How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (24 page)

This fact is relevant to the rules for using a dictionary well, as an extrinsic aid to reading. The first rule of reading any book is to know what kind of book it is. That means knowing what the author's intention was and what sort of thing you can expect to find in his work. If you look upon a dictionary merely as a spelling book or guide to pronunciation, you will use it accordingly, which is to say not well. If you realize that it contains a wealth of historical information, crystallized in the growth and development of language, you will pay attention, not merely to the variety of meanings listed under each word, but also to their order and relation.

Above all, if you are interested in advancing your own education, you will use a dictionary according to its primary intention-as a help in reading books that might otherwise be too difficult because their vocabulary includes technical words, archaic words, literary allusions, or even familiar words used in obsolete senses.

Of course, there are many problems to be solved in reading a book well other than those arising from an author's vocabulary. And we have warned against-particularly on the first reading of a difficult book-sitting with the book in one hand and the dictionary in the other. If you have to look up too many words at the beginning, you will certainly lose track of the book's unity and order. The dictionary's primary service is on those occasions when you are confronted with a technical word or with a word that is wholly new to you. Even then, we would not recommend looking up even these during your first reading of a good book unless they seem to be important to the author's general meaning.

This suggests several other negative injunctions. There is no more irritating fellow than the one who tries to settle an argument about communism, or justice, or freedom, by quoting from the dictionary. Lexicographers may be respected as authorities on word usage, but they are not the ultimate founts of wisdom. Another negative rule is: Don't swallow the dictionary. Don't try to get word-rich quick by memorizing a fancy list of words whose meanings are unconnected with any actual experience. In short, do not forget that the dictionary is a book about words, not about things.

If we remember this, we can derive from that fact all the rules for using a dictionary intelligently. Words can be looked at in four ways.

1. WORDS ARE PHYSICAL THINGS-Writable words and speakable sounds. There must, therefore, be uniform ways of spelling and pronouncing them, though the uniformity is often spoiled by variations, and in any event is not as eternally important as some of your teachers may have indicated.

2. WORDS ARE PARTS OF SPEECH. Each single word plays a grammatical role in the more complicated structure of a phrase or sentence. The same word can vary in different usages, shifting from one part of speech to another, especially in a non-inflected language like English.

3. WORDS ARE SIGNS. They have meanings, not one but many. These meanings are related in various ways. Sometimes they shade from one into another; sometimes a word will have two or more sets of totally unrelated meanings. Through their meanings, different words are related to one another-as synonyms sharing in the same meaning even though they differ in shading; or as antonyms through opposition or contrast of meanings. Furthermore, it is in their capacity as signs that we distinguish words as proper or common names (according as they name just one thing or many that are alike in some respect) ; and as concrete or abstract names (according as they point to something we can sense, or refer to some aspect of things that we can understand by thought but not observe through our senses) .

Finally, 4. WORDS ARE CONVENTIONAL, They are man-made signs. That is why every word has a history, a cultural career in the course of which it goes through certain transformations.

The history of words is given by their etymological derivation from original word-roots, prefixes, and suffixes; it includes the account of their physical changes, both in spelling and pronunciation; it tells of the shifting meanings, and which among them are archaic and obsolete, which are current and regular, which are idiomatic, colloquial, or slang.

A good dictionary will answer all of these four different kinds of questions about words. The art of using a dictionary consists in knowing what questions to ask about words and how to find the answers. We have suggested the questions.

The dictionary itself tells you how to find the answers.

As such, it is a perfect self-help book, because it tells you what to pay attention to and how to interpret the various abbreviations and symbols it uses in giving you the four varieties of information about words. Anyone who fails to consult the explanatory notes and the list of abbreviations at the beginning of a dictionary has only himself to blame if he is not able to use it well.

How to Use an Encyclopedia

Many of the things we have said about dictionaries apply to encyclopedias also. Like the dictionary, the encyclopedia invites a playful reading. It too is diverting, entertaining, and, for some people, soothing. But it is just as vain to try to read an encyclopedia through as a dictionary. The man who knew an encyclopedia by heart would be in grave danger of incurring the title idiot savant-"learned fool."

Many people use a dictionary to find out how to spell and pronounce words. The analogous employment of an encyclopedia is to use it only to look up dates and places and other such simple facts. But this is to under-use, or misuse, an encyclopedia. Like dictionaries, such works are educational as well as informational tools. A glance at their history will confirm this.

Though the word "encyclopedia" is Greek, the Greeks had no encyclopedia, and for the same reason that they had no dictionary. The word meant to them not a book about knowledge, a book in which knowledge reposed, but knowledge itself-all the knowledge that an educated man should have.

It was again the Romans who first found encyclopedias necessary; the oldest extant example is that of Pliny.

Interestingly enough, the first alphabetically-arranged encyclopedia did not appear until about 1700. Most of the great encyclopedias since then have been alphabetical. It is the easiest of all arrangements, and it made possible great strides in encyclopedia-making.

Encyclopedias present a different problem from wordbooks. An alphabetical arrangement is natural for a dictionary.

But is the world, which is the subject matter of an encyclopedia, arranged alphabetically? Obviously not. Well then, how is the world arranged and ordered? This comes down to asking how knowledge is ordered.

The ordering of knowledge has changed with the centuries. All knowledge was once ordered in relation to the seven liberal arts-grammar, rhetoric, and logic, the trivium; arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, the quadrivium.

Medieval encylopedias reflected this arrangement. Since the universities were arranged according to the same system, and students studied according to it also, the arrangement was useful in education.

