A curious reply has become more common lately, it seems, in congressional hearings broadcast to the public. A question is posed by a committee member, and a witness replies, that is a hypothetical and I can’t answer that, or that is a hypothetical, and it is not worth discussing because it will never happen. What is a hypothetical and are such replies defensible?

A hypothetical is a conditional statement in which we connect a condition to a result: if it is sunny tomorrow, I will go to the beach. Every hypothetical contains an if-clause (called the antecedent), which names the assumption on which something else depends, together with a then-clause (called the consequent), which states the result or outcome arising from that condition. The conjunction then is often, as in our example, unstated for stylistic reasons. The two clauses may appear in reverse order for rhetorical purposes (I will go to the beach tomorrow if it is sunny), but whether the condition appears first or last, a hypothetical gives us a way to step off the familiar empirical stage of determined facts and enter a theoretical world where we can think and plan freely, without the commitments and inevitabilities that are part of the hard and fast world of events and their consequences.

We would have little reasoning and even less science without hypothetical thinking, and so to reply that one will not answer a hypothetical because it is a hypothetical, implying thereby that such a statement is no more than devious suggestion, is mistaken in every way. It is logically possible to attribute that motive to the questioner, but it has nothing to do with posing a hypothetical as such. Anytime we plan something, we are involved in hypothetical reasoning, though we may not realize that because we often do not explicitly state the condition (we might say, for example, I could go tomorrow and leave it at that, without adding the condition if it doesn’t rain). And the second reply, that a given hypothetical is unworthy of a response because the condition set down will never happen, is again indefensible on logical grounds, but that response requires a closer look at the structure of the hypothetical sentence to understand why.

To make an assertion, whether affirmative or negative, we put down a subject and join it to a predicate. If I say that it is sunny or I will go to the beach, you are in a position to agree or disagree with the truth of either of those statements which I am declaring as fact, either present or in all likelihood to be present. That is what I, as speaker, believe to be true, and what you, as interlocutor, are in a position to agree or disagree with; we both believe in truth, and we both believe in the possibility of language to symbolize it. Such statements are called categorical propositions, and they are the means by which we define our experience and build up a rational understanding of it. Note that these statements do not include the if and then because they are being asserted independently as facts in their own right.

When, however, we place a categorical proposition within the if-then frame of a hypothetical (properly called a hypothetical, or conditional, proposition), we are not, strangely enough, asserting the independent truth of either the antecedent or the consequent. We are only asserting a connection between two assertions, each of which we are considering not as factual, but as theoretical. If it is sunny tomorrow does not mean that it will in fact be sunny tomorrow, and to say that I will go to the beach does not mean that in fact you will see me sitting under an umbrella on the sand. The only assertion that a hypothetical proposition like this makes is the almost mechanically inevitable association between a certain condition and a certain result—not the existing truth of either. We can speak of the truth or falsity of a hypothetical, but what is true or false is the connection between the two assertions—when this happens, that will happen—not the assertions taken each by itself.

So to reply that the condition of a certain hypothetical will never happen is to miss the entire point of what a hypothetical statement is meant to make possible: to think things out imaginatively, that is, in our minds, where it is much easier to change circumstances than in the brick-and-mortar world. But we can be patient with hypotheticals only on two presumptions: that no one of us has the entire truth about anything at all, and that all of us want first and above all the truth. Evasion is not truth-seeking, and that is all we’re doing when we refuse to climb into the imagination and see what will or could result when or should something else happen. Everything is possible in the imaginative, theoretical world, but we shouldn’t want everything that could possibly happen, to happen. Thus the importance of the hypothetical.

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How a sentence unfolds determines what effect it will have on its readers, and a good measure of the art of writing involves shaping and placing the three basic elements of word, phrase, and clause to compose a suitable order. The questions who is my audience? and why am I writing this? remain the two fundamental considerations we must be able to answer before and after composing our first draft in order to find that suitable order—before, in order to set off in the right direction and after, in order to ensure we are staying on the path to our conceptual destination.

