Dependency, Grounding and English Literature: Towards a Fine-Grained Philosophy of Literary Assessment

The difficulty with much assessment in English literature is not merely that mark schemes are too crude, although they often are. Nor is it merely that teachers possess tacit professional judgement which examination rubrics cannot easily capture, although this too is true. The deeper difficulty is that literary understanding is not one thing. It is a complex family of achievements. A student interpreting a poem, a scene from Shakespeare, or a novel may be doing several distinct kinds of intellectual work at once. They may be clarifying meaning. They may be identifying what in the text makes a claim true. They may be tracing relations of dependence among images, events, characters and forms. They may be making claims about what kind of world the literary work creates. They may be asking what a character essentially is, what grounds an action, or how a tragic structure is constituted. These activities overlap in classroom practice, but they are not identical. If assessment treats them as identical, it will misdescribe student achievement.

Two recent philosophical traditions help to make this problem visible. The first is associated with Johan van Benthem and the logical study of dependency, information and semantic structure. The second is associated with Kit Fine and the metaphysical study of truthmaking, grounding, essence and dependence. The point is not that van Benthem and Fine are doing the same thing. They are not. Indeed, keeping them apart is essential. Van Benthem’s work belongs primarily to logic and semantics. It asks how meanings, propositions, information states and variables depend upon one another. Fine’s work, by contrast, gives us resources for distinguishing semantic truthmaking from metaphysical grounding. Truthmaking concerns what makes a claim true. Grounding concerns what exists in virtue of what, or what depends upon what in reality. 

If we apply these ideas carefully to English literature, they allow us to distinguish two kinds of sophistication that are often confused: semantic sophistication and ontological or metaphysical sophistication.The distinction can be introduced with a familiar classroom example. Suppose a student writes, “Macbeth is ambitious.” This is an interpretative claim. The semantic question is: what makes this claim true? We look for truthmakers in the play. Macbeth’s response to the witches, his soliloquies, his decision to kill Duncan, his language of vaulting ambition, his increasingly tyrannical actions, and the dramatic pattern through which desire for power overtakes moral hesitation may all function as truthmakers. They are not merely pieces of evidence in a mechanical sense. They are the textual features in virtue of which the interpretation is true. The semantic achievement of the student lies in identifying relevant truthmakers, relating them accurately to the claim, and showing how they support the interpretation.

But a different question can also be asked. What grounds Macbeth’s ambition? Is his ambition grounded in character, prophecy, masculinity, political disorder, metaphysical temptation, or the tragic structure of the play itself? Is ambition essential to Macbeth, or is it activated by circumstance? Does Macbeth act because he is ambitious, or does he become ambitious through action? These are not simply truthmaker questions. They are metaphysical questions about the ontology of the literary world. They concern what depends upon what within the world and form of the play. They ask about grounding, essence and constitution. A student may be strong at the first activity and weak at the second, or strong at the second and weak at the first. A rubric that assumes these achievements always travel together will distort judgement.

Van Benthem’s work is relevant because it challenges additive pictures of meaning and reasoning. In an additive model, items simply accumulate. One has knowledge, then interpretation, then analysis, then evaluation, and the whole achievement is imagined as the sum of separate components. Many assessment rubrics operate in this way. They treat literary competence as if it were made by adding independent marks for knowledge, evidence, explanation, terminology, structure and judgement. Van Benthem’s broad logical project, however, draws attention to relations of dependence. In many logical and informational contexts, one variable is not independent of another. The value or truth of one item may depend upon the value or truth of another. What matters is not merely which items are present, but how they are related.

This may sound abstract, but it is immediately recognisable to English teachers. A student’s interpretation often depends upon their knowledge of the text. Their analysis often depends upon the interpretation they have formed. Their evaluation often depends upon the analysis they have carried out. Their control of argument often depends upon the scale of the conceptual task they have set themselves. These are dependencies. They are not simple additions. One cannot simply add “analysis” to “knowledge” as if the two were independent goods. Analysis is often made possible by knowledge. Interpretation is often constrained by evidence. Organisation is often affected by the complexity of the thought being organised. A dependency-sensitive model of assessment would therefore ask not only whether a student has knowledge, interpretation, evidence and control, but how these elements support, constrain, enable or disrupt one another.

The crucial refinement is that dependencies may be local rather than global. A local dependency holds in a particular region or under particular conditions. A global dependency holds everywhere. In ordinary teaching, it is often locally true that strong interpretation depends on strong textual knowledge. For many students, if the knowledge is weak, the interpretation will be weak. The dependency is real, and teachers rightly act on it. But it does not follow that this dependency is universal. There are students whose interpretation is powerful even though their visible textual support is thin. There are students whose thinking is ambitious, original and conceptually difficult, but whose control of material is unstable. There are students who see something profound in King Lear, Macbeth or whatever text they're looking at, but cannot yet organise that perception into the orderly forms rewarded by the rubric. The local dependency between knowledge and interpretation, or between achievement and control, has failed to globalise.

This distinction is of great importance for assessment. Rubrics often convert local dependencies into universal laws. They assume that high achievement must involve clear control of material, secure structure, explicit textual evidence and orderly argument. For many students this is true. But it is not true for all students. At higher levels of literary engagement, the very ambition of the thinking may disrupt control. A student attempting a difficult account of Macbeth’s divided agency, Hamlet’s self-consciousness, or the ontological instability of the ghosts in either may produce writing that is uneven precisely because the thought is difficult. In such a case, lack of control is not straightforwardly evidence of low achievement. It may be evidence that the student is thinking beyond the limits of their current expressive and organisational resources. Teachers often recognise this. Rubrics often do not.

