How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [89]
There is one exception to the last statement. An encyclopedia can properly describe a theory that is no longer held to be correct, in whole or in part, or one that has not yet been fully validated, when it is associated with a topic, person or school that is the subject of an article. Thus, for example, Aristotle's views on the nature of celestial matter could be expounded in an article on Aristotelianism even though we no longer believe them to be true.
Finally, 4. F ACI'S ARE To soME EXTENT CONVENTIONAL.
Facts change, we say. We mean that some propositions that are considered to be facts in one epoch are no longer considered to be facts in another. Insofar as facts are "true" and represent reality, they cannot change, of course, because truth, strictly speaking, does not change, nor does reality. But not all propositions that we take to be true are really true; and we Aids to Reading 187
must concede that almost any given proposition that we take to be true can be falsified by more patient or more accurate observation and investigation. This applies particularly to the facts of science.
Facts are also-again to some extent-culturally determined. An atomic scientist, for example, maintains a complicated, hypothetical structure of reality in his mind that determines-for him-certain facts that are different from the facts that are determined for and accepted by a primitive. This does not mean that the scientist and the primitive cannot agree on any facts; they must agree, for instance, that two pluS" two is four, or that a physical whole is greater than any of its parts.
But the primitive may not agree with the scientist's facts about nuclear particles, just as the scientist may not agree with the primitive's facts about ritual magic ( That was a hard sentence to write, because, being culturally determined ourselves, we tend to agree with the scientist rather than the primitive and were thus tempted to put the second "fact" in quotation marks.
But that is precisely the point. )
A good encyclopedia will answer your questions about facts if you remember the points about facts that we have outlined above. The art of using an encyclopedia as an aid to reading is the art of asking the proper questions about facts. As with the dictionary, we have merely suggested the questions; the encyclopedia will supply the answers.
You should also remember that an encyclopedia is not the best place to pursue understanding. Insights may be gained from it about the order and arrangement of knowledge; but that, although an important subject, is nonetheless a limited one. There are many matters required for understanding that you will not find in an encyclopedia.
There are two particularly striking omissions. An encyclopedia, properly speaking, contains no arguments, except insofar as it reports the course of arguments that are now widely accepted as correct or at least as of historical interest. Thus a 188 HOW TO READ A BOOK
major element in expository writing is lacking. An encylopedia also contains no poetry or imaginative literature, although it may contain facts about poetry and poets. Since both the imagination and the reason are required for understanding, this means that the encyclopedia must be a relatively unsatisfying tool in the pursuit of it.
P A R T T H R E E
Approaches
to Different Kinds
of Reading Matter
1 3
HOW TO READ
PRACTICAL BOOKS
In any art or field of practice, rules have a disappointing way of being too general. 1be more general, of course, the fewer, and that is an advantage. The more general, too, the more intelligible-it is easier to understand the rules in and