 In the last chapter, we looked at what Adler had to say about terms. This chapter deals with propositions of judgments. You know, in rough terms, terms are what the author means, the concept that the author is using. The propositions, the judgments, are what the author believes to be true or false. What we're going to see are both propositions that the author thinks are true and what propositions the author believes are true and justified. There's an important difference between those two. Also in this chapter, we're going to get three more rules of analytical reading, 6th, 7th, and 8th. Let's look at the 6th rule. The 6th rule is that you find the important sentences and then you come to understand the propositions that are expressed by them. Just like when we were dealing with terms, we had to find the words and then find the term. We had to find the word and find the meaning. Propositions aren't really that much different. Words compose sentences. Sentences express propositions. Now there's going to be some issues here in trying to find the important sentences, and then there's going to be some issues in trying to interpret, to understand what the author means by those sentences. The author gives several hints, guidelines, to find the right sentences. Now this is just a start, but you shouldn't consider this to be exhausted. This is almost as much of an artist as a science. So the first sentence is defined to pay attention to. Are the ones you don't understand? If you read them and on their surface you look at them and say, I have no idea what this means, better go ahead and write that down or mark it in some way. You're going to want to come to understand what that sentence means, at least later on if not sooner. The second way is when the author distinguishes some sentence or somehow points them out or marks them. You do this by manipulating the text, using a different font. So in small caps or bold caps or bold italicized underline. Because the author will designate sentences by using certain phrases like theorem or axiom or composition or reason or evidence or rule. When an author goes through the trouble of designating a sentence it's somehow different from the others. Pay attention to that and mark it. Next you're going to want to look for those sentences that contain the terms that you found back in the rule five. So remember you spent some time trying to identify important terms and that was good. Finding in terms is good. When a sentence has those terms, pay attention to that sentence. Maybe circle the word that's in there that's important. Maybe put a little check or dash out to the side, something like that to show that that sentence is important, you must understand what that sentence is. And then finally, this kind of gets into rules seven and eight, but the whole point, the whole reason why the author is writing is trying to convince you of something or trying to get you to believe something or maybe try to teach something, whatever. Especially if it's nonfiction. Hopefully, at least sometimes there's going to be a summary paragraph or sometimes a summary chapter. If you're reading a mystery novel, you shouldn't read the ending first, right? That's a bad idea, spoils the mystery. Not so with nonfiction. Go ahead and read that last chapter. Spoil the ending with nonfiction. That's going to help you understand everything else that the author is doing. Everything else that the author is doing. So look for that summary paragraph, sometimes it's at the beginning, sometimes it's at the end, sometimes it's both. Maybe it's an introduction chapter, including chapter, maybe it's both. As the author really wants to help you along, at every step of the way, the author is going to come and summarize what we've done up to this point, what we're doing here. Pay attention to that. Learn what those sentences mean. Mark them down. Mark them down. So that's rule six. That's the first part of rule six. Find the important sentences. Next, you have to find, you have to uncover the meaning with a proposition. Now remember, propositions was true or was false. But the author believes to be true or what the author believes to be false. Now, there can be several difficulties in interpreting propositions for sentences. First, foremost, definitely, it's that not every sentence expresses a proposition. Your proposition, most probably, it's simply, is going to be expressed by declarative sentence, a subject and a predicate. It's sunny. Today is sunny. The beach is beautiful. I am standing on the beach. These are simple declarative sentences with a subject and a predicate. Okay, promise, not every sentence expresses a proposition. There are plenty of sentences that do not express propositions at all. What is the weather like? That's an interrogative. It's a question. That is not something that's true or false. Go to the beach today. That is, it's a command. It's an imperative. That is also not something that's true or false. It's either followed or not followed, but it's not a true or false thing. I love the beach. Beach, yay, beach, yay. That would be some kind of exclamation. Even something, maybe, maybe, maybe, we'd say, I love the beach. Okay, maybe that expresses some kind of proposition. But really the main point of that sentence is to say, this beach is fantastic. You should go to the beach right now. These sentences, these are not propositions that are either true or false. The first step in interpreting this is, first of all, you've got to find those sentences that actually express propositions because not everyone who does. Second, there can be ambiguity with propositions. Sure, absolutely. We talked about ambiguity with terms. There can definitely be ambiguity in terms. And given that, there can be ambiguity