ἴδμεν γάρ τοι πάνθ', όσ' ένι Τροίη
Caught in the unstopped ear;
Giving the rocks small lee-way
The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year.

--Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberly

A paragraph makes a statement, states a claim. It conducts what Bertrand Russell called “the essential business of language”, namely, “to assert or deny facts.” Because it opens such a claim to the criticism of peers who are qualified to say whether it is false, a paragraph is fundamentally “transactional.” A paragraph takes a position and allows the reader to take theirs in accordance with or in opposition to it. This is not how Wittgenstein’s philosophical “remarks” operate; you are not supposed to ask yourself whether you agree with them or not. You don’t have to make up your mind about whether they are true or false. You only have to understand them; you have to get them to make sense. You have to be able to think them. They are like the strophes of a poem, which are neither right nor wrong, neither good nor bad, but should make you feel something. Thus, in poetry, the emotion is brought to presence; in philosophy, the concept.

No, hardly, but, seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;
Capaneus; trout for factitious bait:

--Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberly

In a prose paragraph, a claim is supported, elaborated, or defended in terms that the reader presumably understands and is, importantly, qualified to challenge. This is not how the poetic paragraphs of Williams Carlos Williams’ Kora in Hell or Rosmarie Waldrop’s Lawn of Excluded Middle work. Prose uses words in their conventional senses to say ordinary things; poetry, even in the form of a series of paragraphs, “detaches [things] from ordinary experience to the imagination,” as Williams explained in Spring and All. Waldrop, meanwhile, was profoundly influenced by Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, composed as a series of remarks that were intended to show, not say, how our concepts work. “If one tried to advance theses in philosophy,” he said, “it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone would agree to them.” A poem doesn’t make us happy or sad; it makes us feel better, better able to feel. Likewise, philosophy doesn’t get us to think that something is true; it improves our thinking. The arrogance of the philosopher! Is the reader a savage?

For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime"
In the old sense.  Wrong from the start--

--Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberly

In the summer of 2001, as a young doctoral student, I visited Steve Fuller at the University of Warwick for a few weeks. I clearly remember one of our meetings, probably near the end of the visit, to discuss something I had written. “When you first got here,” he said dryly, “you were writing prose.” That was true. I had been writing the sort of referential prose that was (and still is) familiar fare in Science and Technology Studies, and which Steve is something of a master of. One presents one’s thoughts as the natural continuation of one or another rationally reconstructed history of ideas in which one presumes to be a participant. But my “true Penelope” was Wittgenstein and this urbane pose was starting to cause a strain. I wanted to “provide a clear view of the language” to produce a “perspicuous presentation”; indeed, I was trying to “get off the dead and desensitized surface of the reader’s mind and on to a part that will register,” as Pound had put it somewhere. “Philosophy must really only be composed in the manner of poetry,” said Wittgenstein. So I had stopped writing paragraphs and had begun making “remarks”. Wrong from the start?

A paper presents the result of study. It represents what the writer has learned through deliberate action, often within a well-defined period of time. Here, “study” may refer merely to a few weeks of an undergraduate class or a reasearch project spanning several years. The paper will not always specify the method by which the results were achieved, but the reader should be able to imagine the means by which they would arrive at them themselves. In some cases, the paper will include a detailed methodology that, ideally, puts the reader in a position to replicate the result. In other cases, the paper will be based solely on the reading and thinking that the writer has done. Do notice, however, that even such a “scholarly” or “theoretical” paper, by virtue of its references, allows the reader to “replicate” the “study” that was done. The reader can consult the same texts and give them the same careful consideration. In all cases, the intended reader of a paper is a peer, an intellectual equal, someone who is qualified to tell the writer that they are wrong. A paper opens the results of the writer’s study to the criticism of other knowledgeable people.

Note: Three weeks ago, I decided I would write a paragraph every morning in a well–composed moment: In twenty-seven minutes, I would write at least six sentences and at most two-hundred words that say one thing and support, elaborate, or defend it. This morning, I appear to have hit my stride, producing exactly 200 words that the WordPress text-editor helpfully tells me will take one minute to read. This is nice to see, since I often tell my authors and students that a paragraph represents one minute of your reader’s attention. I also tell them it “normally” fills about half a page, and it struck me, looking at the character count, that 1168 is just over half of the 2275 characters that my institution, the Copenhagen Business School, defines as the “normal page” for purposes of examination. It’s comforting to know that my rules of thumb comply with the law of the land.

Study is the deliberate pursuit of learning. Sometimes it is so deliberate that it deserves an article; we talk about “the study” we have done or what “a study” has shown. (If you thought I meant something else by “article”, you’re also right, but you’ll have to wait for tomorrow’s post.) When a student “studies” something it is often simply a matter of attending a class, reading the required texts, and doing the assigned writing. A scholar studies something through a more formal process of formulating a research question framed by theory and answering it on the basis of methodically collected data. Sometimes, to be sure, students are asked to engage in scholarly work — when they write research papers, for example — but their results are often not novel enough to make a “contribution” to the discipline. To learn a method, they discover for themselves what they could have read in a book. Scholars, by contrast, are motivated to conduct studies because they have questions that are not answered in the literature. Indeed, they study the subject on behalf of their peers in the discipline and intend to share their findings with them.