Finding the argument: coming to terms with an author

Lesson 2 decided whether to read the book. Lesson 3 explained why it was hard and what to do about it. This lesson is about what you do once you are inside a chapter and have decided to take it seriously.

There's a procedure, it's old, and it's more demanding than it looks. Most of the work turns out to be one step that readers skip because it sounds like a formality.

Four questions, and the stage this lesson sits in

Adler and Van Doren's How to Read a Book puts four questions to any book at all. What is the book about as a whole? What is being said in detail, and how? Is the book true, in whole or part? What of it?¹

Those four questions are answered by fifteen numbered rules in three stages. The first stage works out what the book is about. The second interprets what it says. The third judges it.

This lesson is the first two stages, rules 1 to 8. Lesson 7 is the third. The order is not decoration, and the reason will matter to you before the end of this lesson: each stage produces the material the next one needs. You cannot say whether an argument holds until you have the argument, and you cannot have the argument until you know what the words in it mean in this author's hands.

Two things to hold alongside that. There is a real objection to this ordering, and lesson 9 is where it lands: lesson 9 will show that expert readers of historical documents start by judging the source, before they have understood a line of it, and read better for doing so. Keep the question until then rather than settling it now. And none of this is measured. Adler is a philosopher writing about a craft, not a researcher reporting a result, and where this course has evidence it says so. Here it has a well-articulated tradition, which is a different thing and still worth having.

The eight rules, in Adler's stages.¹

Stage I, what the book is about. (1) Classify the book by kind and subject matter. (2) State what the whole book is about with the utmost brevity. (3) Enumerate its major parts in order and relation, and outline them. (4) Define the problems the author has tried to solve.

Stage II, interpreting the contents. (5) Come to terms with the author by interpreting his key words. (6) Grasp his leading propositions through his most important sentences. (7) Know his arguments by finding them in, or constructing them out of, sequences of sentences. (8) Determine which problems he solved and which he did not, and of the latter, which he knew he had failed to solve.

A chapter to work on

You surveyed Darwin's On the Origin of Species in lesson 2. We are going to read one chapter of it properly, and you can open it free at Project Gutenberg and follow along. It is chapter 3, "Struggle for Existence", and it runs to about six thousand words, which is half an hour at the rate lesson 4 measured.

I have chosen it for a reason that will become clear: it is a chapter whose whole argument turns on a phrase Darwin knows you will misread, and he says so in the fourth paragraph.

The same note lesson 2 carried applies here. We are reading Darwin's chapter, not arguing the biology. Whether his conclusion is true is a question for his field. What we are doing is finding out what he claimed and how the claim is built, which is the only thing that would let anyone judge it in either direction.

Adler states all of these for a whole book. They work on a chapter as well, and a chapter is the right size to learn them on, so that is what we are doing here.

Rule 1, classify it. A work of theoretical natural science, arguing a general claim from assembled observation. Not a manual, not a history, not a polemic. That matters because it tells you what kind of support to expect: not proof, but accumulation.

Rule 2, the whole in one sentence. Chapter 3 says: because every kind of living thing tends to multiply faster than the world can hold, far more are born than can live, and the resulting competition, understood broadly, is what the rest of the argument will act on.

That sentence took me four attempts. Yours won't match mine, and it doesn't need to. What it needs is to be in your own words, which is the point of the exercise: the way to find out whether you have the point is to try to state it without the book open.²

Rule 3, and a book that outlines itself

Open the chapter and the first thing you meet, before any prose, is this.

Bears on natural selection. The term used in a wide sense. Geometrical powers of increase. Rapid increase of naturalised animals and plants. Nature of the checks to increase. Competition universal. Effects of climate. Protection from the number of individuals. Complex relations of all animals and plants throughout nature. Struggle for life most severe between individuals and varieties of the same species; often severe between species of the same genus. The relation of organism to organism the most important of all relations.³

That is Darwin telling you the parts of his chapter, in order, before he writes any of it. Lesson 2 met the same habit at the front of the book, in the analytical table of contents that gives each chapter a paragraph rather than a line.

A reader in a hurry copies that into their notes and calls it the outline. That's the wrong move, and it's worth being clear about why. The rule asks you to enumerate the parts in order and relation, and a list is not a relation. The headnote gives you eleven items and no indication of which are the argument and which are the supporting cases.

