How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (17 page)

There are only two differences between finding the terms that words express and the propositions that sentences express.

One is that you employ a larger context in the latter case. You bring all the surrounding sentences to bear on the sentence in question, just as you used the surrounding words to interpret a particular word. In both cases, you proceed from what you do understand to the gradual elucidation of what is at first relatively unintelligible.

The other difference lies in the fact that complicated sentences usually express more than one proposition. You have not completed your interpretation of an important sentence until you have separated out of it all the different, though perhaps related, propositions. Skill in doing this comes with practice.

Take some of the complicated sentences in this book and try to state in your own words each of the things that is being asserted. Number them and relate them.

"State in your own words!" That suggests the best test we know for telling whether you have understood the proposition or propositions in the sentence. If, when you arc asked to explain what the author means by a particular sentence, all you can do is repeat his very words, with some minor alterations in their order, you had better suspect that you do not know what he means. Ideally, you should be able to say the same thing in totally different words. The idea can, of course, be approximated in varying degrees. But if you cannot get away at all from the author's words, it shows that only words have passed from him to you, not thought or knowledge. You know his words, not his mind. He was trying to communicate knowledge, and all you received was words.

The process of translation from a foreign language to English is relevant to the test we have suggested. If you cannot state in an English sentence what a French sentence says, you know you do not understand the meaning of the French.

But even if you can, your translation may remain only on the verbal level; for even when you have formed a faithful English replica, you still may not know what the writer of the French sentence was trying to convey.

The translation of one English sentence into another, however, is not merely verbal. The new sentence you have formed is not a verbal replica of the original. If accurate, it is faithful to the thought alone. That is why making such translations is the best test you can apply to yourself, if you want to be sure you have digested the proposition, not merely swallowed the words. If you fail the test, you have uncovered a failure of understanding. If you say that you know what the author means, but can only repeat the author's sentence to show that you do, then you would not be able to recognize the author's proposition if it were presented to you in other words.

The author may himself express the same proposition in different words in the course of his writing. The reader who has not seen through the words to the proposition they convey is likely to treat the equivalent sentences a'> if they were statements of different propositions. Imagine a person who did not know that "2 + 2 = 4" and "4- 2 = 2" were different notations for the same arithmetic relationship-the relationship of four as the double of two, or two as the half of four.

You would have to conclude that that person simply did not understand the equation. The same conclusion is forced on you concerning yourself or anybody else who cannot tell when equivalent statements of the same proposition are being made, or who cannot himself offer an equivalent statement when he claims to understand the proposition a sentence contains.

These remarks have a bearing on syntopical reading-the reading of several books about the same subject matter. Different authors frequently say the same thing in different words, or different things using almost the same words. The reader who cannot see through the language to the terms and propositions will never be able to compare such related works.

Because of their verbal differences, he is likely to misread the authors as disagreeing, or to ignore their real differences because of verbal resemblances in their statements.

There is one other test of whether you understand the proposition in a sentence you have read. Can you point to some experience you have had that the proposition describes or to which the proposition is in any way relevant? Can you exemplify the general truth that has been enunciated by referring to a particular instance of it? To imagine a possible case is often as good as citing an actual one. If you cannot do anything at all to exemplify or illustrate the proposition, either imaginatively or by reference to actual experiences, you should suspect that you do not know what is being said.

Not all propositions are equally susceptible to this test. It, may be necessary to have the special experience that only a laboratory can afford to be sure you have grasped certain scientific propositions. But the main point is clear. Propositions do not exist in a vacuum. They refer to the world in which we live. Unless you can show some acquaintance with actual or possible facts to which the proposition refers or is relevant somehow, you are playing with words, not dealing with thought and knowledge.

Let us consider one example of this. A basic proposition in metaphysics is expressed by the following words: "Nothing acts except what is actual." We have heard many students repeat those words to us with an air of satisfied wisdom. They have thought they were discharging their duty to us and to the author by so perfect a verbal repetition. But the sham was obvious as soon as we asked them to state the proposition in other words. Seldom could they say, for instance, that if something does not exist, it cannot do anything. Yet this is an immediately apparent translation-apparent, at least, to anyone who understood the proposition in the original sense.

Failing to get a translation, we would then ask for an exemplification of the proposition. If any one of them told us that grass is not made to grow by merely possible showers -that one's bank account does not increase on account of a merely possible raise-we would know that the proposition had been grasped.

The vice of "verbalism" can be defined as the bad habit of using words without regard for the thoughts they should convey and without awareness of the experiences to which they should refer. It is playing with words. As the two tests we have suggested indicate, "verbalism" is the besetting sin of those who fail to read analytically. Such readers never get beyond the words. They possess what they read as a verbal memory that they can recite emptily. One of the charges made by certain modern educators against the liberal arts is that they tend to verbalism, but just the opposite seems to be the case.

The failure in reading-the omnipresent verbalism -of those who have not been trained in the arts of grammar and logic shows how lack of such discipline results in slavery to words rather than mastery of them.

Finding the Arguments

We have spent enough time on propositions. Let us now turn to the seventh rule of analytical reading, which requires the reader to deal with collections of sentences. We said before that there was a reason for not formulating this rule of interpretation by saying that the reader should find the most important paragraphs. The reason is that there are no settled conventions among writers about how to construct paragraphs.

