HOW TO READ A BOOK

by Mortimer J Adler

  "reading." To make doubly sure, I may even substitute a more elaborate phrase, such as

  "the process of passing from understanding less to understanding more by the operation or your mind upon a book." There is only one term herz, namely, the reference to a kind of reading which I am trying to talk about. But that one term has been expressed by a single word, a short phrase, and a longer one.

  This has probably been the hardest chapter for you to read so far. I know it has been the hardest for me to write. I think I know the reason why. The rule of reading we have been discussing cannot be made fully intelligible without going into all sorts of grammatical and logical explanations about words and terms.

  I assure you I have done very little explaining. To give an adequate account of these matters would take many chapters. I say this to warn you that I have merely touched the most essential points. I hope I have said enough to make the rule a useful guide in practice. The more you put it into practice, the more you will appreciate the intricacies of the problem. You will want to know something about the literal and metaphorical use of words. You will want to know about the distinction between abstract and concrete words, or between proper and common names. You will become interested in the whole business of definitions: the difference between defining words and defining things; why some words are indefinable, and yet have definite meanings, and so forth. You will seek light on what is called "the emotive use of words," that is, the use of words to arouse emotions, to move men to action or change their minds, as distinct from the communication of knowledge.

  If the practice of reading elicits these further interests, you will be in a position to satisfy them by reading books on these special subjects. And you will profit more from reading such books, because you will go to them with questions born of your own experience in reading. The study of grammar and logic, the sciences which underlie these rules of interpretation, is practical only to the extent you can relate it to practice.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  What's the Proposition and Why

  - 1 -

  not only coming to terms but making propositions occurs among traders as well as in the world of books. What a buyer or seller means by a proposition is some sort of proposal, some sort of offer or acceptance. Ip honest dealings, the man v.'ho makes a proposition in this sense is declaring his intention to act in a certain way. More than honesty is needed for successful negotiations. The proposition should be clear and, of course, attractive. Then the traders can come to terms.

  A proposition in a book is also a declaration. It is an expression of the author's judgment about something. He affirms something he thinks true, or denies something he judges to be false. He asserts this or that to be a fact. A proposition of this sort is a declaration of knowledge, not intentions. The author may tell us his intentions at the beginning in a preface. In an expository book, he usually promises to instruct us about something. To find out whether he keeps those promises, we must look for his propositions.

  The order of reading reverses the order of business somewhat. Businessmen come to terms after they find out what the proposition is. But the reader must usually come to terms with an author first, before he can find out what the author is proposing, what judgments he is declaring. That is why the first rule of interpretation concerns words and terms, and the second, which we are about to discuss, concerns sentences and propositions.

  There is a third rule of interpretation closely related to the second. The author may be honest in declaring himself on matters of fact or knowledge. We usually proceed in that trust. But honesty is not enough. Unless we are exclusively interested in the author's personality, we should not be satisfied with knowing what his opinions are. His propositions are nothing but expressions of opinion unless there is some reason for them. If it is the subject matter of the book we are interested in, and not just the author, we want to know not merely what the propositions are, but why.

  The third rule, therefore, deals with arguments of all sorts. There are many kinds of reasoning, many ways of supporting what one says. Sometimes it is possible to argue that something is true; sometimes no more than a probability can be defended. But every sort of argument consists of a number of statements related in a certain way. This is said because of that. The word "because" here signifies a reason being given.

  The presence of arguments is indicated by other words which relate statements, such as: if this is so, then that; or, since this, therefore that; or, it follows from this, that that is the case. In the course of earlier chapters, such sequences occurred. If thinking, I said, is the use of our minds to gain knowledge, and if we use our minds to gain knowledge only in two ways, either in being taught or in investigating, then, I said, we must conclude that all the thinking we do occurs in the course of one or the other of these two activities.

  An argument is always a set or series of statements of which some provide the grounds or reasons for what is to be concluded. It, therefore, takes a paragraph, or at least a collection of sentences, to express an argument. The premises or principles of an argument may not always be stated first, but they are the source of the conclusion, nevertheless. If the argument is valid, the conclusion follows from the premises. That does not necessarily mean that the conclusion is true, because the premises which'support it may be false, one or all.

  Perhaps you have already observed something about the sequence of these three rules.

  We go from terms to propositions to arguments, by going from words (and phrases) to sentences to collections cf sentences or paragraphs.

  When grammar was still taught in the schools, everyone was acquainted with these units. A schoolboy knew that an orderly sequence of sentences made up a paragraph.

  My experience with college students in the last ten years makes me doubt that this simple knowledge is common any longer. They do not seem able to write or speak sentences and paragraphs, and that has made me wonder whether they can recognize them in the books they read.