Fine’s work helps us clarify a different but related distinction. Possible worlds semantics, which dominated much twentieth-century philosophy, understood meaning in terms of possibilities. A proposition is necessary if it is true in all possible worlds; possible if it is true in some possible world. This framework is powerful, but Fine argues that it is too coarse-grained for many philosophical purposes. Two claims may be true in all the same possible worlds and yet differ in meaning, explanation, relevance or dependence. Literary teachers know this intuitively. Two interpretations may both be broadly true, but one may identify the relevant textual support while another misses the point. Two claims may be compatible with the same plot summary but differ radically in what they make salient.

Truthmaker theory offers a finer-grained semantic tool. Instead of asking only where a claim is true, it asks what makes it true. In literature, this is particularly valuable because interpretation is rarely exhausted by correctness. A student must show why a reading is true of this text, through this image, this pattern, this formal movement, this repetition, this silence, this contradiction. Truthmaking is therefore an excellent model for semantic assessment in English. It allows us to ask whether the student has found the right truthmakers, whether they are relevant, whether they genuinely support the claim, and whether they are organised into an explanatory account.Grounding, however, must not be confused with truthmaking. Grounding is not primarily about what makes a sentence or interpretation true. It is about metaphysical dependence. It asks what obtains in virtue of what. For Fine, grounding is a relation in the structure of reality, or at least in the structure of the domain under discussion. Applied to literature, grounding concerns the structure of the literary world or literary object. What grounds Macbeth’s kingship? What grounds the tragedy? What grounds the authority of the witches? What grounds the collapse of moral order? These are questions about the world of the play, not merely about the truth of our interpretations of that world.

Essence is equally important. Fine criticises the idea that essence can be reduced to necessity. It may be necessary that Socrates belongs to the singleton whose only member is Socrates, but that does not mean that belonging to that singleton is part of Socrates’ essence. Essence concerns what something is, not merely what is necessarily connected to it. In literary teaching, this matters because students constantly ask essential questions, though not always in that vocabulary. Is Macbeth essentially a man of action corrupted by imagination? Is Hamlet essentially reflective, or does the reflective self emerge through the conditions of the revenge plot? Is Lear essentially proud, or does the play strip him down to something more basic? Such questions are not simply about which statements are true. They concern what kind of beings these characters are within the literary world.

Fine’s hylomorphic interests deepen this further. Hylomorphism, inherited from Aristotle, is the view that things are constituted by matter and form. A bronze statue is not merely bronze; it is bronze organised by a form. A literary work can be thought of similarly. It has material: words, images, scenes, characters, events, rhythms, references. But it also has form: tragic pattern, narrative ordering, dramatic structure, symbolic arrangement, genre, voice. A student who merely lists evidence may grasp the matter of the work without grasping its form. A student who sees the form but cannot yet secure it in evidence may have a genuine but unstable metaphysical understanding of the literary object. Again, a rubric that rewards only visible control of material may miss the more difficult achievement.

The educational implication is that English assessment needs two different but related forms of fine-grainedness. On the semantic side, it needs a truthmaker-sensitive account of interpretation. On the metaphysical side, it needs a grounding-sensitive account of literary worlds, characters, forms and structures. Van Benthem helps us understand the dependencies among semantic achievements: how evidence, interpretation, relevance and explanation relate. Fine helps us understand why semantic truthmaking must be distinguished from metaphysical grounding, and why literary ontology requires concepts such as essence, constitution and hylomorphic form. The task is not to replace classroom judgement with technical philosophy. It is to give teachers a clearer language for distinctions they already make.

This matters because the best English teachers frequently recognise forms of student achievement that the rubric cannot name. They know when a student has found the truthmakers for an interpretation. They know when a student has asked a deeper question about the being of a character or the structure of a tragic world. They know when a lack of control is mere confusion, and when it is the temporary instability produced by ambitious thought. The philosophical challenge is to make those distinctions explicit enough to guide assessment without flattening them into another crude grid. That is where the speculative possibility of an ontological dependency logic becomes interesting. If van Benthem has shown how semantic and informational dependencies can be regimented, perhaps an analogous framework could help teachers describe dependencies within literary ontology: grounding, essence, form, character, action, world and structure. Such a framework would need to preserve the distinction between semantics and metaphysics while allowing their analogies to become disciplined, teachable and assessable.

The distinction between semantics and metaphysics becomes particularly illuminating when we examine what actually happens in English classrooms. Teachers regularly ask pupils to "interpret", to "analyse", to "support your ideas with evidence", to "comment on language", to "discuss character", or to "evaluate the writer's methods". These activities are usually grouped together under the broad heading of literary analysis. Yet closer inspection reveals that they involve different kinds of intellectual operation. If these operations are not distinguished, assessment criteria inevitably reward some forms of understanding while obscuring others.

The semantic dimension of literary study concerns the truth of interpretative claims. It asks whether a proposed reading is justified by the text and whether the textual features identified genuinely make the interpretation true. This is precisely the territory illuminated by truthmaker semantics. Consider a student discussing Lady Macbeth. The claim "Lady Macbeth manipulates Macbeth" requires truthmakers. The student may point to her questioning of his masculinity, her practical planning of Duncan's murder, her control of the immediate aftermath of the crime, and her rhetorical command during the early acts of the play. Each of these textual features functions as a truthmaker. Together they explain why the interpretation is true.

Notice that the semantic achievement here lies not simply in finding quotations. Quotations are valuable only insofar as they identify genuine truthmakers. Two students may cite exactly the same passage, yet one may identify a relevant truthmaker while the other merely reproduces textual evidence without explaining its semantic significance. Teachers frequently recognise this difference intuitively. One response merely accumulates evidence; the other explains why that evidence matters. Truthmaker semantics provides a language for articulating this distinction. The issue is not simply whether evidence has been supplied but whether the evidence functions as the explanatory basis of the interpretation.

