Literary Deductions

The fallacy of "deduction" was brought home for me in a very real way, as I sat down to write a paper for one of my classes. The class is one I would place in the realm of humanities, although I suppose one could make an argument that it serves a more scientific purpose.

As usual, I began with a thesis. The thesis is often the toughest part of the essay, tough to define, to measure, to conceive. And yet once I have it, the muse has struck. I have my work lain out before me like a plate of dessert -- fresh, fulfilling, sensually palpable.

Then the backbreaking work begins. I have a few quotes in my head, to start, some of which are probably the root of the thesis itself. I commandeer slivers of others' thoughts and compressions of the primary source(s). I add them to the batter. In the end, I have a fresh, sweet batch of essay, with a few source-derived chips speckled here and there amid the great, fragrant composite, swirled, marbled, pinwheeled theory which is the brunt of the opus.

True, the work is "substantiated" by evidence -- the evidence I meticulously selected as if I were shopping for fruit in a market or harvesting blueberries. (I truly hope I'm not an outlier here!)

Now, is this process not deduction at its most appalling? What if I had taken the text itself, read it, categorized it, carefully measured every aspect of it, and from these chunks, _maybe_ tried to make some orderly sense of it? Preposterous, non? As preposterous as proving anthropology could manifest itself in poetry? Or that culture is an empirical science? -- both of which are quite true, according to some folks.

La grande théorie really is inescapable. I shall never view a thesis in quite the same way!