Yeah. It’s pretty extreme. It’s usually two days in a row too. I’m going to try something different next week.
From George Reisman’s MARXISM/SOCIALISM, A SOCIOPATHIC PHILOSOPHY CONCEIVED IN GROSS ERROR AND IGNORANCE, CULMINATING IN ECONOMIC CHAOS, ENSLAVEMENT, TERROR, AND MASS MURDER: A CONTRIBUTION TO ITS DEATH (p. 22)
In all cases, products are products of human labor. The reason that they are products of human labor is that it is human labor that supplies the guiding and directing intelligence in production. A manual worker directs his hands to dig a hole; he directs the shovel in digging a larger hole; he directs the steam shovel in digging a still larger hole. In all cases, the hole is the product of his guiding and directing intelligence.
[1] In all cases, products are products of human labor.
[2] The reason that they are products of human labor is that it is human labor that supplies the guiding and directing intelligence in production.
[3] A manual worker directs his hands to dig a hole;
[4] he directs the shovel in digging a larger hole;
[5] he directs the steam shovel in digging a still larger hole.
[6] In all cases, the hole is the product of his guiding and directing intelligence.
1 is the root. It’s a claim about the relationship between products and labour.
2 gives the reason for the claimed relationship between products and labour in 1.
3, 4, 5 are each examples of a worker directing tools to produce things. They are separated by semi-colons. I think they will all be siblings of the same node. but of which node? 1 or 2?
So would a paragraph of just 1, 3, 4, 5 make sense? I think so. But I think the point of these examples is to show that it is the mind of a worker that directs the tools to produce products. That’s mentioned in 2.
Okay i’m stuck. I can’t decide whether 3, 4, 5, 6 is a child of 1 or 2. It seems like it could be a child of both, but for whatever reason, i’m not fully convinced that it should be a child of 1 and seen as a modifying the group 1, 2. It just seems more like a child of 2 that 1. Like parts of 3, 4, 5 become more relevant in the light of 2.
I’m doing another paragraph tree and I’ve split a complex sentence into two clauses that were joined by ‘but’ which is a coordinating conjunction. Coordinate means roughly equal, so we can expect that in general they are going to be siblings. But the previous few trees I’ve done that have used ‘but’ at the beginning of sentences have been children of what they contrast with. I think I’m a bit confused on this point i.e, how the conjunction can help me decide whether it’s a sibling or a child.
From the same Reisman book as above:
The need to use armed force to establish socialism has created a major split in the socialist movement. The split is between the communists, who are the true socialists, and the social democrats. The social democrats continue to talk about establishing socialism and continue to describe themselves as socialists, but they have managed to retain enough moral sense to want to avoid mass bloodshed. As a result, they effectively abandon socialism as their actual goal when they have the opportunity to achieve it.
[1] The need to use armed force to establish socialism has created a major split in the socialist movement.
[2] The split is between the communists, who are the true socialists, and the social democrats.
[3] The social democrats continue to talk about establishing socialism and continue to describe themselves as socialists,
[4] but they have managed to retain enough moral sense to want to avoid mass bloodshed.
[5] As a result, they effectively abandon socialism as their actual goal when they have the opportunity to achieve it.
1 is the root. The topic is the need to use force for socialism creating a split in the movement.
2 is a child of 1, that’s fine. It’s about who the split is between, the factions. It’s a detail.
3 mentions social democrats which is first mentioned in 2, but I don’t think 3 depends on 2. I think the paragraph would still make sense without 2.
4 is joined to 3 in a complex sentence with ‘but’. It is a coordinating conjunction. I’m a bit confused about whether this should be a child or a sibling of 3.
5 says the social democrats effectively abandon socialism when they have the opportunity to actually achieve it as a result of something said previously. So as a result of what? I think the plausible candidates seem to be 1, 3, and 4. 4 seems the most plausible: they abandon socialism as a result of having retained the sense to avoid bloodshed. 3 doesn’t really give us anything that could result in the social democrats abandoning socialism. 1 is kind of plausible, in that the split about the need to use force, has resulted in one side effectively abandoning socialism when they have the opportunity. Hmm. Not sure. Maybe then 5 should be a child of 1, as a modifier for 1, 4. I don’t know why, but I don’t feel so great about that here too. I think 5 as a child of 4 seems intuitively better.
I felt hesitant to use this paragraph because I’m worried it’ll seem like everything I read is just about socialism and capitalism and that I’m obsessed with politics. I’m going to go ahead and use it anyway, because I just need to get some practise in making paragraph trees and I don’t think I should worry so much about what other people might think and anyway I shouldn’t act to try and hide things.
