Scholars are adept at forming their beliefs on the basis what other people know. Think of a historian’s views about the rise of “scientific management” in the early twentieth century, for example. She will no doubt have done some research of her own, perhaps in the archives of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, but she will have a learned a great deal more about the subject by reading books and papers from her fellow historians. Indeed, she won’t have learned just about scientific management from these peers, she will have learned about the entire history of the world, going all the way back to her undergraduate studies. All this knowledge forms a frame around her specialization and a foundation beneath it.

When you think about it, this is a marvelous cultural achievement. We don’t just believe that Frederick Winslow Taylor had a profound influence on the organization and management of the modern corporation; we know this. Some of us know this in great detail and others only know the broad outlines. But these are not just “opinions” we hold. It is knowledge we have acquired. And we’ve been able to acquire this knowledge much more easily than the hardworking historians who have uncovered all the documentation and brought it together in their work. All we had to do was read what they had written. Then we knew.

But is that really all there is to it? Is this not almost a magical theory of literary meaning? All I have to do is pass my eyes over the pages of a book, it seems, and suddenly my mind is in a state of knowing! Well, no. As every student knows, it’s not that easy. You read the words and try to understand them. You struggle and you learn.

A very important part of this struggle comes in the confrontation of our own reading with that of others. After we have read a book or essay we discuss it with our peers–be they fellow professors or fellow students. Sometimes, we discuss it with “authorities” or “superiors”, i.e., experts outside our own field or teachers with a better understanding than us students. In those conversations, we find out how well we understand the book we were reading, how effective our struggle with those pages was.

What I want to emphasize is that we did, in fact, form beliefs while reading. We thought we knew something about scientific management after reading a chapter about it. But then, when we discuss with other people who have also read that chapter, we come to see the matter from a different point of view. Sometimes we recognize that we had misunderstood what the book was saying. Sometimes we realize that, however well researched and argued the book may be, the author seems simply to have gotten the facts wrong. Our reading, that is, may turn out not to “hold up” under the pressure of another reader’s take on it.

This is something to be mindful of as you go about your scholarly work. It’s one thing to make up your mind about something; it is another to speak your mind to others. You want to become good at making a claim, i.e., saying (claiming) that something is true. You then want to observe what happens to that claim in a conversation with qualified peers–people who make similar claims about similar things for similar reasons. Does the claim survive the criticism of your peers? Is the claim sustainable in discourse?