Participants, processes and circumstances – 189
fact, evidence, data, idea, concept, conjecture, thesis, hypothesis,
theory, opinion, belief, judgement, observations, findings, result,
explanation, reason, argument, conclusion.
To be able to combine terms such as these into grammatical sentences
is a skill that does not always come easily, and often takes time.
(For this reason you should pay careful attention to how they are
used in the books you read.) But there is something you must try to
avoid from the very start – notwithstanding the claim by many poststructuralist theorists that there is ‘nothing beyond the text’. This is
the confusing of these meta-linguistic terms with the object or objects
of your enquiry which do exist or may exist in the ‘real world’:
This fact has a marked effect on ground temperatures.
Facts belong to the world of enquiry and thought. Such things do not
normally (except perhaps in the rarefied world of quantum physics)
affect natural phenomena like ground temperatures. This should be
quite easy to see. Here is a somewhat more difficult one:
Pluralists argue that power is widely dispersed throughout society. This
is very idealistic. In the real world this argument contains many
loopholes due to the complicated structure of the economic and political
system. However, there are situations in today’s political climate where
this line of reasoning does exist.
The argument doesn’t contain loopholes in the real world, but in the
‘meta-world’ of arguments. Similarly, the pluralist line of reasoning
doesn’t so much ‘exist’ in today’s political climate; rather, it can be
applied to account for that climate. What we must do is to reconstruct
these sentences in such a way that the relationship between arguments
and the ‘real world’ of politics is made more secure. If you get into
the kind of situation that has troubled the writer of this passage, you
fact, evidence, data, idea, concept, conjecture, thesis, hypothesis,
theory, opinion, belief, judgement, observations, findings, result,
explanation, reason, argument, conclusion.
To be able to combine terms such as these into grammatical sentences
is a skill that does not always come easily, and often takes time.
(For this reason you should pay careful attention to how they are
used in the books you read.) But there is something you must try to
avoid from the very start – notwithstanding the claim by many poststructuralist theorists that there is ‘nothing beyond the text’. This is
the confusing of these meta-linguistic terms with the object or objects
of your enquiry which do exist or may exist in the ‘real world’:
This fact has a marked effect on ground temperatures.
Facts belong to the world of enquiry and thought. Such things do not
normally (except perhaps in the rarefied world of quantum physics)
affect natural phenomena like ground temperatures. This should be
quite easy to see. Here is a somewhat more difficult one:
Pluralists argue that power is widely dispersed throughout society. This
is very idealistic. In the real world this argument contains many
loopholes due to the complicated structure of the economic and political
system. However, there are situations in today’s political climate where
this line of reasoning does exist.
The argument doesn’t contain loopholes in the real world, but in the
‘meta-world’ of arguments. Similarly, the pluralist line of reasoning
doesn’t so much ‘exist’ in today’s political climate; rather, it can be
applied to account for that climate. What we must do is to reconstruct
these sentences in such a way that the relationship between arguments
and the ‘real world’ of politics is made more secure. If you get into
the kind of situation that has troubled the writer of this passage, you