How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [72]
1 50 HOW TO READ A BOOK
You may remember something that was said on this subject in the last chapter. If an author does not give reasons for his propositions, they can be treated only as expressions of personal opinions on his part. The reader who does not distinguish between the reasoned statement of knowledge and the flat expression of opinion is not reading to learn. He is at most interested in the author's personality and is using the book as a case history. Such a reader will, of course, neither agree nor disagree. He does not judge the book but the man.
If, however, the reader is primarily interested in the book and not the man, he should take his critical obligations seriously. These involve applying the distinction between real knowledge and mere opinion to himself as well as to the author. Thus the reader must do more than make judgments of agreement or disagreement. He must give reasons for them.
In the former case, of course, it suffices if he actively shares the author's reasons for the point on which they agree. But when he disagrees, he must give his own grounds for doing so. Otherwise, he is treating a matter of knowledge as if it were opinion.
RuLE 11, therefore, can be stated as follows : RESPECT THE
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN KNOWLEDGE AND MERE PERSONAL OPINION, BY GIVING REASONS FOR ANY CRITICAL JUDGMENT YOU MAKE, Incidentally, we would not want to be understood as claiming that there is a great deal of "absolute" knowledge available to men. Self-evident propositions, in the sense in which we defined them in the previous chapter, seem to us to be both indemonstrable and undeniable truths. Most knowledge, however, lacks that degree of absoluteness. What we know, we know subject to correction; we know it because all, or at least the weight, of the evidence supports it, but we are not and cannot be certain that new evidence will not sometime invalidate what we now believe is true.
This, however, does not remove the important distinction between knowledge and opinion that we have been stressing.
Knowledge, if you please, consists in those opinions that can be defended, opinions for which thete is evidence of one kind Criticizing a Book Fairly 1 51
or another. If we really know something, in this sense, we must believe that we can convince others of what we know.
Opinion, in the sense in which we have been employing the word, is unsupported judgment. That is why we have employed the modifiers "mere" or "personal" in conjunction with it. We can do no more than opine that something is true when we have no evidence or reason for the statement other than our personal feeling or prejudice. We can say that it is true and that we know it when we have objective evidence that other reasonable men are likely to accept.
Let us now summarize the three general maxims we have discussed in this chapter. The three together state the conditions of a critical reading and the manner in which the reader should proceed to "talk back" to the author.
The first requires the reader to complete the task of understanding before rushing in. The second adjures him not to be disputatious or contentious. The third asks him to view disagreement about matters of knowledge as being generally remediable. This rule goes further: It also commands him to give reasons for his disagreements so that issues are not merely stated but also defined. In that lies all hope for resolution.
1 1
AGREE I N G OR D I SAGRE E I N G
WITH AN AUTHOR
The first thing a reader can say is that he understands or that he does not. In fact, he must say he understands, in order to say more. If he does not understand, he should keep his peace and go back to work on the book.
There is one exception