This has significant consequences for assessment. Current mark schemes often reward "appropriate textual references", "judicious quotation" or "well-selected evidence". These descriptors implicitly recognise truthmakers but do not distinguish between evidence as illustration and evidence as explanation. The distinction is crucial. A quotation that merely accompanies a claim is educationally less valuable than a quotation whose explanatory role is fully understood. Truthmaker semantics therefore encourages teachers to assess not the quantity of textual support but its explanatory relevance.

This emphasis upon relevance also connects naturally with Stephen Yablo's work on aboutness. A literary interpretation is not simply a proposition that happens to be true. It is about certain aspects of the text rather than others. An essay on Macbeth may primarily concern political legitimacy, psychological disintegration, supernatural temptation or theatrical performance. These different topics organise different truthmakers. They establish different semantic fields. Assessment therefore needs to recognise not only whether truthmakers have been identified but also whether they are relevant to the subject matter under discussion. Students often fail not because they misunderstand the text but because they identify truthmakers that belong to a different interpretative question.

None of this yet involves metaphysics. It remains entirely within semantics. The teacher is asking whether an interpretation is true, how it becomes true, what textual features make it true and whether the explanation is relevant to the question posed. These are semantic achievements. Metaphysical achievement begins elsewhere. Suppose another student asks whether Macbeth's ambition causes his downfall. At first sight this may appear to be another interpretative question. Yet it quickly becomes something deeper. Does ambition constitute Macbeth's character or merely modify it? Is the tragedy grounded in Macbeth's individual psychology, or is individual psychology itself grounded in wider political and metaphysical structures? Does prophecy create Macbeth's future, or does it merely disclose possibilities already latent within him? These are not questions about what makes an interpretation true. They concern the internal architecture of the literary world itself.

This distinction becomes even clearer if we compare two essays. One essay argues that Macbeth's ambition explains his behaviour. It carefully identifies textual truthmakers and demonstrates their relevance. The second essay asks whether Shakespeare presents ambition as an essential property of Macbeth or as a contingent response to external circumstances. The second student is no longer simply interpreting. They are exploring ontological dependence within the play. They are asking what grounds character, what grounds action, and how identity is constituted.

The two essays therefore exhibit different kinds of excellence. The first displays semantic sophistication. The second displays metaphysical sophistication. Neither should be treated as a defective version of the other. This distinction becomes particularly important when students begin to explore literary form rather than individual characters. Consider the question: "What makes Macbeth a tragedy?" A semantic response identifies textual truthmakers. The student examines reversals, recognitions, imagery, dramatic irony and structural patterning that justify calling the play a tragedy. A metaphysical response asks a different question. What grounds the tragic form itself? Is tragedy grounded in character? In political order? In cosmic disorder? In moral structure? In dramatic form? The student is investigating the constitution of tragedy as an object rather than merely defending the truth of an interpretative claim.

Hylomorphism offers a particularly rich framework here. If literary works are understood as complex objects possessing both material and form, then assessment can begin distinguishing between students who primarily recognise material components and students who primarily recognise formal organisation. One student may identify numerous quotations while failing to perceive the dramatic architecture organising them. Another may perceive the architecture while struggling to organise the textual material needed to articulate it fully. Current rubrics often reward the first student because material control is more immediately visible than formal insight. Yet the second student may be operating at a higher conceptual level.

This brings us naturally to the question of dependency. Educational discourse frequently assumes that successful literary analysis consists of a collection of separate skills. Knowledge, evidence, terminology, organisation, analysis and evaluation appear as distinct assessment objectives. The underlying model is additive. Each element contributes independently to the total mark. Such a model has practical advantages because it simplifies moderation and standardisation. Philosophically, however, it is implausible.

Van Benthem's work suggests a different picture. Intellectual achievements frequently stand in relations of dependence rather than simple addition. Certain capacities make other capacities possible. Some achievements presuppose others. Others transform the significance of earlier achievements. The educational analogue is straightforward. Interpretation depends upon textual understanding. Evaluation depends upon interpretation. Conceptual ambition often transforms the demands placed upon organisation and control.

This perspective immediately explains a phenomenon familiar to experienced teachers. Good organisation is frequently correlated with good understanding. Yet this correlation should not be mistaken for a universal law. It represents a local dependency. Within ordinary classroom practice, better understanding often leads to better organisation because students possess conceptual structures that support coherent writing. Assessment systems then universalise the pattern. They begin rewarding organisation as though it were an infallible indicator of understanding.

But exceptional students disrupt the dependency. A highly ambitious essay may become structurally unstable precisely because the conceptual task has become unusually demanding. Students attempting genuinely original readings often revise their argument while writing. They discover new relations between ideas. They reorganise conceptual frameworks. The writing becomes uneven because the thinking is still in motion. From the perspective of an additive rubric this appears as weakness. From the perspective of dependency logic it appears as the temporary failure of a local dependency to become global.

The distinction between local and global dependencies therefore has profound educational significance. Locally, strong conceptual understanding usually supports good organisation. Globally, this is not always so. Indeed, one might speculate that beyond a certain level of conceptual ambition the dependency weakens. Organisation ceases to increase proportionately because the cognitive demands of the task begin to exceed available expressive resources. The student's difficulty is no longer ignorance but complexity. Such cases are surprisingly common in advanced literary study. Undergraduate essays often display precisely this phenomenon. Doctoral research displays it even more clearly. Innovative scholarship is frequently less polished than merely competent scholarship because the conceptual landscape itself is being reconstructed. The writer cannot rely upon familiar argumentative pathways. They are creating new ones.