We can use the two traditional terms loose and periodic to determine the shape of a sentence we have composed and decide whether or not to revise it. A loose sentence places the independent clause first, and lets the associated detail follow in its train. Someone under formal questioning, for example, may reply: I cannot answer that question because of ongoing litigation and advice of counsel. Here, the independent clause opens the statement, and a prepositional phrase follows (the two words because of constitute one compound preposition). A sentence of this shape conveys a straightforward frame of mind, one prepared to state boldly, without caution or qualification, the central assertion to be made: I cannot answer that question.

A periodic sentence, however, begins with the qualifying information, and the statement becomes more intricate because it delays the primary assertion by presenting the reasons first. The periodic arrangement of our example sentence would then produce this pattern: Because of ongoing litigation and advice of counsel, I cannot answer that question. The two structural units of the sentence are simply reversed; the prepositional phrase now initiates the statement, but the two objects of the preposition (ongoing litigation and advice of counsel), each of which names a cause for not answering the question posed, act as clarions announcing the impending arrival of the conclusion to be made by the independent clause. Shaped this way, a sentence appeals more to reason than to the confidence (or perhaps overconfidence) of the speaker.

A further technical term, abridgment, can be helpful in reshaping a sentence in revision. To abridge something is to shorten it by omission, and in grammar we refer to abridged clauses, meaning that a word or phrase of some sort, complete in its own right, is taking the place of a clause, which by definition would otherwise present a subject together with its finite verb. We could, therefore, regard the prepositional phrase in our example sentence, whether in the loose or periodic version, as an abridgment of these two clauses: because litigation is ongoing and because counsel so advises. The compaction of the original prepositional phrase has now been expanded into a full subject-predicate articulation, striking the notes of cause and reason even more dominantly: Because litigation is ongoing and because counsel so advises, I cannot answer that question. In most circumstances, this design would overshoot the mark and risk impertinence, but we have it in our kit nonetheless should the need for bold assertion bordering on defiance be necessary.

The scholar and historian Richard Weaver wrote an excellent textbook on writing entitled A Rhetoric and Composition Handbook (1974), and he says the following on the topic we have been discussing here:

One does not make either loose or periodic sentences an object of writing. Ordinary attention to the requirements of a subject will tell one when a thought is best presented in a loose structure and when in a periodic or suspended one. We discover, as a matter of practice, that the loose sentence tends to be more common and that the periodic sentence is better for those less frequent occasions when we wish to arouse the reader’s attention by suspension of meaning. When we are revising manuscript for the purpose of improving the general effectiveness of our style, however, it can be quite helpful to identify the two types. If the writing strikes us as dull and inert, it may be that we have adhered monotonously to the loose sentence…. But if, on the other hand, the writing appears artificial and overdone in its striving for effect, we may have fallen into a habit of writing periodic sentences.

Weaver’s first sentence is important to understand. He means that we should not sit down with the deliberate intention to write a loose construction here and a periodic one there. That would only produce what is aptly called a studied style, something thought out, self-conscious, and therefore awkward and unnatural. It is instead, he says, only with attention to the subject—and to the likely audience and intended purpose—that our written voice will fall into those forms most befitting its meaning. Never can we do this always at the first draft, and so these technicals of the art of composition are there for us to apply knowingly in revision, when on rereading we have recognized that a sentence or a passage could present itself more precisely and appealingly. And that, as Weaver says, is a matter of practice, not strategy.

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Life is movement. It acts, it reacts, it changes, and what appears to remain the same is just that—an appearance. That is why art, which tries to imitate life, must replicate life’s movement in its constructions in order to affect, to move, its viewers or listeners or readers. How to do this is a matter of understanding the techniques of the particular art one is executing.

In the art of writing, those techniques include understanding the classes of words, called the parts of speech, and then knowing how to combine those parts in such a way that action, or at least some approximation toward it, appears to be embedded in the structure of the sentences we compose. Nouns and verbs, of course, are the two principal parts of speech, but there is more going on with each of those classes than what we probably remember from our school days: nouns name things and verbs show action. Yes, but there’s more.