Putting 3-6 as children of 2 makes sense to me because 2 brings up “guiding and directing intelligence” (which they’re about) while 1 doesn’t.
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I think “but” can intuitively feel partially like its subordinating. (And I’m not saying the intuition is wrong. I’m not sure.)
If it makes sense to you for “and” and “because” (and the majority of other conjunctions) then you’re probably doing OK.
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I don’t think the paragraph works right without 2. I think 3 should be a child of 2 because it’s giving further details about information in 2, and isn’t directly about what 1 said.
In general conceptual terms, what does a child relationship mean and what does a sibling relationship mean?
Yeah I think that’s what he meant. The grammar alone didn’t make that clear but the content makes sense this way.
Yeah okay. My intuitions agree too. What I was thinking was if maybe someone had some background knowledge about the various socialist groups then it wouldn’t be strange to then speak about the social democrats without introducing them, and so 2 wouldn’t be strictly necessary. Maybe I tried too hard to make 3 fit with 1 when I was testing whether it could work without 2 and so confused myself.
I think:
sibling = common parent, equal, coordinate
child = subordinate, dependent
Cool, thought so.
One of the main ways to think about siblings is as parts of a whole. Siblings don’t have to be equal. You can divide a whole into 5 parts of different sizes.
If you have a node N and you’re deciding whether something should be a child or grandchild, then one of the main things to consider is if it’s a part of N or a sub-part of N (a part of one of N’s children).
Another important thing is to consider is parallelism. Siblings should generally be the same kind of thing. Don’t make a chapter and a scene siblings. That’s (usually) an inappropriate way to divide a book into parts.
Another thing to consider is completeness. Trees don’t have to be complete. You can just leave stuff out and only include nodes for some of the parts of something. But it’s still useful to consider what would be a complete set of parts. If something wouldn’t be included in the complete set of parts that make up the whole N (and it’s also not an optional node providing an unnecessary detail of N) then it probably shouldn’t be a child of N.
See if that helps with analyzing:
Okay, from the perspective of parts/whole, 3 and 4 are both parts of the whole complex sentence {3, 4}.
Are 3 and 4 the same kind of thing? They are both clauses, joined by a conjunction. Conjunctions join things of the same type. That’s also the same with subordinating conjunctions though.
I still feel a bit confused. It seems like 3 and are siblings but I don’t know why I think that, because it doesn’t really feel like I understand why this is the answer. I feel like the tools I have are giving me multiple answers.
I think a big part of my confusion is that others trees that had sentences that started with ‘but’ were children of what they contrasted with, and you agreed with some of those decisions e.g:
But then there is the idea of coordinating conjunctions meaning approximately equal/siblings.
I think the main thing that makes me think that 3 and 4 are siblings is that they are parts of the same original complex sentence.
Some of my recent replies have taken me quite a lot of time to make by the way. I mean time spent sitting and thinking and writing, not the space between replies. For example my most recent response took me over an hour to prepare, maybe up to two hours. I thought I’d share in case that seems like a sign to you that something is going wrong. I’d really like it if I could respond quicker and I don’t know why it’s taking longer. Sometimes I like write a few thoughts and shuffle them around until something starts to make sense to me, but that can take some time. In the end it seems kind of simple what I’ve written and I wish it could’ve been done more efficiently. This was quicker and took about 5-10 minutes.
Whether the time spent is good depends on how its spent. If you’re analyzing and learning, it’s good. If you’re stuck and going in circles, it’s bad.
Reviewing that, I think I got it wrong. Here’s a way to look at it:
Delete the conjunction. Then consider where the node works better. In this case, I think 3 and 4 work together well, as a sibling group, to explain 2.
I’d guess the main issue here is that paragraph trees are less of an exact science than sentence grammar trees.
Grammar has better defined and studied rules. There are grammar classes, grammar books, grammar experts, sentence diagramming, and some types of grammar tree diagrams in use outside CF. You can’t really google the right answers for paragraph trees like you can for grammar. Inside CF, I and others have done more grammar trees than paragraph trees.
Writing classes that teach people how to write a paragraph or chapter are not as specific as grammar classes that teach people how to form different tenses and where to put commas. Writing classes involve more creativity, freedom, the writer learning to use their own judgment, etc. I’d also guess that most writing classes are more focused on fiction writing than non-fiction.
