Month: October 2019

Take me by the hand! Structuring texts

What is the following paragraph good for? It’s providing an introduction to the text. – This is of course a bit much. In academic texts, we commonly expect first paragraphs to introduce us to something, ideally to the text that follows. Stating the obvious is superfluous. But how much of the obvious is actually obvious? Some texts just open with stating facts about the topic. After all, the title of the text will have told the reader enough. So why should one care to introduce you, gentle reader, to the text? We can start straight with the topic, no? Opening lines confirm, raise or irritate and adjust expectations. I could have written that it is a sunny morning and the coffee was rather nice. Then you might have expected a bit of storytelling. That would have irritated the standard expectations in academic writing, but then again a bit of irritation might draw extra attention. But at some point you might want to know what I am up to. Or do you? And is there that much of a difference between the text, the topic and myself? – I tend to think that, at least in academic writing, a text is more readable if the author takes care to guide the reader through the text. At the same time I realise that providing guidance is something that requires some added attention. So here are some suggestions.

It is or at least feels like an old trope to compare a text with a house. Ideally, an academic text guides you like someone guides you through a house. While it’s obvious that you enter through the door, the rooms will need some guidance. “So this is my study; and there on the left we have the bathroom.” But some people will just show you where the house is. And others might just hand you a key, expecting you to guess the rest. The same with texts. Some people send drafts without even providing a working title. The assumption might be that I can simply guess what the text is about after reading it. But while I welcome the trust in my reading skills, I I’d like to note that it is never obvious what a text is about. Unless of course you’re dealing with a manual for setting up furniture, but even then …

The tricky thing is that much academic writing is fairly formulaic. This means that both reader and writer live under the impression that we roughly know what the parts of a text do. So most writers just get on with their business, that is: with stating the claims and arguments they want to state. This might easily trick us into thinking that it’s equally obvious what the individual parts of a text do. But this is just wrong. There is an enormous difference between saying that p and saying that the thesis that p will be briefly introduced and then discussed in the light of the concern that q. What is the difference? The first thing the latter formulation does is that it locates p in (a glimpse of) a space of further reasons or ideas. Knowing that the bathroom is next to the bedroom upstairs provides much more guidance than just being told that there is a bathroom upstairs. But such mapping out also tells me more about the authors’ attitude towards the claim that p. Reading upfront what’s going to be done with p informs me that p is not just being taken for granted. It will be questioned or assessed in the light of q. This, in turn, allows me to ask myself about my attitude towards p and q. It raises expectations, but it also indicates under what conditions the job of the following paragraph or section is done. It’s done when we know how p relates to q.

Why is that important? Locating claims in a space of other claims and attitudes does not only help me in mapping out the conceptual territory; it also enables a more dialogical reading. I can see relations between attitudes, between mine and yours, and perhaps between yours and those of others if you take the trouble to inform me whether q is taken for granted in the bulk of the literature. Moreover, it allows for economical reading. Perhaps I’m not bothered about the relation between p and q, and take the liberty to skip to the next section. Then I will look for markers that tell me when the job is done and where a different part of the argument begins. This might give you pause. But I doubt that all of us read every paper and book from cover to cover.

But while pointing out the jobs that paragraphs do is great, it’s sometimes not enough. Sometimes we also need to be told why a job needs doing in the first place. Why are there two bathrooms but no kitchen? Authors often assume that the moves they make are sufficiently motivated, because, for instance, there is this counterargument or example that everyone talks about. It just needs to be addressed. Does it? Why? And do you have anything special to say? And why in this context, at this moment? To avoid concerns about the relevance or aptness of a step, it will help to remind the reader why something is there. The easiest way of doing this will be by stating how the move in question relates to your main point or question. If that relation remains unclear, the passage might be better off somewhere else, perhaps in a different paper or a footnote.

But how do you do it? How do you provide such guidance? Often writing happens more intuitively, rushed, back and forth, unaware of the reader addressed, perhaps even unaware of your attitude towards the ingredients. I don’t think that this can or should be done in the first version. Rather I’d insert such guidance in the revision of a first draft by simply asking myself about each paragraph: Why is it there? How does it relate to my main point or the previous paragraph? If I have no answer, I have to search or adjust. If I do have an answer, I will write it down. I write at the beginning of every paragraph what the paragraph or section is supposed to do. Oh, and watch out for connectives between paragraphs and sentences. Is a “thus” or a “likewise” really justified? Am I drawing a conclusion? Am I making an analogy? Is the precise relation perhaps unclear? Then why not state that and perhaps why it is unclear? Of course, even guidance can be overdone or cumbersome. Experiment with different ways. But already the sheer awareness of what the bits are doing will help the author in steering attention.  Except for the very beginning, each part of a text with some sort of guidance will be greeted with appreciation.

