• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Before we proceed to this fourth remark, one thing should be observed. Since you have said you understand, your failure to support any of these first three remarks obligates you to agree with the author as far as he has gone. You have no freedom of will about this. It is not your sacred privilege to decide whether you are going to agree or disagree.

If you have not been able to show that the author is uninformed, misinformed, or illogical on relevant matters, you simply cannot disagree. You must agree. You cannot say, as so many students and others do, "I find nothing wrong with your premises, and no errors in reasoning, but I don't agree with your conclusions." All you can possibly mean by saying some-Agreeing or Disagreeing With an Author 1 61

thing like that is that you do not like the conclusions. You are not disagreeing. You are expressing your emotions or prejudices. If you have been convinced, you should admit it. ( If, despite your failure to support one or more of these three critical points, you still honestly feel unconvinced, perhaps you should not have said you understood in the first place. ) The first three remarks are related to the author's terms, propositions, and arguments. These are the elements he used to solve the problems that initiated his efforts. The fourth remark

-that the book is incomplete-bears on the structure of the whole.

4. To say that an author's analysis is incomplete is to say that he has not solved all the problems he started with, or that he has not made as good a use of his materials as possible, that he did not see all their implications and ramifications, or that he has failed to make distinctions that are relevant to his undertaking. It is not enough to say that a book is incomplete.

Anyone can say that of any book. Men are finite, and so are their works, every last one. There is no point in making this remark, therefore, unless the reader can define the inadequacy precisely, either by his own efforts as a knower or through the help of other books.

Let us illustrate this point briefly. The analysis of types of government in Aristotle's Politics is incomplete. Because of the limitations of his time and his erroneous acceptance of slavery, Aristotle fails to consider, or for that matter even to conceive, the truly democratic constitution that is based on universal suffrage; nor can he imagine either representative government or the modem kind of federated state. His analysis would have to be extended to apply to these political realities.

Euclid's Elements of Geometry is an incomplete account because Euclid failed to consider other postulates about the relation of parallel lines. Modem geometrical works, making these other assumptions, supply the deficiencies. Dewey's How We Think is an incomplete analysis of thinking because it fails to 1 62 HOW TO READ A BOOK

treat the sort of thinking that occurs in reading or learning by instruction in addition to the sort that occurs in investigation and discovery. To a Christian who believes in personal immortality, the writings of Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius are an incomplete account of human happiness.

This fourth point is strictly not a basis for disagreement.

It is critically adverse only to the extent that it marks the limitations of the author's achievement. A reader who agrees with a book in part-because he finds no reason to make any of the other points of adverse criticism-may, nevertheless, suspend judgment on the whole, in the light of this fourth point about the book's incompleteness. Suspended judgment on the reader's part responds to an author's failure to solve his problems pedectly.

Related books in the same field can be critically compared by reference to these four criteria. One is better than another in proportion as it speaks more truth and makes fewer errors.

If we are reading for knowledge, that book is best, obviously, which most adequately treats a given subject matter. One author may lack information that another possesses; one may make erroneous suppositions