Wallace's "This Is Water": Thought, Belief, and Education
This essay critically examines David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement speech, commonly known as "This Is Water," focusing on Wallace's central claim that real education is about learning to control how and what one thinks. The paper argues that Wallace ultimately blurs the distinction between thought and belief, tracing this tension through his fish and atheist anecdotes. The essay extends the critique by connecting Wallace's framework to Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion as a case study in unreflective belief, then considers how peer-group pressure and the rise of social media complicate Wallace's emphasis on self-centeredness as the primary obstacle to meaningful thought.
- Wallace's Argument: Education as Control of Thought: Wallace's thesis on education and mental default settings
- The Fish and the Atheist: Two Anecdotes Examined: Two anecdotes reveal the thought-belief distinction problem
- Thought Versus Belief: Where Wallace's Distinctions Break Down: Wallace's conflation of thinking and believing examined
- Richard Dawkins as the Fish Who Cannot See the Water: Dawkins as unwitting illustration of Wallace's blind spot
- Peer Pressure, Social Media, and the Limits of Wallace's Vision: Social media and peers complicate Wallace's individualist framework
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper opens by accurately summarizing Wallace's argument before subjecting it to critique, demonstrating careful reading before evaluation.
- It uses a specific, well-chosen case study — Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion — to ground the abstract distinction between thought and belief in a concrete, campus-relevant example.
- The conclusion broadens the argument meaningfully by introducing social media and peer dynamics, showing awareness that Wallace's speech exists in a specific historical moment that has since shifted.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates internal critique: it identifies a tension within Wallace's own argument (the distinction between thought and belief) and tracks how that tension undermines his thesis, rather than simply disagreeing with his conclusions from the outside. This technique — showing that an argument fails on its own terms — is one of the most persuasive moves in analytical writing.
Structure breakdown
The essay follows a clear five-part arc: (1) expository summary of Wallace's thesis; (2) close reading of two key anecdotes that reveal the thought/belief tension; (3) explicit identification of the logical problem; (4) application to Dawkins as a real-world illustration; and (5) a forward-looking critique that complicates Wallace's individualist assumptions by introducing social and technological context. Each section builds on the previous one, creating a progressive argument rather than a list of observations.
Wallace's Argument: Education as Control of Thought
In his commencement speech, David Foster Wallace makes the claim that the "real value of a real education...has almost nothing to do with knowledge" (Wallace, 2005). Instead, Wallace believes that college education is about training the mind to think — giving students "not the capacity to think, but rather the choice of what to think about," or, as he phrases it later in the speech, "learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think."
He clarifies this by painting a larger picture of how, in his view, the mind works. For Wallace, the human mind is "hard-wired" for self-centeredness, and virtuous behavior consists in learning how to override the mind's "default setting" and redirect attention outward. His examples mostly concern experiences that he believes undergraduates have not yet encountered — such as the tedium and "petty frustration" of waiting in line at a supermarket after a long workday. Drawing on his experience as a novelist, Wallace paints two hypothetical pictures of such a situation: one in which the mind's default mode of self-centeredness causes the individual to view every other person encountered with contempt and hostility, and another in which the mind extends an imaginative sympathy, viewing other people according to the most generous possible assumptions about their own difficulties in life.
This imaginative generosity can lead, in Wallace's view, to a kind of religious acceptance of transcendent meaning within tedium and frustration: "it will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down."
Works Cited
Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Print.
Gladwell, Malcolm. "Do Parents Matter?" 17 August 1998. Web. Accessed 11 April 2012 at:
Smith, Zadie. "Generation Why?" New York Review of Books, December 2010. Web. Accessed 11 April 2012 at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/25/generation-why/?pagination=false
Wallace, David Foster. "This Is Water: Commencement Speech." 2005. Web. Accessed 11 April 2012 at:
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