Finding your voice in academic writing. Some practical considerations

I’ll begin writing my paper this afternoon. I just want to check some final bits of literature before I get going. – This is me speaking to myself, almost every day. I know by now that I get out of this habit only by ignoring any further stuff. Sit down and write, just write! Do what? Write! Yeah, but what exactly? – You think I’m making this up? Yes, that’s the short version. – So what’s going on here? In such moments you’re witnessing the transition between two processes. It’s the move from discovering things to presenting what you think about these things in a paper. It’s in that transition that you have to find your own voice, amidst all the rants in your head, coming out of reading the secondary or even primary literature. Usually though, I don’t find my voice, or certainly not in that moment. Rather I hear all the others, and the feeling grows: I have nothing to say. – In what follows, I want to impart some advice of how you might find your voice. Here is the most important insight right away. I didn’t find it where I was looking for it initially. Unlike I thought, it’s not a matter of style. Rather, style is a result of something else: a result of emphasising those things that matter to you.*

Your voice: what is it anyway? – There is a lot of talk about finding your voice. But what is it anyway? I guess it’s a trademark sound you recognise. Famous musicians or writers of fiction are recognisable by how they play or say something. That suggests that it is a matter of style. But at least in academic writing I think that this is a red herring. Style does not develop out of wanting to sound stylish. Now, I have to tread carefully. Of course, it’s important to check out aspects of style. A good way of learning to write is to try and figure out what exactly you like in other writers and imitate, yes: imitate, that. That’s what I do. Academic writing can be very elegant. And what makes it elegant is that certain writers have found ways of sounding at ease when I would sound cumbersome. Good writers have a way of solving problems of presenting a lot of stuff easily. Imitating such chops helps. But imitating is not sufficient, unless you want to sound exactly like (someone imitating) Fodor or Shakespeare. You have to make it your own. So here are some ideas of how to approach it.

(1) Write an introduction. – Let’s look back at the literature search and the transition to writing a (preliminary) introduction. How do you do it? Now a good introduction tells me a number of things. It sets out

  • (a) the general topic;
  • (b) a problem arising in scholarly debates (often in line with how it’s discussed in the literature);
  • (c) a hypothesis as to how to approach the problem;
  • (d) the research question, i.e. the question inquiring about a crucial aspect that needs to be shown for the hypothesis to come out true;
  • (e) the methodological approach that justifies the kind of evidence or argument required to answer that question;
  • (f) the steps (and restrictions) that need to be taken into account to make the case.

This is a lot, but some things can at least sometimes be done with a single sentence. I’ve addressed some of these items earlier. What’s important for finding your voice is not so much how you go about all the individual points. Rather you need to get just some of these steps under your control. Let me focus on (b) and (f).

What might get you into trouble. ­– I start with (b), because it’s the most obvious point for moving from the literature to your own presentation. Beginners will often present the problem by picking two (or more) pieces from the (secondary) literature and put them in (oppositional) order. So you might write something like this: “Paper A argues thus and so. But thus and so leaves us with the problem of … In the light of this problem, paper B argues that so and thus.” This approach is perfectly fine. You identify a (perhaps long-standing) problem and see how it’s addressed. Then you present these views, probably as an opposition. And then what? Then you think you compare A and B and take a side or you address a problem in paper B and defend your own view, B*. – This is all very well, but it can create various difficulties. One of them is that you will follow the literature very closely in setting out the problem. What I mean is that you’ll probably go along with the emphases of paper B. That is fine if you want to address a certain position in particular. But it doesn’t help you if you want to set out the problem or debate. So here is what you should do.