The educational implication is striking. Certain indicators traditionally associated with quality may function only within restricted regions of performance. Organisation, control, fluency and explicitness may reliably indicate achievement across much ordinary classroom work while becoming progressively less reliable indicators at the highest levels of conceptual originality.

If this is correct, assessment requires a richer conception of dependency than current rubrics possess. Rather than assuming that all educational goods increase together, teachers would ask which dependencies hold locally, which hold globally, which weaken under conceptual pressure and which disappear altogether. The rubric would no longer resemble a checklist of independent variables. It would resemble a network of interacting intellectual capacities.

This also suggests a more charitable interpretation of unusual student responses. When a student produces a brilliant but disorganised essay, the teacher need not choose between calling it excellent or deficient. Instead the teacher may recognise that different dependency structures are operating simultaneously. Semantic truthmaker identification may be relatively weak while metaphysical reasoning is exceptionally strong. Organisation may have become unstable because conceptual ambition has exceeded currently available expressive resources. (And this may result in a disorgnised essay that doesn't strike anyone as brilliant at all. Yet if the disorganisation is due to the instability created by an ambitious reading then quick draw judgements of failure become invalid.)   The assessment problem then becomes one of accurately representing this complex profile rather than collapsing it into a single numerical judgement.

Such an approach does not abandon standards. On the contrary, it refines them. It replaces crude aggregation with structured description. It asks not merely whether students possess desirable qualities but how those qualities interact. It thereby moves assessment closer to the actual complexity of literary understanding, where meanings, truthmakers, grounding relations, formal structures and intellectual dependencies continually intersect without ever collapsing into a single dimension of achievement.

The distinction developed here has implications that extend well beyond assessment. Indeed, one of its most significant consequences may be pedagogical rather than evaluative. Once semantics and metaphysics are recognised as distinct domains of literary understanding, the repertoire of classroom practices available to teachers expands considerably. At present, the essay dominates English assessment because it appears capable of demonstrating every desirable intellectual quality simultaneously. Essays are expected to display textual knowledge, interpretation, analysis, organisation, evaluation, conceptual understanding and stylistic control. They become universal assessment instruments, expected to reveal the totality of a student's literary understanding. 

The preceding discussion suggests that this expectation is philosophically implausible. If semantic understanding and metaphysical understanding are genuinely different achievements, and if each possesses its own internal dependency structures, then there is no reason to expect a single representational form to display them equally well. Indeed, there are reasons to expect precisely the opposite. Different forms of response may reveal different aspects of literary understanding more effectively than the conventional literary essay.

This observation resonates with an older tradition within English teaching that has often existed somewhat uneasily alongside examination culture. Teachers have long employed dramatic improvisation, diary writing, letter writing, creative rewriting, monologue, dialogue, alternative endings and imaginative reconstruction as classroom activities. These practices have frequently been justified on motivational grounds: they engage students, encourage participation and make literature enjoyable. Such justifications, while perfectly respectable, arguably underestimate their intellectual significance. The distinction between semantics and metaphysics suggests a much deeper rationale.

Creative writing may function as a remarkably sensitive instrument for revealing different forms of literary understanding. The crucial point is that creative writing need not be regarded as an alternative to literary criticism. It may instead constitute a different mode of displaying literary knowledge. The question therefore changes. Instead of asking whether creative writing is less rigorous than essay writing, we ask what kinds of understanding creative writing is capable of revealing that essays may obscure.

Consider the familiar classroom exercise in which students are asked to write a letter from Lady Macbeth to Hecate after Duncan's murder. At first sight this appears simply imaginative. Yet examined through the framework developed in this essay, the task becomes philosophically revealing. Semantically, the student must identify the truthmakers that make Lady Macbeth recognisably Lady Macbeth. Her vocabulary, emotional register, understanding of events, relationship to Macbeth, conception of power, attitude towards guilt and perception of the supernatural must all be consistent with the textual evidence. If these truthmakers are poorly identified, the letter will fail and Lady Macbeth will cease to sound like herself. The creative task therefore provides rich evidence of semantic understanding.

But simultaneously the student must negotiate metaphysical questions. What kind of being is Lady Macbeth? What grounds her confidence? Is she fundamentally manipulative, fundamentally fearful, fundamentally ambitious, or something more complex? What is essential to her identity, and what merely reflects changing circumstances? Is her relationship to supernatural powers one of dependence, alliance, exploitation or misunderstanding? These are grounding questions that concern the ontology of the literary world rather than merely the truth of interpretative claims.

The teacher is therefore able to observe semantic and metaphysical achievement operating together while still distinguishing them analytically. The same applies to dramatic monologue. Suppose students are asked to write Macbeth's internal reflections immediately after hearing of Lady Macbeth's death. Such a task is often described as empathy, yet empathy scarcely captures its intellectual demands. The student must construct a coherent semantic field in which every phrase is supported by truthmakers drawn from the play. Simultaneously, the student must determine what now grounds Macbeth's identity: has kingship become his essence, has guilt replaced ambition, or has nihilism displaced political purpose? The monologue inevitably embodies answers to these metaphysical questions whether the student explicitly formulates them or not.

From the perspective of assessment, this is particularly valuable because different forms of response place different demands upon semantic and metaphysical reasoning. Traditional literary essays frequently privilege semantic explicitness. Students explain their truthmakers overtly and demonstrate relevance through direct commentary. The essay is therefore an excellent vehicle for displaying semantic organisation. Creative forms often privilege ontological coherence. A convincing dramatic monologue does not simply state what Macbeth thinks; it embodies what Macbeth is. The student must sustain the internal ontology of the character throughout the piece, making contradictions immediately visible and grounding relations dramatically enacted rather than discursively described. This suggests that the distinction between semantics and metaphysics may also illuminate an old debate concerning expressive forms in English education. Rather than asking whether creative writing and analytical writing are competing pedagogies, we might regard them as complementary representational systems, each making different dimensions of literary understanding visible.