with propositions. Depending on what you mean by the terms, you can have a couple of different propositions. But even leaving that aside, supposing there's no real confusion about the terms, there can still be ambiguity with the proposition itself. So say, I told you to say, I said, I saw a dolphin on the beach. Now, that can be interpreted in at least two different ways. Either while on the beach I saw a dolphin or upon observing the beach, there was a dolphin on the beach. And those are two different, right? Either while on the beach I'm looking out there and I see a dolphin, or when I'm on the beach, there's a dolphin right there, right? Those are two different ways, two different propositions that are expressed by the same words, by the same sentence. So there can be problems in interpreting the propositions. Now, what you want to do is you want to ensure that you properly interpret these propositions. If you have ambiguity and you're not exactly sure what's going on, write down all the possibilities, or at least the most relevant possibilities. You're going to need that to interpret what the author is doing. And really the best way to keep track of that is keep track of your terms. Your terms are really going to help you out in interpreting the sentence property and interpreting the context. So if I say, I saw a dolphin on the beach, look at the rest of the context of the paragraph of the story. If the rest of the story is just about me going to the beach and enjoying the sunshine, enjoying the weather, and taking in the beautiful sights, and I don't mention anything about having to do a dolphin rescue, or throwing water on a dolphin, or this extraordinary weird thing that popped up on those, isn't it weird that a dolphin was up? Then I didn't see a dolphin beach itself. I guess, while I was at the beach or something. Remember, this is active reading. So interpreting the proposition is not just something that the text does for, you've got to work with the text to figure some things out, okay? Now, a part of what that's going to involve, a big part of what that's going to involve, is writing down these propositions. What you understand the proposition to be in writing it down. And when you do this, test the proposition. See if you understand what it says. So, I don't know, supposedly you know a proposition that you can come across. And this is just really simple and silly, but let's just deal with it for the sake of example. All oceans are saline bodies of water. All oceans are saline bodies of water. So how would you test it? Well, you'd write down, it's like, okay, the Pacific, that's an ocean. And it's saline, yeah, it's saline, the Atlantic, that's an ocean. Is it saline? Yeah, it's saline. So you go through the oceans and figure out where they're saline. And you know, maybe think about, okay, well are all saline bodies of water ocean? No, right, there's other bodies of water besides oceans that are not saline. So, bays, harbors, these are still saline bodies of water, but they're not oceans. But this is what you do, this is what you do, this is how you work with the proposition. You look at the judgment, if it's a generalization, you try to write out particular cases. And you know, kind of the reverse, right, if it's a particular judgment, think about what generalization is going to make that true. Or is it not a generalization, but is it something else? So you know, here's a generalization. All lakes are freshwater. All lakes are freshwater. It's actually false, right? There's one lake that is salt, is saline. So what makes a lake lake? So if you see something like this, you know, Lake Michigan is freshwater. It's like, okay, well now is that true because it's a lake or is it true because they tested it? Is it true for some, for whatever reason? So when you get a proposition like this, trying to figure out what's going to make that true, what does the author think is going to make that proposition true? How is it going to lead to an overall point, conclusion that the author is trying to make? These propositions do not occur in a vacuum or in a desert or absent any other kind of context. Now you should be able to locate this proposition on a conceptual map of what the author is trying to do. It's going from the question to the answer. So when you're understanding these propositions, trying to understand what's going on, try to find your place on that map with that proposition. Now that's going to help you. So that's two parts to rule six. Find the important sentences and then under, you have to come to understand the propositions that are expressed by those sentences. This brings us to rule seven. Find the argument. Find the argument. Now, as a grammatical point, right, letters compose words. Words compose sentences. Sentences compose paragraphs. And as we've seen, words express terms. Propositions, sentences express propositions. At least some sentences express propositions. It may be nice that paragraphs express arguments, but it doesn't work out that way. It's not going to be nearly as neat and say, aha, here's the argument. Maybe, maybe, maybe. If the author has been very considerate, you will find a summary paragraph with that argument given in a paragraph. Either at the end of a chapter or, you know, at the end of a text something like that. Maybe, maybe, maybe. But usually it's just not the case. Just for most paragraphs, don't express a single argument. So you're going to have to do a little bit of work. You're going to have to figure out which propositions express the argument. And how are they supposed to be related to each other? Now, an argument is a series of statements that in some way justify or infer a conclusion. And that inference pretty much just goes one direction. Sometimes it goes