How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [122]
In the great works of science, there is no oratory or propaganda, though there may be bias in the sense of initial presuppositions. You detect this, and take account of it, by distinguishing what the author assumes from what he establishes through argument. The more "objective" a scientific author is, the more he will explicitly ask you to take this or that for granted. Scientific objectivity is not the absence of initial bias.
It is attained by frank confession of it.
The leading terms in a scientific work are usually expressed by uncommon or technical words. They are relatively easy to spot, and through them you can readily grasp the propositions. The main propositions are always general ones.
Science thus is not chronotopic. Just the opposite; a scientist, unlike a historian, tries to get away from locality in time and place. He tries to say how things are generally, how things generally behave.
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There are likely to be two main difficulties in reading a scientific book. One is with respect to the arguments. Science is primarily inductive; that is, its primary arguments are those that establish a general proposition by reference to observable evidence-a single case created by an experiment, or a vast array of cases collected by patient investigation. There are other arguments, of the sort that are called deductive. These are arguments in which a proposition is proved by other propo.
sitions already somehow established. So far as proof is concerned, science does not differ much from philosophy. But the inductive argument is characteristic of science.
This first difficulty arises because, in order to understand the inductive arguments in a scientific book, you must be able to follow the evidence that the scientist reports as their basis.
Unfortunately, this is not always possible with nothing but the book in hand. If the book itself fails to enlighten him, the reader has only one recourse, which is to get the necessary special experience for himself at first hand. He may have to witpess a laboratory demonstration. He may have to look at and handle pieces of apparatus similar to those referred to in the book. He may have to go to a museum and observe specimens or models.
Anyone who desires to acquire an understanding of the history of science must not only read the classical texts, but must also become acquainted, through direct experience, with the crucial experiments in that history. There are classical experiments as well as classical books. The scientific classics become more intelligible to those who have seen with their own eyes and done with their own hands what a great scientist describes as the procedure by which he reached his insights.
This does not mean that you cannot make a start without going through all the steps described. Take a book like Lavoisier's Elements of Chemistry, for instance. Published in 1789, the work is no longer considered to be useful as a textbook in chemistry, and indeed a student would be unwise to study it for the purpose of passing even a high school examination in the subject. Nevertheless, its method was revolutionary at the 260 HOW TO READ A BOOK
time, and its conception of a chemical element is still, on the whole, the one that we have in modern times. Now the point is that you do not have to read the book through, and in detail, to receive these impressions of it. The Preface, for example, with its emphasis on the importance of method in science, is enlightening. "Every branch of physical science," wrote Lavoisier, must consist of three things: the series of facts which are the objects of the science, the ideas which represent these facts, and the words by which these facts are expressed. . . . And, as ideas are preserved and communicated by means of words, it necessarily follows that we canot improve