I now know what I didn’t know then: Deductive vs inductive fiction-reading

 In a previous blog, I quoted Lars Svendsen in his ‘The Philosophy of Boredom’:

‘Information and meaning are not identical. To simplify, one could say that meaning consists of assembling small parts which fit together to form a bigger whole, whereas information is the opposite’.

Any teacher worth their salt will have seen through this and will have related it to a well-known principle of learning: inductive vs. deductive methods.

So let’s see whether this can be applied to reading books, too – and why it matters to do so. After all, 'meaning' is what we're after...

As a reminder – and perhaps simplistically –  deduction is the formulating of examples from a rule; induction is the formulating of a rule from examples.

In the class, deductive teaching often takes the form of a teacher writing/explaining a rule (e.g. How to form the present perfect) and asking learners to apply that rule across a body of examples/exercises. Inductive teaching would be learners being asked to infer a general rule from multiple examples of the present perfect – the naming of that rule only being given once the learners have had a chance to try and find it themselves. This is simplistically stated, but it should be enough for our purposes.

How does this relate to reading fiction?

In two main ways – hardly similar, yes, but both important for a teacher to think about.

First, let’s follow Federico Zeri (an Art historian) in his application to deduction/induction in the reading of paintings. As he points out, when we want to interpret a painting, we do so in a deductive way: because you can see the whole canvas at once, you are forced to perceive the whole before you can attend to the parts. That way, you will automatically relate the parts to the whole, and feed your interpretation of that whole through assigning meaning to the parts – meaning which is, really, driven by your perception of the whole (at least originally).

Compare that to a text, and it’s immediately obvious that reading is an inductive process: because we cannot perceive the whole at once (a novel is linear, bound to the arrow of time, a painting isn’t), because we cannot know what the whole is before we’ve reached the end of the text, we can only accumulate bits of knowledge – punctual, discrete perceptions. From that slow accumulation, we hope to finally be able to give meaning to the whole, building on the parts we discovered one by one.

For teachers, this creates both a problem and an opportunity.

The problem is that when a teacher hands out a poem, or a text, to their learners, that teacher knows the whole while the learners don’t. So really, learners face an inductive process while the teacher has integrated the deductive one. In other words, for the teacher it’s quite clear why this or that part relates to the whole, since they know the whole. For the learners, this is much more difficult to do: how do you know that this part illuminates the whole when you haven’t seen the whole yet?

It's easy for the teacher to point out this line in a poem, that word, this rhythm, and claim they participate to the meaning of the whole, since they can deduct those meanings from the overall shape of the whole.

It’s very difficult for learners to do the same; as a result, that line, that word, that rhythm are just bits of information – as yet, they cannot signify much since there is nothing to relate them to (except between themselves of course). So learners are facing an almost impossible task – almost but not quite if you follow a simple procedure when trying to interpret texts 😊. 

This is important to realise since we teachers all do that: because we know the whole, we can work out how the parts construct it, relate to it, build towards it. Doing that the other way around is very difficult, and all the more so if you don’t have much experience reading or interpreting (as our learners tend to). This discrepancy has the unfortunate habit of leading teachers to expect the constituting parts to be self-evident, whereas they are that only within a deductive process: ‘What, can’t you see that the boat in that line refers to religion?!’. Well, no, because in an inductive process, that is a really hard thing to do.

Yet there’s another side to that inductive/deductive coin: the ultimate benefits of re-reading.

Consider: the first time you read a text can only be an inductive process – a demanding, time-consuming, attention-heavy process, and one largely consisting of walking in semi-darkness, unsure of what is to come.

But the next time you re-read that same text, the inductive process has become a deductive one. Now that you know what happens, to whom, how, and how it all resolves (if it does), you can much more easily see how the parts relate to the whole. Now you can approach the text from two different directions as it were, and that will be a great boon for your preparation, and therefore should lead to you – the teacher – being able to select passages, episodes, examples, quotes that you know are central, or exemplary, to the text as a whole (and preparation is key!)

That, then, becomes a way of selecting passages for close-reading, for example, or extract passages that you can use for discussions rather than illustrations.

It must also lead you to be more patient with learners, and to accompany their process of interpretation from their perspective, certainly when the text discussed was handed out to them on the day.

Both inductive and deductive readings are inescapable; the key is to be aware of the difference and of the implications for your teaching and for your learners. Then of course, you are free to make use of what each brings to the discussion-table. This is not a must-do/should-do situation - it's a question, as so very often, of choices.