In school, I remember learning something about topic sentences and learning the 5 paragraph essay (intro paragraph, 3 paragraphs making one argument each, conclusion paragraph). That’s not very specific guidance about structuring sentences within a paragraph. And that essay structure is just one option out of many options – deviating from it isn’t actually wrong.
If you’re seeking answers with the same level of detail and same clarity about one single right answer as you have with grammar trees, you’re going to be disappointed. This area is less developed (not all the right answers/concepts have been found or practiced) and also inherently less specific/restricting. There’s more flexibility for how to organize a paragraph than a sentence. It’s less flowcharted in my mind and the subject matter is less suitable to being flowcharted.
Why make paragraph trees if they aren’t a standard or popular tool like grammar rules? Because something along those lines is important to philosophy discussions and text analysis (which is also the main reason for working on grammar).
In discussions, debates or solo analysis, I’ve found people commonly make mistakes. I’ve found some patterns in the mistakes, including, for sentences:
- people make errors about which words or groups modify which other words or groups
- people make errors about which elements are grouped by a conjunction
- people make errors about the meanings of words (people tend to learn word meanings by observing usage then guessing the pattern, but that leads to errors in philosophy discussions that could be prevented or corrected if they’d use the dictionary more)
- people come up with interpretations of sentences which ignore one or more words instead of explaining why that word is present
- people fail to notice that text is ambiguous. sometimes they still don’t get it after it’s pointed out
- people write sentences that don’t say what they mean due to all of these issues above
Grammar trees help with these issues. The first two in particular are directly related to tree structure. Trees also make you put all the words somewhere, get people using dictionaries more often, and let you show two different trees which a sentence is ambiguous between.
Similar errors are common for paragraphs, including misunderstandings about how the elements of the paragraph group together, what parts work together to form a whole, what modifies what, etc.
Similar errors are common in back-and-forth debates, including misunderstandings or ambiguity about what a statement is a reply to (what the parent node is). I often have to ask people, after they make an argument, what specifically the argument is a response to. And when I say an argument, I’ve often seen people interpret it as having a different parent than I intended (one way this happens is they treat it as replying to the original topic – the root node – instead of to a recent node that it’s specifically replying to. Quotes can be used to show the parent of each argument, but even with quotes errors are common (people will e.g. interpret my argument as replying to something other than what I quoted immediately before it, or will write replies after a quote that aren’t replies to anything in the quote).
The primary purpose of working on tree diagrams of various kinds, including paragraph trees, is to better enable philosophical activities. The goal is to get good enough answers that philosophy goes smoothly instead of being blocked by errors in sub-issues like how to read and write sentences or paragraphs. (And to practice enough for this stuff to be reasonably fast and intuitive, so that you usually get it right even without writing out a tree. Using a tree for every sentence and every paragraph in a discussion would slow it down too much. It works better if a lot of parts are easy for you and then you make trees just for hard parts.)
Does that make sense and help?
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If you think that, then 3 and 4 of the current tree being siblings makes more sense to me. I think the fact that you agreed that that past tree had 4 as a child of 3 meant I had a criticism of this current tree that I couldn’t answer. I think that’s why my tools felt seemed to be giving multiple answer cos some of those tools were your past judgments of my trees.
I don’t think I agree that on this occasion this was the main issue, but I do think this is something I’m finding hard about this topic in general. I did somewhat expect paragraph trees to be like this because I am aware that the available standards for paragraph trees aren’t up to the standards available for grammar trees.
Yes it does. I liked the explanation of why this analysis is important for philosophy too. I’m looking forward to understanding paragraphs better.
My revised tree:
I am happy with this.
Should I continue with these smaller paragraph trees? I’m guessing I should, because they aren’t quite at the point where I can do them quiet efficiently.
I have some questions about revision/practise. Are you expecting that I am doing more revision and more practise than you can see me doing? Currently what I have been doing is share basically everything that I am doing. So the record of my practise is all here. Should I be doing more? I feel as if I should be practising and revising more, but I don’t know if it’ll be more efficient to just go back as problems come up. I’m guessing you’d recommend doing as much revision and practise as I can and want.
yes
there’s flexibility here. there isn’t one right answer. you need to use your own intuition some and figure out what works for you. if you can do more practice that’s fun and seems effective, then do that. if it’s not working so well, then you might need to solve some problem or it might be time to move on.
How much of my CF YouTube grammar videos have you watched?
I have seen a lot I think. I checked on the Critical Fallibilism Philosophy channel, and I have watched most of the videos in this playlist here. But, there are more that I haven’t seen than I realised.
