What Kind of Reader Is Not Reading to Learn? Alder
How to Read a Book - by Charles Van Doren and Mortimer Adler
ISBN: 0671212095Date read: 2017-06-10
How strongly I recommend it: 7/10
(Run into my list of 300+ books, for more.)
Get to the Amazon folio for details and reviews.
Light? No. Serious. Very serious and scholarly. Advises to read books that are above your current ability. A very specific methodology is given. Read books twice, inquire questions while reading, answer those questions, then summarize and criticize afterwards. The signal is to grow upward to the level of the writer.
The reader is the catcher in a game of baseball game. Communicable the ball is but as much an activity as pitching or hitting it.
Yous know the volume has more to say than you understand and hence that information technology contains something that can increase your understanding.
Reading annihilation that, is at once thoroughly intelligible to us may increase our store of data, merely cannot improve our agreement, for our understanding was equal to them before we started. Otherwise, nosotros would have felt the shock of puzzlement and perplexity that comes from getting in over our depth.
A person tries to read something that at commencement he does not completely understand. The thing to be read is initially ameliorate or higher than the reader. The author is communicating something that tin increase the reader'southward agreement.
Communication betwixt unequals must be possible, or else i person could never learn from some other.
Here past "learning" is meant understanding more, not remembering more information that has the same degree of intelligibility as other information you already possess.
The reader must be able to overcome this inequality, approaching equality with the writer. To the extent that equality is approached, clarity of communication is achieved.
Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an writer says, you know what he ways and why he says it.
Agile reading is the effort to sympathise.
One must also use ane's senses and imagination. One must observe, and recall, and construct imaginatively what cannot be observed.
You demand keenness of ascertainment, readily available retentiveness, range of imagination, and, of course, an intellect trained in assay and reflection.
Reading is learning from one who is absent-minded.
If y'all enquire a volume a question, you must answer information technology yourself.
Radio and specially television receiver are then designed as to brand thinking seem unnecessary.
The packaging of intellectual positions and views from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics - to make it easy for him to "make up his own heed" with the minimum of difficulty and effort.
The non-thinker: He inserts a packaged opinion into his mind. He and so pushes a button and "plays back" the opinion whenever it seems advisable to do then. He has performed passably without having had to retrieve.
If you understand perfectly everything the author has to say, you have not increased your agreement.
Gradually lift yourself from a state of understanding less to 1 of understanding more than.
Yous have gained aught simply information if you have exercised only your memory.
Avert the error of assuming that to be widely read and to be well-read are the same thing.
Teaching : sharing with simply two other arts - agriculture and medicine - an uncommonly important characteristic :
* the patient must become well
* plants or animals must grow
* the student must learn
When the learner proceeds without the assistance of any sort of teacher, the operations of learning are performed on nature or the world rather than on soapbox. The rules of such learning institute the art of unaided discovery.
## SKIM:
Skim systematically, to learn everything that the surface alone tin can teach y'all.
The question typically asked at this level is "What is the book well-nigh?"
The analytical reader must enquire many organized questions of what he is reading.
Written report the table of contents to obtain a general sense of the book's structure; utilize information technology as you would a road map before taking a trip.
Check the index.
Judge the range of topics covered.
Read the publisher's blurb, where they summarize as accurately as they tin can the chief points in their book.
Await now at the chapters that seem to be pivotal to its argument.
Read summary statements in their opening or closing pages.
Turn the pages, dipping in here and in that location, reading a paragraph or ii.
Read the last two or three pages, or, if these are an epilogue, the final few pages of the main part of the book. Few authors are able to resist the temptation to sum up what they retrieve is new and of import virtually their work in these pages.
Yous have now skimmed the volume systematically.
In tackling a hard book for the first fourth dimension, read information technology through without ever stopping to look upward or ponder the things you do not sympathise correct abroad.
Every book, no matter how hard, contains interstitial material that can exist and should be read rapidly; and every good book also contains matter that is difficult and should be read very slowly.
Race through even the hardest book. You lot will and then be prepared to read it well the second time.
The one simple prescription for active reading. Ask questions while yous read - questions that you yourself must try to respond in the class of reading.
