How to Read a Book, Chapter 9
Chapter 9: Determining and Author's Message
This is the final step of understanding an author's meaning, before readers begin making their own contributions to the discussion and critiquing a text. It's important to make sure we understand what someone is saying before we either agree or disagree. I'm assuming here that we are really interested in an honest discussion, rather than simply in scoring rhetorical points. Adler and Van Doren mentioned that "one of the most familiar tricks of the orator or propagandist is to leave certain things unsaid, things that are highly relevant to the argument, but that might be challenged if they were made explicit." As readers we need to be on the lookout for these types of omissions; we also need to avoid making them ourselves.
The authors also warned that authors' "propositions are nothing but expressions of personal opinion unless they are supported by reasons." What they call "reasons" are both facts (data, evidence) and an argument suggesting why "we should be persuaded to accept them." Sometimes one or the other of these aspects is more pronounced, but both must be addressed. A pile of evidence is only convincing if we understand why. And even an argument that is logical and plausible needs data to be considered connected with reality.
There are both logical and grammatical structures that contribute to the development of an argument. The logical progression is from terms to propositions to arguments. Depending on the complexity of the topic, these logical elements could be expressed as individual words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, or even larger units. Generally writers will try to make these elements as compact as possible, but there's often a tension between brevity and nuance. Again this becomes doubly complicated in polemical or propagandistic writing, but we'll continue assuming the author wants their argument to be accepted after being fully understood rather than to trick the reader. In either case, though, it's the reader's job to uncover the terms, propositions, and arguments so they can evaluate and respond to them.
The steps involved in this process, they said, are to "Mark the most important sentences in a book and discover the propositions they contain" (Rule #6), and "Locate and construct the basic arguments in the book by finding them in the connection of sentences" (Rule #7). The good news is that these propositions and arguments are unlikely to be hidden. Adler and Van Doren said "the heart of [the author's] communication lies in the major affirmations and denials" made and the reasons supporting them. They suggested that readers might find them by noting sentences they need to pause over and reread in order to understand. They remarked on the value of cultivating a sense of noticing when we are "perplexed and know it".
Adler and Van Doren then made the interesting observation that these arguments, and reading more broadly, take place in time. There is a progression: "You have to say one thing first, then another, and then another. An argument begins somewhere, goes somewhere, gets somewhere." They went on to discuss how this is a natural element of human thought, like recognizing colors. I was reminded of a passage in the first chapter of John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, which I'm also reading now, where he talked about the way orators say only what the audience is ready to hear, building their argument over time. There's an element of performance in this, that I find fascinating.
The advice the authors gave for figuring out propositions and arguments was the classic, "State it in your own words!" That simple advice, they said, was "the best we know for telling whether you have understood the proposition or propositions in the sentence." This becomes especially important, they continued, when the readers begin looking at books syntopically, comparing the ideas of different authors who may not use the same terminology or arguments, even when they are talking about the same thing. This becomes even more interesting but also more difficult when the authors are not talking about the same thing (or aren't aware of it), and the reader makes the connection. At this point, we might say, readers are well on their way to becoming authors in their own right.
Adler and Van Doren spent some time discussing assumptions, axioms, self-evident truths, and tautologies, before arriving at their eighth rule: Find out what the author's solutions are. This echoes rule #4, which was about describing the problem with which the author was engaging. The question now becomes, did they solve it? If so, how? Did they fail? Did they create new problems that must now be addressed? These are they types of evaluative questions the authors suggested readers were ready to address, after successfully following the eight rules, as they began a critical conversation with the book.