of fact may be true or false. But statements may also be many other things, like long or short, articulate or muddled, obnoxious or boring, controversial or conventional. Their truth value is only one of their many features. My point is that propositions are the sorts of things that are only true or false. Or rather, they have something else too: a meaning. And what they “mean” is the very state of things that makes them (or would make them) true.

A proposition is true or false of a fact.  A fact is the truth or falsity of a proposition. That’s the sense which I want to claim that facts, like beliefs about them, are “propositional states”. They are states of affairs with “propositional content”. The belief and the fact (and the approximating statement of that fact, for that matter) have the proposition common. If I believe something and tell you, and if you believe me, then there are two beliefs, a statement (made by me to you) and a fact, but only one proposition, which is the common logical structure of them all.

A prose paragraph is usually a statement of fact along with reasons to believe it. It can be very useful to you as a writer to clarify the propositional content for yourself. Isolate it from the rhetorical flourish, if you will. Imagine the fact and it’s simplest statement. If I’m right about this, what you will now have in mind is the proposition. And it belongs as much to the fact as to the statement and the belief.

“The human brain, once it is fully functioning, as in the making of a poem, is outside time and place and immune from sorrow.” (Cyril Connolly)

“Bullet time is a stylistic way of showing that you’re in a constructed reality, and that time and space are not the same as us today living our lives.” (John Gaeta)

I’ve written about the relevance of this effect to the experience of writing here. In an important sense, the writer is working in a constructed reality, outside of space and time.

In philosophy, we talk of “propositional attitudes”, like beliefs and desires, which have “content” that can be expressed as a proposition, which in turn may be true or false. Propositions are simply the sorts of thing that can be true or false. Beliefs are the paradigm case of propositional attitudes, because when we believe something we hold it to be true. Belief arguably treats propositions essentially as propositions. It holds them “as such”. But desires also have propositional content. If I desire to go on vacation, I’m hoping (another propositional attitude) that the proposition “I am on vacation” will soon be true. That is, the desire has content that can be expressed as a statement that is currently false and the relevant attitude is something like dissatisfaction with that state of affairs.

We normally say that a proposition is made true, if it is, by a “fact”. This is sometimes called “the correspondence theory” of truth, according to which propositions are true “to the facts”, i.e., in so far as they correspond with the facts, or what are sometimes also called “states of affairs”. Now, propositional attitudes are also states of affairs–they are “mental” states. If I believe something, it is a fact that I believe it. A great deal of social research involves establishing what people believe, or desire, or hope, or fear.

This would seem to suggest that a propositional attitude actually has two components. (1) a propositional state and (2) the relevant attitude (of holding it to be true, for example, or hoping it will soon become true). The question that I’m raising in the title of this post is whether there is also a physical “state of affairs”, an arrangement in the world, that can rightly be considered “propositional”. There is the fact out there in the world: is it “articulate” like a proposition? Is it a propositional state?

When I started this post I thought I knew the answer, and that the answer is yes. Having stated the question more clearly, however, I’m not as sure. The great thing about blogging in a situation like this is that I can just put it out there and see how that feels. I will return to the question soon.

Here’s something I like to point out to writers whenever I can. Writing is like drawing in the sense that it represents something on a page. What is represented, of course, doesn’t actually have to exist. We can describe a fantasy just as we can draw a unicorn. In both cases, we mark a page to indicate an image. We use imagination to see it.

But there is a straightforward sense in which writing is harder than drawing, more difficult. The typical case of drawing involves representing a three-dimensional object in a two-dimensional space. There is an art to this and some people are very good at it. The trick is to learn how to make do without the third dimension, how to use two dimensions in the viewer’s experience to indicate a complete, three-dimensional object. Interestingly, however, this object is normally frozen in time. It is not a four-dimensional object.

Now consider writing prose. Here, a typical case is that of telling a story. That is, the “object” is often four dimensional, occupying both time and space. But prose itself is wholly linear: one word follows the other in a sentence. Once sentence follows another in a paragraph. A text is, we might say, one-dimensional. If the draftsman reduces a three-dimensional object to two, a writer reduces a four-dimensional object to one. Here, again, there is an art to it, and some people are better at it than others.

You might ask whether this post, too, is a representation of a four dimensional object in a one-dimensional space. I would argue that it is indeed. I had to describe the acts of writing and drawing. If you look closely you’ll notice I told a little story about drawing and writing. You probably formed images in your mind accordingly. You may have pictured a unicorn in your mind’s eye. (I’ll leave your fantasies to you.) And now, in this last sentence, I’m telling you a little story about you as a reader of this post, and me as a the writer. (Notice the “now” that I just invoked.) I’m writing this in my office in Copenhagen. Be well, dear reader, wherever you are!