Four primary questions you must ask about whatsoever book:
1. WHAT IS THE BOOK ABOUT As A WHOLE?
2. WHAT IS Beingness SAID IN Detail, AND HOW? (the principal ideas, assertions, and arguments)
3. IS THE BOOK TRUE, IN WHOLE OR PART?
4. WHAT OF Information technology? (Is it important to you to know these things? What else follows? What is further implied or suggested?)
Ask a book questions as yous read with a pencil in your hand.
The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot limited information technology ordinarily does not know what he thinks.
## Forming the Habit of Reading:
You lot must learn to forget the separate acts in guild to perform all of them well. But in order to forget them as carve up acts, y'all have to acquire them first as carve up acts.
* Expository books convey cognition primarily.
* Theoretical books teach you that something is the case.
* Practical books teach you how to practice something y'all want to practice.
To make noesis practical we must convert it into rules of operation. We must laissez passer from knowing what is the case to knowing what to do about it.
If a theoretical volume emphasizes things that lie outside the telescopic of your normal, routine, daily feel, information technology is a scientific work. If not, information technology is philosophical.
The philosopher usually finds it easier to teach students who have not been previously taught past his colleagues, whereas the scientist prefers the student whom his colleagues accept already prepared.
State the unity of the whole book in a single sentence, or at most a few sentences (a brusque paragraph).
Discover its theme or main point.
Set forth the major parts of the volume, and evidence how these are organized into a whole, by beingness ordered to one another and to the unity of the whole.
You accept non grasped a complex unity if all you lot know well-nigh information technology is how information technology is 1. You must also know how information technology is an organized many.
To give an account of the structure of the volume:
(1) The author achieved this plan in five major parts, of which the first part is near so and so, the 2d office is most such and such, the 3rd part is nearly this, the fourth role about that, and the fifth role about still another thing.
(2) The kickoff of these major parts is divided into 3 sections, of which the first considers Ten, the 2d considers Y, and the third considers Z.
(3) In the first section of the showtime function, the author makes four points, of which the showtime is A, the second B, the third C, and the fourth D.
Notice out what the author's problems were.
The author starts with a question.
Codify the questions as precisely as you tin.
The kinds of questions anyone can ask about anything:
* Does something be?
* What kind of affair is it?
* What caused it to exist, or under what conditions can it exist, or why does it exist?
* What purpose does information technology serve?
* What are the consequences of its existence?
* What are its characteristic backdrop, its typical traits?
* What are its relations to other things of a similar sort, or of a different sort?
* How does it comport?
* What ends should exist sought?
* What means should exist 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 practise, or the ameliorate rather than the worse?
* Nether what weather would it exist better to do this rather than that?
The kickoff phase of analytical reading, or rules for finding what a book is about:
i. Allocate the book according to kind and subject thing.
ii. Country what the whole volume is most with the utmost brevity.
3. Enumerate its major parts in their order and relation, and outline these parts as y'all have outlined the whole.
4. Define the trouble or problems the writer is trying to solve.
The best poetry is that which is the most richly cryptic.
The most important words are those that give y'all trouble.
You lot have to observe the meaning of a word yous do not understand by using the meanings of all the other words in the context that you practise understand.
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 equally if they were raised from the page in loftier relief.
Run across how essential a part of reading it is to be perplexed and know it.
Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books also equally from nature.
If you never ask yourself any questions well-nigh the significant of a passage, you lot cannot expect the volume to give you lot any insight you practice not already possess.
The fact that we have stated these rules in a fixed order does not mean that you have to follow them in that guild.
"State in your own words!" That suggests the all-time test we know for telling whether you have understood the proffer or propositions in the judgement.
If yous cannot go abroad at all from the author's words, it shows that only words have passed from him to you, non thought or knowledge. Similar knowing not just "two + 2 = 4" but therefore "4 – 2 = ii"
Exemplify the general truth that has been enunciated by referring to a item instance of it. To imagine a possible case is often as good as citing an actual ane. If you cannot, y'all exercise not know what is beingness said.
Unless you can testify some acquaintance with actual or possible facts to which the proposition refers or is relevant somehow, you are playing with words, not dealing with thought and cognition.
Lack of grammer and logic results in slavery to words rather than mastery of them.