(2) Labelling positions (in a debate). – Instead of presenting the content of two papers you should present two abstract positions, A and B. How do you abstract away from the papers? By focussing solely on what you think is important for presenting the problem. That means, you don’t follow the twists and turns of the paper. You just pick a claim or concept. Of course, this might seem difficult. But you can figure it out by saying what, for instance, makes the connection to paper B. (You want an example? Look how Putnam introduces the “traditional doctrine” of meaning by summarising Frege in the introduction to The Meaning of “Meaning”. Putnam solely focuses on what he is going to exploit later to make his case.) So your A and B are not authors or papers; they are two positions, isms, types of argument. Labelling positions rather than remaining glued to individual authors has some important consequences. Firstly, you focus on what you think matters. And this means you impose your voice from the very beginning. Your voice is not some afterthought that you present after you mastered the masters. You exercise your voice by pulling the masters your way. They just matter insofar as they are representatives of your set-up of the problem. Secondly, if you introduce a new author, you can just subsume them under one of your own categories. Thirdly, there is no right and wrong in that abstraction. Of course, your way of presenting a position might strike some readers as awkward. Try and see what works. But unlike in the case of presenting an author’s positions, you cannot be unfaithful by changing the emphasis. Of course, you shouldn’t build a straw man. But it’s perfectly fine to justify a somewhat strong characterisation by saying, for example, that you focus on a particular aspect that you deem relevant. Fourthly, you can use these labels throughout your paper. In fact, the aspect that defines the position A or B builds the conceptual repertoire for setting up the drama.

(3) Structuring with labels. – The second step I would recommend is setting out the structure of the paper (f). As suggested above, this often happens by presenting views of opposing authors, and then presenting one’s own idea in the last section. This is often frustrating because, as a writer you have to withhold your own position for long phases, while the reader will want to get to the last chapter to see what your point actually is. However, if you structure your work with the labels you defined in the introduction, your view is present from the get-go. Not in the sense of an own position, but in the sense of your take on what is important about someone else’s position. Your voice informs the writing all the way through. – Now you might worry that this will mean to present someone’s view in a biased way, but this is not the case. Of course, you present an interpretation of someone’s view in any case, but with the labelling strategy you highlight what you find relevant for your purposes. Rather than presenting paper A and paper B … and then seeing how their emphases translate into something that you can refine and discuss as your own adjustment, you will present your take of position A and B. This way, you’re setting up a conceptual space in which you can move around and attribute various positions and distinctions. Your voice is not a particular position, but what shapes the entire space of discussion.** (Once you think like that, you’re no longer tied to presenting A and B as a succession. You might also structure your paper by beginning with your idea, B*. But you do it by setting out B, reference authors that have held B already, and then introduce A as an objection to B, and finally land on B* as the position that addresses that objection.) While doing all that, you can reference and highlight peculiarities in other authors as you go along. But they will speak to the terms of the discussion as you have set them.

So how do you find your voice after long periods of browsing through literature? – I’d reiterate that you find it by focusing, not on something else or something supposedly new, but on what you find important in the text you’re working through. It’s mainly a shift of emphasis: from following what others find important to focusing on what you find important in others. If you look for examples, check out how papers that you like actually build up the problem they work through: I’m sure that more often than not you’ll find that they juxtapose ideas by characterising or labelling positions, while subsuming whole lists of authors under these labels.

____

* One afterthought: I now tend to think that this (style being a result of what matters to you) might apply across the board, in writing, music, other arts. But sometimes it’s first necessary to find someone (or some piece of literature etc.) who encourages you to think that the things you find important can actually be said. Can be said, that is, in such and such a way, and without embarrassment. – So it was sometimes only after reading certain authors that I actually dared saying things the way I do now.

If this is correct, the continuous reading in such phases has at least two different functions: you can read (1) to gather content you want to write about or (2) to seek legitimacy for how you want to say things.

** This also means that your view (or what you find important about something) is not necessarily constituted by taking a distinctive or opposing position. Rather your view can be a way of relating or integrating certain positions. (Historians do this much of the time.) All too often, philosophers seem to assume that they have to carve out their view by putting it in opposition to others. There is reason to doubt this, as I argue in a previous post.

How do I figure out what to think? (Part I)

Which view of the matter is right? When I started out studying philosophy, I had a problem that often continues to haunt me. Reading a paper on a given topic, I thought: yes, that makes sense! Reading a counterargument the next day, I thought: right, that makes more sense! Reading a defence of paper one, I thought: oh, I had better swing back. Talking to others about it, I found there were two groups of people: those who had made up their mind for one side, and those who admitted to swinging back and forth just like I did. I guess we all experience this swinging back and forth in many aspects of life, but in philosophy it felt unsettling because there seemed to be the option of just betting on the wrong horse. But there was something even worse than betting on the wrong horse and finding myself in disagreement with someone I respected. It was the insight that I had no clue how to make up my mind in such questions. How did people end up being compatibilists about freedom and determinism? Why do you end up calling yourself an externalist about meaning? Why do you think that Ruth Millikan or Nietzsche make more sense than Jerry Fodor or Kant? – I thought very hard about this and related questions and came up with different answers, but today I thought: right, I actually have something to say about it! So here we go.

