Against statement

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Statement: There is a link between the critic of american stress on the theory of statement in education writing and the way european use distortion in philosophical and social theory.

It is common for european to be surpised by the way students are taught in america to write clear essays, by constructing "simple" statements. It is very important as a clarification, or a summary "state of the art" essay, but it cannot be understood for a european thinker as thinking because it always remains on the same level: this is mono level discoursing.

What the thinkers in europe do by using distortion, very well depicted by Wittgenstein, is precisely creating the effect in discourse to open the mono-level to a multi-level.

The difficulty is that no european has ever produced a model showing how this bouncing to multilevel sentences had anything good. Is wisdom the goal ?

Critic of distortion

Source:Meaning distortion

Many bad philosophical arguments gain their plausibility through distortion. For example, the following argument is not uncommon : "Everyone is selfish, including people who help others. This is because everyone does what he or she wants to do.." In this argument it is implicitly assumed that a selfish person is to be defined as someone who does what he or she wants. But this is a distortion of the ordinary meaning of "a selfish person", which is more like "someone who wants to do only those things that are to his or her advantage." A person might want to do something in order to help other people, not because it is to his or her advantage. Here is a real example of bad philosophy that relies on distorting meaning:

“Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.”

• Roland Barthes (1915-80), famous French social and literary critic. Quote take from his inauguration lecture of the Chair of Literary Semiology, Collège de France, delivered on January 7, 1977, and published as Leçon (Paris: Editions du Seuil) in 1978.

Here "legislation" is presumably used to describe language because language is governed by rules. But this is not what is ordinarily meant by "legislation". Furthermore, the fact that an activity is governed by rules does not make it oppressive. For example, it would be silly to say that football is an oppressive activity because there are rules in the game. Without rules there cannot be games! Incidentally, we might observe that to label language as legislation is presumably an act of classification, since he is saying that language belongs to the class of legislations rather than the class of things that are not legislations. Likewise, to say that classifications are oppressive is also an act of classification. To be consistent then, Barthes should conclude that his very assertion is also an oppressive act! If this is supposed to be true one can only conclude that Barthes is simply distorting the meaning of "oppression".

Theory of statement

source: Thesis statement

A thesis statement in an essay is a sentence that explicitly identifies the purpose of the paper or previews its main ideas.

1. A thesis statement is an assertion, not a statement of fact or an observation.
   • Fact or observation: People use many lawn chemicals.
   • Thesis: People are poisoning the environment with chemicals merely to keep their lawns clean.
2. A thesis takes a stand rather than announcing a subject.
   • Announcement: The thesis of this paper is the difficulty of solving our environmental problems.
   • Thesis: Solving our environmental problems is more difficult than many environmentalists believe.
3. A thesis is the main idea, not the title. It must be a complete sentence that explains in some detail what you expect to write about.
   • Title: Social Security and Old Age.
   • Thesis: Continuing changes in the Social Security System makes it almost impossible to plan intelligently for one's retirement.
4. A thesis statement is narrow, rather than broad. If the thesis statement is sufficiently narrow, it can be fully supported.
   • Broad: The American steel industry has many problems.
   • Narrow: The primary problem if the American steel industry is the lack of funds to renovate outdated plants and equipment.
5. A thesis statement is specific rather than vague or general.
   • Vague: Hemingway's war stories are very good.
   • Specific: Hemingway's stories helped create a new prose style by employing extensive dialogue, shorter sentences, and strong Anglo-Saxon words.

Date: Jul/09/2006