Catch 23

In homage to Jeremy’s posts on opening sentences and paragraphs that convince you to keep reading, here’s the intro to a chapter I stumbled across today that almost guarantees I’ll finish the whole thing:

Yossarian looked at the professor soberly and tried another approach. “Does Orr have a theory?”
“He sure does,” Prof. Daneeka responded.
“Then can you approve his dissertation?”
“I sure can. But first he has to make his concepts explicit. That’s part of the rule and we follow it scrupulously.”
“Then why doesn’t he?”
“Because he has a theory,” Daneeka said calmly, “and you can’t start with a theory.”
“I see. He should have started with a set of concepts.”
“That’s right. As Abraham Kaplan puts it: ‘Proper concepts are needed to formulate a good theory.’”
“Well,” Yossarian sighed, “all he has to do is turn things around and then you can approve his dissertation.”
“No. Then I can’t approve his dissertation.”
“You mean there is a catch?”
“Sure there is a catch,” the professor replied. “Catch-23. Anyone needs a good theory to arrive at the proper concepts.”

–Charles Jones, “Doing Before Knowing: Concept Development in Political Research”