Business Ethics

Mapping: a reading technique

When you are reading a philosophy article, you will need a map! Unfortunately, you will usually have to draw it yourself. Fortunately, you can do it with the tools I'm about to describe. Don't worry about getting it all right; assume you won't. But if you follow these guidelines, you will almost always be able to correct your mistakes, and figure out where you are.

Tools:

Mapping methods:

Method 1: Be an active, not a passive reader! Don't just let the text lead you along; question it.

Bring your questions to the text, and start interviewing it right away. Don't just read it front to back because it's written that way; read it in whatever ways help you understand it best. Assume that you have the ability to do this. You will have to stay involved with the text, and wrestle the meaning out of it, or it will definitely knock you out (well, put you to sleep, anyway!).


Method 2: Start before you start.

You are not reading a novel, where you want to be entertained and surprised. Here you want to get the whole picture as soon as you can. So try to figure out what the thesis (i.e., the point) of the article is before you start reading it. You don't need psychic powers to do this. Look in the places where a thesis is likely to be found, and use any other clues you may have. Look at the title; try to find the conclusion; look at any boldfaced headings in the text; look at the first paragraph; remember anything you already know about the author; think about why the editors put this article in the place where it is in the book. After two or three minutes of this, and before you really start reading, write down in a complete sentence what you think the thesis is. Since your guess will probably be wrong, you'll be tempted not to bother writing it down. Do it anyway! From now on you will be correcting, refining, and amplifying your guess until it becomes a map of the article. The process will keep you involved while you read.


Method 3: Zoom out (skim) and zoom in (read very slowly and carefully).

You are drawing a map. You need both large features and details to get where you are going.

For the large features, Zoom out. Skim the article, and identify its main divisions. Take anywhere from five or ten minutes to a half hour to do this superficially before you do any close reading. Again, don't worry about getting it all right; you won't. But do what you can in the time you've allowed, and correct the results later. Sometimes the author, or the editors, have called attention to the large features by some device like numbered or boldfaced headings. These are obvious road signs. But often you have to do the work yourself. What are you looking for? How is a philosophy essay structured? The main divisions of a philosophy essay are not usually topics (like, Five kinds of invertebrate life cycle, or Three uses of the verb "to dream"). They are usually arguments, like Three reasons why business executives should only be concerned with making a profit for the stockholders, or Five reasons for thinking that life is but a dream. When you draw the main features of your map, each argument should be included in some form that summarizes its conclusion, and the reasons offered for the conclusion. (E.g. "Moral argument: business execs are agents of stockholders, who want profits; execs would be stealing to use stockholder money for any other purposes. Therefore it is morally wrong for executives to do anything but pursue profits. Pragmatic argument: Business execs don't know how to do anything but look out for the bottom line anyway. Therefore they should stick to what they're good at, and only pursue profits.")


To find the main divisions of the article, you want to ask 1) What's the main thesis?, 2) What supporting arguments does the author use, and how do they support the conclusion?, 3) What objections, if any, does the author raise and answer, either to the main thesis or to the conclusions or premisses of any of the arguments along the way? Arguments and objections often have flags you can spot from the air while you're skimming. Some argument indicators: "In conclusion...," "It follows that...," and "A second argument that establishes this point is ...." Some premise and conclusion indicators: "because", "since" and "hence." An objection indicator: "On the other hand,..." For more, consult a logic text, or just use your common sense!


For the small features, zoom in. Read several times, very closely and carefully. Write down what you are reading in your own words, sentence by sentece. Try reconstructing arguments, numbering the reasons given and the conclusion drawn. Obviously you won't know what features deserve this kind of treatment until you know what the large features are. (If you were going from Rowan to visit my brother in England, you would want a detailed map to the airport in Philadelphia or New York, and another detailed map from Heathrow to his house in Ealing. You would not want detail on the mid-Atlantic ocean floor!) What deserves close reading is the arguments, with their statements of evidence, the handling of objections, and the statement of the main thesis (plus anything else the author obviously thinks is highly important).

The most common student mistake in reading philosophy is to walk into the forest of an article and immediately start drawing a careful picture of each tree. Don't do it! Even if you manage to draw every tree, (and it could easily take you a day to do that), you still won't have a map of the forest. Result: You spend many excruciating, boring hours of study, you don't get anything out of the article, and you get a bad grade on your reading test. Not a pleasant thought! Worse than that, the "map of the forest" metaphor breaks down here, because in this case, if you don't know what the forest looks like it's frequently not possible to draw a tree, or know what's a tree and what isn't. Without the big picture, you'll get the details wrong, too. Keep zooming out, so when you zoom in you know where you are and why you're doing it.


Method 4: Read between--and behind--the lines.

What is the author not saying? What invisible assumptions control the essay? Try a different angle and see what difference it would make. How would this territory look from the viewpoint of a Puerto Rican woman? An African-American man? A union member in a New Jersey auto plant? A worker in a third-world sneaker assembly plant? (Pick viewpoints that you can connect with the article in some way; these relate most obviously to a business context.)

The author did not write in a vacuum. Who else is in the discussion? What is the context of the discussion, and what do you think the other participants would have to say?

What are the author's training, background, and credentials? What does this tell you about the author's likely expertise and biases?

An article in an anthology has been put there for reasons. Why have the editors included this essay in this place? (The answer can give you helpful clues about the content of the essay.)


Method 5: Mark your trail!

Keep drawing your map. Keep summarizing what you are reading, keep revising your outline of the main features, keep filling in details. Write down your results somewhere where you can find them later and make sense out of them. A computer file is a great place to do this; but there are many options.

A highlighter can be very useful here. But be careful not to highlight everything! I recommend using it when you skim, to highlight the thesis and the main supporting reasons and objections. Again, when you do your close reading, you might want to highlight the beginnings of key points, or passages that strike you as especially significant. (Note: don't highlight if you are going to sell your book; it's really rude! Use light pencil checks in the margin instead. If you are going to keep the book, I recommend blue highlighter; it doesn't show up when you photocopy.)

In books I own, writing in the margin is one of my favorite ways of marking my trail, and carrying on a running discussion with the author.

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