Let’s first see how the unsettling feeling arises. The way much philosophy is taught is by setting out a problem and then presenting options to solve it. Sometimes they are presented more historically, like: Nietzsche tried to refute Schopenhauer. Sometimes they are presented as theoretical alternatives, like: this is an argument for compatibilism and here is a problem for that argument. I had a number of reactions to such scenarios, but my basic response was not: right, so these are the options. It was rather: I have no idea how to oversee them. How was I supposed to make up my mind? Surely that would require overseeing all the consequences and possible counterarguments, when I had already trouble to get the presented position in the first place. I went away with three impressions: (1) a feeling of confusion, (2) the feeling that some of the views must be better than others, and (3) the assumption that I had to make up my mind about these options. But I couldn’t! Ergo, I sucked at philosophy.

In this muddle, history of philosophy seemed to come to the rescue. It seemed to promise that I didn’t have to make up my mind, but merely give accurate accounts of encountered views. – Ha! The sense of relief didn’t last long. First, you still have to make up your mind about interpretations, and somehow the views presented in primary texts still seemed to pull me in different directions. My problem wasn’t solved but worsened, because now you were supposed to figure out philological nuances and historical details on top of everything else. Ergo, the very idea of reporting ideas without picking a side turned out to be misguiding.

Back to square one, I eventually made what I thought was a bold move: I just picked a side, more or less at random. The unease about not seeing through the view I had picked didn’t really go away, but who cares: we’re all just finite mortals! – Having picked a side gave me a new feeling: confidence. I had not seen the light, but hey, I belonged to a group, and some people in that group surely had advanced. Picking a side feels random only at the beginning: then things fall into place; soon you start to foresee and refute counterarguments; what your interlocutors say matters in a new way. You listen not just in an attempt to understand the view “an sich”, but you’re involved. Tensions arise. It’s fun, at least for a while. In any case, picking a side counters lack of confidence: it gives your work direction and makes exchanges meaningful.

For better or worse, I would recommend picking a side if your confusion gets the better of you all the time. At least as a pragmatic device. It’s how you make things fall into place and can take your first steps. However, the unease doesn’t go away. At least for me it didn’t. Why? Let’s face it, I often felt like an actor who impersonates someone who has a view. Two questions remained: What if people could find out that I had just randomly picked a side? This is part of what nourished impostor syndrome (for the wrong reasons, as might turn out later). And how could I work out what I should really think about certain things? – While getting a job partly helped with the first question, a lot of my mode of working revolves around the second question. I got very interested in questions of norms, of methodology and the relation between philosophy and its history. And while these issues are intriguing in their own right, they also helped me with the questions of what to think and how to figure out what to think. So here are a few steps I’d like to consider.

Step one: You don’t have to pick a side. – It helps to look more closely at the effect of picking a side. I said that it gave direction and meaning to my exchanges. It did. But how? Picking a side means to enter a game, by and large an adversarial game. If you pick a side, then it seems that there is a right and wrong side just as there is winning and losing in an argumentative setting. Well, I certainly think there is winning and losing. But I doubt that there is right and wrong involved in picking a side. So here is my thesis: Picking a side helps you to play the game. But it doesn’t help you in figuring out what you should think. In other words, in order to work out what to think, you don’t have to pick a side at all.

Step two: Picking a side does not lead you to the truth. – As I noted, the way much philosophy is taught to us is by setting out a problem and then presenting options to solve it. The options are set up as better or worse options. And now it seems that picking a side does not only associate you with winning, say, a certain argument, but also with truth. And the truth is what you should think and be convinced of, right? But winning an argument doesn’t (necessarily) mean to hit on the truth of a matter. The fact that you win in an exchange does not mean that you win the next crucial exchange. In fact, it’s at least possible that you win every argument and never hit on any truth. It’s merely the adversarial practice of philosophy that creates the illusion that winning is related to finding the truth.

