Writing may be creative or expository, and expository writing may be primarily designed to convey information or primarily designed to prove a point. Philosophical writing is of this last sort. Try to remember this: the object of the exercise is to state a claim and to defend it.
PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS: CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF A VIEW
(From Rosenberg, Jay F. 1996. The Practice of Philosophy . Third Edition. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, pp. 56-61)
The primary medium for working through a philosophical dialectic is the philosophical essay. This is a distinctive form which ranges from brief discussion notes in professional journals to works of book length. As a student of philosophy, you will (or should) be called upon to try your hand at writing philosophical essays. In any case, you will surely be reading some, and so a thorough discussion of the form is appropriate here. A philosophical essay is neither a research paper, a scholarly collection and arrangement of diverse sources (although the standards and forms of scholarly documentation should, of course, be observed whenever relevant and necessary), nor is it a literary exercise in self-expression. It does not deal with feelings or impressions. It is not a report or a summary. Fundamentally, it is the reasoned defense of a thesis. That is, there must be some point or points to be established in the essay, and considerations must be offered in support of them in such a way that the considerations can be seen to support them. Clarity of exposition, precision of statement, organization of ideas, and logical rigor and consistency in the treatment of those ideas are thus among the primary demands of philosophical writing. It follows that literacy and sound literary style are essential preconditions of a successful philosophical essay (indeed, I would add, of any writing). At a minimum, a philosophical essay should be written in coherent and articulate prose which adheres to the accepted rules and conventions of English grammar and composition. Enthusiasm cannot compensate for unintelligibility, nor can a superficial facility with technical terms effectively substitute for a sound understanding of the ideas and principles that such terminology has evolved to express. You should particularly avoid ponderous "academic" forms. Philosophy has had a bad press in this regard. It is notorious for being a "deep" subject, and those who write about it all too often aspire to a corresponding impenetrability. Well, deep philosophy may be--but the deep lucidity of a glacier-fed mountain lake, not the deep murkiness of a mist-laden swamp, should be your model and inspiration.
Philosophical essays come in a variety of species, each of which has its own characteristic structure. Perhaps the most basic of these, mastery of which serves as a point of entry to all the others, is the critical examination of a view. The critical examination of a view, of course, presupposes a view to be critically examined. That is, you are confronted at the beginning with something that itself has fundamentally the form of a philosophical essay[SOH]a piece of writing within which some claim or thesis is advanced and considerations are offered in favor of accepting or adopting that claim. Correspondingly, a critical examination of a view may be broadly divided into two parts: the exposition and the critique. Exposition consists in setting out for study and discussion the view, position, claim, or thesis at issue together with the structure of argumentation offered in support of it. Critique is the assessment or evaluation of that view through an examination of the structure and content of the supporting reasoning. One useful way to approach the writing of such a philosophical essay, then, is with something like the following checklist of questions in mind:
Does my essay have an introductory paragraph?
In my introductory paragraph, do I
* give a brief description of what the essay is about?
* state what I plan to accomplish in the essay?
* summarize how I plan to go about accomplishing it?
When reconstructing an argument, have I clearly explained
* what conclusion the philosopher is working toward?
* what reasons, both implicit and explicit, the philosopher offers to support that conclusion?
* why and how the philosopher thinks those reasons support the conclusion?
When raising an objection, have I
* made it clear what aspect of the argument I object to?
* explained the reasons why I object to that aspect of the argument? * assessed the severity of my objection?
* thought about and discussed how the philosopher might respond to my objection?
* discussed one objection thoroughly rather than many objections superficially?
Throughout my paper, do I periodically tell the reader
* what I' ve just done?
* what remains to be done?
* what the reader should expect to happen next?
* whether what I am saying is an interpretation or a criticism?
Does my essay have a clear and articulate structure?
* Does each paragraph work to support my thesis?
* Do I have transitions between paragraphs that make it clear why one paragraph follows the one which precedes it?
* Does each sentence within a paragraph work to support or explain the topic of that paragraph?
Have I satisfactorily explained
* any important special terminology that the author employs?
* the interpretation of any passages that I quote?
* the nature and point of any examples that I offer?
As helpful as such a brief checklist can often be, however, both the idea of a philosophical exposition and, especially, the topic of a philosophical critique deserve a more extensive discussion.
Views are usually somebody's views. The expository task is thus primarily exegetical. The business of setting out a position together with its supporting argumentation will usually be a matter of reading, understanding, reconstructing, and lucidly reporting the content of some philosophical work. This undertaking has its own strategies and hazards, some of which I will have occasion to discuss later.
