Reading Comprehension and Analysis

Read carefully the passage given below and write your answers to the questions that follow in clear, correct and concise language.

In proportion as a book is more loosely constructed, the paragraphs tend to become more diffuse. You often have to search through all the paragraphs of a chapter to find the sentences you can construct into a statement of a single argument. Some books make you search in vain, and some do not even encourage the search.

A good book usually summarizes itself as its arguments develop. If the author summarizes his arguments for you at the end of a chapter, or at the end of an elaborate section, you should be able to look back over the preceding pages and find the materials he has brought together in the summary. In The Origin of Species, Darwin summarizes his whole argument for the reader in a last chapter, entitled "Recapitulation and Conclusion." The reader who has worked through the book deserves that help. The one who has not cannot use it.

Incidentally, if you have inspected the book well before beginning to read it analytically, you will know whether the summary passages exist and if they do, where they are. You can then make the best possible use of them when interpreting the book.

Another sign of a bad or loosely constructed book is the omission of steps in an argument. Sometimes they can be omitted without damage or inconvenience, because the propositions left out can be generally supplied from the common knowledge of readers. But sometimes their omission is misleading, and may even be intended to mislead. One of the most familiar tricks of the orator or propagandist is to leave certain things unsaid, things that are highly relevant to the argument, but that might be challenged if they were made explicit. While we do not expect such devices in an honest author whose aim is to instruct us, it is nevertheless a sound maxim of careful reading to make every step in an argument explicit.

Whatever kind of book it is, your obligation as a reader remains the same. If the book contains arguments, you must know what they are, and be able to put them into a nutshell. Any good argument can be put into a nutshell. There are, of course, arguments built upon arguments. In the course of an elaborate analysis, one thing may be proved in order to prove another, and this may be used in turn to make a still further point. The units of reasoning, however, are single arguments. If you can find these in any book you are reading, you are not likely to miss the larger sequences.

This is all very well to say, you may object, but unless one knows the structure of arguments as a logician does, how can one be expected to find them in a book, or worse, to construct them when the author does not state them compactly in a single paragraph ?

The answer is that it must be obvious that you do not have to know about arguments "as a logician does." There are relatively few logicians in the world, for better or for worse. Most of the books that convey knowledge and can instruct us contain arguments. They are intended for the general reader, not for specialists in logic.

No great logical competence is needed to read these books. To repeat what we said before, the nature of the human mind is such that if it works at all during the process of reading, if it comes to terms with the author and reaches his propositions, it will see his arguments as well.

There are, however, a few things we can say that may be helpful to you in carrying out this rule of reading. In the first place, remember that every argument must involve a number of statements. Of these, some give the reasons why you should accept a conclusion the author is proposing. If you find the conclusion first, then look for the reasons. If you find the reasons first, see where they lead.

In the second place, discriminate between the kind of argument that points to one or more particular facts as evidence for some generalization and the kind that offers a series of general statements to prove some further generalizations. The former kind of reasoning is usually referred to as inductive, the latter as deductive; but the names are not what is important. What is important is the ability to discriminate between the two.

In the literature of science, this distinction is observed whenever the difference is emphasized between the proof of a proposition by reasoning and its establishment by experiment. Galileo, in his Two New Sciences, speaks of illustrating by experiment conclusions that have already been reached by mathematical demonstration. And in a concluding chapter of his book On the Motion of the Heart, the great physiologist William Harvey writes: "It has been shown by reason and experiment that blood by the beat of the ventricles flows through the lungs and heart and is pumped to the whole body." Sometimes it is possible to support a proposition both by reasoning from other general truths and by offering experimental evidence. Sometimes only one method of argument is available.

In the third place, observe what things the author says he must assume, what he says can be proved or otherwise evidenced, and what need not be proved because it is self-evident. He may honestly try to tell you what all his assumptions are, or he may just as honestly leave you to find them out for yourself. Obviously, not everything can be proved, just as not everything can be defined. If every proposition had to be proved, there would be no beginning to any proof. Such things as axioms and assumptions or postulates are needed for the proof of other propositions. If these other propositions are proved, they can, of course, be used as premises in further proofs.

Every line of argument, in other words, must start somewhere. Basically, there are two ways or places in which it can start: with assumptions agreed on between writer and reader, or with what are called self-evident propositions, which neither the writer nor reader can deny. In the first case, the assumptions can be anything, so long as agreement exists. The second case requires some further comment here.

In recent times, it has become commonplace to refer to self-evident propositions as "tautologies"; the feeling behind the term is sometimes one of contempt for the trivial, or a suspicion of legerdemain. Rabbits are being pulled out of a hat. You put the truth in by defining your words, and then pull it out as if you were surprised to find it there. That, however, is not always the case.

For example, there is a considerable difference between a proposition such as "a father of a father is a grandfather," and a proposition such as "the whole is greater than its parts." The former statement is a tautology; the proposition is contained in the definition of the words; it only thinly conceals the verbal stipulation, "Let us call the parent of a parent a 'grandparent'." But that is far from being the case with the second proposition.

(a) What are the observations of the essayist on books in the passage? (15)

(b) Enumerate the points of comparison between a writer and a logician, as proposed in the passage. (15)

(c) What are the helpful rules of reading discussed in the essay? (15)

(d) What does the essayist mean by the phrase 'self-evident propositions'? (15)

(e) According to the essay, what are 'tautologies'? (15)