Now you might want to object that I got things the wrong way round. We argue, not to win, but about what’s true. That doesn’t make winning automatically true, but neither does it dissociate truth from arguing. Let’s look at an example: You can argue about whether it was the gardener or the butler who committed the murder. Of course, you might win but end up convicting, wrongly, the gardener. Now that does show that not all arguments bring out the truth. But they still can decide between true and false options. Let me address this challenge in the next step.

Step three: In philosophy, there are no sides. – It’s true that presenting philosophical theories as true or false, or at least as better or worse solutions to a given problem makes them look like gardeners or butlers in a whodunit. Like a crime novel, problems have solutions, and if not one solution, then at least one kind of solution. – This is certainly true of certain problems. Asking about an individual cause or element as being responsible or decisive is the sort of setting that allows for true and false answers. But the problems of philosophy are hardly ever of that sort. To see this, consider the example again. Mutatis mutandis, what matters to the philosopher is not mainly who committed the crime, but whether the gardener and the butler have reasons to commit the murder. And once someone pins down the gardener as the culprit, philosophers will likely raise the question whether we have overlooked other suspects or whether the supposed culprit is really to blame (rather than, say, society). This might sound as if I were making fun of philosophy, but the point is that philosophers are more engaged in understanding than in providing the one true account.

How does understanding differ from solving a problem? Understanding involves understanding both or all the options and trying to see where they lead. Understanding is a comprehensive analysis of an issue and an attempt to integrate as many facts as possible in that analysis. This actually involves translating contrary accounts into one another and seeing how different theories deal with the (supposedly) same facts. Rather than pinning down the murderer you’ll be asking what murder is. But most of the time, it’s not your job to conclusively decide what murder is (in the sense of what should count as murder in a given jurisdiction), but to analyse the factual and conceptual space of murder. Yes, we can carve up that space differently. But this carving up is not competitive; rather it tells us something about our carving tools. To use a different analogy, asking which philosophical theory is right is like asking whether you should play a certain melody on the piano or on the trombone. There are differences: the kinds of moves you need to make to produce the notes on a trombone differ vastly from those you need to make on the piano. Oh, and your preference might differ. But would you really want to say there is a side to be taken? – Ha! You might say that you can’t produce chords on a trombone, so it’s less qualified for playing chord changes. Well, just get more trombone players then!

I know that the foregoing steps raise a number of questions, which is why I’d like to dedicate a number of posts to this issue. To return to swinging back and forth between contrary options, this feeling does not indicate that you are undecided. It indicates that you are trying to understand different options in a setting. Ultimately, this feeling measures our attempts to integrate new facts, while we are confronted with pressures arising from observing people who actually adhere to one side or another. For the time being, I’d like to conclude by repeating that it is the adversarial style that creates the illusion that winning and losing are related to giving true and false accounts. The very idea of having to pick a side is, while understandable in the current style of playing the game, misguided. If there are sides, they are already picked, rooted in what we call perspectives. In other words, one need not worry which side to choose, but rather think through the side you already find yourself on. There are no wrong sides. Philosophy is not a whodunit. And the piano might be out of tune.

What is a debate? On the kinds of things we study in history of philosophy

Philosophers focus on problems; historians of philosophy also focus on texts. That’s what I sometimes say when I have to explain the difference between doing philosophy and history of philosophy. The point is that historians, in addition to trying and understanding what’s going on in a text or between texts, also deal with the ‘material basis’ on which the problems are handed down to us: the genres, dates, production and dissemination, the language, style and what have you. But what is it that we actually find in the texts? Of course, we are used to offer interpretations, but I think that, before we even start reading, we all tend to have presumptions about what we find. Now these presumptions can be quite different. And it matters greatly what we think we find. In the following, I want to say a few things about this issue, not to offer conclusions, but to get the ball rolling.

An assumption that is both common and rightly contested is that we might find the intention of the author. Wanting to get Aristotle, Cavendish or Fodor right, seems to mean that we look for what the author meant to say. It’s understandable that this matters to us, but apart from the fact that such a search is often in vain, we can understand texts independently from intentions. – Another unit is of course the focus on arguments. We can read a text as an argument for a conclusion and thus analyse its internal structure. Getting into the details of arguments often involves unpacking and explaining claims, concepts, assumptions in the background, and examples. Evaluating the arguments will mean, in turn, to assess how well they support the claims (I like to think of an evaluation as indicating the distance between claim and argument). But while all this is a crucial part in the philosophical analysis, it does not explain what is going on in the text, that is: it does not explain why and on what basis an author might argue for a certain conclusion, reject a certain view, make a certain move, use a certain strategy, use a certain term or concept. In other words, in addition to the internal analysis we need to invoke some of the so-called context.