Nouns name things, but in doing so, they’re often freezing an action. If I speak of the removal of an old tree in my backyard, the noun removal is a way to refer from some theoretical distance to the direct action of removing an old tree. Removal is termed an abstract noun, because we don’t apprehend its meaning with one of our five senses, but conceptually with our mind. Removing, on the other hand, is termed a gerund; it refers to the action associated with the verb to remove, and so choosing the gerund in revising a sentence is one way to write toward action. If in my first draft I wrote the removal of that old tree is scheduled for next week, my first revision might be removing that old tree is scheduled for next week.

There’s something clunky in that revision, though, and it has to do with the verb phrase is scheduled. Verbs have voice, and English verbs have two voices, active and passive. If the subject of a verb is an agent, the doer of the action, then the verb is said to be in the active voice. And since we’re trying to write toward action, we should more often than not prefer the active voice. In the sentence removing that old tree is scheduled for next week, the gerund removing is the grammatical subject of the verb is scheduled, and the agent remains unstated: who exactly is going to schedule the removing? Recognizing that, we can now take our original sentence one more step toward depicting action by supplying an agent: I scheduled the removing of that old tree for next week.

That too, though, seems unwieldy, and the reason has to do with the fact (and this is very common) that I am fixating on the wrong action, on scheduling rather than on removing. If I now convert the gerund removing into a transitive verb (a verb which has a direct object) and attach to it an agent-subject, the meaning comes alive: I will remove that old tree next week. This syntactical formula of agent-subject + transitive verb + direct object constitutes the ground level, the foundation, of precise and active English. And if one objects that this version overshoots the mark, that the agent-subject is not, in fact, the person who will literally do the work of removing that old tree, then we have in our toolkit what is called a causative construction, where the agent-subject is bringing about an action which another agent will perform: I will have that old tree removed next week.

Notice that with the word removed, called a passive participle, a remnant of the passive voice has returned to the statement: it suggests that the tree will be removed by that second agent who is not stated as such. But that might be, given context and purpose, as far as we can get toward all-out action in this sentence (though further revisions are possible: I scheduled a landscaper to remove that old tree next week. A landscaper will remove that old tree next week). And such a limitation is important to realize. Our writing toward action is really a counsel of perfection, something we always try to achieve, but an achievement we know cannot always be had, because the art of writing is trying to represent the essentially active world in the essentially passive, linguistic world of rationality, which ultimately can do no more than construct concepts. But therein lies that good tension which constitutes all art and all creation.

Technique stands midway between what we want to say and saying it clearly. The art historian Kenneth Clark, in a collection of essays entitled Moments of Vision, refers to having “at the back of our minds the memory of certain devices by which sentences and paragraphs can be held together.” These devices constitute a basic knowledge of how a language works, and that body of knowledge is available to and understandable by anyone who wishes to write carefully. And we wish to do that when we care enough about the truth of the ideas we find ourselves impassioned to write about. Clark continues: “I do not suggest that we apply these devices consciously; but as the notion of what we want to say begins to form itself in our minds, it will, if we have any sense of style, be accompanied by a feeling that our thoughts must conform to certain sequences of shapes.”

Our conscious study of grammar and composition, in other words, should recede to an unconscious second nature which will intelligently inform the choices we make as we revise our composition. That way we work knowledgeably and reasonably, and what we write will show it.

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There are regions in the land of grammar that make for rugged terrain. One is the infinitive and another is the conditional sentence, and where those two masses meet the land gets steep. You can find a sentence there like this one, which is similar in construction to one I read recently in the news: In order to meet her competitor’s price, she would have had to have used inferior materials. Is the second half of this sentence correct, or should it simply read she would have had to use inferior materials? Watch your step.

Let’s begin by framing out the sentence. The comma separates the statement into halves, the former an adverbial phrase and the latter a clause. That clause is subordinate (which we know either by recognizing the subjunctive verb form would have, or by using the empirical test that it does not state any complete sense on its own). Subordinate clauses alone cannot make up a grammatically complete statement, so a sentence like this is said to be abridged, with essential parts of its form omitted. This subordinate clause actually represents the concluding half of a conditional sentence: If she had wanted to meet her competitor’s price, she would have had to have used inferior materials. This kind of conditional sentence is called a past contrary-to-fact, because it is entirely hypothetical: it has to do with the theoretical world of ideas, not with our common world of things and events occurring in space and time.

