4: Analytical Reading

The aim of analytical reading is to gain the best understanding of the book in unlimited time.

Not only should you aim to understand what is being said, you should develop a personal opinion about its validity.

This isn’t necessary for every book, and would be a waste of time for lower quality books. If your goal with a book is simply information or entertainment, then you don’t need to do as thorough of a job.

Analytical Reading consists of four components:

• Understand the author - her intentions, problems, and goals.
• Understand what the book says, through its logical arguments.
• Use external resources, only after you struggle through it yourself first.
• After you understand a book, criticize a book from your own viewpoint, finding areas you agree and disagree.

Understand the Author

Discover the author’s intention.

• Find out what the author’s problems were.
• What are the main questions the book tries to answer?
• Which questions are primary and which secondary?

Different categories of books have different typical questions they try to answer.

Typical questions on theoretical topics include: Does something exist? What kind of thing is it? What caused it to exist? Under what conditions can it exist? Why does it exist? What are the consequences of its existence? What are its characteristic properties? What are its relations to other things of a similar sort, or a different sort? How does it behave?

Typical questions on practical topics include: What ends should be sought? What means should be chosen to a given end? What things must one do to gain a certain objective, and in what order? Under these conditions, what is the right thing to do, and the wrong thing? Under what conditions would it be better to do this rather than that?

Find What the Book Says

Here you comprehend what the book is actually saying, and how the author answers her questions.

Well-written books guide the reader to comprehend their arguments using signposts, such as keywords and important sentences.

Keywords

Keywords are meaningful words or phrases that are used often and convey a wealth of information. Understand the keywords of the author, and what is meant by them.

• The same word can mean different things to different authors. Different words can mean the same thing for the same author.
• Find the meaning of the word through context.
• Clues that a word is important:
  • The author quarrels with other writers about it.
  • You struggle to understand it.

Most Important Sentences

Find the author’s leading propositions in her most important sentences.

The important sentences are the ones that express the judgments on which the argument rests.

How to find them

• Special sentences may be formatted stylistically or set apart.
• The important words are often contained in the important sentences.
• Don’t pause at the sentences that interest you - pause at the ones that puzzle you.

Unpack complicated sentences to find all the propositions the author is making.

State the proposition in your own words - this is the best way to verify that you understand it.

• If you can’t do this, the author has merely transferred words to you, not knowledge.
• Being unable to do this may make you confuse restatements of the proposition for distinct propositions, mch like “2 + 2 = 4” and “4 - 2 = 2” are really the same arithmetic relationship, but different restatements.
• This is helpful for syntopical reading - different authors say the same thing in different words, and this will help you see how they agree and disagree.

In addition, define an example or cite your own experience.

• “Nothing acts except what is actual.” can be restated as “your bank account doesn’t grow by merely possible windfalls.”

Sequences of Sentences

A good author develops arguments clearly in sequences of sentences. A good book usually summarizes itself as its arguments develop.

Until an author supports her propositions with reasons, they are merely opinions. The author’s argument explains that the conclusion follows from the premises. You must distinguish between genuine knowledge and mere opinion.

An orator’s great trick is to leave certain things unsaid that would be challenged if they were made explicit.

Find what things the orator says must be assumed, what can be proved, and what need not be proved because it is self-evident.

How to Use External Resources

As much as possible, you should struggle with the book independently on a first pass. This will help you see the forest for the trees, rather than getting mired in minutiae like looking up words you don’t know.

When you use an external resource, understand 1) what you hope to get from consulting it, 2) the limitations of the resource.

Here is how to use external resources:

• Dictionary
  • Dictionaries contain the commonly accepted definitions of words and their transformation throughout time.
  • The author, however, may use words to mean different things, which is why you must understand terms from the context of the book.
  • Use it only for the most important words that are critical for understanding.
• Encyclopedia
  • These contain facts, and not arguments on subjective questions (“what makes man happy?”), other than what people have said about the subject. It also contains no imaginative literature.
  • Use it resolve disagreements about facts.
• Summaries/abstracts
  • Use these to recover your knowledge about the book after you’ve read it. Do not use these as a substitute for reading the book yourself. You’ll develop a bad habit of using these as a crutch, and you’ll get lost understanding a book without a summary.
  • Note that many of these have incorrect interpretations or incomplete treatments.
  • Ideally you’ve written your own summaries yourself, and you can refer to them when you return to a book.
  • Exception: use them in syntopical reading to know if a work will be relevant to your project.
• Commentaries/reviews
  • It’s best to avoid these until after your read-through. Otherwise you’ll start the book biased and focus on things that support the commentary, rather than working to understand what the author is saying.

