HOW TO READ A BOOK

by Mortimer J Adler

  CHAPTER TEN

  Coming to Terms

  - 1 -

  where are we?

  We have seen that any good book deserves three readings. They have to be done separately and consciously when we are learning to read, though they can be done together and unconsciously when we are expert. We have discovered that there are four rules for the first, or analytical, reading. They are: (i) classify the book according to kind and subject matter; (2) state what the whole book is about with the utmost brevity; (3) define its major parts in their order and relation, and analyze these parts as you have analyzed the whole; (4) define the problem or problems the authors trying to solve.

  You are now prepared to go on with the second reading, and its four rules. You are already somewhat acquainted with the first of these rules. It was stated in the second chap ter of this book: spot the important words an author uses and figure out how he uses them. We then put this rule into operation by running down the various meanings of such words as "reading" and "learning." When in any context you knew precisely what I meant when I used these words, you had come to terms with me.

  Coming to terms is nearly the last stage in any successful business negotiation. All that remains is to sign on the dotted line. But in the reading of a book, coming to terms is the first stage of interpretation. Unless the reader comes to terms with the author, the communication of knowledge from one to the other does not take place. A term, as you will see shortly, is the basic element of communicable knowledge.

  But you can see at once that a term is not a word—at least, not just a word without any further qualifications. If a term and a word were exactly the same, you would only have to find the important words in a book and you would know its basic terms immediately.

  But a word can have many meanings, especially an important word. If the author uses a word in one meaning, and the reader reads it in another, words have passed between them, but they have not come to terms. Where there is unresolved ambiguity in communication, there is no communication, or at best it must be incomplete.

  Just look at the word "communication" for a moment. Its root is related to the word

  "common." We speak of a community when people have something in common.

  Communication is an effort on the part of one man to share something with another: his knowledge, his decisions, his sentiments. It succeeds only when it results in a common something, as an item of knowledge which two men have in common.

  Now when there is ambiguity in communication, all that is in common are the words which one man speaks or writes and another hears or reads. So long as ambiguity remains, there are no meanings in common between writer and reader. For the communication to be successfully completed, therefore, it is necessary for the two parties to use the same words with the same meanings. When that happens, communication happens, the miracle of two minds with but a single thought.

  A term can be defined as an unambiguous word. That is not quite accurate, for strictly there are no unambiguous words. What I should have said is that a term is a word used unambiguously. The dictionary is full of words. They are almost all ambiguous in the sense that they have many meanings. Look up any word and find this out for yourself, if you think there are many exceptions to this generalization. But a word which has several meanings can be used in one sense at a time. When you and I together, as writer and reader, somehow manage for a time to use a given word with one meaning, then, during that time of unambiguous usage, we have come to terms. I think we did manage to come to terms in the matter of reading and learning, for instance.

  You cannot find terms in dictionaries, though the materials for making them are there.

  Terms occur only in the process of communication. They occur when a writer tries to avoid ambiguity and a reader helps him by trying to follow his use of words. There are, of course, many degrees of success in this business. Coming to terms is the ideal limit toward which writer and reader should strive. Since this is one of the. primary achievements of the art of writing and reading, we can think of terms as an artistic use of words, a skilled use of words for the sake of communicating knowledge.

  Let me restate the rule for you. As I phrased it originally, it was: spot the important words and figure out how the author is using them. Now I can make that a little more precise and elegant: find the important words and through them come to terms with the author. Note that the rule has two parts. The first step is to locate the words which make a difference. The second is to determine their meanings, as used, with precision.

  This is the first rule for the second way of reading, the interpretative reading. The other rules, to be discussed in the next chapter, are like this first one in an important respect.

  They, also, require you to take two steps: a step dealing with the language as such, and a step beyond the language to the thought which lies behind it.

  If language were a pure and perfect medium for thought, these steps would not be separate. If every word had only one meaning, if words could not be used ambiguously, if, in short, each word was an ideal term, language would be a diaphanous medium. The reader would see straight through the writer's words to the content of his mind. If that were the case, there would be no need at all for this second way of reading.

  Interpretation would be unnecessary.

  But you know that that is far from being the case. There is no use in crying about it, no use in faking up impossible schemes for an ideal language, as the philosopher Leibnitz and some of his followers have tried to do. The only thing to do is to make the best of language as it is, and the only way to do that is to use language as skillfully as possible.

