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(Move: Look for Patterns)

What details don’t seem to fit? How might they be connected with other details to form a different pattern?

What does this new pattern mean? How might it cause me to read the meaning of individual details differently?

(Moves: Look for Anomalies and Keep Asking Questions)

The process of posing and answering such questions—the analytical process—is one of trial and error. One of the main things you acquire in the study of an academic discipline is knowledge of the kinds of questions the discipline typically asks. For example, an economics professor and a sociology professor might observe the same phenomenon, such as a sharp decline in health benefits for the elderly, and analyze its causes and significance in different ways. The economist might consider how such benefits are financed and how changes in government policy and the country’s population patterns might explain the declining supply of funds for the elderly. The sociologist might ask about attitudes toward the elderly and about the social structures that the elderly rely on for support.

Science as a Process of Argument: A Biologist Speaks

In the following Voice from Across the Curriculum, molecular biologist Bruce Wightman argues that, as in other disciplines, scientific ideas are constantly tested and reformulated. He is responding to the misconception that science is all about facts and thus does not require analysis and interpretation.

Voices from Across the Curriculum

I find it ironic that the discipline of science, which is so inherently analytical, is so difficult for students to think about analytically. Much of this comes from the prevailing view of society that science is somehow factual. Science students come to college to learn the facts. I think many find it comforting to think that everything they learn will be objective. None of the wishy-washy subjectivity that many perceive in other disciplines.

Anyone who has ever done science knows that nothing could be further from the truth. Just like other academics, scientists spend endless hours patiently arguing over evidence that seems obscure or irrelevant to laypeople. There is rarely an absolute consensus. Science is an endless process of argument, obtaining evidence, analyzing evidence, and reformulating arguments. To be sure, we all accept gravity as a “fact.” But to Newton, gravity was an argument for which evidence needed to be produced, analyzed, and discussed. It’s important to remember that a significant fraction of his intellectual contemporaries were not swayed by his argument. Equally important is that many good scientific ideas of today will eventually be significantly modified or shown to be wrong.

—Bruce Wightman, Professor of Biology

“2:30”: An Example of the Five Analytical Moves in Action

Printed below is a commencement address given on May 27, 2010 at Harvard University to medical and dentistry students and their families and friends. Students in both programs take their courses together for the first two years and then pursue separate tracks in the final two years before coming together again at graduation. The speaker, Bob Tarby, was a biology and English major at our college before going on to Harvard. HSDM is the Harvard School of Dental Medicine.

Study how this speech develops as a piece of thinking from its initial observation that “dentistry is the butt of a lot of jokes.” Concentrate on moves 4 and 5—making the implicit explicit and reformulating questions. Throughout the piece, you will also notice how the writer has set up his primary questions by employing moves 1–3. He suspends judgment to explore a question. He locates significant parts and finds patterns, both in people’s responses to dentists and in the way people think and feel about teeth.

Mark specific sentences in which the speaker makes the implicit explicit. Also mark places where he pauses to formulate and to reformulate questions. We have included a few analytical observations in square brackets to help you shift