both, but let's not worry about that right now. That's pretty rare cases. Arguments usually go from premises to the conclusion. Usually it's a series of premises that reach that conclusion. And there can be inferences along the way, and that's fine, right? That's fine. But it's a set of, that justification goes one direction from premises to conclusion. Okay. It's your job to figure out which of the premises and which of the conclusion. Now, hopefully, hopefully, hopefully, the author saves the conclusion for last or in some way says the point of this text is to prove the following claim, right? And that would be the conclusion. Everything else, all these other propositions, at least in theory, are supposed to be offered in support of that conclusion. But what you have to do, I mean, if the author's done a very good job, that the author's been considered up to this point, and you can easily find all the propositions. You know, your first step is just to list all the propositions and figure out which one's the conclusion. All of those are supposed to support that. And hopefully there's some kind of order of inference, where one set of propositions infers another, and then that one with another set of evidence infers another, and then all the way down to the conclusion. It isn't always that nice and neat and tidy. Sometimes it's a little bit, it's more rare to find a nice and neat and tidy that way. But nevertheless, you should look for that. So the author's been very considerate right at all these propositions that the author released to be true, and hopefully it's like the last one that is the conclusion. Now there's a couple of pitfalls you have to watch out for. Not every argument in a text is there just to prove the conclusion. A lot of times there are anticipated objections, right? Possible counterarguments for a contrary conclusion. Keep your eye out for those too. And a lot of times it's a very complex work. You're going to have the main point that the author's trying to prove, and a set of possible objections. And at some point the author's going to maybe offer a buttle to each of those objections. You can have a lot of arguments happening within the same text that aren't all directly inferential for the conclusion. Some of these are trying to avoid misunderstandings or complications, or even just trying to say here's an anticipated objection, here's why it's not going to work. You've got to keep track of all this. You're going to have to keep track of what the author says in the text. You have to recognize what the author is doing. There's a very real difference between providing a quote of what the author says and understanding what the author is doing. There's a very real difference between those two. And when you're taking notes, I strongly suggest if you're going to write a quote, fine, write a quote, but interpret it. Tell, write down. Make a note yourself. What is the author doing here? That's a note for you to understand what the author is doing. And frankly, if you're doing your first set of notes, don't do quotes. If you want my advice, and people are probably going to disagree with me, but if you want my advice, when you do the first set of notes, don't do quotes. Mark where in your, get a little quick citation, page number, paragraph number of where you get that information from in the text. But don't write a quote, at least not yet. Just get an idea of what that author is doing. All right. So you have to recognize the premises from the conclusion. There's going to be some indicated words that can help out with this. Because for the reason that since, what, this shows that, these sorts of indicator words give us reasons or premises. This tells us what the justification evidence is. Therefore, so it follows that necessarily, this necessitates, these indicator words give us conclusions. Those indicator words give us conclusions. That's at least in, I can speak as far as English is concerned. I can't speak about other languages. So you're going to have to look for these indicator words. They're helpful. There's not always reliable. They're not always going to be there. There's an arbitrarily large number of ways to express an argument, unfortunately. And that's even worse when it comes to natural languages like English. You've got to pay attention to what's happening with the text. You've got to keep in mind, what is the author trying to do? What's the question? What's the overall field? What's the context? What is the author trying to prove? It really, really helps to find that summary early on. You're going to need to keep something in mind about the evidence that's out there. Evidence comes in two kinds, right? Justified or proven or not proven. Now I know you're like, wait, hold on a second, not proven? Oh yeah, sometimes. Proven evidence is just like, maybe like a chain of reasoning. A implies B, B implies C, C implies D, D implies E. Therefore, A implies A. Boom, right? Okay. Now it's just impossible for all your evidence to have an additional proof, because whatever that proof is, that's further evidence. So if every belief has to have justification, that's going to be yet one more belief. So A needs to be proved by B, B needs to be proved by C, C needs to be proved by D. So one, you're going to run out of letters real fast, right? Our minds simply are not big enough for this infinite regress of justification. Some of the evidence that the author is going to use is not going to have an additional proof, and Adler gives two kinds. You should, you know, just please take this for thought. I'm not saying this exhaust the options, but at least take this for thought. The first kind is just what he assumes to be true, that the author assumes this to be true, and the author assumes you think