The modern university is very different from the medieval one, and the change is reflected in modern encyclopedias. The knowledge that they report is divided up in fiefs, or specialties, that are roughly equivalent to the various departments of the university. But this arrangement, although it forms the backbone structure of an encyclopedia, is masked by the alphabetical arrangement of the material.

It is this infrastructure-to take a term from the sociologists-that the good reader and user of an encyclopedia will seek to discover. It is true that it is primarily factual information that he wants from his set. But he should not be content with facts in isolation. The encyclopedia presents him with an arrangement of facts-facts in relation to other facts. The understanding, as contrasted with the mere information, that an encylopedia can provide depends on the recognition of such relations.

In an alphabetically-arranged encyclopedia, these relations are to a large extent obscured. In a topically-arranged encyclopedia, they are, of course, highlighted. But topical encyclopedias have many disadvantages, among them the fact that most readers are not accustomed to using them. Ideally, the best encyclopedia would be one that had both a topical and an alphabetical arrangement. Its presentation of material in the form of separate articles would be alphabetical, but it would also contain some kind of topical key or outline-essentially, a table of contents. (A table of contents is a topical arrangement of a book, as opposed to an index, which is an alphabetical arrangement.) As far as we know, there is no such encyclopedia on the market today, but it would be worth the effort to try to make one.

In default of the ideal, the reader must fall back on the help and advice provided him by an encyclopedia's editors.

Any good encyclopedia includes directions about how to use it effectively, and these should be read and followed. Often, these directions require that the user go first to the set's index, before turning to one of the alphabetically-arranged volumes.

Here, the index is serving the function of a table of contents, though not very well; for it gathers together, under one heading, references to discussions in the encyclopedia that may be widely separated in space but that are nevertheless about the same general subject. This reflects the fact that although an index is of course alphabetically arranged, its so-called analyticals -that is, the breakdowns under a main entry-are topically arranged. But the topics themselves must be in alphabetical order, which is not necessarily the best arrangement. Thus the index of a really good encyclopedia such as Britannica goes part of the way toward revealing the arrangement of knowledge that the work reflects. For this reason, any reader who fails to use the index has only himself to blame if the work does not serve his needs.

There are negative injunctions associated with the use of encyclopedias, just as there are for dictionaries. Encyclopedias, like dictionaries, are valuable adjuncts to the reading of good books-bad books do not ordinarily require their presence; but, as before, it is wise not to enslave yourself to an encyclopedia.

Again, as with dictionaries, encyclopedias are not to be used for the settling of arguments where these are based on differences of opinion. Nevertheless, they should be used to end disputes about matters of fact as quickly and permanently as possible. Facts should never be argued about in the first place.

An encyclopedia makes this vain effort unnecessary, because encyclopedias are full of facts. Ideally, they are filled with nothing else. Finally, although dictionaries usually agree in their accounts of words, encyclopedias often do not agree in their accounts of facts. Hence, if you are really interested in a subject and are depending on encyclopedic treatments of it, do not restrict yourself to just one encylopedia. Read more than one, and preferably ones written at different times.

We noted several points about words that the user should keep in mind when he consults a dictionary. In the case of encyclopedias, the analogous points are about facts, for an encyclopedia is about facts as a dictionary is about words.

1. FACTS ARE PROPOSITIONS. Statements of fact employ words in combination, such as "Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809," or "the atomic number of gold is 79."Facts are not physical things, as words are, but they do require to be explained. For thorough knowledge, for understanding, you must also know what the significance of a fact is-how it affects the truth you are seeking. You do not know much if all you know is what the fact is.

2. FACTS ARE "TRUE" PROPOSITIONS. Facts are not opinions.When someone says "it is a fact that," he means that it is generally agreed that such is the case. He never means, or never should mean, that he alone, or he together with a minority of observers, believes such and such to be the case. It is this characteristic of facts that gives the encyclopedia its tone and style. An encyclopedia that contains the unsupported opinions of its editors is dishonest; and although an encyclopedia may report opinions (for example, in a phrase like "it is held by some that this is the case, by others that that is the case") , it must clearly label them. The requirement that an encyclopedia report the facts of the case and not opinions about it (except as noted above) also limits the work's coverage. It cannot properly deal with matters about which there is no consensus with moral questions, for example. If it does deal with such questions, it can only properly report the disagreements among men about them.

3. FACTS ARE REFLECTIONS OF REALITY. Facts may be either (a) informational singulars or (b) relatively unquestioned generalizations, but in either case they are held to represent the way things really are. (The birthdate of Lincoln is an informational singular; the atomic number of gold implies a relatively unquestioned generalization about matter.) Thus facts are not ideas or concepts, nor are they theories in the sense of being mere speculations about reality. Similarly, an explanation of reality (or of part of it) is not a fact until and unless there is general agreement that it is correct.

There is one exception to the last statement. An encyclopedia can properly describe a theory that is no longer held to be correct, in whole or in part, or one that has not yet been fully validated, when it is associated with a topic, person or school that is the subject of an article. Thus, for example, Aristotle's views on the nature of celestial matter could be expounded in an article on Aristotelianism even though we no longer believe them to be true.

Finally, 4. FACTS ARE TO SOME EXTENT CONVENTIONAL.

Facts change, we say. We mean that some propositions that are considered to be facts in one epoch are no longer considered to be facts in another. Insofar as facts are "true" and represent reality, they cannot change, of course, because truth, strictly speaking, does not change, nor does reality. But not all propositions that we take to be true are really true; and we must concede that almost any given proposition that we take to be true can be falsified by more patient or more accurate observation and investigation. This applies particularly to the facts of science.