As I have repeatedly stressed, the most important fact about a philosophical critique is that it does not end with disagreement. That is where it begins. Philosophical criticism is reasoned disagreement. Since the view up for assessment will be supported by its own structure of reasoned considerations, a negative philosophical evaluation of a thesis requires that the arguments supporting the position, and not merely the position itself, be critically engaged. That's Rule One. It is, you will recall, thus never sufficient simply to point out that a philosophical conclusion looks, or even is, false or paradoxical. If you wish effectively to call the conclusion into question, what you need to discover and demonstrate are the inadequacies of the reasoning offered in support of it.
As we have seen, there are two directions which a critical thrust can take. You may address the form of the argument--its validity or invalidity--or you may address its content. I have already said most of what can usefully be said about the first type of criticism outside the confines of a course in formal logic. The exposition of the argument to be evaluated is clearly crucial to this mode of criticism. The argument must be set out with sufficient clarity and precision and in sufficient orderly detail to allow for the extraction of a "logical skeleton" that in fact fairly and accurately represents the pattern of reasoning actually being employed. Unfortunately, nothing short of the kind of familiarity and practice that only repeated experience brings suffices to indicate what the argument is likely to be and how much detail is needed to uncover its operative logical structure. Even if you've successfully accomplished this rather tough job, however, your ability to demonstrate the argument's invalidity (if it is invalid) is still limited by your insight in recognizing it for what it is, and by your creativity in coming up with an appropriate model to demonstrate invalidity by exhibiting a further instance of that pattern of reasoning with indisputably true premises and an indisputably false conclusion. Alas, as I remarked earlier, both insight and creativity sadly fall outside the limits of what is teachable.
Usually, however, you will be dealing with patterns of reasoning that are formally correct. In that case, your critique will need to address the specific content of the argument. The way you do this, you surely remember, is to construct an internal criticism. That is, you attempt to establish that the various premises and presuppositions used in the argument cannot all consistently be held together. You try to show that anyone who accepts all of those premises and presuppositions at the same time--and in particular, then, the philosopher who offered the argument in the first place--lands in trouble.
What kind of trouble? I have repeatedly spoken of uncovering an inconsistency or an incoherence in some philosopher's views. It is now time to talk about this matter in more detail. What kinds of incoherence or inconsistency are there? And what do they look like when you uncover them?
In a sense, there is only one basic form of inconsistency or incoherence--a selfcontradiction. In the most straightforward case, a person contradicts himself by saying two things which cannot both be true at the same time. At one point in the dialectic he says X ; at another, he says not-X. In a somewhat less straightforward case, however, he may, so to speak, say both X and not-X at the same time. This sounds a bit mysterious, but in fact you've already seen at least one example of it. A person who claimed that all paintings were forgeries would be contradicting himself in this way, for he would in effect be saying both that some paintings are originals (for the forgeries to be copies of) and that no paintings are originals, both X and not-X.
Roughly, a claim is self-contradictory if it is false and its falsehood can be determined using only facts about the meanings of the words used to express the claim. "Some parents have no children," "Tom is taller than Sam, who is taller than Tom," "Mary can draw a four-sided triangle," "John is his own father's uncle," and "Yesterday I met a married bachelor" are examples of claims which it is plausible to regard as in this sense self-contradictory.
Of course, philosophers are rarely polite enough to supply you with even this straightforward a self- contradiction. More often the inconsistency, if there is one, will be merely implicit. The philosopher won't say both X and not-X. Instead, he'll say X , and also say a lot of other things--U, V, W, Y, Z--which, taken together, imply not-X. This is, in fact, the typical case, and so it's the one that I outlined earlier when I first introduced the notion of internal criticism.
Your job as a critic, correspondingly, is to make such an implicit contradiction explicit. As we have seen, you do this by constructing an argument of your own, one whose premises are claims that the philosopher under examination -- U, V, W, Y, Z--and whose conclusion is something that he's on record as being committed to reject-- not-X. A main part of your critical task, then, is to draw out and exhibit the implications of what is explicitly said in the work you are criticizing. And that is another reason why fair and accurate exposition necessarily precedes an effective critique. You can't determine what a person's explicit views imply until you've first gotten properly clear about what those views in fact are.
