How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [55]
The author may be honest in declaring himself on matters of fact or knowledge. We usually proceed in that trust. But unless we are exclusively interested in the author's personality, we should not be satisfied with knowing what his opinions are. His propositions are nothing but expressions of personal opinion unless they are supported by reasons. If it is the book and the subject with which it deals that we are interested in, and not just the author, we want to know not merely what his propositions are, but also why he thinks we should be persuaded to accept them.
The seventh rule, therefore, deals with arguments of all sorts. There are many kinds of reasoning, many ways of supporting what one says. Sometimes it is possible to argue that something is true; sometimes no more than a probability can be defended. But every sort of argument consists of a number of statements related in a certain way. This is said because of that. The word "because" here signifies a reason being given.
The presence of arguments is indicated by other words that relate statements, such as: if this is so, then that; or, since this, therefore that; or, it follows from this, that that is the case.
In the course of earlier chapters in this book, such sequences occurred. For those of us who are no longer in school, we observed, it is necessary, if we want to go on learning and discovering, to know how to make books teach us well. In that situation, if we want to go on learning, then we must know how to learn from books, which are absent teachers.
An argument is always a set or series of statements of which some provide the ground� or reasons for what is to be concluded. A paragraph, therefore, or at least a collection of sentences, is required to express an argument. The premises or principles of an argument may not always be stated first, but they are the source of the conclusion, nevertheless. If the argument is valid, the conclusion follows from the premises.
1 1 6 HOW TO READ A BOOK
That does not necessarily mean that the conclusion is true, since one or all of the premises that support it may be false.
There is a grammatical as well as a logical aspect to the order of these rules of interpretation. We go from terms to propositions to arguments, by going from words ( and phrases ) to sentences to collections of sentences ( or paragraphs ) . We are building up from simpler to more complex units. The smallest significant element in a book is, of course, a single word. It would be true but not adequate to say that a book consists of words. It also consists of groups of words, taken as units, and similarly of groups of sentences, taken as units.
The active reader is attentive not only to the words but also to the sentences and paragraphs. There is no other way of discovering the author's terms, propositions, and arguments.
The movement at this stage of analytical reading-when interpretation is our goal-seems to be in the opposite direction from the movement in the first stage-when the goal was a structural outline. There we went from the book as a whole to its major parts, and then to their subordinate divisions. As you might suspect, the two movements meet somewhere. The major parts of a book and their principal divisions contain many propositions and usually several arguments. But if you keep on dividing the book into its parts, at last you have to say: "In this part, the following points are made." Now each of these points is likely to be a proposition, and some of them taken together probably form an argument.
Thus, the two processes, outlining and interpretation, meet at the level of propositions and arguments. You work down to propositions and arguments by dividing the book into its parts. You work up to arguments by seeing how they are composed of propositions and ultimately of terms. When you have completed the two processes, you can really say that you know the contents of a book.
Determining an Author's Message 1 1 7
Sentences vs. Propositions
We have already noticed another thing about the rules we are going