Yous often take to search through all the paragraphs of a chapter to find the sentences you lot can construct into a argument of a unmarried statement.
One of the almost familiar tricks of the orator or propagandist is to get out sure things unsaid, things that are highly relevant to the statement, simply that might be challenged if they were made explicit.
Every argument must involve a number of statements.
If you lot notice the conclusion offset, so look for the reasons. If y'all find the reasons first, meet where they lead.
Discriminate between the kind of argument that points to facts as evidence for some generalization and the kind that offers a serial of general statements to prove some further generalizations.
Observe what things the author says he must assume, what he says can be proved or otherwise evidenced, and what need non be proved considering it is self-evident.
Every argument must start with assumptions agreed on betwixt author and reader, or with self-evident propositions, which neither the writer nor reader can deny.
Self-evident propositions are indemonstrable but also undeniable truths, based on common experience lonely and are part of mutual-sense noesis.
The second stage of analytical reading, or rules for finding what a book says (interpreting its contents):
5. Come to terms with the author past interpreting his key words.
6. Grasp the author's leading propositions by dealing with his nigh of import sentences.
seven. Know the author's arguments, by finding them in, or constructing them out of, sequences of sentences.
8. Determine which of his problems the writer has solved, and which he has non; and as to the latter, decide which the author knew he had failed to solve.
Reading a book is a kind of conversation. The reader has the terminal word.
Reading does not stop with understanding. It must be completed by the work of criticism, the piece of work of judging.
In that location is no book so good that no fault can be institute with it.
Unless readers exercise their critical faculties now, they are doing the author an injustice. He has washed what he could to brand them his equal. He deserves that they act like his peers, that they engage in conversation with him, that they talk back.
To regard anyone except yourself as responsible for your judgment is to be a slave, not a free man. It is from this fact that the liberal arts learn their name.
Exist non but a responsive merely also a responsible listener.
Have the responsibility of taking a position.
To criticize is non always to disagree.
Suspending judgment is taking the position that something has not been shown - that you are not convinced or persuaded.
Hesitate earlier you lot say, "I empathize." You lot take a lot of work to do earlier y'all can make that declaration honestly
Writers, such every bit Plato and Kant, Adam Smith and Karl Marx, who take non been able to say everything they knew or idea in a single piece of work. Those who approximate Kant's Critique of Pure Reason without reading his Critique of Practical Reason, or Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations without reading his Theory of the Moral Sentiments, or The Communist Manifesto without Marx'due south Capital, are more likely than not to exist agreeing or disagreeing with something they do not fully understand.
Regard disagreements every bit capable of being resolved.
Disagreement is futile agitation unless it is undertaken with the hope that it may lead to the resolution of an event.
The person who disagrees should be as much prepared to have his own mind inverse as seek to change the mind of another - to keep the possibility that he misunderstands or that he is ignorant on some point.
Many people regard disagreement as unrelated to either educational activity or being taught. They think that everything is only a matter of stance. On such a view, communication cannot exist assisting if the profit to be gained is an increment in knowledge.
Distinguish between genuine cognition and mere opinion.
The reader who does not distinguish between the reasoned statement of knowledge and the flat expression of opinion is not reading to learn. He is at most interested in the writer'south personality and is using the book as a case history.
Knowledge consists in those opinions for which in that location is prove of one kind or another.
Stance is unsupported judgment.
After he has said, "I understand just I disagree," he can make the post-obit remarks to the author:
(1) "Yous are uninformed"
(two) "You are misinformed"
(three) "You are illogical - your reasoning is not cogent"
(four) "Your assay is incomplete"
In science and history, the lack of data is discovered by afterwards researches.
Not sequitur, which means that what is drawn as a conclusion simply does not follow from the reasons offered.
If you have not been able to show that the author is uninformed, misinformed, or illogical on relevant matters, yous simply cannot disagree. You must hold. Yous cannot say, as so many students and others practice, "I observe nothing wrong with your premises, and no errors in reasoning, merely I don't hold with your conclusions." All yous can possibly mean by saying something like that is that you lot do not like the conclusions. Yous are not disagreeing. You are expressing your emotions or prejudices.
The third phase of analytical reading: rules for criticizing a book equally a communication of noesis.
