On Wednesday, I said that sentences express thoughts and paragraphs represent beliefs. Today, I want to argue that the sentence is to the proposition as the paragraph is to the statement (or, better, that the proposition is to the statement as the sentence to the paragraph). I take the words “proposition” and “statement” from the standard translations of Wittgenstein’s “Satz” and Foucault’s “énoncé” respectively, and it’s important to keep in mind that “Satz” just is the German word for “sentence” (though it has a meaning that goes beyond grammar) and “énoncé” is etymologically more closely related to “announcement” (though in the older sense of a “making known”). I want to relate our familiar units of prose composition (sentences, paragraphs) to these somewhat more sublime entities of epistemological analysis. I want to show how our prose relates to our thoughts and beliefs, our intelligence and our knowledge.

In Foucault’s “archaelogy of knowledge” a statement is a contribution to a discourse, or, as he sometimes puts it, a discursive formation is a distribution of statements. To participate in a discourse is to make statements that are recognized as such within it. A statement doesn’t have to be true to be part of a discourse and this is why some philosophers complain that Foucault isn’t sufficiently interested in Truth. He doesn’t think that the truth of a statement explains its role in our system of knowledge. For Foucault, it was much more important to understand the emergence of statements in history and the authority one needs to make a statement. He was trying analyze the competence, if you will, to speak for things, to represent reality.

A proposition as Wittgenstein understood it is, by contrast, essentially true or false. Its meaning (to use the spin that logical positivists like A. J. Ayer would put on it) is simply the fact in the world that makes it true (or false). Wittgenstein was influenced by Frege to think of popositions as functions whose values were “true” and “false” (rather than numerical values). It is a contribution to a larger argument and logical analysis allows us to trace the “truth functionality”, if you will, of the argument by considering the effects of the truth and falsity of the individual propositions on each other.

The meaning of a proposition is independent of who considers it. When we analyse an argument into the propositions it adduces, we are trying to establish a very “objective” view of the matter. We want each analytical unit (each proposition) to be true or false on its own terms — not on the basis of some ad hoc interpretation) so that, at least for as long as we’re thinking about the argument, the meaning of the terms (the words) in all the propositions is “invariant” from proposition to proposition. (If the words change their meaning as we go, we can’t keep track of the truth functions.) Not only do the meanings of the words remain stable, they mean the same thing to anyone who might say or hear, write or read them. In fact, properly speaking, there is no speaker and no listener. There’s just the proposition and its truth functionality, its meaning. The proposition is “disembodied”, if you will.

A statement, by contrast, must have an author and an audience. When we interpret a proposition we identify its objective content, whereas a statement must be interpreted with its subjective position in mind. A statement is always embodied in a speaker who is embedded in a situation. If understanding a proposition is all about grasping its “logic”, understanding a statement requires some “rhetorical” sensibilities. We must not just consider what the speaker is trying to say (what is meant and whether it’s true) but what the speaker is trying to do (why it is being said and in this way).

All this might make it seem like propositions and statements are utterly at odds with each other, but I think it’s far more interesting to consider how they complement each other. And I think this happens mainly in the act of composition, putting propositions together into statements by way of arranging sentences into paragraphs. A proposition is a mental event while a statement is a social event (it is the function of a belief). The sentence expresses the propisition (it is the content of a thought) while the paragraph represents the statement (it announces the belief).

I realise this has been a somewhat philosophical post. How does it relate to the everday business of scholarly writing? How does it help you in your work? I will obviously need to return to these issues, but let me conclude with something like an aphorism that I will promise to unpack in the future: A sentence is the work of a writer; a paragraph is the work of an author. Indeed, we are writers insofar as we compose sentences that say what we think. But we become authors when we put these sentences together to make statements in a discourse, when we write paragraphs that have a determined rhetorical posture.

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Some notes for another post: There’s the beginnings of an analysis of the difference between “continental” and “analytic” philosophy in this post. The relationship between logical form and social function has been studied by Pierre Bourdieu. If a proposition merely has “logical form”; a statement has what Foucault calls an “enunciative modality” (style, subjectivity), and this resonates with everything from Barthes’ “morality of form” to Deleuze & Guattari’s “region of intensities” (plateaus) — and, indeed, Heidegger’s “place of forms”. In all this, it seems natural to think of the “analytic” philosophers as focused on what sentences do, while the “continentals” were operating at the level of paragraphs. Too much to unpack now, but I wanted to note it down for future reference.

