Don't just summarize: evaluate.

This is the concluding paragraph of a paper:


Ivan's inclination of doubt leads him to see the bad side of everything in the world. Dostoyevsky shows his opinion on human doubt through the climax of the novel, the murder of Fyodor. The murder of Fyodor is justified by Ivan's theory, according to Smerdyakov, and Ivan is lost in madness. Through the novel we are presented with logical reasoning justifying the existence of God or the possibility of an evil one. But these arguments are responsible for leading Ivan to hysteria and to the murder of his father. Dostoyevsky portrays that faith is superior to doubt and that no matter how intellectual a human is, faith in God, miraculous and unexplainable as it is, is always better than religious doubt and atheism.

What's the problem? The paragraph summarizes accurately what happens to Ivan, and certainly, Dostoyevksy wants us to see Ivan's descent into insanity as the consequence of his intellectual stance. What is missing is any real evaluation of what Dostoyevsky is saying - does Dostoyevsky present us with any reason to accept the moral of his story?

It is easy to tell a story that has some kind of a moral.

Once upon a time, there was a little boy called Ian. Ian's brother said to him "Ian, I have tickets to watch Manchester United play. Do you want to come watch the match with me?" But Ian said "I don't like Manchester United, I'm going to watch Manchester City," and he went to watch the game on his own. He didn't want to be with his brother. Because he was on his own, he had nobody to look after him, and someone got in a fight with him and Ian was killed. All because he didn't want to be united to his brother and to Manchester United.

Does that persuade you that supporting Manchester United is morally superior to supporting Manchester City? Of course not. I could have put in the names of any two teams and told the same basic story. Since I'm telling the story, I have that degree of control. An atheist could tell a story in which a Christian goes insane, and so on.

Dostoyevsky needs to convince us that there is a plausible psychological connection between Ivan's philosophy and his later insantiy. Otherwise, readers will come away thinking he has cheated, simply setting up a plot to vindicate his own beliefs. A high school student who reads the novel all the way through, and is able to figure out what lesson the author is trying to convey is doing fairly well. But at university level - particularly in a class on philosophy in literature - you need to do more than this. You cannot give Dostoyevsky such an easy ride: you should raise some challenges to his ideas. If, after raising some challenges, you still find his ideas convincing, then good for Dostoyevsky. But you need to show awareness of the gap that separates The Brothers Karamazov from my simple moral tale about Manchester United.


Here's an example of evaluation:

  So language can certainly affect behavior and can mislead humans into thinking something that is not true, like in Orwell's 1984 and even in politics today. Despite this, human thought will always be independent of the phenomenon of language. The human brain and its power to create thought cannot be undermined by any spoken language. So, hopefully, Orwell's fear that: "If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?" (Orwell 1) will not be a threat.

In this paper, the student identified a philosophical theme in the novel: thought depends on language, so by limiting someone's language, one can limit their thoughts. That was something we discussed in class. The student then developed an argument against this, based on the idea of a language of thought. According to some philosophers (e.g. Jerry Fodor), thought involves processing information using an internal language - mentalese - which is independent of and prior to any spoken language. If this is correct, one cannot control someone's thought by controlling their language, because we always have mentalese available. The student found the arguments in favor of mentalese compelling, and thus one aspect of Orwell's worst nightmare was rejected. That is how evaluation works. Evaluation need not be negative: you could reject the language-of-thought view, and thus end up supporting Orwell. The important point is to find some alternative position, some objection to place against the author you are studying.



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