it's true as well, right? We can call these shared assumptions. Now you may or may not share the assumptions. Okay, that's fine, but when you're reading a text, you've got to understand when the author believes that you have a shared assumption. That's one. Another kind is what Adler calls self-evident. And there's lots of debate about what self-evident propositions are. I'm just going to talk about how Adler talks about it, just for the moment. For Adler, a self-evident proposition is one where, you know, if you assume it's false, you're going to have like a contradiction or an absurdity. So Adler gives the example of the relationship between parts and holds. So the hole is greater than the parts. The hole is greater than the parts. Okay, now if you think that's false, if you think that's false, or you have an e-car psyche, he thinks it's self-evident in this way, right? Let's assume it's false. If it's false, then the hole is just as big, or rather just as great as any one of its parts. So think about a leg, excuse me, a chair. Now the leg of a chair is just a part. It's not as big as a chair. It can't hold as much weight as the whole chair. It's, you know, it's just a leg. But if the hole is not greater than the parts, then the hole the chair is just as big as the leg, which is a little silly. So this, so Adler's at least arguing here that the hole is greater than the parts is self-evident, since if you think it's false, you're going to get this contradiction. It gives some kind of nonsense to it. So when you're finding the argument, you've got to find, you're kind of these starting pieces of evidence, either it's a shared assumption or it's self-evident. Now that's where Adler kind of limits it. I'm going to let you figure out whether there's more kinds than that. Now at one point in this chapter, Adler says that you need to be able to find the argument, but you don't need to be a trained logician. You know, in Adler's context, a trained logician was pretty trained and people generally had some kind of training and logic. These days, that's not the case, right? You don't have formal logic taught, or you know, critical thinking as a mandatory component of public education, depending on which college you go to. It's not going to be mandatory for your degree, right? There won't be a separate course called critical thinking. Now, at Adler's time, there was more of this requirement. And then there was some pretty specialized training and logic. Nowadays, you just kind of have the specialized training and logic depending upon where you go. So having said that, Adler says you don't need to think as a logician, just maybe you do. I want to look this up a little bit. I found that when somebody tries to teach, tries to self-train in logic, usually it ends badly. Now usually, there's deep misunderstandings and that person really doesn't know what they're doing. So I strongly suggest getting some training, some formal training and reason. And there's several ways that you go about doing this. There's several different kinds of courses out there that aren't necessarily for credit that will give you at least some help in this. But leaving that aside, Adler says you don't need to have training and logic, but you do need to make, you do need to understand what kind of argument is offered. And the divides broadly between inductive arguments and deductive. Now already, if you don't know the difference between inductive arguments and deductive arguments, this is why I say maybe you'd benefit from the training of a logician. And these are two very different argument types. In fact, the way Adler describes the difference is that inductive arguments have particular judgments, or are single instances of a subject and a predicate. And from that, generalizes. It goes through generalization. And then deductive arguments go from a generalization down to a particular judgment. Okay, and that was pretty much the accepted way of doing it. Today, I actually don't like to think of inductive and deductive arguments like that. Here's how I think of inductive arguments. Inductive arguments are arguments where the premises or the evidence or the reasons make the conclusion more likely to be true, or raise the probability that the conclusion is true. Deductive arguments, the truth of the premises necessitates the truth of the conclusion. You know, if the premises are true, the conclusion must be true. And the reason why there's this difference is the relationship between the different propositions that constitute the evidence or the reasons is going to depend upon its argument form. Now, if you already are not familiar with argument forms, you already are kind of, you know, maybe you ought to figure this part out before you try to figure out whether it's an inductive or deductive argument. And like I said, maybe you should get some training from a logician. I know a lot of people out there are already like, oh, come on, don't tell me that. I hate logicians. Okay, I mean, I get it, right? Logic can be a complicated course, but you're going to have to have some of these basics down in order to understand the argument, because I'll tell you what, you're right off the bat, right? Inductive arguments are basically, all of the physical sciences is induction. And that's not a bad thing, right? I'm a fan of that. But a lot of people think that if they find like one case where the generalization is not true, then the whole thing goes off as one thing. No, right? So most everybody, I mean, here's a generalization that we get from the physical sciences, you know, kinesiology, biology, whatever you want to call it. You should not try to run a marathon week in after week in. That's a bad idea, a bad idea to try to do that. You're going to destroy your