I keep noticing that one of the greatest worries of students is finding a workable research question for their essays – one that allows them to structure their work and keeps them in line with what they intend to promise. I’ve written on this before at length on this blog (here, a Groningen student reviews three of my posts), but I think I managed to break down the issue even more. – I’ve just finished an exciting three-day seminar on “Spinoza’s Ethics. An introduction to doing philosophy systematically for beginners.” The idea was to bring out the systematicity of the Ethics to such a degree that students could continue working with the text independently without loosing grip of the general framework. On the last day, I wanted to turn the tables and have my roughly fourty students work, not primarily through the text, but through potential essays on this book. Hence, I divided them into six groups and gave them pertinent tasks. In a feedback round, most students and I agreed that this was a surprising success. Therefore, I simply want to share the set-up of the tasks:

At the beginning, I asked the students to:

• find some friction (in the text),
• provide concrete evidence for this friction by providing at least two passages or sentences from the text,
• provide a motivation of why the friction arises,
• provide at least one possible answer as to how to state the friction and how to amend it.

By asking for a friction, I could rule out explorative works that have no natural boundaries and can keep students on the preparatory reading path forwever. By asking for concrete passages of text, students will have a constant fall-back place when themes would have them meander into the wilderness of the space of reasons. By asking for friction in the text, I also wanted to make sure that the friction arises from an immanent reading, rather than from an external criticism (e.g. of the sort: I don’t like this kind of philosophy, so here is why I prefer something else – which doesn’t really engage with the material). This approach mostly yields ambiguous uses / understandings of particular terms. Not everyone is interested in that kind of focus, but the promise is that this provides a workable way in and out, while one still has time to draw in all the pertinent aspects related to working through the friction.

Eventually, the student groups came up with six workable research questions. The evidence and motivations made for a pertinent structure, the possible answer for a fairly clear hypothesis. In the discussion of these approaches, we then tried to establish what the chapters / sections should look like: i.e. how they should implement the friction, motivation, and the answers. (In fact, this idea for planning essays is derived from my account of questions.)

Especially for beginners, it’s also important to counter the feeling that they don’t yet know enough to come up with a proper question. I addressed this worry by making clear that any philosophical thesis can (and indeed will be) countered at some point. So one shouldn’t waste their time by trying to immunise their work against criticism. Whatever you’ll say can be criticised. So you might as well get started immediately.

Of course, this is not waterproof. But my sense was that students now had an idea about how to move from reading to planning their writing – and that’s all I want.

***

Many thanks again to my great students in this course!

A: Marriage is a speech act.

B: Why do you devalue traditional rituals?

A: I don’t! I just made a point about the constitutive role of language for marriage.

B: Oh, but why did you say that marriage was nothing but talk?

…

It’s common to paraphrase texts, whether written or uttered, with our own words. In fact, students are often encouraged to “use their own words” when asked to restate or summarise an argument. Such instructions are usually intended to allow for checking whether something has been understood correctly or for translating technical terms into common language. The misunderstanding in the example above can serve as an illustration: While A made a point about the act or marrying requiring the people getting married to actually say “yes”, B took A to mean that marriage reduces to talk and is thus devoid of any further value. So B took A’s utterance in a reductive sense, while A meant it in a constitutive sense. These different senses are brought out in the paraphrases. B specifies to have taken the initial sentence in the sense of “nothing but”; A clarifies to have meant “the constitutive role”. Paraphrases are ubiquitous and yet very difficult to master, at least in philosophical contexts. Attempting to outline a simple doctrine often forces me to re-write for hours on end. But what precisely is it that makes paraphrasing so difficult? As the little example shows different paraphrases can already come with different interpretations, which in turn entail different evaluations.

In what follows, I hope to gesture at an answer that shows how paraphrases (tacitly) depend on interpretations and thus also determine evaluations of the paraphrased positions. What’s more: I hope to give a reason for dispelling the common myth that you can present a position without already being committed to an evaluation. I’ll close with some thoughts about how paraphrases also validate the paraphrased thoughts.

Problems with paraphrases in philosophy

While exercises of paraphrasing might be “basic tasks”, they are generally highly contentious and often even lie at the core of academic disputes. On the one hand, paraphrases can be historically problematic in that they introduce ideas unheard of at the time of the original expression; on the other hand, paraphrases can be systematically problematic in that they introduce unwanted (metaphysical) commitments. Historically speaking, the early modern use of the term “man” commonly has a wider scope (including women) than the twentieth-century use that renders it identical to the expression “male human (being)”. At the same time, this etymology is complicated by the fact that the pre-twentieth-century use of “man” is often tacitly referring to human males as the standard. Thus, depending on the context, the paraphrase of “man” with the term “human being” might count as anachronistic, although it is etymologically apt. Metaphysically speaking, we might wonder whether the expression “the present King of France” commits us to non-existent objects. Whichever side you take on such matters, a crucial function of the paraphrase lies in directing the attention or focus of the interlocutor. Thus, it clearly affects the philosophical approach to a given thought or content and also the direction a conversation about it might take. Hence, the worry arises whether different paraphases tacitly commit interlocutors to contrary interpretations. Arguably, such worries are rooted in a holistic understanding of sentence meaning. Assuming that the meaning of a given sentence is not atomistcally determined, but by a set of other sentences that the given sentence is related to, I will worry whether get the implications right. Going back to the initial example, speakers A and B construe the meaning of the initial sentence via different sets of related sentences or implications.