Some great writers, such as Montaigne, Locke, or Proust, write extremely long paragraphs; others, such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, or Tolstoy, write relatively short ones. In recent times, under the influence of newspaper and magazine style, most writers tend to cut their paragraphs to fit quick and easy reading. This paragraph, for instance, is probably too long. If we had wanted to coddle our readers, we should have started a new one with the words, "Some great writers."

It is not merely a matter of length. The point that is troublesome here has to do with the relation between language and thought. The logical unit to which the seventh rule directs our reading is the argument-a sequence of propositions, some of which give reasons for another. This logical unit is not uniquely related to any recognizable unit of writing, as terms are related to words and phrases, and propositions to sentences. An argument may be expressed in a single complicated sentence. Or it may be expressed in a number of sentences that are only part of one paragraph. Sometimes an argument may coincide with a paragraph, but it may also happen that an argument runs through several or many paragraphs.

There is one further difficulty. There are many paragraphs in any book that do not express an argument at all-perhaps not even part of one. They may consist of collections of sentences that detail evidence or report how the evidence has been gathered. As there are sentences that are of secondary importance, because they are merely digressions or side remarks, so also can there be paragraphs of this sort. It hardly needs to be said that they should be read rather quickly.

Because of all this, we suggest another formulation of RULE 7, as follows:

FIND IF YOU CAN THE PARAGRAPHS IN A BOOK THAT STATE ITS IMPORTANT ARGUMENTS; BUT IF THE ARGUMENTS ARE NOT THUS EXPRESSED, YOUR TASK IS TO CONSTRUCT THEM, BY TAKING A SENTENCE FROM THIS PARAGRAPH, AND ONE FROM THAT, UNTIL YOU HAVE GATHERED TOGETHER THE SEQUENCE OF SENTENCES THAT STATE THE PROPOSITIONS THAT COMPOSE THE ARGUMENT.

After you have discovered the leading sentences, the construction of paragraphs should be relatively easy. There are various ways of doing this. You can do it by actually writing out on a piece of paper the propositions that together form an argument. But usually a better way, as we have already suggested, is to put numbers in the margin, together with other marks, to indicate the places where the sentences occur that should be tied together in a sequence.

Authors are more or less helpful to their readers in this matter of making the arguments plain. Good expository authors try to reveal, not conceal, their thought. Yet not even all good authors do this in the same way. Some, such as Euclid. Galileo, Newton (authors who write in a geometrical or mathematical style) , come close to the ideal of making a single paragraph an argumentative unit. The style of most writing in non-mathematical fields tends to present two or more arguments in a single paragraph or to have an argument run through several.

In proportion as a book is more loosely constructed, the paragraphs tend to become more diffuse. You often have to search through all the paragraphs of a chapter to find the sentences you can construct into a statement of a single argument.

Some books make you search in vain, and some do not even encourage the search.

A good book usually summarizes itself as its arguments develop. If the author summarizes his arguments for you at the end of a chapter, or at the end of an elaborate section, you should be able to look back over the preceding pages and find the materials he has brought together in the summary. In The Origin of Species, Darwin summarizes his whole argument for the reader in a last chapter, entitled "Recapitulation and Conclusion." The reader who has worked through the book deserves that help. The one who has not cannot use it.

Incidentally, if you have inspected the book well before beginning to read it analytically, you will know whether the summary passages exist and if they do, where they are. You can then make the best possible use of them when interpreting the book.

Another sign of a bad or loosely constructed book is the omission of steps in an argument. Sometimes they can be omitted without damage or inconvenience, because the propositions left out can be generally supplied from the common knowledge of readers. But sometimes their omission is misleading, and may even be intended to mislead. One of the most familiar tricks of the orator or propagandist is to leave certain things unsaid, things that are highly relevant to the argument, but that might be challenged if they were made explicit. While we do not expect such devices in an honest author whose aim is to instruct us, it is nevertheless a sound maxim of careful reading to make every step in an argument explicit.

Whatever kind of book it is, your obligation as a reader remains the same. If the book contains arguments, you must know what they are, and be able to put them into a nutshell.

Any good argument can be put into a nutshell. There are, of course, arguments built upon arguments. In the course of an elaborate analysis, one thing may be proved in order to prove another, and this may be used in turn to make a still further point. The units of reasoning, however, are single arguments.

If you can find these in any book you are reading, you are not likely to miss the larger sequences.

This is all very well to say, you may object, but unless one knows the structure of arguments as a logician does, how can one be expected to find them in a book, or worse, to construct them when the author does not state them compactly in a single paragraph?

The answer is that it must be obvious that you do not have to know about arguments "as a logician does." There are relatively few logicians in the world, for better or for worse. Most of the books that convey knowledge and can instruct us contain arguments. They are intended for the general reader, not for specialists in logic.

No great logical competence is needed to read these books.

To repeat what we said before, the nature of the human mind is such that if it works at all during the process of reading, if it comes to terms with the author and reaches his propositions, it will see his arguments as well.

There are, however, a few things we can say that may be helpful to you in carrying out this rule of reading. In the first place, remember that every argument must involve a number of statements. Of these, some give the reasons why you should accept a conclusion the author is proposing. If you find the conclusion first, then look for the reasons. If you find the reasons first, see where they lead.

In the second place, discriminate between the kind of argument that points to one or more particular facts as evidence for some generalization and the kind that offers a series of general statements to prove some further generalizations.

The former kind of reasoning is usually referred to as inductive, the latter as deductive; but the names are not what is important. What is important is the ability to discriminate between the two.