Logic and stylistic
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What can a thinker use to think better?
Who is a thinker?
In your everyday life, in your personal life, in your working life, you have to think to make decision on yourself, and to give arguments to clarify situations for other people. A manager has to take decisions depending on his analysis of the environment and the place of his firm. Politics have to make decisions between several groups. As an individual, you might also be blurred in your decisions.
What is thinking?
Thinking is commenting. If you focus on a situation, you instantly have ideas, judgements on this situation. Those sentences, are fragments, unorganised. You always have some "knowledge" about things, words that are said about it.
So thinking is trying to build more discourse, more judgement about a situation, starting with what you already have.
The tools for (better) thinking
If thinking is mainly a job of building sentences, paragraphs, then, to improve it, we have to work on sentences. We need to find the techniques to unbuild and rebuild methodically from sentences to other sentences.
This is a real "coming and going" from the level of automatic sentence working to the meaning these sentences produce in relation to the situation.
stylistic for logic use
The limits of classical stylistic
A relatively automatic work on sentences comes from stylistic: trying to build sentences which are clearer, more beautiful, more striking. To achieve this, stylistic mainly rely on showing the relations between proposition in an explicit way: put a "and", a "but", a "because", "although"... It deals with cutting long sentences, avoiding adverbs, choosing an apropriate verb.
Stylistic is mainly used for the effect of the text "on the reader". What we search is an effect of the produced text on the existing text.
This is far from what we need as a technical background for the process of sentence building in thinking.
Multi-level sentence analysis
The effect on corpus
This study field can really start from an analysis of stage comic texts. You know that jokes are specially constructed to make a definite hiatus between two levels. The spectator hears the first part. He knows he will be surprised, but doesn't know how. The comic knows something about the structure he must achieve, and this structural knowledge guides him in finding the apropriate direction to write the correct ending to a joke.
There is nevertheless a very important field using this structural knowledge in text building: sciences. What a mathematician learns in his study, is how to find some very precise structures that he can later use as a guide in his own writing. I will give two example: the demonstration of second degre equations and the diagonalisation.
The main difficulty in sentence working is that we very quickly meet a wall which could be called a poetic wall: how to make words which are not there, coming into the discourse. In fact this is really in what a good poet / author succeeds when unexpected words (themes) are brought into the sentence opening wide a new range of possibilities for the appreciation of the situation and for the continuing of the discourse.
If there is something the logic has proved, this is the difficulty to materialise words from a structure.
Date:Jul/09/2006