General maxims of intellectual etiquette:
ix. Do not begin criticism until you have completed your outline and your interpretation of the volume. (Do not say you agree, disagree, or suspend judgment, until you can say "I empathize.")
x. Practise not disagree disputatiously or contentiously.
11. Demonstrate that you recognize the divergence between knowledge and mere personal opinion by presenting expert reasons for any critical judgment you brand. B. Special Criteria for Points of Criticism
12. Prove wherein the writer is uninformed.
13. Show wherein the writer is misinformed.
14. Show wherein the writer is casuistic.
15. Testify wherein the author's assay or business relationship is incomplete.
No higher commendation can be given any work of the human mind than to praise it for the measure of truth it has accomplished.
A person who has read widely merely not well deserves to be pitied rather than praised.
The not bad writers read fewer books. Merely what they did read, they read well. Because they had mastered these books, they became peers with their authors. They become authorities in their own right.
One approaches the ideal of expert reading by applying the rules we accept described in the reading of a single book, and non by trying to get superficially acquainted with a larger number.
Seeking the meaning of a volume: practice all that y'all can by yourself earlier seeking outside help. For if you act consistently on this principle, you volition notice that you need less and less outside help.
Read the great books in relation to i another, and in an order that somehow respects chronology. The chat of the books takes place in time.
Abstracts are useful in only two connections:
Start, they can help to jog your retentivity of a volume's contents, if yous take already read it.
2d, when you wish to know whether a sure piece of work is likely to be germane to your project.
An abstract can never supercede the reading of a book, merely information technology can sometimes tell yous whether you lot want or demand to read the book or not.
To use a reference book well, you must, outset, accept some idea of what you desire to know.
Apply a lexicon co-ordinate to its primary intention - equally a aid in reading books that might otherwise be likewise hard considering their vocabulary includes technical words, archaic words, literary allusions, or fifty-fifty familiar words used in obsolete senses.
We would non recommend looking upwardly a technical word or with a word that is wholly new to you during your kickoff reading of a good book unless they seem to be of import to the writer'south general pregnant.
The seven liberal arts : grammar, rhetoric, and logic, the trivium; arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, the quadrivium.
An encyclopedia is non the best place to pursue understanding. It contains no arguments. Reading applied books, the kind dealing mainly with the principles underlying rules,
An intelligent reader of such books about "practical principles" always reads between the lines or in the margins. He tries to run into the rules that may not be expressed but that can, nevertheless, be derived from the principles. He goes further. He tries to figure out how the rules should be applied in exercise.
To fail to read a practical volume as practical is to read it poorly.
A rule of acquit is practically true on two weather condition: 1 is that it works; the other is that its working leads you to an terminate you rightly desire.
We have no practical involvement in even the soundest means to reach ends we disapprove of or do not care about.
The two major questions yous must inquire yourself in reading whatsoever sort of applied book.
The first is: What are the author'south objectives?
The 2nd is: What means for achieving them is he proposing?
What reaches the heart without going through the mind is probable to bounce dorsum and put the mind out of business.
Understanding with a applied book, however, does imply activity on your part. If you lot are convinced or persuaded by the author that the ends he proposes are worthy, and if yous are further convinced or persuaded that the means he recommends are probable to achieve those ends, so it is hard to run across how you can decline to act in the manner the author wishes you to. If you did non, it is non just considering you were lazy or tired. It is because you did not actually mean it.
Dazzler is harder to analyze than truth.
Don't try to resist the consequence that a work of imaginative literature has on you lot.
The reader of nonfiction should be like a bird of prey, constantly alert, always ready to pounce. Reading poetry and fiction is not the same.
If we must escape from reality, it should be to a deeper, or greater, reality.
The reality of our inner life, of our own unique vision of the globe. To detect this reality makes us happy; the experience is deeply satisfying to some role of ourselves we do not usually touch.
Poetry and fiction must be read as having several distinct though related meanings.
One of the most remarkable things about the corking philosophical books is that they ask the aforementioned sort of profound questions that children ask.
A person who has the power to retain the child's view of the world, with at the same fourth dimension a mature agreement of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare - likely to exist able to contribute something actually important to our thinking.