The implications become even richer once dependency structures are introduced. Essay writing possesses its own local dependencies: textual knowledge generally supports semantic interpretation, interpretation supports analytical commentary, analytical commentary supports evaluative judgement, and organisation usually depends upon stable conceptual planning. These dependencies make essays powerful assessment instruments for many forms of understanding.

Creative writing, however, possesses different dependency structures.To produce a convincing dramatic monologue, semantic truthmakers remain essential and the student must still understand the text. However, organisation no longer depends upon argumentative progression but upon dramatic coherence. Character voice depends upon ontological consistency rather than discursive exposition, and narrative movement depends upon psychological grounding rather than explicit analytical structure. Consequently, different local dependencies become visible. Voice depends upon semantic truthmakers, character consistency depends upon metaphysical grounding, emotional plausibility depends upon ontological coherence, and narrative progression depends upon the internal structure of the literary world. These are not the same dependency structures found in essays, nor are they inferior; they simply reveal different intellectual achievements.

Indeed, one might speculate that creative writing occasionally makes certain forms of metaphysical understanding easier to observe than traditional essays. Students often struggle to explain grounding relations explicitly because they lack philosophical vocabulary, yet they may demonstrate an intuitive grasp of those same relations through dramatic construction. A student who cannot write that "Macbeth's later identity is grounded in accumulated acts of violence" may nevertheless produce a monologue in which every sentence embodies precisely that transformation. The ontology of the character is displayed through the writing itself. This possibility has important implications for classroom assessment. Rather than forcing every kind of literary understanding into essay form, teachers might deliberately vary representational practices in order to make different achievements visible. Letters, diaries, dramatic monologues, imagined conversations, courtroom speeches, political manifestos, religious confessions, dream sequences, alternative scenes and marginal annotations supposedly written by characters may each reveal distinctive configurations of semantic and metaphysical understanding.

The educational significance of such variation is not merely motivational; it is epistemological. Different representational forms disclose different kinds of knowledge.This recalls a familiar lesson from philosophy itself. Geometry, algebra and topology often describe the same object through different representational systems, none of which is universally superior. Each renders certain structural features more visible than others. Similarly, essays and creative writing may be understood as distinct representational systems for literary understanding, illuminating different dependency structures because they impose different expressive constraints.

The speculative programme emerging from this essay therefore moves beyond assessment reform towards a broader pluralism of literary pedagogy. Semantic understanding should be cultivated through activities that sharpen sensitivity to truthmakers, relevance, aboutness and explanatory precision, while metaphysical understanding should be cultivated through activities that invite students to investigate grounding, essence, constitution, identity and literary worlds. Some activities will naturally integrate both, while others will foreground one dimension and leave the other relatively implicit. Teachers will thereby gain a much richer understanding of the distribution of achievement within a classroom.

Assessment, correspondingly, becomes less concerned with asking every task to reveal every intellectual virtue. Instead, different tasks become windows onto different aspects of literary understanding, and a carefully designed sequence of activities may therefore provide a far richer picture of student achievement than any single essay could ever produce. This conclusion also transforms the status of the literary essay itself. The essay need no longer function as the universal measure of literary understanding. It remains an indispensable intellectual form, particularly for displaying explicit semantic reasoning and disciplined conceptual organisation, but it becomes one representational practice among several rather than the privileged endpoint of literary education.

Such a shift has implications extending well beyond English literature. It suggests a more general philosophy of educational assessment in which assessment does not merely aggregate performances or assume that all understanding can be adequately represented through a single symbolic medium. Instead, it seeks forms of representation appropriate to the different structures of understanding being investigated. The distinction between semantics and metaphysics developed through Fine, together with the study of dependency inspired by van Benthem, points towards precisely such a philosophy. It allows teachers to recognise that literary understanding is internally differentiated, to identify different dependency structures operating within semantic and metaphysical reasoning, and to develop assessment practices capable of representing those structures without collapsing them into additive checklists. Most importantly, it legitimises a richer ecology of classroom practices in which essays, creative writing, dramatic performance and imaginative reconstruction are not rivals competing for curricular time but complementary modes through which different dimensions of literary understanding become visible.

The long-standing opposition between critical writing and creative writing therefore begins to dissolve. Both become forms of disciplined inquiry and both are capable of exhibiting sophisticated literary knowledge, though they exhibit different aspects of that knowledge. The philosophical distinction between truthmaking and grounding, together with the logical distinction between different kinds of dependency, provides the conceptual framework within which those differences can finally be described with the precision that classroom practice has long deserved.

One of the most productive ideas that can be borrowed from van Benthem for educational purposes is the distinction between local and global (or universal) dependency. Although developed within formal semantics, the distinction has surprising pedagogical significance because it encourages teachers to ask not merely whether one achievement depends upon another, but whether that dependency holds everywhere or only within a restricted domain. Once combined with Fine's distinction between semantic and ontological questions, it generates a remarkably rich framework for thinking about literary understanding.

The first point to emphasise is that local and global dependency are themselves neutral concepts. They do not belong exclusively to semantics or metaphysics. What changes is the domain over which the dependencies are defined. In semantic contexts, dependencies concern meaning, interpretation, truthmakers and relevance, whereas in ontological contexts they concern grounding, constitution, essence and dependence within the literary world. The same logical distinction can therefore be deployed in two different philosophical environments while preserving the distinction between semantics and metaphysics.