On Friday, I want to say something about how my ideas about academic writing are rooted in both Wittgenstein’s take on “propositions” and Foucault’s theory of “statements”. On Monday, I will bring this back to Crispin Sartwell’s question about knowledge, true belief, and good reasons. But, today, I want to begin with more ordinary things, namely, the sentences and paragraphs that make up the bulk of our academic writing. Briefly put, a paragraph states a belief and offers reasons for it. A belief is a “propositional attitude” and may be true or false; reasons are rhetorical postures and may be good or bad. The paragraph is to the statement as the sentence is to the proposition.

By beginning with sentences and paragraphs I hope to keep the discussion concrete and relevant to your work as a writer. Whether you’re a student or a scholar (which aren’t really so different), you read and write a lot of prose, and scholarly prose consists of paragraphs that, in turn, consist of sentences. You know what it means to write a sentence and to compose a paragraph. You understand that this sentence appears in the second of paragraph of this post. There is no mystery about what the words “sentence” and “paragraph” mean — you know one when you see one — though a formal definition may not spring immediately to mind. I want to begin with that work-a-day sense of what we’re talking about.

Now, a sentence expresses a thought. You have something on your mind and you string words together that capture it. To write a sentence, your mind doesn’t have to be made up; you don’t have to decide whether or not a sentence is true in order to write it. You might write a declarative sentence and, deciding that you don’t know whether it is true, turn it into a question. Or you might think of a question and end with a sentence that provides the answer. The important thing is that the sentence corresponds to a thought that you have had and that you want your reader to have. You want to reader to consider it, at least for an instant. A sentence is an instance of thinking.

If a sentence expresses a thought, however, a paragraph represents a belief. This distinction between expression and representation is perhaps a little subtle but it is important. To express something is to “get it out”; the important thing is that you say what you think, that it corresponds with what you have on your mind. To represent something, by contrast, is to “set if before” someone (sometimes yourself) so that they can have a good look at it. Here the important thing is not to get your idea right but to get the object right and to shed some light on it. You’re not just expressing your opinion; you’re describing what would be the case if what you believe is true. It’s in this sense that a paragraph presents itself as an instance of knowing.

This idea that a paragraph is an instance of knowing ties in nicely with the notion of a “writing moment”. When we “reengineer” our writing process, we’re trying to break it into discrete tasks that can be carried out according to a plan. Thinking of the writing process as a series of moments that each represents an instance of knowing — which is to say, moments that produce written representations of things you know — is a good way to keep your mind properly focused. We are not just expressing a series of stray thoughts, we are composing them into a picture of the facts as we see them. We are saying what we think is true, what we believe is the case. We have our reasons and we present those too.

Frege taught Wittgenstein that “only in the context of a sentence does a word have meaning.” Well, at least in the case of scholarly writing, perhaps we could say that only in the context of a paragraph does a sentence have a use. Or, more precisely, a sentence only finds its academic purpose in a paragraph. Reading a sentence out of context, we may recognize the language and understand the words. We have some sense of what the sentence means, but we don’t yet know what purpose it serves. We don’t know what the write is up to. In a well-written scholarly paragraph, this should not be a problem. By the end of the paragraph we know not just what the sentence says but what the writer wants with us. As we’ll see on Friday, a paragraph arranges sentences as propositions that together make a statement.

Happy New Year!

To get it started right, I just cleaned up the page for the Writing Process Reengineering course that I ran back in November, and which now serves as a standing resource for anyone who wants to go it alone. I’ve added a short podcast at the top to invite you to write 40 paragraphs over 4 weeks (2 paragraphs a day, 5 days a week). If you accept it, I’m ready to help.