  You will notice, furthermore, that we are now moving in the direction of building up from simpler to more complex units. The smallest significant element in a book is. of course, a single word. It would be true but not adequate to say that a book consists of words. It also consists of groups of words, taken as a unit, and similarly groups of sentences, taken as a unit. The reader, who is active rather than passive, is attentive not only to the words but to the sentences and paragraphs. There is no other way of discovering the author's terms, oropositions, and arguments, The movement of this second or interpretative reading seems to be in the opposite direction to the movement of the first or structural reading. There we went from the book as a whole to its major parts, and then to their subordinate divisions. As you might suspect, the two movements meet somewhere. The major parts of a book and even their principal divisions contain many propositions and usually several arguments. But if you keep on dividing the book into its parts, you at last have to say: "In this part, the following points are made." Now each of these points is likely to be a proposition, and some of them taken together probably form an argument.

  Thus, the two processes, which we have called the first and the second reading, meet.

  You work down to propositions and arguments by dividing the book into its parts. You work up to arguments by seeing how they are composed of propositions and ultimately of terms. When you have completed these two readings, you can really say you know the contents of a book.

  - 2 -

  There is one other thing to be noticed about the rules we are going to discuss in this chapter. As in the case of the rule about words and terms, we are here also dealing with the relation of language and thought. Sentences and paragraphs are grammatical units.

  They are units of language. Propositions and arguments are logical units, or units of thought and knowledge.

  If you remember what our main problem was in the last chapter, you will be prepared to face a similar one here. Because language is not a perfect medium for the ex
pression of thought, because one word can have many meanings and two or more words can have the same meaning, we saw how complicated was the relation between an author's vocabulary and his terminology. One word may represent several terms, and one term may be represented by several words.

  Mathematicians describe the relation between the buttons and buttonholes on a well-made coat as a perfect one-to-one relationship. There is a button for every buttonhole, and a hole for every button. Well, the point is that words and terms do not stand in a one-to-one relation. The greatest error you can make in applying these rules is to suppose that a one-to-one relationship exists between the elements of language and those of thought or knowledge.

  Let me show you this at once in the case of sentences and propositions. Not every sentence in a book expresses a proposition. For one thing, some sentences express questions. They state problems rather than answers. Propositions are the answers to questions. They are declarations of knowL edge or opinion. That is why we call sentences which express them declarative, and distinguish sentences which ask questions as interrogative. Other sentences express wishes or intentions. They may give us some knowledge of the author's purpose, but they do not convey the knowledge he is trying to expound.

  Moreover, not all the declarative sentences can be read as if each expressed one proposition. There are at least two reasons for this. The first is the fact that words are ambiguous and can be used in various senses. Hence it is possible for the same sentence to express different propositions if there is a shift in the terms the words express.

  "Reading is learning" is certainly a simple sentence. But if at one place I mean by

  "learning" the acquisition of information, and at another I mean the development of understanding, the proposition is not the same, because the terms are different. Yet the sentence is verbally the.same.

  The second reason is thafall sentences are not as simple as "reading is learning." You may remember from grammar school, if you belonged to a more fortunate generation, the distinction between simple sentences, on the one hand, and complex or compound sentences, on the other. When its words are used unambiguously, a simple sentence usually expresses a single proposition. But even when its words are used unambiguously, a compound sentence expresses two or more propositions. A compound sentence is really a collection of sentences, connected by such words as "and," or "if"

  and "then," or "not only" and "but also." You may rightly conclude that the line between a long compound sentence and a short paragraph may be difficult to draw. A compound sentence can express a number of propositions related in the form of an argument.

  Complex sentences are the most difficult to interpret. There is no question that compound sentences express several propositions somehow related. But a complex sentence may express either one proposition or several. Let me take an interesting sentence from Machiavelli's The Prince to show you what I mean: A prince ought to inspire fear in such a way mat, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred; because he can endure very well being feared whilst he is not hated, which will always be as long as he abstains from the property of his citizens and from their women.

  That is grammatically a single sentence, though it is both compound and complex. The semicolon and the "because" indicate the major break which makes the sentence compound. The first proposition is that a prince ought to inspire fear in a certain way.

  Beginning with the word "because," we have a complex sentence. It could be made independent by saying: "The reason for this is that he can endure," and so forth. This complex sentence expresses two propositions at least: (l) the reason why the prince ought to inspire fear in a certain way is that he can endure being feared so long as he is not hated; (a) he can avoid being hated only by abstaining from the property of his citizens and their women.

