Reading Philosophy Texts
The following text is a basic introductory guideline for students. Other teachers should feel free to use and adapt this material if they find it helpful. Please cite me when appropriate, and if this guideline worked for your teaching or did not work at all, I would like to hear it. You can contact me at rima dot hussein at jhu dot edu.
Reading texts in philosophy is fun, intellectually challenging, and liberating. It is also demanding and time-consuming. In all likelihood, this is because philosophers do deeply puzzling things in their writing, such as figuring out whether we have some way of forcing people to accept the existence of God through reason alone. Or figuring out whether perceptual illusions tell us something about the nature of our minds. Or if there is something common to our thoughts about the world and the way it really is. Or how to be a good person. Can philosophers answer these questions? Not yet, not to the satisfaction of all, and not exhaustively. The expectation of finding conclusive answers to these questions will make reading philosophy frustrating. Philosophy texts more often offer you ways to navigate foundational questions in a more or less structured manner. So, to save you some grief, I suggest taking the pressure off. Try a first step. Try understanding what the text in front of you claims. Then, take a second step and try to understand how it supports this claim. And then take a third, and consider whether you find this convincing. That is all you need to do.
In the following, I will walk you through these steps and give you a few more specific tools to help you stay oriented.
Let me work through an example. Donald Davidson’s On the Very Idea of A Conceptual Scheme is a seminal text, one that I had always wanted to read. My friends reference it sometimes, and it seems to feature in the way some people debate what concepts do. This topic is a bit outside of my area of expertise, so I am unsure what to expect. I start where one does, at the start of the paper.
“Philosophers of many persuasions are prone to talk of conceptual schemes. Conceptual schemes, we are told, are organizing experience; they are systems of categories that give form to the data of sensation; they are points of view from which individuals, cultures, or periods survey the passing scene. There may be no translating from one scheme to another, in which case the beliefs, desires, hopes and bits of knowledge that characterize one person have no true counterparts for the subscriber to another scheme. Reality itself is relative to a scheme: what counts as real in one system may not in another.” (Davidson, D. On the Very Idea of A Conceptual Scheme, p. 5)
At this point, I do not know anything about the context of this writing; since no one has told me to read it for a particular purpose and what to expect. In order to start making headway in even accessing the text, it is important to understand that philosophers are not just writers. We use writing as a means to access fundamental structures and communicate them to one another. Our primary mode of writing involves employing good reasoning: Philosophers make claims, support these claims with arguments (i.e. sets of premises), provide evidence for the premises in their arguments, and place their reasoning into a context, in most cases this context is a philosophical debate in which the claim acquires a specific meaning. Here is an example just to get this simple structure clear.
(Skip this, if you have taken a logic course. And, do take a logic course. They are teach you the critical reasoning skills you will need.)
(Claims, and premises are single statements - or “propositions” - that are well-formed that is, they make grammatical sense and typically mean something that can be true or false. When it is questionable under what conditions a sentence could be verified or falsified, we might want to rephrase it or ask ourselves if we should reject the content of the paper on grounds of incomprehensibility.)
Elements of Reasoning
Claim. A claim is a sentence that requires support typically by way of giving an argument or simply giving evidence. Example: ‘Socrates is capable of rational thought.’
Argument. An argument is a set of sentences that establish a conclusion. We call sentences in an argument premises. Example:
Premise 1: All humans are capable of rational thought.
Premise 2: Socrates is human.
Conclusion: Therefore, Socrates is capable of rational thought.
We can see how the premises in the argument support the conclusion. For the premises to successfully do so, the conclusion must follow from the premises, it must be formally related (we call this formal feature of arguments validity). For the time being, try to focus on this: when reading, you can notice arguments anytime a statement features a word like “because” or any of its equivalents.
Evidence. We need to provide evidence for the truth of the premises. Conclusions can follow from premises, but if the premises are not true, the argument might be valid but it does not thereby have to be sound (only an argument that is valid and in which the premises are true is sound.) Examples.
P1: On many definitions of what it means to be human, it involves at least the capacity to be rational. This is good evidence for P1, but could be debated, if one wanted to.
P2: For all we know, Socrates was a human being since we have recorded writings of his activities and none of them mention that he was anything but human.
So, the evidence supports both premises, and so the initial claim can be accepted. Bad evidence is often irrelevant and perhaps unnatural seeming. For example, if I claimed that P2 is true by pointing to the revolutions of the stars, you might wonder why in the world I would bring up astrophysics, when trying to convince you that Socrates is a human. Bad evidence is often very easy to spot. Good evidence is straightforward and convincing to a reader who is not dead-set on doubting the text. Excellent evidence supports the premise such that it becomes very difficult to doubt the premise even for the extreme skeptic. Such excellent evidence is used to support the central claim of the paper.
Overall this argument is convincing and supports its conclusion, the claim at stake, very well.
