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of science and philosophy, it is also relatively easy; and even if history is a mixed form, at least the reader ordinarily knows that he is reading history. But the various strands that go to make up social science-sometimes interwoven in this pattern, sometimes in that, sometimes in still anothermake the question very hard to answer when we are reading a work in any of the fields involved. The problem, in fact, is precisely as difficult as the problem of defining social science.

Nevertheless, the analytical reader must somehow manage to answer the question. It is not only his first task, but also his most important. If he is able to say what strands go to make 304 HOW TO READ A BOOK

up the book he is reading, he will have moved a good way toward understanding it.

Outlining a work in social science poses no special problems, but coming to terms with the author, as we have already suggested, may be extremely difficult, owing to the relative inability of the author to stipulate his usage. Nevertheless, some common understanding of the key terms is usually possible.

From terms we move to propositions and arguments, and here again there is no special problem if the book is a good one.

But the last question, What of it?, requires considerable restraint on the part of the reader. It is here that the situation we described earlier may occur-namely, the situation in which the reader says, "I cannot fault the author's conclusions, but I nevertheless disagree with them." This comes about, of course, because of the prejudgments that the reader is likely to have concerning the author's approach and his conclusions.

Reading Social Science Literature

More than once in the course of this chapter we have employed the phrase "social science literature" instead of "social science book." The reason is that it is customary in social science to read several books about a subject rather than one book for its own sake. This is not only because social science is a relatively new field with as yet but few classic texts. It is also because when reading social science, we often have our eye primarily on a particular matter or problem, rather than on a particular author or book. We are interested in law enforcement, for example, and we read half a dozen works on the subject. Or our interest may concern race relations, or education, or taxation, or the problems of local government.

Typically, there is no single, authoritative work on any of these subjects, and we must therefore read several. One sign of this is that social science authors themselves, in order to keep up with the times, must constantly bring out new, revised editions How to Read Social Science 305

of their works; and new works supersede older ones and rapidly render them obsolete.

To some extent, a similar situation obtains in philosophy, as we have already observed. Fully to understand a philosopher, you should make some attempt to read the philosophers your author himself has read, the philosophers who have influenced him. To some extent it is also true in history, where we suggested that, if you want to discover the truth of the past, you had better read several books about it rather than one.

But in those cases the likelihood that you would find one major, authoritative work was much greater. In social science that is not so common, and so the necessity of reading several works rather than one is much more urgent.

The rules of analytical reading are not in themselves applicable to the reading of several works on the same subject. They apply to each of the works that is read, of course, and if you want to read any of them well you have to observe them. But new rules of reading are required as we pass from the third level of reading ( analytical reading ), to the fourth ( syntopical reading) . We are now prepared to tackle that fourth level, having come to see, because of this characteristic of social science, the need for it.

Pointing this out makes it clear why we relegated the discussion of the social sciences to the last chapter in Part Three.

It should now be clear