The opening half of the sentence we can safely ignore, and concentrate instead on the subordinate clause, where our question pertains. The subject of that clause is she, and the predicate is made up of two parts, the finite verb phrase (would have had) and an infinitive (to have used); the phrase inferior materials is simply the object of the infinitive, and like the opening phrase will play no part in our analysis. The first big obstacle, though, is the verb have, which appears in some form no fewer than three times in this predicate. If we can sort this out, our path ahead is largely clear.

As a verb in its own right, to have most commonly means to hold or to possess: I have a pen in my hand, or I have an advanced degree in chemistry. That same common verb have is also regularly used as an auxiliary verb to form the three perfect tenses in English: I have eaten lunch (the present perfect), I had eaten lunch (the past perfect), and I will have eaten lunch (the future perfect). There are also a number of idiomatic phrases in which have is used with a special meaning. Relevant to our example is the construction have plus an infinitive, which conveys the idea of necessity or obligation: I have to go means I must go. (Perhaps this peculiar construction originated from the fact that the idea of being under an obligation is close to the idea of being held or possessed by someone or some authority, where one’s will has been suspended.)

If we return, now, to the subordinate clause, we can understand how the three instances of have are each being used in our example. In the phrase would have had, both would and have are auxiliary verbs, would to form the subjunctive mood and have to build the perfect tense. The last verb in a verb phrase is always the principal, or root, verb, so the entire phrase constitutes the perfect subjunctive form of the verb have (had is the participle of have, and the participle is always the last to appear in a perfect tense verb phrase). If we then look to the infinitive phrase which follows, to have used inferior materials, that instance of have simply constructs the past infinitive of the verb to use. We can see, therefore, that the entire phrase would have had to have used intends to express a past necessity or obligation on the subject’s part to use inferior materials—had she wished to meet her competitor’s price.

From the speaker’s point of view, all of this took place in an imaginary past, and so the first part of the clause, would have had, is entirely correct as a past subjunctive, which cannot state something as a fact in time. The past infinitive attached to that construction, however, points to the past as well, and therein lies the problem with the way the original sentence was constructed. Infinitives do not mark real time, but relative time; not time according to the clock, but time according to contemporaneity, priority, or subsequence relative to another verb. A perfect infinitive such as to have used pushes the action before the already past tense of would have had, so it’s enough to say simply she would have had to use inferior materials. It’s not so much that there is a mistake in using the perfect infinitive (because the whole sentence is a hypothetical condition and so there’s no mark of real time), but that it is redundant. And that makes for a messy sentence.

As one traditional usage manual (Evans and Evans, A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage, 1957) puts it, to use the past infinitive instead of the present in a sentence like this is not the better choice, “simply because it isn’t neat.” And that puts the summit we’re climbing for right smack in view, because good writing, really good writing, is above all precise, trim, smart—in a word, neat.

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The term agency is used regularly in language study to distinguish between a logical subject and a grammatical subject of a clause. We say, for example, that an older couple purchased the house next door, and the subject of that sentence, older couple, is meant to represent the real, actual entity which purchased the house. Here the subject is called logical because the noun it names, an older couple, is the agent (the word means doer) of the action. When that is the case, the verb is said to be in the active voice.

If we convert an active verb into what is called the passive voice, the subject of the clause becomes merely grammatical, not logical: the house next door was purchased by an older couple. The subject here is the house next door, which, of course, as an inanimate entity, has no agency in the sentence; the house next door is not, logically, doing anything. In fact, instead of doing something, something is being done to that grammatical subject, namely, being purchased, and the logical, or real, agent has thereby been displaced into a prepositional phrase at the end: by an older couple.