Context:
The argument is convincing as it stands but requires our implicit or explicit contextual placement. Because I am a philosopher, it is reasonable to assume that when I mention some ‘Socrates,’ I mean the ancient Greek philosopher, and that when I talk of ‘rational thought,’ I mean basic human reasoning skills and so on. A different context where ‘Socrates’ could refer to the 8-bit educational home video game console, would require a different argument and different evidence. While you might want to convince me that that Socrates is capable of rational thought, the argument for this claim cannot appeal to a fact about human beings.
You may have noticed that arguments can be nested. A paper or book in philosophy usually defends an overarching claim by providing arguments that consist of premises which are themselves claims and require arguments. The more complex the idea, the more arguments are nested inside arguments. Philosophers who adhere to this writing norm make things a little easier on the reader: If you read the introduction carefully, you will know what to expect and what the sections will contain and you might be able to skip over sections that you think need little justification. But be careful, this strategy is also a bit risky. Some things philosophers claim seem too obvious to even warrant justification and then the interesting thing about the argument is to see why this obvious truth needed this much work to be established (e.g. Whitehead and Russell spent 379 pages to argue that 1+1 equals 2.)
Let us return to Davidson. We can look for these elements in this short introductory paragraph already.
First, “conceptual scheme” is not an everyday term. Any such odd word, or even the odd use of everyday words in philosophy placed prominently in the heart of introductory phrases of a paper indicate a specialized context and probably have a technical definition which will help us see what could be at issue. We can start there. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (right now, October 28, 2023) tells me that a conceptual scheme refers to “[t]he general system of concepts which shape or organize our thoughts and perceptions. The outstanding elements of our everyday conceptual scheme include spatial and temporal relations between events and enduring objects, causal relations, other persons, meaning-bearing utterances of others, and so on.”
Davidson clearly claims a few things about conceptual schemes. Davidson claims in the passage, (1) that conceptual schemes are thought to organize experience in a specific way (2) that they are points of view and (3) that they presumably cannot be translated into one another and 4) that thereby everything one single person believes including her outlook on reality itself is relative to conceptual schemes.
“Conceptual schemes, we are told, (1) are organizing experience; they are systems of categories that give form to the data of sensation; (2) they are points of view from which individuals, cultures, or periods survey the passing scene. (3) There may be no translating from one scheme to another, in which case the (4) beliefs, desires, hopes and bits of knowledge that characterize one person have no true counterparts for the subscriber to another scheme. Reality itself is relative to a scheme: what counts as real in one system may not in another.”
Any competent English reader will notice that Davidson places himself at some distance from these claims. Davidson writes “Conceptual schemes, we are told…” are involved in all these claims. So in this passage alone, we were already told the topic, some core context clues, and a range of claims that Davidson might not endorse. We might expect Davidson to question whether all of these claims are true of conceptual schemes, whether the arguments for such a view follow, and whether they are supported by good evidence. We can look out for these and take notes as we read.
To understand what Davidson believes, we need to move along in the text and read the rest of the introduction just as closely as this first paragraph. You can take a little bit of time to look up the core terms used in the introduction of a paper, and note down the main claims expressed here. It is well worth your time to go slow at the start and then move faster as you start reading the text. You will be helped by a philosophical dictionary or an encyclopedia. I use the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, and if I am not satisfied, I make use of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
For you to get a good understanding of a piece of philosophical writing your reading should try to identify
the problem at hand
the author’s proposed solution (their claim)
enough of the context of the debate for you to know what the core terms mean
the strategy the author uses to make her solution persuasive or true (the arguments and evidence given)
and perhaps, the way in which the problem has previously been solved within the debate if the author decides that engagement with the previous solution advances her claims.
Try to find these elements in the text you are reading, underline, and annotate them. Annotations that will help you: It is always helpful to restate the central claim as clearly as possible in our own words. This helps to stay focused on what needs to be argued, and it will also help you later when writing your paper. But make sure you go back to this statement and adjust your view and expectations for the argument after your first reading. Throughout your reading you will likely discover that you got a central idea wrong. You should also note down all of your questions, or things that surprise you, and finally things you disagree with or still do not understand.
Your marginal notes and the underlined passages should enable you to answer the following questions:
What is the claim? Is that even clear? Do the arguments support the claim? And most important of all: does this make sense to you?
At this point you are well-prepared for class. Discussion sections should now become a place for you to see if any of your questions can be answered and if other people had similar views on the text. At this point you will start developing a more complex view on the topic and the more you do this, the easier reading will become. Finally, this will make writing a paper much easier.
You will be able to quickly and simply articulate the main point of an author’s position and her strategy which is a core part of any discussion of the position in question. And because you now have identified what the author is saying and why, you can agree and disagree and give a justified response and critique. And this is the first step to writing your own philosophy paper.
Cited:
Blackburn S. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. 2nd ed. rev ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2008.
Davidson, D. On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme. In: Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 47 (1973 - 1974), pp. 5-20.