Rule 4, the problems he set himself. This one takes a sentence and readers skip it, which is a pity, because Darwin states his problem in the chapter's first paragraph and you can quote it: "How have all those exquisite adaptations of one part of the organisation to another part, and to the conditions of life, and of one distinct organic being to another being, been perfected?"³ Everything in the chapter is in service of that question, and knowing the question is what lets you tell the argument from the illustrations.

So use the headnote as a claim to test. Read the chapter with the headnote beside you and ask which of those eleven are load-bearing. My answer, after reading it, is that four are: bears on natural selection, the term in a wide sense, geometrical powers of increase, and the nature of the checks. The first is the chapter's reason for existing, the middle two are the argument, and the fourth is what the argument runs into. The other seven are illustration. If your answer differs and you can say why, you have done the rule properly and I have not.

Rule 5, which is the one everybody skips

Rule 5 says: come to terms with the author by interpreting his key words.

The word term is doing precise work there. A term isn't a word. A term is a word used in one settled sense. The same word can carry several senses, and a writer making an argument has to pin one of them down, whether or not they tell you they are doing it. Finding the sense the author pinned down is the reader's job, and it is not the dictionary's, because a dictionary records how a word is used in general and an argument runs on how it is used here.

Darwin, unusually, does the work in front of you. Four paragraphs into chapter 3:

I should premise that I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny.³

Read that against whatever you wrote in the predict block. Three things have happened at once.

The sense has widened. "Struggle" now includes dependence, which is close to the opposite of what the ordinary word suggests. Darwin gives the example himself: a plant on the edge of a desert "is said to struggle for life against the drought, though more properly it should be said to be dependent on the moisture".³

The sense has moved from survival to reproduction. The parenthesis, "which is more important", is not politeness. It tells you which half of the definition the argument will lean on.

And the sense is admitted to be loose. Darwin closes the passage with "In these several senses, which pass into each other, I use for convenience sake the general term of struggle for existence".³ He is telling you he has bundled several things under one word because he needs a word.

That last one is worth stopping on, because it is a counterexample to the rule we are using. Rule 5 assumes an author has one settled sense waiting to be found. Sometimes there is not one, and Darwin has just said so out loud. When coming to terms returns the answer "he has three senses here and slides between them", that is not the rule failing. It is the rule's most valuable output, because a place where an author is sliding between senses is a place where the argument is at its weakest, and you have found it by doing exactly what the rule told you to do.

Now here is why this is not a preliminary courtesy. The chapter's argument is valid only under Darwin's sense and not under yours. If "struggle" meant animals fighting, the conclusion that there must be a struggle everywhere would be plainly false, since most organisms don't fight anything. Under the wide sense, the conclusion follows. A reader who never came to terms would have read the chapter, understood every sentence, and concluded that the author was overreaching.

That is lesson 3's diagnosis arriving in a new place. If you cannot come to a term, the obstacle is usually not the word itself. It is the relations the author has packed into it.

The wrinkle: a term you settled too early

The clean case is an author who defines his term where you can see it. The common case is worse, and almost nobody demonstrates it, so here it is.

Chapter 1 is about variation under domestication, and its last third is about breeders: dogs, cattle, garden fruit, and a long run on pigeons. Read that part quickly and selection means what you expect. A man looks at a litter, picks the ones he wants, and breeds from those. There's a chooser, the chooser has a purpose, and the purpose explains the result.

That is the sense most readers carry out of chapter 1, and it's already wrong, because the last part of that chapter takes the purpose away. Darwin calls it Unconscious Selection and says it matters more to his argument than the deliberate kind. A man "who intends keeping pointers naturally tries to get as good dogs as he can, and afterwards breeds from his own best dogs, but he has no wish or expectation of permanently altering the breed".³ The classical gardeners, who "cultivated the best pear they could procure", "never thought what splendid fruit we should eat".³

Two paragraphs into chapter 3, before he has defined anything else, Darwin names it:

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection, in order to mark its relation to man's power of selection.³

And chapter 4 opens by asking it outright: "Can the principle of selection, which we have seen is so potent in the hands of man, apply in nature?"³

Now here is the thing worth being exact about, because it is easy to tell this story either flattering way. The word did not change on you without warning. Darwin announces the extension at the moment he coins it, "in order to mark its relation" to the human case, and chapter 4's question only makes sense if there is one principle being tested in a second place. He had already loosened the chooser's grip in chapter 1.