Your commitment is about 9 hours of instruction and about 20 hours of writing. The “deal” is that you write each paragraph in a disciplined and deliberate fashion, always deciding the day before what you are going to say. To support you in this endeavor, I have provided 20 podcasts that are intended to be listened to at the end of each weekday during the four-week process. Like I usually say, if you want to work in some completely different way I will try to help if you ask, but I’m not sure how good I’ll be at it. If you are doing things my way, however, I know exactly how to help you do it better.

The course page is still a work in progress. I’m considering replacing all the seminar recordings with made-for-video (or perhaps audio) content, rather than a livestream recording. And I will add some nice drawings this month too. So if you’re on board, you can look forward to an active site for writing-related content.

My intellectual project for this year, or at least this semester, is to develop an epistemological model of the scholarly paragraph. I want to see what happens if we approach the composition of a paragraph as the performance of the competence we call being “knowledgeable”. Instead of approaching this as I usually do, as a “unit of composition”, I want to take the paragraph as an instance of knowing (which resonates nicely with what I already call “the writing moment”). A good scholarly paragraph is evidence that the scholar knows some particular thing. So we can analyse paragraphs in order to understand what knowledge (or at least academic knowledge) is.

That’s what I’m going to be talking about this year every chance I get. The prose paragraph is the essence of academic writing and academic writing is the essence of scholarly knowledge. If you can’t put it in writing — if you can’t compose a coherent prose paragraph about it — you don’t really know something “for academic purposes”. I realize that that’s a pretty hard line to take here at the start of the year. But it’s winter and it’s dark here in Denmark so please bear with me.

Spring isn’t that far away!

Alper Gürkan recently drew my attention to Crispin Sartwell‘s idea that knowledge is merely true belief, not justified true belief as is more commonly proposed, and as I usually propose, at least provisionally. I’m still trying to locate the crux of my disagreement with him, and when I do I will certainly report back, but I wanted to take a moment to note down an insight that occurred to me while reading him. Such insights are good examples of why it pays to engage with people you disagree with even if you’re pretty sure they’re not going to change your mind. You might find a new reason to believe what you already believe. And that, as I hope to show, is just another point at which to open your mind.

I normally present “justified true belief” as a three-part definition of knowledge that suggests a three-step heuristic for deciding whether or not you know something. First, ask yourself whether or not you believe it, then, whether or not it is true, and, finally, whether you have a good reason to believe it, a justification. Sartwell’s papers (1991, 1992) on this have challenged me to consider whether these are really three different issues. After all, if you already believe something you surely think it is true, right? So how does “Is it true?” move your thinking forward after you’ve decided that you believe it? Likewise, if you think something is true then, surely, you think you are justified in thinking so. As a heuristic to help you, the individual writer, decide whether or not you know something, this doesn’t seem very helpful.

But here’s the thing I realized in trying to defend my position: maybe this is a actually a two-by-two heuristic. To know something we must believe something for reasons, but what we believe must be true and our reasons must be good. Inspired by Sartwell, we can say that our epistemology has both a descriptive and a prescriptive aspect (or, if you prefer, an empirical and a normative one). If you’re knowledgeable, you must possess (as a matter of empirical fact) both beliefs and reasons. But these beliefs and reasons must be the right ones, and this “rightness” is captured by the words “true” and “good”. In holding beliefs were are striving to possess truths, to participate in “the truth”, if you will. And we want to be guided by correct thinking.

Now reasons are probably themselves just beliefs. But when we consider whether or not they are “good” we are not interested in whether they are factually true. We are more concerned about whether they relevant to the belief in question. Sometimes this means that our reasons should imply our beliefs, and sometimes they just need need to increase their likelihood of being true. But they cannot be arbitrarily related to our beliefs. That wouldn’t be good.

So far, these are just intuitions that I’m kicking around in my head. The bigger intuition that I’m trying to capture is that if someone insists that they “just believe” something and, when pressed, say simply, “Because … reasons!” they are admitting that they don’t know. They need to assert true beliefs and adduce good reasons, whatever those normative terms mean to their peers in their disciplines. In fact, understanding what counts as a “true belief” and a “good reason” in a particular research community goes a long way towards explicating what “knowledge” means in that community, delineating its epistemology.

(Part 2.)