Consider first semantic dependency. Suppose an English teacher asks students to explain why the claim "Macbeth is ambitious" is true. A straightforward local dependency immediately appears, since good interpretations normally depend upon accurate identification of textual truthmakers. If students cannot identify the speeches, actions, dramatic patterns and linguistic choices that make the interpretation true, they usually cannot sustain convincing interpretations. For most students, semantic understanding depends locally upon the successful identification of relevant truthmakers, and within ordinary classroom practice this dependency is remarkably robust. Teachers naturally organise lessons around it, guiding students to become familiar with the text, identify significant passages, and recognise recurring images, motifs and dramatic structures, all of which support increasingly sophisticated interpretation.

The important question, however, is whether this local dependency should be elevated into a universal principle. Many assessment systems quietly assume that it should, effectively adopting the view that every successful interpretation must exhibit explicit textual truthmakers. At first sight this appears entirely reasonable, yet experienced teachers quickly recognise counterexamples. For instance, a highly able student discussing King Lear might propose that Lear's tragedy lies not simply in political failure or family conflict but in the gradual collapse of distinctions between authority, identity and recognition. Such an essay may be intellectually adventurous, yet because the student is pursuing a highly abstract conceptual argument, explicit textual evidence becomes relatively sparse. The truthmakers remain largely implicit, even though the teacher recognises that the interpretation arises from a deep familiarity with the play.In such cases, the local dependency has not disappeared but has instead become indirect, with truthmakers presupposed rather than constantly displayed. Assessment rubrics, however, frequently treat the local dependency as universal, assuming that every sophisticated interpretation must continuously display its truthmakers in explicit textual form. The consequence is that semantic sophistication is underestimated precisely when the student has begun thinking at a higher level of abstraction. 

This suggests an important refinement: semantic assessment should distinguish between explicit and implicit truthmaker competence. Early literary learning requires explicit demonstration, whereas more advanced literary understanding may increasingly internalise semantic dependency, with students ceasing to display every truthmaker because those truthmakers have become integrated into their interpretative framework. The assessment challenge is therefore developmental rather than simply additive.

A similar distinction appears, though in a different form, within literary ontology. Suppose students are discussing Macbeth's identity. At an introductory level, teachers commonly encourage a grounding relation such as the idea that ambition grounds Macbeth's actions. Within many episodes this is perfectly adequate, as the student identifies an important ontological dependence in which action depends upon character. Again, the dependency is local, holding within a restricted region of the literary world. As students mature intellectually, however, the grounding structure itself becomes increasingly complicated. Ambition may ground Macbeth's early actions, but later fear, guilt, habit or political necessity may take over. The ontological network evolves, and grounding becomes dynamic rather than static.

Consequently, no universal grounding principle governs the entire play. Character does not simply ground action; sometimes action grounds character, as Macbeth becomes the person he is through repeated acts of violence, with identity itself emerging from action. At other moments, the political world grounds Macbeth's choices more strongly than his own psychological dispositions, while elsewhere supernatural prophecy appears to restructure the entire field of possible agency. The grounding relations therefore shift across the dramatic narrative, and this has important pedagogical consequences. Many classroom discussions encourage students to identify a single explanatory principle governing the whole work, leading them to search for "the" cause, "the" tragic flaw, or "the" central theme. Fine's conception of grounding suggests that literary ontology is often much richer, with grounding relations that possess structure, change over time, overlap, compete and may even reverse direction.

Assessment therefore ought to distinguish between students who identify isolated grounding relations and those who recognise changing grounding networks. The difference is considerable. One student might write that Macbeth kills Duncan because he is ambitious, while another might argue that Macbeth's ambition initially grounds his actions, but after Duncan's murder the relationship reverses, with his actions progressively grounding a transformed identity until violence itself becomes constitutive of who he is. The second student is no longer simply identifying grounding but analysing its dynamics. Current assessment criteria rarely possess the vocabulary for recognising this difference, and the distinction between local and universal grounding helps explain why. The first student assumes a universal grounding relation, whereas the second identifies a sequence of local grounding relations whose organisation constitutes the tragedy.

This distinction also illuminates one of the oldest tensions in English teaching. Teachers frequently encourage students to seek consistency, yet literature often explores instability, with characters developing, identities fragmenting, motivations changing and ontological dependence shifting. An assessment framework sensitive to local grounding would therefore value students who notice changing dependency structures rather than rewarding only stable explanatory models.

Perhaps the most interesting educational implications emerge when semantic and ontological dependencies begin interacting. A student may exhibit excellent semantic dependency while displaying relatively simple ontological reasoning, with precise truthmakers and carefully supported interpretations but an uncomplicated ontology of the literary world. Another student may exhibit the reverse profile, with thinly displayed truthmakers but extraordinarily subtle grounding relations, where identity shifts, agency fragments, political institutions ground personal action and personal action subsequently restructures institutions. In such cases, the literary world itself becomes a complex network of ontological dependence.

The educational significance of this contrast is profound, as the two students require different pedagogical responses. The first may need encouragement towards greater metaphysical ambition, while the second may need help making semantic truthmakers more explicit. Neither is simply stronger or weaker; rather, they are developing different dimensions of literary understanding. The teacher's judgement therefore becomes diagnostic rather than merely classificatory.

The distinction between local and universal dependency also sheds new light on classroom progression. Educational development is often imagined as linear, with knowledge producing interpretation, interpretation producing analysis and analysis producing evaluation. However, the dependency perspective suggests something more complex, as progress consists partly in recognising where local dependencies cease to behave universally. Students initially require explicit textual evidence for every interpretative move, but later they begin recognising semantic structures without continually displaying every supporting truthmaker. Similarly, students initially seek single grounding principles, but later discover multiple interacting ontological dependencies, and while they initially organise arguments through familiar structures, conceptual ambition may later disrupt that organisation before more sophisticated forms of control emerge.