But he does not make it easy either. Having taken the human chooser out, he writes the new principle as an agent anyway. Natural Selection "is a power incessantly ready for action", and in chapter 4 it is "daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good".³ So if you carried a chooser into chapter 4, you had help carrying it.

What is still yours is that you settled the term from the first part of one chapter and never went back. The correction was there, on a page you read past, and it was one sentence long. That is the ordinary case, and it is harder to catch than an author who plainly shifts his usage, because the announcement was made and you were not holding anything to check it against. Writing the sense down is what turns it from something you must notice into something you can test.

So the fifth rule isn't a step you complete. It's a reading you hold and revise. When an argument stops making sense three chapters in, the first thing to suspect is a term you settled too early.

What do you do about it? Not start again. Go back to your notes, apply the corrected sense, and see which of your earlier statements survive it. Usually most of them do, and the two or three that don't are the ones that were confusing you.

This is not a Darwin problem. It is what authors do. Think of a political theorist whose power starts as capacity and has become coercion by the later chapters, or a lawyer whose consideration has nothing to do with being considerate: same shape, same repair.

Rule 7: an argument is not in a paragraph

Rule 7 asks you to know the author's arguments by finding them in, or constructing them out of, sequences of sentences.¹

The second half of that is the part that matters. Arguments aren't laid out anywhere, as a rule. They are distributed: a premise in one paragraph, a second premise four pages later inside an example, the conclusion in a sentence that reads like a summary. Your job is to gather them and set them out in order, and the reason it is worth doing is that the gaps only become visible once the argument is written down.

The central argument of the chapter is three sentences, and Darwin puts them one after another, which is unusually tidy of him. Take the tidy case first, because what you are about to do to it is what you will have to do from scratch when an author scatters his premises over four pages, and you won't manage that if you have never done it where the sentences were already in a row.

A struggle for existence inevitably follows from the high rate at which all organic beings tend to increase.³

Every being, which during its natural lifetime produces several eggs or seeds, must suffer destruction during some period of its life, and during some season or occasional year, otherwise, on the principle of geometrical increase, its numbers would quickly become so inordinately great that no country could support the product.³

Hence, as more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life.³

Set out as a piece of reasoning, that is:

1. Every kind of organism tends to increase geometrically.
2. More individuals are produced than can possibly survive.
3. Therefore there must be a struggle for existence.

One more thing to notice about that argument, because it closes the loop on rule 5. Darwin's third sentence says there must be a struggle "in every case". That is only true under the wide sense Darwin defined earlier, which includes a plant depending on moisture. The argument and the definition are load-bearing for each other, which is why the stages run in the order they do.

Rules 6 and 8, briefly

Rule 6 asks you to grasp the author's leading propositions through his most important sentences.¹ The practical question is which sentences those are, and the test that works for me is this: the important sentences are usually the ones you had to read twice. A sentence you glide over is doing work you already accept. A sentence that makes you stop is either badly written or carrying something new, and you can tell which by trying to say it in your own words.

Rule 8 asks you to work out which problems the author solved and which he did not, and of the latter, which he knew he had failed to solve.¹ The last clause is the interesting one, and authors will often tell you outright.

Darwin does it twice in this chapter. Three paragraphs in: "In my future work this subject shall be treated, as it well deserves, at much greater length."³ That marks the chapter as a sketch, and a reader who takes chapter 3 for Darwin's full treatment of competition is disagreeing with Darwin about it.

The stronger case comes later, on the checks to increase, which is one of the four items you decided was load-bearing: "What checks the natural tendency of each species to increase in number is most obscure", and "We know not exactly what the checks are in even one single instance."³ That is rule 8's real target. An author naming, at the head of the section where he is supposed to be solving it, a thing he has not solved.

Collecting those admissions as you read gives you something worth more than a summary: a map of where the book is strong, where it is thin, and where the author already knows it is thin.