But we're still not finished exploring the variety of subtle ways that a stretch of philosophical argumentation can embody a conceptual incoherence. So far, I have been talking only about contradictions between what is said and what is said or implied. In a sophisticated piece of philosophical reasoning, however, the inconsistency, if there is one, may well lie not even that close to the surface. What a philosopher explicitly says, that is, will very often contradict neither anything else that he explicitly says nor even anything implied by the other things he explicitly says. Nevertheless, what he says may still contradict something else to which he is committed, not by saying it or implying it but, for instance, by simply taking it for granted or presupposing it.
Everyone, of course, takes many things for granted all the time, and practicing philosophers are no exception. Some of the things taken for granted are what we might call implicit premises, claims that are regarded as being so obviously true that they are just never mentioned. They "go without saying." Uncovering such implicit premises is often a tricky job, rather like diagnosing the motive behind some act, but once they've been brought out into the open they behave just like explicit premises. You work out their implications in conjunction with those of other things the philosopher says, and you attempt to exhibit the incoherence, if there is one, in the form of an explicit self- contradiction.
But even beyond implicit premises that may or may not be lurking behind a particular argument, there are some other things that are necessarily presupposed or taken for granted in the course of any argument. These are what you might think of as the most general ground rules for all constructive reasoning. I shall call them "canons of rational practice." Canons of rational practice incorporate the fundamental constraints that must be adhered to in order to have any coherent argument at all[SOH]good or bad, valid or invalid. A specifically philosophical sort of criticism-- and one which often proves especially puzzling to the beginner--is to attempt to convict the person who has ostensibly offered an argument of violating one of these. And someone who has violated one of the canons of rational practice has produced something incoherent, all right, but in a special way. He hasn't exactly contradicted himself. Instead, he has contradicted the presumption that what he's offering is an argument suitable for establishing its conclusion--or any conclusion at all. He has, so to speak, subtly opted out of the reasoning game. But all this is still awfully general and vague. Examples of such canons of rational practice and their violation, spelled out in some detail, are clearly what we need. That, consequently, is my next project. I shall, in fact, supply five.
PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS: ADJUDICATION OF A DISPUTE
(Rosenberg, Jay F. 1996. The Practice of Philosophy . Third Edition. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, pp. 89-91)
The most straightforward development of the critical examination of a view is the adjudicatory essay. Here the author acts as a third party to a philosophical dispute and attempts to arrive at a verdict that properly takes into account the strengths and weaknesses of the competing positions. Such an adjudicatory essay can usefully be viewed as having a six-part structure:
There is nothing sacred about this ordering of elements, however. You may sometimes find it more convenient to collect together first expository and then evaluative elements, proceeding in the sequence A-B-D-C-E-F, or to adopt an oscillatory "seesaw" strategy in the central portion of the essay, alternating between one position and the other until both have been explained and explored piecemeal. Let's consider each of these six elements of an adjudicatory essay in detail.
A well-turned adjudicatory essay, then, makes substantially greater demands on a student than does the critical examination of a single view. Like such a critical examination, an adjudicatory essay requires mastery of dialectical technique. But, in addition, it also asks a student to attempt constructively to conduct at least one side of the discussion from a philosophical standpoint within which he or she does not naturally feel at home, and that requires a higher standard of sympathetic exegesis and philosophical imagination than what is typically needed for a purely critical task. An adjudicatory essay, then, takes one step along the road toward lessening what often strikes students as the extreme negativity of the practice of philosophy, for it calls upon them to understand each of a pair of competing philosophical positions well enough to appreciate its strengths as well as its shortcomings. It calls upon them, if only for a moment, to BECOME advocates of some view other than their own. Once students begin in this way to grasp the range of possible philosophical advocacies, they have taken an essential step forward toward coherently developing their own philosophical world views and becoming articulate and effective proponents of them.
The following criteria are used. They are listed in order of importance.
SYMBOLS USED IN THE MARGINS OF PAPERS
AW : Awkward formulation
E : Explain (claim needs to be laid out more fully in order to be properly comprehensible/assessable)
F : Flow (abrupt change of topic; poorly connected sentences, etc.)
I : Inaccurate
M : Misleading
MP: Misses the point
NF: Does not follow R : Relevance (the material does not seem to belong to the present discussion)
REP : Repetitive
SS : Sentence structure
SUP : Support (a claim or thesis is presented without adequate supportive argument)
T : Thesis (thesis statement absent or unclear or too rudimentary)
U : Unclear
UD : Underdeveloped (a point you make is not sufficiently developed)
V : Vague
W : Wordy
WW : Wrong word
[...] : Omit bracketed material
1,2,3, : ..Numbers refer to the comments below.