Criticizing a Book

Up until this point, you’ve been keeping your mouth shut and absorbing the author. After you finish understanding a book, you can argue with the author and express yourself.

Reading a book is like a conversation. Your obligation as a reader is to talk back, even though the author isn’t there.

There is no book so good that no fault can be found with it.

We’ve been conditioned to think that teachable students are those who passively swallow knowledge without independent judgment. The opposite is true - the teachable reader is the most critical.

Your job is to determine which of her problems the author has solved, which she has not, and decide if the author knew she had failed to solve them.

Complete Your Understanding First

Until you’ve completed your understanding, you don’t have the right to say “I agree,” “I disagree,” or “I suspend judgment.”

Imagine how silly this sentiment is: “I don’t know what you’re saying, but I disagree.”

• Analogy: if a person argues with you, but she cannot state your argument in her own words, you can reject her criticism.

Much like a conversation, you need to give the author the chance to express herself fully before passing judgment. If you interrupted the author at each sentence to say she’s wrong, you’re not having a conversation that can lead to learning.

Therefore, you must finish the other tasks above (outlining the book, defining main terms, understanding the main arguments) before criticizing.

• Say that you read an author state “all men are equal.” Without understanding the author, you might take this to mean that “all people are equally endowed at birth in skill and ability,” but the author might really mean “all people should have equal political rights.”

The knowledge to understand the author may be present in other works by the author. For example, you can’t criticize Marx’s The Communist Manifesto without having understood his Capital.

How to Criticize Well

Criticizing a book means to comment, “I agree,” “I disagree,” or “I suspend judgment.”

• Agreeing is as valid a critical action as disagreeing. Furthermore, you can be wrong in agreeing.
• You can suspend judgment if you feel the author does not make a sufficiently reasoned argument.

Do not be contentious or combative for its own sake.

• Many see a discussion as something to be won, rather than an opportunity to discover the truth. They close themselves to learning something new or changing their mind.
• A disagreement is an opportunity to teach, and an opportunity to be taught.
• Do not play devil’s advocate by default. Don’t resent the author for being right or teaching you something new.
• Inversely, don’t accept the author’s word as true simply because she seems more educated than you.
• Separate your emotional reaction to the book from the rational one.
• Read the book sympathetically, earnestly trying to take the author’s point of view.

When you agree or disagree, you must give reasons for your disagreement.

• Without reasons, you can’t be sure that the disagreement is due to misunderstanding.
• Without reasons, you’re merely expressing opinions. And fighting opinions with opinions is an endless battle with no victory.
• Likewise, you should distinguish between the author’s knowledge (arguments backed by evidence) and the author’s opinions (not backed by evidence).
• Be aware of your own assumptions, and that your opponent may be entitled to different assumptions.
  • “Good controversy should not be a quarrel about assumptions.” If the author asks you to take something for granted, you should honor her request.

Categories of Disagreement

If you disagree with the author, your criticism must fit into a set of categories:

• The author is uninformed: lacks knowledge that is relevant to the argument.
  • Darwin lacked knowledge of later Mendelian genetics.
  • An author ignores the relevant work of predecessors.
• The author is misinformed: asserts what is not the case; proposes as true/likely what it is false/unlikely.
  • Aristotle was misinformed about how females participate in animal reproduction, and thus came to unsupportable conclusions about procreation.
  • You must be able to argue the greater probability of a conclusion contrary to the author’s.
  • The misinformation should be relevant to the argument.
    • Aquinas supposed that heavenly bodies were composed of different matter from terrestrial bodies; but this was not relevant to his metaphysical account of matter. Thus you couldn’t reject his argument on grounds of misinformation.
• The author is illogical: commits some logical fallacy.
  • Non sequitur: the conclusion simply does not follow from the reasons offered.
    • Example from Machiavelli: “The chief foundations of all states are good laws. As there cannot be good laws where the state is not well armed, it follows that where they are well armed they have good laws.”
    • The inversion of a logical statement is not equivalent to the original statement - there can be well-armed states that do not have good laws.
  • Inconsistency: two things the author has tried to say are incompatible.
• The author’s analysis is incomplete: the author has not solved all the problems she started with, or seen the implications of the materials used, or failed to make distinctions relevant.
  • Aristotle’s Politics is incomplete because his acceptance of slavery prohibited him from conceiving of universal suffrage.
  • To a Christian believing in personal immortality, Marcus Aurelius is incomplete in his treatment of human happiness.

If you can’t support any of these remarks, then you are obligated to agree with the author.

• You cannot say, “I find nothing wrong with your premises or reasoning, but I don’t agree with your conclusions.” All you can mean by this is that you do not like the conclusions.