What people get wrong

"I know what the word means." You know what it means in general. The author's usage governs, and in a book making an argument the most important words are the ones most likely to have been narrowed, widened or borrowed from somewhere else. The word you are surest about is the one worth checking.

"The thesis will be in the introduction." Often it is not. Lesson 2 already found this on this same book: Darwin's clearest statements of what he is claiming sit at the end of the introduction and again in the last chapter, not at the top. Survey first, and look at the closing pages, which is what lesson 2's sixth step is for.

"Outlining is busywork." It is the test of whether you found the structure. If you can outline a chapter without the book open, you have it. If you can't, you have an impression of it, and an impression is what you had before you started.

"If I can quote it, I understood it." Quotation is a record that your eye passed over a sentence. Restating in your own words is the check, and it is deliberately harder, because the only way to do it is to have the thought rather than the string.²

"Coming to terms is for philosophy books." Every field does it. An economist's "efficiency", a lawyer's "reasonable", a historian's "revolution", an architect's "honest" are all ordinary words carrying settled senses that are not the dictionary's. The sense isn't usually announced as plainly as Darwin announces his.

Practice

Connections

Lesson 2 gave you the survey, which told you the book's structure from the outside. This lesson works one chapter from the inside, and the survey is what makes that possible: an outline is much easier to build when you already know where the chapter sits in the whole.

Lesson 3 gave you the diagnosis. A term you cannot come to is nearly always missing background rather than a hard word, which is why the fix is another text rather than a dictionary.

Lesson 6 makes this practical, because everything above is unusable if you have no record of it. A term settled on page 40 and needed on page 300 has to be written down somewhere you can find it.

Lesson 7 is the third stage, criticism, and it begins where this one stops. The rule there is that you may not say you agree or disagree until you can say you understand, and what this lesson produced is the evidence that you do.

Go deeper

• Project Gutenberg's On the Origin of Species. Free, complete, and the chapter worked above is short enough for one sitting. The analytical contents at the front are worth reading on their own as an example of a book that outlines itself.
• Harvard Library, "Interrogating Texts: Six Reading Habits". Free, and its third habit, outline and summarise and analyse, is the same idea in fewer words, with the summary framed as a test rather than a chore.
• Adler and Van Doren, How to Read a Book, revised edition, 1972. The fifteen rules in full, with a chapter on each stage. In copyright, so try a library or Open Library rather than a search engine.

Sources

1. Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book, revised edition, 1972. The four questions a reader asks of any book, and the fifteen numbered rules of analytical reading in three stages, of which rules 1 to 8 are used here. The gloss on term above, that a term is a word used in one settled sense and that finding the author's sense is the reader's work rather than the dictionary's, is this course's reading of rule 5 and not a quotation from Adler. See research/SOURCES.md, which records how this text was consulted, at what depth, and why it is not linked here.
2. Harvard Library, "Interrogating Texts: Six Reading Habits to Develop in Your First Year". Read in full. The outline, summarise and analyse habit, and its statement that the way to determine you have really got the point is to be able to state it in your own words.
3. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, first edition, 1859, chapters 1, 3 and 4, Project Gutenberg #1228. Every passage quoted above was taken from that text. The chapter 3 headnote; the definition of "Struggle for Existence" in a large and metaphorical sense; the desert plant and the several senses which pass into each other; the naming of Natural Selection to mark its relation to man's power of selection; the opening question of chapter 4; the three sentences of the geometrical-increase argument and the two subordinate clauses carrying its unstated premise; the note that the subject would be treated at greater length in a future work; and, from the section on the checks to increase, "The amount of food for each species of course gives the extreme limit to which each can increase", "What checks the natural tendency of each species to increase in number is most obscure" and "We know not exactly what the checks are in even one single instance". From chapter 3 and chapter 4, the two personifications of Natural Selection, as "a power incessantly ready for action" and as "daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation". From chapter 1, Unconscious Selection, the pointer breeder who "has no wish or expectation of permanently altering the breed", and the gardeners who "cultivated the best pear they could procure" and "never thought what splendid fruit we should eat". From chapter 3's first paragraph, the question Darwin sets himself about how the adaptations have "been perfected".