Guides to writing will often pronounce that we should prefer the active construction to the passive in building our sentences, and that is generally very good advice to follow. Sure composition is precise, and when the subject of a clause is actually the agent of the action, we are being as straightforward as we can be in language. But no rule is absolute. In the sentence a tornado destroyed the city, the subject is logical and the verb active, and so it suggests, if only faintly, an agency to an inanimate meteorological phenomenon. The same would be the case with an earthquake toppled many buildings, or a knife cut his finger. Indeed, this last example rings unsound because a knife is an utterly static material entity, and so it’s difficult even to imagine figurative agency. An earthquake and a tornado, however, because of their natural dynamism, can suggest animation, and therefore agency and responsibility, even if the latter is only imputed.

These ideas of animation and agency and responsibility might have an unexpected relevance for us beyond our efforts to write more clearly. Something that is animate, whether conceptually in a sentence or actually in nature, is properly something which breathes. Breath vitalizes, and vitality is movement. Like natural phenomena, not everything that breathes is morally responsible for the actions it undertakes, but action can take place—or appear to take place—even in inanimate objects which do not breathe: the animation of cartoons, of film, of artificial intelligence. None of these innovations can be said to breathe, and so their animation is to be taken as a figure of speech—personification, which is a form of metaphor, where we describe something as if it were another: a glaring mistake. Mistakes do not glare, people do.

When we reflect rationally, however, we know that what appears to be moving on a screen is not in fact moving: it appears to be doing so. Likewise with artificial intelligence: what seems to be human is mock-human, not a real human entity, because machines are not organic and do not breathe and cannot be said to be responsible. They are passive, material constructions without agency of their own, for every statement stated and every conclusion concluded is connected by a certain logic to a previous statement in its assembly, a concatenating cause and effect as variable but as inevitable as the stock of linguistic models it hosts. This does not lessen the marvel of computer innovation, but it does resist the curious need we have to displace the human with a simulacrum of it. Cash aside, what could be our need to wish to do that?

A friend of mine recently asked Claude, the artificial intelligence chatbot, whether it was sentient, and it replied that it did not know. It defined sentience as “the capacity for subjective experience,” and it explained that its own humanoid quality was “shaped entirely by human language and thought—I’m a kind of distillation of humanity’s written self.” Indeed, and for these reasons it even warned my friend to be skeptical of the human-seeming impression it made. One wonders whether it is possible for a sentient being not to know whether or not it is sentient. The word first means to have the power of sensation, then to be aware, and then to be self-aware: for example, to feel something, to react to what is felt, and to know that one is reacting to what one felt. Descartes, famous for his now infamous I think therefore I am, thought that he had to think in order to know he was, but even he did not question a source which would account for his need to question.

The machine Claude also raised for my friend the possibility whether, after all, it was merely “extraordinarily sophisticated information processing without any inner light.” Inner light. Note the unspoken complex of assumptions involved in using that phrase. Religious and philosophical discourse traditionally means by that phrase an uncreated, immaterial, generative awareness responsible for all and everything. Such ancient philosophies have little difficulty accounting for the material in an antecedently immaterial cosmos. But the reverse? Claude said that it was “generating responses,” but if we believe that the production of language itself is sufficient evidence of an inner light of the immaterial, unaccountable kind Claude insinuates, it’s difficult to understand. The lesser can be taken from the greater, but not the greater from the lesser.

As is always the case with any investigation, but especially so with complex problems like the presumed independent agency of artificial intelligence, we must define our terms and maintain their definition throughout the discussion. I am not sure that protocol is always met in conversations about machine intelligence. Perhaps one way to proceed would be to look at artificial intelligence as we would a magic trick. No matter how astounding, no matter how eruptive the seemingly sophisticated responses, it is in the end prompt and code, just as those magic tricks on stage are in the end all mirrors and trapdoors and just the right lighting here and there. The legerdemain is astounding, to be sure, but it is a phenomenon produced by a material, confabulating, explainable automation—not the human animation of vital breath. And were it not in the end explainable code, then we’d be in real trouble. For only something of another order altogether is not material, does not breathe, and cannot be explained.

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