I'm looking to add to a grammar nodes for thought patterns like "Playing Devils Advocate" or "Thought Experiments" or "Listicles" or "FAQs".
That is, there are distinct modes of speech:
- Dialectic: aimed at arriving at truth or understanding
- Rhetorical: persuasion
- Imperative: directions or commands
- Phatic: social context only, such as greetings or farwells
- Performative: speech which of itself performs some action, as in "I do" in a wedding ceremony.
- Narrative: telling a story.
- Descriptive: relating a fact, scene, or event.
Et cetera.
See, e.g., Roman Jakobson: https://www.elcomblus.com/functions-of-language-by-roman-jak...
I'm not quite sure what you have in mind as "types of thoughts".
The field of psychology, and subfields of cognitive psychology and ideation might be closer to what you're looking for. (I have a heck of a time formulating useful queries / questions on psych topics myself, for some reason.)
See e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideation_(creative_process)
Aristotle, Rhetoric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric_(Aristotle)
Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutio_Oratoria
I guess there are more modern books on the subject :-) Those two are fascinating though. And "Playing Devils Advocate" reminds me of:
Eric Berne, Games People Play https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_People_Play_(book)
Also I've read books about informal logic that cover different domains of writing, speech, etc.
Bringing it back to Aristotle times makes sense. Though also frighteningly expands the scope of my search :)
Other topics coming to mind: Metacognition Category theory Set theory * if you don't find something or start your own map its definitely something i'd contribute to !
This is one thing I was thinking about, eventually.
For now I'm just thinking about sort of a collection of writing prompts to help me think more clearly.
> its definitely something i'd contribute to
Cool! The eventual destination would probably be this folder: https://github.com/publicdomaincompany/scroll/tree/main/gram...
For example, right now there is a "question" node. Often when writing I find it a good prompt to just start writing a bunch of questions on the journey to fleshing out an issue.