Progress therefore becomes increasingly differentiated, with students learning not merely to master isolated skills but to navigate increasingly complex dependency structures. Assessment consequently requires comparable refinement, as teachers must learn to distinguish explicit from implicit truthmaker competence, isolated from dynamic grounding, local from universal dependency, stable from evolving ontological structure, and genuine conceptual instability from mere confusion. Only then can assessment remain sufficiently fine-grained to describe the increasingly differentiated forms of understanding exhibited by advanced literary readers.

Seen in this light, van Benthem's semantic dependency logic and Fine's ontology are not simply two philosophical theories placed side by side but together suggest a more general educational principle. Intellectual achievement rarely consists of accumulating independent competences; instead, it involves learning to negotiate increasingly intricate networks of dependence. Some of these networks organise meaning, others organise being, some remain local and others approach universality. Expert teaching consists in helping students perceive which dependencies are operating in a given literary problem, which are merely local regularities, which genuinely extend across the work as a whole, and which dissolve altogether as literary understanding becomes increasingly sophisticated. The ultimate aim of assessment is therefore not simply to measure attainment but to represent, as faithfully as possible, the evolving architecture of those semantic and ontological dependency networks themselves.

Conclusion

The argument developed throughout this essay has attempted to do two related things. First, it has argued that recent developments in logic and metaphysics provide conceptual resources capable of describing literary understanding more accurately than the additive assumptions built into many contemporary assessment systems. Secondly, it has suggested that these philosophical developments are not merely of theoretical interest. Properly understood, they offer practical ways of refining classroom pedagogy, curriculum design and assessment practice without abandoning professional judgement or reducing literature to formalism.

The central proposal may now be stated in a more systematic form. English literature involves at least two fundamentally different kinds of intellectual activity. One concerns meaning, while the other concerns being. The first belongs to semantics, and the second belongs to ontology or metaphysics. Neither should be reduced to the other, and both must be recognised if literary understanding is to be described adequately.

The semantic domain asks questions concerning meaning, interpretation, relevance, aboutness and truth. More precisely, following the truthmaker tradition developed by Kit Fine, it asks what in the literary text makes an interpretation true. Literary criticism, understood semantically, therefore becomes an investigation into truthmakers. The student's task is to identify the textual features, linguistic structures, dramatic movements, formal organisations and symbolic relations that make an interpretative judgement true. Assessment correspondingly evaluates the richness, relevance and explanatory adequacy of those truthmakers.

The ontological domain asks different questions. Here the concern is not whether an interpretation is true but how the literary world itself is organised. The relevant concepts are grounding, essence, constitution, identity and hylomorphic organisation. Students investigate what depends upon what within the literary work. They ask what grounds character, action, tragedy, authority, guilt, political order or narrative identity. Assessment correspondingly evaluates the sophistication with which students recognise these ontological structures.

This distinction may be summarised schematically. Semantic inquiry asks what makes an interpretation true, operates primarily through the concept of truthmakers, and is typically evidenced through explanation of textual relevance. Ontological inquiry asks what structures the literary world, operates through the concept of grounding, and is typically evidenced through analysis of identity, constitution, dependence and literary worlds. This distinction immediately transforms the way assessment objectives are understood. Many existing assessment systems tacitly assume that semantic and ontological sophistication develop together. A student who produces excellent semantic interpretation is expected also to exhibit sophisticated ontological reasoning, while weaknesses in textual interpretation are frequently assumed to imply weaknesses in conceptual understanding of literary worlds. There is no obvious philosophical justification for this assumption, and classroom experience frequently suggests the opposite.

Some students become exceptionally skilled at identifying semantic truthmakers while remaining relatively conventional in their ontological thinking. Others display unusually subtle intuitions concerning identity, agency, dependence and literary structure while struggling to articulate the semantic truthmakers supporting those intuitions. Rather than treating these profiles as defective, assessment should recognise them as different intellectual configurations.

This leads naturally to the second organising distinction developed throughout the essay. Van Benthem's distinction between local and global dependency provides a model for thinking about educational progression. Within semantics, local dependencies describe regular relations between truthmakers and interpretation. Within ontology, local dependencies describe regular relations between grounding structures inside literary worlds. Crucially, neither should automatically be universalised.

The distinction between local and universal dependency requires further elaboration, particularly because the tendency to universalise local regularities does not arise only in student thinking. It is also embedded within assessment frameworks and pedagogical practices themselves. Students may infer from repeated success that a particular interpretative strategy always applies, or that a particular explanatory relation governs an entire text. And assessment criteria can reinforce this tendency by rewarding consistency over discrimination, encouraging students to apply familiar patterns indiscriminately. Similarly, pedagogical approaches that emphasise model answers or canonical interpretations may inadvertently present local dependencies as if they were universal principles.

Within semantics, local dependencies include the observation that relevant truthmakers normally support successful interpretation, that knowledge of textual detail normally supports identification of truthmakers, and that semantic coherence normally supports persuasive explanation. These are reliable tendencies within many contexts. However, when universalised, they become distortions. The assumption that every successful interpretation must explicitly display all relevant truthmakers, or that interpretative validity depends upon exhaustive textual coverage, reflects not the structure of literary understanding but the overextension of local regularities into rigid assessment expectations.

Within ontology, local dependencies include the observation that character may ground action, that political structure may ground individual choice, that narrative form may ground thematic development, and that identity may ground motivation. Again, these relations frequently hold within particular contexts. Yet when they are universalised, they produce reductive readings. The assumption that character always grounds action, or that a single explanatory principle governs the entire literary work, reflects a failure to recognise the variability and plurality of grounding relations within complex texts.