As I see it, a fruitful approach to providing context, at least in the history of philosophy, is to study texts as elements of debates. One reason I like this is that it immediately opens up the possibility to locate the text (and the claims of an author) in a larger interaction. We hardly ever write just because we want to express a view. Normally we write in response to other texts, no matter whether we reply to a question, reject a claim, highlight a point of interest etc., and no matter whether that other text is a day or thousand years old.

But even if you agree that debates are a helpful focus both for studying a historical or contemporary text (in research as well as in teaching), there might be quite some disagreement as to what a debate actually is or what we are looking for in a debate. I think this matters not only for historians but also for understanding debates more generally. – Currently, for instance, we have a public debate about climate change. What kind of ‘unit’ is this? There are conditions under which the debate arose quite some decennia ago, with claims being put forward in research contexts, schools and the media. These conditions vary greatly: there are political, technological, scientific, educational and many other kinds of conditions. Then there are different participants, many kinds of scientists, citizens, politicians, journalists. Then there are different genres: scientific publications, media outlets, referee reports for politicians, interviews, protests in the streets and online etc. What is it that holds all this together and makes it part of a debate? My hunch is that it is a question. But which one? Here, I think it is important to get the priorities right. There are sub-questions, follow-up questions, all sorts, but is there a main question? This is tricky. But I guess it should be the most common and salient point of contact between all the items constituting the debate. For this debate, it is perhaps the question: How shall we respond to climate change?

Once we determine such a question, we can group the items, especially the texts, accordingly. The debate is one of the crucial factors that makes the text meaningful, that places it in a dialogical space, even if we do not understand very much of what it says (yet). Even if I am not a climate scientist, I understand the role of a paper within the debate and might be able to place it quite well just by reading the abstract. The same is true of a medieval treatise on logic or an early modern text on first philosophy. – So this is a good way in, I guess. But where do we go from here? You probably can already guess that I want to say something critical now. Yes, I do. The point I want to address is this: How is a debate structured?

When we think about debates in philosophy, we obviously start out from what we perceive debates to be nowadays. As pointed out earlier, much philosophical exchange is based on criticising others. Therefore, it seems fair to assume that debates are structured by opposition. There is a question and opposing answers to it. Indeed, many categories in philosophical historiography are ordered in oppositions and it helps to understand one term through thinking in relation to its opposite. Just think of empiricism versus rationalism, realism versus nominalism etc. That’s all fine. But it only gets you so far. Understanding the content, motivation and addressees of a text as a response in an actual debate requires going far beyond such oppositions. Of course, we can place someone by saying he’s a climate change denier; but that doesn’t help us in understanding the motivations and contents of the text. It’s just a heuristic device to get started.

Today I had the pleasure of listening in on a meeting of Andrea Sangiacomo’s ERC project team working on a large database to study trends in early modern natural philosophy.* It’s a very exciting project, not least in that they are trying to analyse the social and semantic networks in which some of the teaching took place. Not being well-versed in digital humanities myself, I was mainly in awe of the meticulous attention to details of working with the data. But then it struck me: They are tracking teaching practices and yet they were making their first steps by tracing opposing views (on occasionalism). Why would you look for oppositions, I wondered half aloud. Of course, it is a heuristic way of structuring the field. It was then that I began to wonder how we should analyse debates, going beyond oppositions.