Composition is the art of constructing texts. In his classic, if somewhat forgotten, little handbook, Rhetoric and English Composition, Herbert Grierson points out that this can be understood on three levels: the construction of sentences, the construction of paragraphs and the construction of whole texts. But he also emphasizes the relation between these levels. Not only is the “the ideal paragraph” essentially “an expanded sentence”, the work should always be guided by the same principles. At all levels, “coherence and the right distribution of the emphasis as determined by the purpose you have in view” are paramount. There is a sense in which style is just your “choice of words”. Composition demands that we put words together, in sentences, paragraphs, and texts, to achieve a well-defined goal.

In a sentence, words are put together grammatically in your attempt to mean something by them. In isolation, words don’t mean anything very specific; they do not convey a clear meaning. In fact, until a group of letters is positioned among other words, it is unclear even what language it belongs to. The word “hat”, for example, refers to something you wear on your head in English but is a form of the verb “to have” in German. A word really only finds its meaning in the context of a sentence, and here its meaning is determined by usage. Usage is the governing principle of grammatical correctness and that is why the way you construct your sentences goes such a long way towards defining your style. What is often called “accepted usage” by grammarians and editors determines the effect that particular words have in particular combinations and in particular settings. The style of your composition, as you try to get the words to mean what you want to say, is your struggle with what usage (in your particular context) would have your words mean before you started using them. This struggle takes place first and foremost within the sentences you write.

If a sentence is an arrangement of words, a paragraph is an arrangement of sentences. There is obviously no grammar of such arrangements, but there are some principles to keep in mind. First and foremost, a paragraph should have a unified purpose. This means that all the sentences that are gathered in a paragraph should, at a general level, be about the same thing. They will not, of course, say the same thing, but they will each play a specific role in supporting, elaborating, defending, or motivating a common subject matter. This, in turn, is but one part of the overall subject matter of the text. “The bearing of each sentence upon what precedes,” says Grierson, “should be explicit and unmistakable.” In an important sense, then, the text’s agenda is not advanced (moved forward) within its paragraphs but between them. A paragraph slows down and dwells, as it were, on a particular element of the larger subject covered by the text.

Ultimately, a composition consists of a series of paragraphs. If you looked only at the topic (or “key”) sentences of these paragraphs, you should get a good sense of how the text is organized and what it wants to accomplish. When writing a text, it can therefore be useful to generate an outline simply by listing these key sentences and perhaps to organize them further using what will turn out to be section headings. You will here need to decide what the organizing principle of the text as a whole will be: a narrative plot, a logical argument, a call to arms, a set of impressions, etc. “It is,” says Grierson, “an additional satisfaction if in an essay or a book you can feel at the end not only that you have derived pleasure from this or that part of the work, or this or that special feature—the language, the character drawing, the thoughts, the descriptions—but that as you lay it down you have the impression of a single directing purpose throughout”. The reader should feel, as Aristotle also said, that there was a reason to begin exactly where you began and end exactly where you ended. The composition of the whole text depends on the way the paragraphs are strung together to achieve this single purpose.

Texts are constructed out of words, not ideas, as Mallarmé might say. Words are arranged into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into essays. The correctness or rightness of these arrangements depend on their overall effect, that is, their aptness to a single purpose. This purpose, which gives the composition its coherence, makes demands of the text as a whole, and the demands of the text will make demands of the individual paragraphs, which will then pass further demands onto the sentences. It’s really like any other construction project: the smaller parts must contribute to the larger whole; they must make themselves useful. It is often in working with the sentences that one discovers the style that is best suited to accomplishing the overall goal, always working under the general constraints of usage. It is also here that you might find a truly creative solution to the problem of writing, which can be a very complex problem because there are so many different reasons to write. Composition, in any case, is the simple art of solving it.

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*This post was originally half of a post I published on my old blog back in 2014, based on earlier draft I wrote as an experiment in 2008. I have edited it slightly to bring its terminology into line with what readers of this blog will be familiar with. The second half was an attempt to say something of a more “deconstructive” nature. These elementary (and entirely orthodox) remarks about composing paragraphs and essays are hopefully useful and, in any case, perfectly harmless.