What are these "childishly simple" questions that philosophers ask?
What is the difference between existing and not existing?
What is common to all the things that do exist, and what are the backdrop of everything that does exist?
Are at that place different ways in which things tin exist - different modes of beingness or existence?
Exercise some things exist but in the listen or for the mind, whereas others be exterior the mind, and whether or not they are known to united states of america, or even knowable past us?
Does everything that exists exist physically, or are there some things that be apart from material embodiment?
Practice all things change, or is there anything that is immutable?
Does annihilation be necessarily, or must we say that everything that does exist might not have existed?
Is the realm of possible beingness larger than the realm of what actually does be?
What is involved in any change?
In every procedure of change, is at that place something that endures unchanged also every bit some respect or aspect of that enduring thing which undergoes change?
When you learn something that you did not know earlier, you have certainly changed with respect to the knowledge you have acquired, merely y'all are also the same private that you were before; if that were not the case, you lot could non be said to have inverse through learning. Is this truthful of all alter?
For example, is it true of such remarkable changes as nativity and death - of coming to be and passing away - or only of less fundamental changes, such as local move, growth, or alteration in quality?
How many different kinds of change are there?
Do the same fundamental elements or atmospheric condition enter into all processes of alter, and are the aforementioned causes operative in all?
What practice we hateful by a cause of change?
Are there dissimilar types of causes responsible for alter?
Are the causes of change - of becoming - the same every bit the causes of being, or existence?
Good and evil, of course, are not the same as right and wrong. How do nosotros brand this distinction precise?
Philosophy today is no longer being written for lay readers. 2d-society questions are of narrow appeal; and professional philosophers, like scientists, are not interested in the views of anyone just other experts.
History is closer to fiction than to science. The historian must e'er make up something. He assign causes for events and motivations for actions.
The causes of every act, Tolstoy thought, were so manifold, so complex, and so securely hidden in unconscious motivations that it is impossible to know why anything ever happened.
It is necessary to read more than 1 business relationship of the history of an event or menses if we want to understand information technology.
Read a history not only to learn what really happened at a particular fourth dimension and place in the past, just besides to acquire the way men act in all times and places, particularly at present.
## How to Read Biography and Autobiography:
A biography is a story most a real person. This mixed patrimony causes it to have a mixed character.
## How to Read Science and Mathematics:
Until approximately the finish of the nineteenth century, the major scientific books were written for a lay audience. There was as even so no institutionalized specialization in those days, days which Albert Einstein called "the happy childhood of science." Intelligent and well-read persons were expected to read scientific books as well as history and philosophy.
Philosophers seldom write for anyone except other philosophers; economists write for economists.
Country, every bit clearly as you can, the trouble that the author has tried to solve.
Scientific objectivity is not the absence of initial bias. It is attained by frank confession of it.
Discover this, and take account of it, by distinguishing what the author assumes from what he establishes through argument.
We are also not told, at least not early enough, how beautiful and how intellectually satisfying mathematics can be.
Start with Euclid, whose Elements of Geometry is i of the most lucid and beautiful works of whatever kind that has ever been written.
## How to Read Philosophy:
The most of import matter to discover in reading whatsoever philosophical work is the question or questions it tries to respond.
Dogmatic theology always depends upon dogmas and the authority of a church that proclaims them.
Keep in mind that an article of faith is non something that the true-blue assume. Religion, for those who have it, is the most sure form of knowledge, non a tentative opinion.
A mind not agitated past good questions cannot capeesh the significance of fifty-fifty the best answers.
==
Syntopical reading is to construct an assay of the subject that may non be in any of the books.
Syntopical reading: inspect all of the books on your list.
Don't read any of them analytically before inspecting all of them.
It will give you a clear enough idea of your subject then that your subsequent analytical reading of some of the books on the list is productive.
Read some books faster than others.
In syntopical reading, information technology is you and your concerns that are primarily to exist served, not the books that you read.
Find the passages in the books that are nigh germane to your needs.
Force an author to utilise your linguistic communication, rather than using his.
Refuse to accept the terminology of whatsoever one author.
The syntopical reader, in short, tries to wait at all sides and to accept no sides.
Source: https://sive.rs/book/HowToReadABook
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