Now you might ask why one should go beyond. My answer is that debates, even though the term might suggest critical opposition over a question, might be structured by opposition. But the actual moves that explain what’s going on in a text on a more detailed level, that is: from one passage or even one sentence to the next, are way more fine-grained. Again, as in the case of the straightforward opposition, these moves should be thought of as (implicit) responses to other texts.** Here is a list of moves I think of ad hoc:

  • reformulating a claim
  • quoting a claim (with or without acknowledgement)
  • paraphrasing a claim
  • translating a claim (into a different language, terminology)
  • formalising a claim
  • simplifying a claim
  • embedding a claim into a more complex one
  • ascribing a claim (to someone)
  • (intentionally) misacscribing a claim
  • making up a claim (as a view of someone)
  • commenting on a claim
  • elaborating or developing an idea
  • locating a view in a context
  • deriving (someone’s) claim from another claim
  • deriving (someone’s) claim from the Bible
  • asserting that a claim, actually, is another claim
  • asserting that a claim is ambiguous
  • asserting that a claim is self-evident
  • asserting that a claim is true, false, paradoxical, contradictory, opposing another one, an axiom, demonstrable, not demonstrable
  • asserting that a claim is confirmed by experience
  • asserting that a claim is intuitive, plausible, implausible, unbelievable
  • raising (new) questions
  • answering a question raised by a claim
  • doubting and questioning a result
  • revising a claim
  • revising one’s own claim in view of another claim
  • understanding a view
  • failing to understand a view
  • misrepresenting a view
  • distorting a view
  • evaluating a view
  • dismissing a view
  • re-interpreting a (well-known) view
  • undermining a claim, one’s own claim
  • exposing assumptions
  • explaining an idea in view of its premises or implications
  • illustrating a view
  • finding (further) evidence for or against a view
  • transforming or applying a concept or view to a new issue, in philosophy or elsewhere
  • recontextualising a view
  • repairing a view or argument
  • popularising a view
  • trying to conserve a view
  • trying to advance a view
  • juxtaposing views
  • comparing views
  • resolving a tension between views
  • highlighting a tension between views
  • associating a view with another one
  • appropriating a view
  • pretending to merely repeat a traditional view, while presenting a bold re-interpretation of it [yes, what Ockham does to Aristotle]
  • explicitly accepting a view
  • pretending to accept a view
  • accepting a view, while condemning the proponent
  • rejecting a view, while praising the proponent
  • pretending to reject a view, while actually appropriating (part of) it [yes, I’m thinking of Reid]
  • pretending to accept a view, while rejecting its premises
  • highlighting relations between views (analogies etc.)
  • ridiculing a view
  • belittling a view
  • shunning a view
  • showing societal consequences of a view
  • suppressing or hiding a claim
  • disavowing a claim
  • retracting a claim
  • putting a view in euphemistic terms
  • showing that a claim is outrageous, heretical, controversial, complacent
  • polemicising against a view
  • etc.

This list is certainly not exhaustive. And “view” or “claim” might concern the whole or a part, an argument, a term or concept. Even if we have some more positive or negative forms of responses, we have to see that all of these ways go beyond mere opposition, counterargument or criticism. Sometimes the listed moves are made explicitly; sometimes a move in a text might be explicable as result of such a move. What is perhaps most salient is that they often say as much about the commitments of the respondent as they are intended to say about the other text that is being responded to. While mere criticism of an opponent does not require us to expose our commitments, much of what we find in (historical) texts is owing to commitments. (In other words, adversarial communication in current professional settings, such as the Q&A after talks, might often be taken as people merely showing off their chops, without invoking their own commitments and vulnerabilities. But this is not what we should expect to find in historical texts.)*** So if we look at Spinoza as criticising Descartes, for instance, we should not overlook that the agreements between the commitments and interests of these authors are just as important as the tensions and explicit disagreement. Looking again at the issue of climate change, it is clear that most moves probably consist in understanding claims and their implications, establishing agreement and noting tensions, corroborating ideas, assessing consequences, providing evidence, trying to confirm results etc. So the focus on opposition might be said to give us a wrong idea of the real moves within a historical debate and of the moves that stabilise a debate or make it stick.

Anyway, the main idea of beginning such a list is to see the variety of moves we might find in a text responding to someone else. To analyse a text merely as an opposing move with pertinent counterarguments or as presenting a contrary theory makes us overlook the richness of the philosophical interactions.

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*Here is a recent blog post by Raluca Tanasescu, Andrea Sangiacomo, Silvia Donker, and Hugo Hogenbirk on their work. I’m only beginning to learn about the methods and considerations in digital humanities. But I have to say that this field strikes me as holding a lot of (methodological) inspiration (for history of philosophy and science etc.) even if you continue to work mostly in more traditional ways.

** Besides texts of different authors, this might of course also concern other texts of oneself or parts or temporal stages (drafts) of the same text.

*** I’m grateful to Laura Georgescu for pointing out this difference between criticism in current professional settings as opposed to many historical texts.