This kind of problem becomes clearly palpable in teaching contexts. A helpful example is Anselm of Canterbury’s Proslogion. Confronted with the phrase “something than which a greater cannot be thought” (aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit), many students begin by asking whether that renders God’s greatness subjective. Given the phrasing in Anselm, this question reveals a certain kind of modern understanding of the term “thinking”. Reading “… cannot be thought”, they render “thought” as an activity that they (or even an ideal thinker) can perform and thus as the individual mental act of a subject. This reading drastically changes when students are exposed to an understanding of “than which a greater cannot be thought” as “greatest possible”, such that it can be seen as a metaphysical modality rather than a subjective act. Again, it’s paraphrases, both tacit and explicit ones, that bring out different commitments. Thus, the seemingly simple task of “saying the same thing in your own words” requires a careful interpretation of the phrase that is to be paraphrased. As I see it, then, giving a paraphrase depends on a specific interpretation of the initial phrase. Where does this leave us?  

The interpretation-ladenness of paraphrases

If our paraphrases are guided by specific interpretations, then this means that there is no such thing as a neutral report or presentation of a position. If I present Anselm’s formula in my own words and mistakenly say, for instance, “God is the greatest being, according to Anselm” (as opposed to “God is the greatest possible being”), then I’ll be mistakenly implying that God is the actually greatest thing (and something greater could be thought). However, most problematic paraphrases are not owing to such obvious blunders. Rather, they can depend on quite nuanced understandings. Now, my point is not that there are problematic interpretations; my point is rather that the paraphrase we choose commits us to a limited set of possible interpretations (as opposed to a different set of possible interpretations owing to a different paraphrase) and that there are no paraphrases that come without implications (and thus specific interpretations contrary to others). If this is correct, then there is no innocent or neutral paraphrase of a given expression. This, in turn, allows us to rid ourselves of a persistent myth: the myth that one could paraphrase a position and only then decide what to make of it. This myth often translates into a common thesis or essay structure, suggesting that you can structure your work by first presenting a position neutrally and only then evaluating it. This is impossible because the paraphrase already commits you to a specific interpretation – whether you know it or not.

The validating nature of paraphrases

But why, you might ask, is this so? Why can’t I simply paraphrase a position neutrally, leaving it open for various possible commitments? I have to admit that I have attempted this for a long time. But it doesn’t seem to work. The reason is that paraphrasing is a strangely bi-directional activity. On the one hand, a paraphrase is a bit like an (indirect) quotation, trying to convey what someone (else) has said. (Of course, we also continuously paraphrase our own expressions.) On the other hand, a paraphrase is like an appropriation, trying to convey what you have understood. These two aspirations can come apart, of course, both in historical and current readings. But what is even more important is that the appropriation often carries with it a sort of validation. In trying to appropriate someone’s form of words, I validate what has been said – by embedding it into my own thoughts. In fact, we often present and paraphrase claims that we take to be commonly accepted without specific references to any particular author. People now constantly say that mariage is a speech act, without particular reference to Austin or a theory of performative utterances. This thought has become part of a fairly common way of thinking about the role of language. Its ubiquitous paraphrases have made it part of the public domain, as it were. This way the initial thought gets validated in various formulations.

To see this, it’s vital to realise just how ubiquitous paraphrases are. In fact, most of the things we say are paraphrases of others’ words. In fact, we learn to speak and practise our daily interactions by constantly saying, in slight variations and paraphrases, what we hear and read others say. And since it often doesn’t matter who precisely said what, the exact authorship of the paraphrased sentences fades – until we fully embrace the thoughts ourselves and think we are original.   

So paraphrasing is a continuous and indeed necessary activity we practise in our daily lives, often used to validate thoughts in new contexts. This feature of validation, I submit, carries over when we, as philosophers, present the position of someone else. To what precise extent remains to be seen. But it’s clear that the concomitant validation plays a crucial role in the way we learn and pick up thoughts both in daily interactions and as philosophers who appropriate thoughts of others into our understanding of the world and the claims of current or past interlocutors.

An afterthought:

If this is remotely correct, using ChatGPT or other tools for paraphrases (instead of learning and constantly practising the validation of thoughts ourselves) might have highly problematic consequences for our (linguistic) interactions with others and indeed ourselves.