Claim/support
One of the most common organizational strategies of scientific and philosophical writing—including many selections in Reading the World—is to begin by stating a proposition (such as Hsun Tzu's argument that "human nature is evil" or Thomas Malthus's claim that "population grows exponentially while food supply grows arithmetically"), to continue by offering support for that proposition, and to conclude by restating the proposition and explaining its ramifications. This organizational pattern is also commonly used in college essays, with the "proposition" usually called the "thesis statement." (For more on thesis statements, see p. 634.) Once you have identified an essay as being organized in this fashion, you will have a pretty good idea of where to look for the main point: it will probably be stated once in the first paragraph and once again near the end.
Problem/solution
Essays that make specific policy arguments—think of Martha Nussbaum's "Education for Profit, Education for Democracy" (p. 61) or Garrett Hardin's "Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor" (p. 582)—are often organized from the top down: with the problems that need to be solved stated first, followed by the proposed solutions.
Statement/response
Another common organizational pattern of the readings in this book is statement/ response. This strategy involves quoting or paraphrasing an argument (usually one that you oppose) in the beginning of the essay and then responding to that argument in the remainder of the essay. This form is usually used in texts that rebut other texts and in persuasive essays in which the author anticipates and responds to objections, as Vandana Shiva does in "Soil Not Oil" (p. 374).
Cause/effect
One standard assumption of philosophy and science is that every effect proceeds from a cause. This movement from cause to effect is an important organizational strategy. Some writers who organize their arguments along these lines begin with the cause and move on to explain the effects, as Rachel Carson does in "The Obligation to Endure," (p. 328) when she explains the chemical composition of DDT and then describes its effects on the environment. Many authors, however, present the effects first and then trace them back to a cause, as Joseph Stiglitz does in "Rent Seeking and the Making of an Unequal Society" (p. 594).
Narrative
Stories, or narratives, are an important part of many different kinds of writing. The New Testament parables, the Buddhist suttas, African folktales, and the writings of great philosophers, ancient and modern, often rely on short narratives to make or illustrate points. In many of these texts, the narrative is followed immediately by an interpretation, in which the story becomes the basis for some conclusions or discussion, as in Richard Feynman's "O Americano Outra Vez" (p. 53).
Comparison/contrast
When an author is comparing two things—ideas, movements, people, and so on— he or she will often organize the text as an explicit comparison or contrast. Such an organizational pattern usually takes one of two forms. In the first of these forms, the author spends the first half of the essay discussing one subject of the comparison and the second half discussing the other. In the second variation, the author establishes several grounds for comparison and then goes back and forth between the things being compared. In Reading the World, perhaps the most straightforward example of this kind of organization is Daniel Kahneman's comparison of System 1 and System 2 in Thinking, Fast and Slow (p. 134).
READING VISUAL TEXTS
The word "text" does not apply only to written works. An oral narrative is a text, as is a piece of music, a painting, a photograph, or a film. Works of all these types address audiences, advance ideas, make arguments, and require thoughtful strategies of reading and interpretation. Reading the World includes a number of visual texts that can be studied as seriously and interpreted as diligently as the written texts in the book.
Artists, like authors, have objectives, cultural contexts, and recurring concerns, and they respond to historical discussions and debates. You can, therefore, ask the same "prereading" questions of a painting as of an essay. Additionally, there are other reading strategies that you can use with visual texts. For an introduction to some of these strategies, look at the detail on p. 615 from William Hogarth's engraving Gin Lane (the full text of which appears on p. 548).
This detail shows two of the scenes in the foreground of the engraving. Knowing only that the engraving is titled Gin Lane, you can infer that both of the major figures are intoxicated. One of them, a woman, is reaching for a pinch of snuff while her child falls from her breast and over a railing. The other figure, a man, is holding a glass of gin in one hand and a bottle of gin in the other, and appears to be starving to death. Taken together, the two images present a fairly complete argument, which,
william hogarth Gin Lane, 1751 (engraving, detail).
Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France / Lauros-Giraudon / Bridgeman Art Library.
if rendered in prose, would read something like: "Drinking gin is bad because it causes you to ignore your own health and the well-being of your family."
But there is much more to the text than this paraphrase suggests. Here are some important things to look for when "reading" a visual text:
Emotional appeals. Few images are as emotionally charged as Hogarth's portrayal of a drunken mother allowing her infant child to fall from her exposed breasts to a certain death. The mother's complete lack of concern and the look of pure panic on the infant's face produce a powerful emotional appeal in support of the otherwise bland argument that drinking gin is bad. Most people are extremely affected by emotional appeals, especially when those appeals are made visually. Many people can read words about great suffering, misery, deprivation, and abuse without feeling the emotions that a single picture can convey.
Symbolism. The image of a baby at its mother's breast is a powerful symbol of motherhood and self-sacrifice in cultures throughout the world (see, for example, the wings of the old man in the image from Jung's Red Book, which represent the ability to escape the confines of earthly thought). By inverting this symbol, Hogarth taps into a very deep pool of cultural—and even cross- cultural—associations involving infants, mothers, and nursing. Many of the visual texts in this book feature similar kinds of symbolic representation: the gun and the French flag carried by Liberty in Liberty Leading the People (p. 494) and the light coming from the lamp in An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (p. 308) convey ideas through symbols whose physical forms only suggest their ultimate meaning.
Visual irony. Hogarth was a master of visual irony, much of which requires very close reading of his art. For example, there is a more obvious irony in the fact that the man in Gin Lane is starving to death while clutching a large quantity of gin, whose price could have purchased food instead. There is a less obvious but equally important irony, however, in the piece of paper in his basket. It reads, "The downfall of Madam Gin," presumably the title of a broadside ballad he wrote to sell in order to get enough money to buy more gin.