  Because language is imperfect as a medium, it also functions as an obstacle to communication. The rules of interpretative reading are directed to overcoming that obstacle. We can expect a good writer to do his best to reach us through the barrier language inevitably sets up, but we cannot expect him to do it all. In fact, we must meet him halfway. We, as readers, must try to tunnel through from our side. The chance of a meeting of minds through language depends on the willingness of both reader and writer to work toward each other. Just as teaching will not avail unless there is a reciprocal activity o£ being taught, so no author, regardless of his skill in writing, can achieve communication without a reciprocal skill on the part of readers. The reciprocity here is founded on the fact that the rules of good reading and writing are ultimately the same in principle. If that were not so, the diverse skills of writing and reading would not bring minds together, however much effort was expended, any more than the men who tunnel through from opposite sides of a mountain would ever meet unless they made their calculations according to the same principles of engineering.

  You have noted that each of the rules of interpretative reading involves two steps. Let me shift from the engineering analogy to explain how they are related. They can be likened to the two steps a detective takes in pursuing the murderer. Of all the things which lie around the scene of the crime, he must pick~out those he thinks are likely to be clues. He must then use these clues in running down the culprit. Interpreting a book is a kind of detective work. Finding the important words is locating the clues. Coming to terms through them is running down the author's thought.

  If I were to get technical for a moment, I should say that ihese rules have a grammatical and a logical aspect. The grammatical step is the one which deals with words. The logical step deals with their meanings or, more precisely, with terms. So far as communication is concerned, both steps are indispensable. If language is used without thought, nothing is being communicated. And thought or knowledge cannot be communicated without language. As arts, grammar and logic are concerned with language in relation to thought and thought in relation to language. That is why I said earlier that skill in reading and writing is gained through these liberal arts, especially grammar and logic.

  This business of language and thought—especially the distinction between words and terms—is so important that I am
going to risk being repetitious to be sure you understand the main point. The main point is that one word can be the vehicle for many terms. Let me illustrate this schematically in the following manner. The word "reading"

  has been used in many senses in the course of our discussion. Let us take three of the meanings: (i) reading in the sense of getting amusement; (2) reading in the sense of getting information, and (3) reading in the sense of gaining insight.

  Now let us symbolize the word "reading" by the letter X, and the three meanings by the letters a, b, and c. What is symbolized, then by Xa, Xb, and Xc, are not three words, for X remains the same throughout. But they are three terms, on the condition, of course, that you and I know when X is being used in one definite sense, and not another. If I write Xa in a given place, and you read Xb, we are writing and reading the same word, but not in the same way. The ambiguity prevents communication. Only when you think the word as I think it do we have one thought between us. Our minds cannot meet in X, but only in Xa or Xb or Xc. Thus we come to terms.

  - 2 -

  You are prepared now, I hope, to consider the rule which requires a reader to come to terms. How does he go about taking the first step? How does he find the important worda in a book?

  You can be sure of one thing. Not all the words an author uses are important. Better than that, you can be sure that most of his words are not. Only those words which he uses in a special way are important tor him, and for us as readers. This is not an absolute matter, of course, but one of degree. Words may be more or less important. Our only concern is with the tact that some words in a book are more important than others. At one extreme are the words which the author uses as the proverbial man in the street does. Since the author is using these words as ordinary men do in ordinary discourse, the reader should have no trouble with them. He is familiar with their ambiguity and he has grown accustomed to the variation in their meanings as they occur in this context or that.

  For example, the word "reading" occurs in Sir Arthur Eddington's fine book on The Nature of the Physical World, He speaks of "pointer-readings," the readings of dials and gauges on scientific instruments. He is using the word "reading" in one of its ordinary senses. It is not for him a technical word. He can rely on ordinary usage to convey what he means to the reader. Even if he used the word "reading" in a different sense somewhere else in his book-in a phrase, let us say, such as "reading nature"—he could be confident that the reader would note the shift to another of the word's ordinary meanings. The reader who could not do this could not talk to his friends or carry on his daily business.

  But Sir Arthur cannot use the word "cause" so light-heartedly. That may be a word of common speech, but Sir Arthur is using it in a definitely special sense when he discusses the theory of causation. How that word is to be under-Btood makes a difference which both he and the reader must bother about. For the same reason, the word "reading" is important in this book. We cannot get along with using it in an ordinary way.

  I repeat that an author uses most words as men ordinarily do in conversation, with a range of meanings, and trusting to context to indicate the shifts. Knowing this fact should be of some help to you in detecting the more important words. There is one qualification here. We must not forget that at different times and places the same words are not equally familiar items in daily usage. A contemporary like Eddington or me will employ most words as they are ordinarily used today, and you will know what these are because you are alive today. But in reading the great books of the past, it may be more difficult to detect the words the author is using as most men did at the time and place he was writing. The translation of books from foreign languages complicates the matter further.

