How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [57]
It is important to distinguish the various propositions that a long, complex sentence contains. In order to agree or disagree with Machiavelli, you must first understand what he is saying.
But he is saying three things in this one sentence. You may disagree with one of them and agree with the others. You may think Machiavelli is wrong in recommending terrorism to a prince on any grounds; but you may acknowledge his shrewdness in saying that the prince had better not arouse hatred along with fear, and you may also agree that keeping his hands off his subjects' property and women is an indispensable condition of not being hated. Unless you recognize the distinct propositions in a complicated sentence, you cannot make a discriminating judgment on what the writer is saying.
Lawyers know this fact very well. They have to examine sentences carefully to see what is being alleged by the plaintiff or denied by the defendant. The single sentence, "John Doe signed the lease on March 24," looks simple enough, but still it says several things, some of which may be true and the others false. John Doe may have signed the lease, but not on March 24, and that fact may be important. In short, even a grammatically simple sentence sometimes expresses two or more propositions.
We have said enough to indicate what we mean by the difference between sentences and propositions. They are not related as one to one. Not only can a single sentence express several propositions, either through ambiguity or complexity, but one and the same proposition can also be expressed by two 1 20 HOW TO READ A BOOK
or more different sentences. If you grasp our terms through the words and phrases we use synonymously, you will know that we are saying the same thing when we say, "Teaching and being taught are correlative functions," and "Initiating and receiving communication are related processes."
We are going to stop explaining the grammatical and logical points involved and tum to the rules. The difficulty in this chapter, as in the last, is to stop explaining. Instead, we will assume that you know some grammar. We do not necessarily mean that you must understand everything about syntax, but you should be concerned about the ordering of words in sentences and their relation to one another. Some knowledge of grammar is indispensable to a reader. You cannot begin to deal with terms, propositions, and arguments-the elements of thought-until you can penetrate beneath the surface of language. So long as words, sentences, and paragraphs are opaque and unanalyzed, they are a barrier to, rather than a medium of, communication. You will read words but not receive knowledge.
Here are the rules. The fifth rule of reading, as you will recall from the last chapter, was : RuLE 5. FIND THE IMPORTANT
WORDS AND COME TO TERMS. The sixth rule can be expressed thus : RuLE 6. MARK THE MOST IMPORTANT SENTENCES IN A BOOK
AND DISCOVER THE PROPOSmONS THEY CONTAIN. The seventh rule is this : RuLE 7. LOCATE OR CONSTRUCT THE BASIC ARGU
MENTS IN THE BOOK BY FINDING THEM IN THE CONNECTION OF
SENTENCES. You will see later why we did not say "paragraphs"
in the formulation of this rule.
Incidentally, it is just as true of these new rules as it was of the rule about coming to terms that they apply primarily to expository works. The rules about propositions and arguments are quite different when you are reading a poetical work-a novel, play, or poem. We will discuss the changes that are required in applying them to such works later.
Determining an Author's Message 1 21
Finding the Key Sentences
How does one locate the most important sentences in a book? How, then, does one interpret these sentences to