OK I’d recommend going through those videos and pausing to do the problems yourself.
First sentence from Learn to analyze writing (with grammar trees)
Note that I would like for death to be solved very much
I think this is an imperative sentence. I haven’t done any practise with these. It starts with a verb.
First I’ll see if I can first do a tree for a simple imperative sentence:
Take the dog for a walk
So we have a verb, what’s the subject? I think it’s implied. It’s being spoken to someone so I think the subject is ‘you’ like:
[You] take the dog for a walk
So here is a tree for that:
Okay so I think the subject is ‘you’ for the original sentence too. Maybe that’s the case for all imperative sentences. That seems plausible but I haven’t thought about it ~at all.
[you] Note that I would like for death to be solved very much
Okay here is my tree.
And here is your tree from the video:
Cool I was right about the implied ‘you’.
For ‘that’, it seems like we have the the same answer, but in my tree I had ‘that’ as a single node. I coloured it red to indicate its function as a kind of conjunction and I have the clause it relates as a child of it. You have it in two places. I prefer mine in that it’s simplified. Do you think mine is okay or have I made an error? Am I wrong that yours and mine are different ways to diagram the same thing?
I had ‘death’ as the parent of ‘to be’. You have it as the subject of ‘to be’. I didn’t even consider that it might be the subject of ‘to be’. I haven’t run into subjects of verbals much before, maybe only once before.
I had ‘very much’ modifying the correct thing ‘like’. I used the technique that we discussed on a previous problem of putting it before and after different parts of the sentence (in my mind) to test whether the meaning changes. It works before and after ‘like’ and at the end of the clause that ‘like’ is the root of. You did something similar in the video too where you tried it out as a child of different nodes.
Sentence 2 from Learn to analyze writing (with grammar trees):
Is the fact of living during a time period where certain important problems have not been solved, where certain knowledge has not yet been created, best conceived of as a “disaster”?
Elliot says this one is hard.
First thing I notice is that it’s a question. I haven’t practised doing interrogatives. From what I know they can be turned into normal sentences like imperatives. I’ll try a simple one and see what I can figure out.
Is swimming hard?
The answer version of that is:
swimming is hard
Okay so looks like in an interrogative sentence the verb is first, and the subject immediately follows the verb. Other examples I can think of are like this too. So the form is like: verb, subject, object, question mark.
okay. Most of this sentence is a subtree modifying ‘fact’. I’ll do that after I do the main part of the sentence.
original interogative:
Is the fact best conceived of as a “disaster”?
normal version:
the fact is best conceived of as a disaster
At first glance, I’m not sure how this ‘of’ is working. It is usually a preposition, but it is followed by another preposition ‘as’.
I looked up double prepositions but it didn’t seem promising and it violates what I understand about prepositions in that a preposition takes a noun as an input.
After more research, I’ve discovered the concept of a phrasal verb. From wikipedia:
In the traditional grammar of Modern English, a phrasal verb typically constitutes a single semantic unit consisting of a verb followed by a particle (e.g., turn down, run into, or sit up), sometimes collocated with a preposition (e.g., get together with, run out of, or feed off of).
Particle verbs (phrasal verbs in the strict sense) are two-word verbs composed of a simple verb and a particle extension that modifies its meaning. The particle is thus integrally collocated with the verb. In older grammars, the particle was usually analyzed as an adverb.78
a. Kids grow up so fast these days
b. You shouldn’t give in so easily.
In these examples, the common verbs grow and give are complemented by the particles up and in. The resulting two-word verbs are single semantic units, so grow up and give in are listed as discrete entries in modern dictionaries.
This concept applied to the sentence I think means that ‘conceived of’ is a phrasal verb, with ‘conceived’ as the verb, and ‘of’ as the particle. ‘of’ is functioning as a modifier of ‘conceived’. This makes sense and doesn’t violate what I know about prepositions.
So I think the tree of the main clause of the sentence is:
I think the clause introduced by the second ‘where’ is a restatement of the first ‘where’ clause. A clue is that ‘certain’ is repeated. Another is that, from what I understand, solving problems fundamentally involves creating knowledge. So I think that it makes sense as a restatement. I have made the restatement modify the root node of the subtree of what it restates.
I haven’t watched the rest of the video to see Elliot’s answer yet. I’m posting this for now.
don’t forget about giving some consideration to how restrictive and non-restrictive work for adverbs, then after that returning to thinking about them for modifier clauses.
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