  You can see why it is important to distinguish the various propositions that a long compound and complex sentence contains. In order to agree or disagree with Machiavelli, you must first understand what he is saying. But he is saying three things in this one sentence. You may disagree with one of them and agree with the others. You may think Machiavelli is wrong in recommending terrorism to a prince on any grounds; but you may acknowledge his shrewdness in saying that the prince had better not arouse hatred along with fear, and you may also agree that keeping his hands off their property and women is an indispensable condition of not being hated. Unless you recognize the distinct propositions in a complicated sentence, you cannot make a discriminating judgment on what the writer is saying.

  Lawyers know this fact very well. They have to examine sentences carefully to see what is being alleged by the plaintiff or denied by the defendant. The single sentence, "John Doe signed the lease on March 24," looks simple enough, but still it says several things, one of which may be true and the other false. John Doe may have signed the lease, but not on March 24, and that fact may be important. In short, even a grammatically simple sentence sometimes expresses two or more propositions.

  - 3 -

  I have said enough to indicate what I mean by the difference between sentences and propositions. They are not related as one to one. Not only may a single sentence express several propositions, either through ambiguity or complexity, but one and the same proposition can be expressed by two or more different sentences. If you grasp my terms through the words and phrases I use synonymously, you will know that I am saying the same thing when I say, "Teaching and being taught are correlative functions," and

  "Initiating and receiving communication are related processes."

  I am going to stop explaining the grammatical and logical points involved, and turn to the rules. The difficulty in this chapter, as in the last, is to stop explaining. Perhaps I had better assume that the school you went to taught some grammar. If it did, you may see now why all that business of syntax, of parsing and diagramming sentences, was not a meaningless routine invented by old-fashioned teachers to crush the spirit of the young.

  It all helps toward skill in writing and reading.

  In fact, I should say it is almost indispensable. You cannot begin to deal with terms, propositions, and arguments— the elements of thought—until you can penetrate beneath the surface of language. So long as words, sentences, and paragraphs are opaque and unanalyzed, they are a barrier to, rather than a medium of, communication.

  You will read words but not receive knowledge.

  Here are the rules. The first rule, you will recall from the last chapter, is: Find the important words and come to terms. The second rule is: Mark the most important sentences in a book and discover the propositions they contain. The third rule is: Locate or construct the basic arguments in the book by finding them in the connection of sentences. You will see later why I did not say "paragraphs" in the formulation of this rule.

  You have already been introduced to the second and third rules. In the early chapters, we marked the sentence "reading is learning" as important, because it expressed a basic proposition in this discussion. We also noted several different kinds of argument: a proof that the great books are most readable, and a marshaling of evidence to show that the schools have failed to teach the arts of reading and writing.

  Our task now is to get further light on how to operate according to the rules. How does one locate the most important sentences in a book? How, then, does one interpret them to discover the one or more propositions they contain?

  Again, there is this emphasis on what is important. To say that there is only relatively small number of important sentences in a book does not mean that you need pay no attention to all the rest. Obviously you have to understand every sentence. But most of the sentences, like most of the words, will cause you no difficulty. From your point of view as a reader, the sentences important for you are those which require an effort of interpretation because, at first sight, they are not perfectly intelligible. You understand them just well enough to know there is more to understand. These may not be the sentences which are most important for the author,
but they are likely to be, because you are likely to have the greatest difficulty with the most important things the author has to say.

  From the author's point of view, the important sentences are those which express the judgments on which his whole argument rests. A book usually contains much more than the bare statement of an argument, or a series of arguments. The author may explain how he came to the point of view he now holds, or why he thinks his position has serious consequences. He may discuss the words he has to use. He may comment on the work of others. He may indulge in all sorts of supporting and surrounding discussion.

  But the heart of his communication lies in the major affirmations and denials he is making, and the reasons he gives for so doing. To come to grips, therefore, you have to see the main sentences as if they were raised from the page in high relief.

  Some authors help you do this. They underline the sentences for you. They either tell you that this is an important point when they make it, or they use one or another typographical device to make their leading sentences stand out. Of course, nothing helps those who will not keep awake while reading. I have met many students who paid no attention to such signs. They preferred to read on rather than Stop and examine the important sentences carefully. They somehow knew unconsciously that the author was not just being helpful. He was trying to get them to do some mental work where it was most needed.

  There are a few books in which the leading propositions are set forth in sentences which occupy a special place in the order and style of the exposition. Euclid, again, gives us the. most obvious example of this. He not only states his definitions, his postulates, and axioms—his principal propositions—at the beginning, but he labels every proposition to be proved. You may not understand his statements. You may not follow his arguments.

  But, if you have eyes in ' your head, you cannot miss the important sentences or the grouping of sentences for the statement of the proofs. That is^all done for you.