Planning a paper version of Reason and Imagination I have made some minor improvements and Bruce made a major suggestion, to have a new Introduction to spell out the six themes that I have used to introduce the guides and Misreading Popper.
This reminds me of some wise words from C Wright Mills on the treatment of themes and topics in writing a book. He talked about themes and topics (a distinction which he attributed to a great editor, Lambert Davis). A topic is a subject which might be treated in a chapter of the book. The order of chapters brings up the issue of themes.
“A theme is an idea, usually of some signal trend, some master conception, or a key distinction, like rationality and reason, for example. In working out the construction of a book, when you come to realise the two or three, or as the case may be, the six or seven themes, then you will know that you are on top of the job. ”
These themes will keep turning up in connection with the different topics, they may appear to be repetitious, they may at first be confused and poorly formulated.
“What you must do is sort them out and state them in a general way as clearly and briefly as you can…cross classify them with the full range of the topics…At some point all the themes should appear together, in relation to one another…maybe at the beginning of the book, certainly near the end…It is easier to write about this than to do it, for it is usully not so mechanical a matter as it may appear…Sometimes you may find that a book does not really have any themes. It is just a string of topics, surrounded of course by methodological introductions to methodolgy, and theoretical introductions to theory. These are indeed quite indispensable to the writing of books by men without ideas. And so is lack of intelligibility”.
So in addition to the introduction to the six themes (1) conjectural knowledge, (2) objective knowledge, (3) no obsession with terms, (4) the social turn (‘rules of the game’), (5) revival of metaphysics and (6) significance of evolution I will need to look at each paper to see if it will help to identify how one or more of the themes occur in that chapter.
Or maybe the Introduction can flag the way the themes are related to particular topics in each chapter.