  You can see, therefore, why eliminating the ordinary words may be a rough discrimination. Nevertheless, it remains true that most of the words in any book can be read just as one would use them in talking to one's friends. Take any page of this book and count the words which we are using that way: all the prepositions, conjunctions, and articles, and certainly most of the verbs, nouns, and adjectives. In this chapter so far, I would say that there have been only a few important words: "word," "term,"

  "ambiguity," "communication," "important"; of these, "term" is clearly the most important. All the others are important in relation to it.

  You cannot locate the important words without making an effort to understand the passage in which they occur. This situation is somewhat paradoxical. If you do understand the passage, you will, of course, know which words in it are the most important. If you do not fully understand the passage, it is probably because you do not know the way the author is using certain words. It you mark the words that trouble you, you may hit the very ones the author is using specially^ That this is likely to be so follows from the fact that you should have no trouble with the words the author uses in an ordinary way.

  From your point of view as a reader, the most important words are those which give you trouble. As I have said, it is likely that these words are important for the author as well.

  The opposite is possible, of course. They may not be.

  It is also possible that words which are important for the author do not bother you, and precisely because you understand them. In that case, you have already come to terms with the author. Only where you'fail to come to terms have you work still to do.

  - 3 -

  So far we have been proceeding negatively by eliminating the ordinary words. You discover some of the important words by the fact that they are not ordinary for you.

  That is why they bother you. But is there any other way of spotting the important words? Are there any positive signs which point to them?

  There are several positive signs I can suggest. The first and most obvious sign is the explicit stress an author places upon certain words and not others. He may do this in many ways. He may use such typographical devices as quotation marks or italics to mark the word for you. He may call your attention to the word by explicitly discussing its various senses and the way he is going to use it here and there. Or he may emphasize the word by defining the thing which the word is used to name.

  No one can read Euclid without knowing that such words as "point," "line," "plane,"

  "angle," "figure," "parallel," and so forth are of the first importance. These are the words which name geometrical entities that Euclid defines. There are other important words, such as "equals," "whole," and "part," but these do not name anything which is defined.

  You know that they are important from the fact that they occur in the axioms. Euclid helps you here by making his primary propositions explicit at the very beginning. You can guess that the terms which compose such propositions are basic, and that underlines for you the words which express these terms. You may have no difficulty with these words, because they are words of common speech, and Euclid appears to be using them that way.

  If all authors wrote as Euclid did, you may say, this business of reading would be much easier. Unfortunately, that is not possible, although some men have thought that any subject matter can be expounded in the geometrical manner. I shall not try to explain why the procedure—the method of exposition and proof—which works in mathematics is not applicable in other fields of knowledge. For our purposes, it is sufficient to note what is common to every sort of exposition. Every field of knowledge has its own technical vocabulary. Euclid makes his plain right at the beginning. The same is true of any writer, such as Newton or Galileo, who writes in the geometrical manner. In books differently written or in other fields, the technical vocabulary must be discovered by the reader.

  If the author has not pointed out the words himself, the reader may locate them through having some prior knowledge of the subject matter. If he knows something about biology or economics before he begins to read Darwin or Adam Smith, he certainly has some leads toward discerning the technical words. The various steps of the first reading may be helpful here. If you know what kind of book it is, what it is about as a whole, an
d what its major parts are, you are greatly aided in separating the technical vocabulary from the ordinary words. The author's title, chapter headings, and preface may be useful in this connection.

  Now you know that "wealth" is a technical word for Adam Smith, and "species" is one for Darwin. And as one technical word leads to another, you cannot help but -discover other technical words in a similar fashion. You can soon make a list of the important words used by Adam Smith: labor, capital, land, wages, profits, rent, commodity, price, exchange, productive, unproductive, money, and so forth. And here are some you cannot miss in Darwin: variety, genus, selection, survival, adaptation, hybrid, fittest, creation.

  Where a field of knowledge has a well-established technical vocabulary, the task of locating the important words in a book treating that subject matter is relatively easy.

  You can spot them positively through having some acquaintance with the field, or negatively by knowing what words must be technical, because they are not ordinary.

  Unfortunately, there are many fields in which a technical vocabulary is not well established.

  Philosophers are notorious for having private vocabularies. There are some words, of course, which have a traditional standing in philosophy. Though they may not be used by all writers in the same sense, they are nevertheless technical words in the discussion of certain problems. But philosophers often find it necessary to coin new words, or to take some word from common speech and make it a technical word. This last procedure is likely to be most misleading to the reader who supposes that he knows what the word means, and therefore treats it as an ordinary word.

  In this connection, one clue to an important word is that the author quarrels with other writers about it. When you find an author telling you how a particular word has been used by others, and why he chooses to use it differently, you can be pretty sure that that word makes a great difference to him.