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In any event, they are certainly the principal points a reader who disagrees can make. They are somewhat independent.

Making one of these remarks does not prevent you from making another. Each and all can be made, because the defects they refer to are not mutually exclusive.

But, we should add, the reader cannot make any of these remarks without being definite and precise about the respect in which the author is uninformed or misinformed or illogical.

A book cannot be uninformed or misinformed about everything. It cannot be totally illogical. Furthermore, the reader who makes any of these remarks must not only make it definitely, by specifying the respect, but he must also support his point. He must give reasons for saying what he does.

Judging the Author's Soundness

The first three remarks are somewhat different from the fourth, as we will presently see. Let us consider each of them briefly, and then tum to the fourth.

Agreeing or Disagreeing With an Author 1 5 7

1. To say that an author is uninformed is to say that he lacks some piece of knowledge that is relevant to the problem he is trying to solve. Notice here that unless the knowledge, if possessed by the author, would have been relevant, there is no point in making this remark. To support the remark, you must be able yourself to state the knowledge that the author lacks and show how it is relevant, how it makes a difference to his conclusions.

A few illustrations here must suffice. Darwin lacked the knowledge of genetics that the work of Mendel and later experimentalists now provides. His ignorance of the mechanism of inheritance is one of the major defects in The Origin of Species. Gibbon lacked certain facts that later historical research has shown to have a bearing on the fall of Rome.

Usually, in science and history, the lack of information is discovered by later researches. Improved techniques of observation and prolonged investigation make this the way things happen for the most part. But in philosophy, it may happen otherwise. There is just as likely to be loss as gain with the passage of time. The ancients, for example, clearly distinguished between what men can sense and imagine and what they can understand. Yet, in the eighteenth century, David Hume revealed his ignorance of this distinction between images and ideas, even though it had been so well established by the work of earlier philosophers.

2. To say that an author is misinformed is to say that he asserts what is not the case. His error here may be owing to lack of knowledge, but the error is more than that. Whatever its cause, it consists in making assertions contrary to fact. The author is proposing as true or more probable what is in fact false or less probable. He is claiming to have knowledge he does not possess. This kind of defect should be pointed out, of course, only if it is relevant to the author's conclusions. And to support the remark you must be able to argue the truth or greater probability of a position contrary to the author's.

1 58 HOW TO READ A BOOK

For example, in one of his political treatises, Spinoza appears to say that democracy is a more primitive type of government than monarchy. This is contrary to well-ascertained facts of political history. Spinoza's error in this respect has a bearing on his argument. Aristotle was misinformed about the role that the female factor plays in animal reproduction, and consequently came to unsupportable conclusions about the processes of procreation. Aquinas erroneously supposed that the matter of the heavenly bodies is essentially different from that of terrestrial bodies, because he supposed that the former change only in position, and are otherwise unalterable. Modem astrophysics corrects this error and thereby improves on ancient and medieval astronomy. But here is an error that has limited relevance. Making it does not affect Aquinas' metaphysical account of the nature of all sensible things as composed of matter and form.

These first two points of criticism may be related. Lack of information, as we have seen, may be the