body like that. But there's a list, one case where this guy does, he goes around, you know, goes around week in week and running marathons. He's kind of built differently than the rest of us. Now that one case, he must have, oh, well, then it's all for a boy, then anybody can go run a marathon every week. No, right, no. But that's the nature of a conclusion drawn from induction, right? The conclusion is more likely to be true, right? All right, leave that aside. But nevertheless, this is important. You really ought to figure out what kind of argument is being offered. That's part of this task of completing rule seven, right? Of finding the argument. It's going to be very, very helpful to determine what kind of argument you got. All right, so the last rule, rule eight, is find the solutions. All right, what does the author think the author's done? Has the author succeeded? There's basically what's going on. It's a little bit different than just simply finding the arguments, right? I mean, you've got to find the arguments that's true. But like I said, there can be lots of different arguments offered in a text, and they can all kind of lead to a point, but some are going to be indirect, some are going to forestall objects, right? They can get complicated real fast. You should be able to, at this point, figure out overall what the author's doing. And the way I like to think about it, at least I do, right? What's the question the author is trying to answer and what does the author believe answers that question? What does the author believe answers that question? By the way, what the author's actually done can sometimes be different than what the author tried to do, right? And with rule eight, you've got to figure out whether the author succeeded. What's the question answered, first of all, right? What's the question? What does the author think is the answer and has the author actually provided that? Maybe the author was trying to definitively prove such a software, but the arguments offered are only inducted, so they only made it more likely, something like that. But maybe that's all you can do. So when you're finding the solutions, you've got to figure out what the author's trying to do and whether the author succeeded, right? What has the author done to answer that question and has the author done a good job? Okay, so we got, at this point, now we've got rules five, six, seven, and eight. This is the second stage of analytical reading. And for what it's worth, pretty much everything from rule one through eight, that deals with, for instance, like one text at a time, right? Rules one through eight deal with that text at a time. The third stage of analytical reading is not going to deal just with that text, right? The third stage is going to deal with that text, that author, compared to other authors, compared to you, right? And trying to understand what everybody is saying about all the others. So, but now we've got five, six, seven, and eight. That's the second stage of analytical reading. From here, we'll move on to the third stage. Now, here's something else to keep in mind, right? So, now that it makes this grammatical point, saying that letters compose words, words compose sentences, sentences compose paragraphs. Okay, and at terms compose propositions, propositions compose arguments, right? Okay, that's great. And he kind of sort of speaks sometimes as if, this is a linear progression, like first you understand the terms, then the propositions, and then the argument. You know, in other words, sometimes he says, well, first it seems like he might be saying, you have to figure out all the terms first before you can move on to the propositions, and you keep not to move on, all the propositions first before you move on to the argument. That isn't necessarily the case, right? At least I found it, it's not necessarily the case. Sometimes I've read texts like, oh, wow, look, there's a term, I never knew that was there. Sometimes this happens. You know, sometimes the author doesn't contain enough propositions to make a good argument, and you've got to do the job for the author. You're not going to find that in the text. So, this is just kind of my way of saying is, you know, it's really great. I think it's great to have the overall point in mind before you try to find anything else, and that's something that I really aim for when I'm comprehending. But sometimes you're not really able to do that. Sometimes just the terms are really obvious. Okay, I know this author is dealing with this term, this term, this term. All right, maybe from there you go to, you try to build the judgments, and then build the argument, and then figure out what the author is doing. Authors, there's a wide variety of ways to write any given piece, right? There really is, and there's no one way that's going to be a perfect rule for all of the pages. It's just not going to work that way. At least I don't think so. You know, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there's somebody out there that can give you a systematic approach. You go from one step to the next, and it's invariant. For what it's worth, I don't think that's the case. I think that you're going to continue to work with this text, and you're going to find new terms, you're going to find new judgments, you're going to find new arguments kind of embedded in there. And sometimes you might find that, you know, maybe the author thinks the author's doing one thing, but really has done something else, and that doesn't come until after you've really poured over that text four or five times. Sometimes that can happen. So I'm about to get blown away by a pretty strong northern wind here, and I'm going to take that as a cue that this is done. All right, so I'll see you next time.