Especially since the arrival of LLMs, there are quite a few pieces that claim “writing is thinking” or portray writing as thinking in a certain way (even Nature featured a piece on it). The idea is that you don’t just jot down what you thought out beforehand. Rather, the writing and rewriting process often produces thoughts that have not been anticipated by the writer. This is crucial in processes of learning, knowledge-production, artistic endeavours, or therapeutic ambitions. Although I don’t seem to have put it quite that way, I am myself a vocal advocate of that claim. In what follows, I don’t want to revoke my earlier claims. But still: I want to convince you that it’s even worthwhile to entertain the idea that much writing isn’t thinking in this sense, and that that might just be fine.
My idea goes back to recent exchanges with my colleagues Lavinia Marin and Timm Lampert. Lavinia pointed out to me that writing papers in the so-called hard and even some social sciences has no epistemic function. Papers get written to communicate work set-ups and results at conferences, to publish and to get funding. Today, Lavinia detailed this and a number of further points in an intriguing blog post (which I advise you to read as a whole). About writing in these sciences, she says the following: “Writing is just this process where you sit down and add up words. The hardest part is sitting down. … The way many academics treat writing today is that writing is not supposed to produce any new knowledge, insights or thinking. Writing is the wrapping of your results. This is at least for large parts of science, so alpha sciences, beta sciences, all that empirical stuff. “Apply ass to chair”, as Austin K Leon likes to say.” Timm took up this idea and suggested that much applied work based on logic, mathematics, and indeed programming with the aid of LLMs might fit this account.
This is of course somewhat anectdotal, but if this picture isn’t entirely off the mark, it does reveal some insights, not least in explaining why the academic responses to Large Language Models are such a mixed bag. The philosopher in me immediately wants to raise his voice and declare how much gets lost in this view on writing. Yet the historian in me cautions me to wait and listen. What does this mean? Here is a hunch: It doesn’t mean that people in the sciences don’t care about thinking. It just might mean that the real (epistemic) action is elsewhere. Not that long ago I stumbled across some intriguing work by Dana Jalobeanu on enacting experiments and recipes, inspiring me to rethink assumptions about early modern texts. As Dana points out in a paper on Della Porta and Bacon, experiments and recipes are records of what has been tried out in a laboratory or kitchen. The actual epistemic work is not in crafting the written text (which might sometimes just be a list of items and acts), but in all the work that precedes the writing and the work or reenactment inspired in the recipient who might try and replicate the promised results, with all the twisting and turning and trying and failing and trying again slightly differently. Once you see this, it becomes clear that the status and expectations from writing in certain sciences are vastly different from the status of writing in the humanities. In the former, much writing seems a much more social and epistemic action oriented endeavour where texts are just intermediearies and starting points for the actual work. In fact, once you see this, it becomes clear that even philosophical classics like the Descartes’ Meditations or Locke’s Essay heavily rely on the collaboration of the readers.
As I see it, this is quite a positive view of non-epistemic writing. And if writing works really like that in a number of domains, then there do seem to be good reasons to outsource such tedious exercises to LLMs. Recognising this rather strong difference between writing in the humanities and a number of sciences is really helpful to understand the different reactions to the advent of a lot of AI developments. Even if many colleagues in the humanities are not entirely skeptical about the merits of LLMs, they are worried about outsourcing too much and giving way to pernicious deskilling. Rightly so, because writing in the humanities really is different.
However, the process of introducing non-epistemic writing practices into the humanities has not begun with LLMs. It began much earlier. As most of us know all too well, there is the endless repetition of talk of the “crisis of humanties” – to which many administrators (it’s always the administrators!) responded, at least since the New Public Management developments in the 80s, by introducing success measures from the sciences into the humanities. Before we knew it, we began to write papers instead of books, grant applications, performance reviews, explained the value of potential applications of our work to various stakeholders and the average taxpayer. While there is nothing wrong with accountability per se, many complained – rightly I think – that the humanities’ competition with the hard and many social sciences is a game we can’t win. As I see it, this development lead to forms of formulaic writing in the humanities that tip the balance in favour of the (in some respects non-epistemic) paper model which I think is pernicious for many endeavours in our field (and should be countered by the reintroduction of the genre of commentary, as I argued earlier). So I think that many worries about recent technological developments are not inspired by LLMs per se, but by the way in which they accelerate an aleady problematic development in the humanities.
What’s more, the message that writing as such can be shortened and largely outsourced is not lost on students who are often already too busy. I am old enough to have grown up in a world where I learned writing by hand and the first thing I typed on a computer was my MA thesis, the authoritative book-like page on the screen making me feel at once proud and like an impostor whose scribblings were seemingly unduly dignified by the miraculous word-processor. But I keep wondering what it’s like for people who have never made this transition and are born into a world where pens and paper are part of a posh hobby like collecting vinyl records perhaps.
I’m not sure how big of a difference this makes. But what I’m reminded of is that we all (still) write, even if we happen to write non-epistemically and outsource like hell, in an environment in which those who are happy enough to have learned the art of reading and writing at school. This social environment with all its implicit forms of collective knowledge matters greatly. For the forms of writing we (used to?) learn – all the different genres of reports, discussions, commentaries, tables, proofs, translations, essays etc., all that jazz – is epistemic writing in that it trained us to think and imagine. Being trained this way, we can also enjoy the luxury of writing non-epistemically now and then, for instance when the action of thinking is happening elsewhere.
Most of all, we shouldn’t forget that meandering and serendipitous research processes inside and outside of the actual writing are a deeply human thing. Seen this way, there is no point in outsourcing, because writing and thinking – just like many other beautiful things that take time and practice to learn – are not there for the purpose of piling up huge quantities of ever more texts or lines in an academic CV. They have, as the saying goes, intrinsic value. As Lavinia highlights in her blog post, it doesn’t just happen in academic contexts but – now perhaps most of all – in our (popular) culture more widely understood:
“Much of the knowledge propagated in the popular culture is exactly from nerds and fans who have no profit mindset, but simply enjoy the sheer act of research. (I am inspired here by Celine Nguyen’s amazing essay). Research is a wonderful experience, just as painting, singing, staging a drama in your backyard, singing in a garage band, sculpting or knitting. It’s a particular form of leading a creative life, which I think we were all meant to lead. Any artistic practice is highly enjoyable in itself and helps us endure this life on earth. And we just need to recognise that reading and writing are such practices that make us more human and happier to be alive. And hence, the benefit, if you must use these economic terms, is simply experiential. Writing by hand, reading slowly are acts of sheer experiential enchantment. Ways of living our intellectual lives. If we insist on becoming more efficient about these practices, we will be refusing to future generations the access to these practices; we may be cutting them off from very human experiences that we shouldn’t hoard for ourselves.”
Handling Ideas 