Assessment systems can inadvertently institutionalise these universalised assumptions. Mark schemes may privilege responses that display consistent explanatory frameworks, even when such consistency oversimplifies the text. Pedagogical practices may encourage students to adopt stable interpretative templates that can be applied across different works, thereby reinforcing the illusion that literary understanding consists in the application of general rules rather than the careful discrimination of context-specific relations. In this way, both assessment and teaching can transform local dependencies into de facto universals, not because the literary works demand it, but because the structures of evaluation reward it.

Recognising this tendency has important pedagogical implications. The educational task is not merely to teach students particular interpretations, but to help them recognise different kinds of dependency and to judge carefully the scope over which those dependencies operate. Students should increasingly ask whether a given relationship is local or whether it genuinely extends across the entire literary work. They should also learn to recognise when apparent regularities are artefacts of interpretative habit or assessment expectation rather than features of the text itself. Teachers therefore become guides not simply to literary meaning but to the topology of literary dependence. They help students to identify where dependencies hold, where they break down, and where multiple dependency structures interact. This involves not only correcting errors but cultivating a sensitivity to scope, variation and exception.

Assessment correspondingly changes its function. Rather than rewarding isolated competences or the consistent application of generalised strategies, it attempts to describe the organisation of understanding itself. The teacher asks what truthmaker structures the student has recognised, what grounding structures they have identified, which dependencies they have articulated, and where they have mistakenly universalised local regularities. Equally important is the identification of moments where students recognise that dependencies shift across the literary work, or where they perceive interactions between semantic and ontological organisation. The assessment record therefore becomes descriptive before it becomes classificatory. It maps understanding rather than merely measuring it, and it resists the pressure to reduce complex intellectual configurations to uniform criteria.

One consequence is especially significant. Educational progress ceases to appear linear and instead becomes increasingly differentiated. Beginning students often work through relatively stable local dependencies, applying them with increasing confidence. Intermediate students begin recognising exceptions and limitations. Advanced students increasingly recognise interacting dependency networks, while the strongest students begin asking whether the apparent dependencies belong to the literary world itself or merely to particular interpretative frameworks.  At this point, literary criticism approaches philosophical inquiry. 

I argue that this progression deserves explicit recognition within curriculum design. Different classroom activities naturally reveal different aspects of these developing structures. Traditional analytical essays remain exceptionally valuable for making semantic truthmakers explicit, while creative writing frequently reveals ontological understanding more effectively. Drama, dialogue and dramatic improvisation expose dynamic grounding relations, and discussion often uncovers implicit dependency structures before they can be articulated in formal writing. Rather than competing pedagogies, these become complementary representational practices, each rendering different intellectual structures visible.

This reconceptualisation also entails a broader pedagogical shift. Teaching moves away from the transmission of stable interpretative frameworks and towards the cultivation of intellectual flexibility, where students are encouraged to navigate between semantic and ontological modes of inquiry and to test the limits of their own assumptions. The classroom becomes a space in which uncertainty, revision and exploratory thinking are not signs of weakness but indicators of developing sophistication. Teachers increasingly design tasks that foreground variation, contradiction and competing dependencies, enabling students to experience literary understanding as an evolving process rather than a fixed outcome. In this way, pedagogy aligns more closely with the dynamic structures of understanding that the framework seeks to describe.

This conclusion also suggests a fresh way of understanding one of the most influential traditions within English education, namely what is often called the London School of English teaching. Figures such as James Britton, Douglas Barnes, Harold Rosen and Peter Medway consistently argued that pupils should encounter literature through multiple forms of language use rather than through analytical essays alone. Talk, imaginative writing, dramatic activity, exploratory writing and personal response were treated not as preparatory exercises but as intellectually serious modes of learning. Their work is often defended psychologically or democratically, emphasising engagement, voice and personal growth. The present argument suggests an additional philosophical justification.

Different representational practices disclose different structures of understanding. Some make semantic truthmakers highly visible, others reveal ontological intuitions that remain inaccessible within conventional analytical prose, and still others expose dependency relations that become obscured once experience is compressed into examination formats. The London tradition therefore appears as an intuitive recognition that literary understanding possesses multiple dimensions requiring multiple forms of representation.

The philosophical vocabulary developed by Fine and van Benthem provides conceptual precision for insights that English teachers have often possessed without an adequate theoretical language. The broader significance of this proposal extends beyond English literature. Assessment across many disciplines frequently relies upon additive models in which competences are accumulated independently. The present framework suggests that educational understanding is more naturally conceived as a structured network of semantic and ontological dependencies whose organisation changes as expertise develops. Educational judgement therefore becomes an exercise in modelling those evolving structures rather than merely assigning numerical values to isolated performances.

The philosophical ambition of this essay has been correspondingly modest but, it is hoped, fertile. It has not attempted to derive educational practice directly from formal logic or metaphysics. Rather, it has argued that recent developments in both fields reveal distinctions already operating implicitly within expert classroom judgement. Teachers have long recognised students whose interpretations were semantically sophisticated but ontologically conventional, or ontologically adventurous but semantically unstable. They have long recognised that good organisation sometimes reflects conceptual simplicity while temporary disorder may accompany ambitious thought. They have long recognised that different classroom activities reveal different aspects of literary understanding. The present framework attempts to provide a systematic language in which those professional intuitions can be described, compared and refined.

If successful, the result is not a new assessment rubric but a new way of thinking about assessment itself. Instead of treating literary understanding as the accumulation of independent achievements, it becomes possible to describe it as an evolving architecture of semantic truthmakers, ontological grounding relations and local dependency structures whose complexity increases as students become increasingly accomplished readers. Assessment then ceases to be the reduction of literary understanding to a numerical coordinate. It becomes, more appropriately, an attempt to represent as faithfully as possible the intricate conceptual landscape through which literary understanding itself develops.