Exegesis Basics

Guide on good exegesis

How to do good exegesis is too broad a topic to cover in depth on this wiki, but for people who'd like to contribute, here are a few basics.

Logic basics

Propositions, or, What it takes to have something to say

A proposition is a statement: the sort of thing that can be true or false. Typically a proposition is expressed by a clause in a sentence (possibly the whole sentence). For example, "People who engage in political maneuvering must be aware of how they're coming across in the eyes of others" is a proposition. It's true if such people really do need to be aware of how they come across, false if they don't.

A proposition say something about something. What the proposition is about is called the subject. What the proposition affirms or denies about its subject is called the predicate. In our example, "People who engage in political maneuvering" is the subject, and "must be aware of how they're coming across in the eyes of others" is the predicate. (Usually the grammatical subject of a sentence is the logical subject of a proposition, but not always.)

Without a subject, a person wouldn't have anything to talk about. Without a predicate, a person wouldn't have anything to say about it. And so, until you've decoded the subject and predicate (even if not consciously), you don't understand what someone else is saying.

Definitions

An important kind of proposition is a definition: a statement that marks off the boundaries of some kind of thing, distinguishing it from others. For example, "Written language, as opposed to other forms of language, is limited to written symbols."

A definition has two main elements: a genus and a differentia. The genus is the broader kind of thing that the thing being defined is to be distinguished from (the "space" in terms of which the distinction makes sense). You know what the genus is when you can say, "As opposed to what?" The differentia is what's different or special about the thing being defined: where the boundary is. The genus of "Written language" is language (of course), and the differentia is that it's limited to written symbols.

A verbal definition by itself is seldom enough to get across the kind of thing that an author wants to talk about. It summarizes knowledge by drawing a distinction, usually using many other concepts than the one being defined. A definition locates a concept in a wider hierarchy of concepts. To understand the idea, usually you need some contrasting examples as well as a verbal definition.

Interpretation basics

Your job as an exegete is to spell out what the author is saying: what are the author's propositions, and what are the subjects and predicates of those propositions?

You must separate any feelings of agreement or disagreement from answering those two basic questions: What is Lenore talking about, and what is she saying about it? Exegesis is not agreement or disagreement with a text, it's attempting to show the way toward understanding what the text has to say. If you are rushing to agreement or disagreement, then you're probably skipping understanding. You're probably blotting out the opportunity to learn something new and unexpected. For more about this slow approach to interpretation, see Lance Fletcher on Slow Reading.

In discussion of ideas (as opposed to factual reporting), nearly all of the work is in communicating new concepts: new distinctions, postulated and perhaps unobservable kinds of things, new kinds of subject and predicate. Consequently much of the work of exegesis is trying to describe the author's predicates in your own words: writing your own definitions, finding your own examples, re-stating the propositions in your own words, collecting the main propositions into one place, etc.

Words

To talk about ideas, people often use words in specially refined or idiosyncratic ways, which do not agree with common usage. In common usage, "extraverted" is just a synonym for "gregarious" or "loud and expressive", but Lenore spends at least a chapter explaining what she means by "extraverted" and "introverted".

Consequently, to do good exegesis, you need to attend carefully to what the author is talking about, even if the author is using words in unfamiliar ways. It would be a catastrophic error to say, for example, that a person who is loud and expressive when performing on stage is being "extraverted" because that accords with common usage, when Lenore explicitly says that such behavior can be "introverted" and gives explicit reasons why.

An author might give you clear-cut definitions and might not. An author might give you eye-opening, illuminating examples and might not. Lenore gives few if any definitions and it's debatable what's an example and what's not. So we have some work cut out for us, filling in these missing elements or figuring out why it might actually make more sense for Lenore to omit them.

Writing basics

When you write, always make clear what you're talking about and what you're saying about it. You don't have to be heavy-handed about it, as if you were writing a legal brief, but do be sure to indicate what you're talking about and what you're saying about it. Write so it's easy for your reader to tell what you're talking about and what you're saying about it--regardless of how hard it was for you to do that when reading Lenore's stuff.

All of the above principles of exegesis apply no less to interpreting your fellow authors' writing than to Lenore's. Never agree or disagree with a proposition until you know what the author is saying and what he or she is saying about it.

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Please don't edit the above. It's just the host's basic guidance for how to do exegesis. Exploring it and refining it further would distract us from what we're here to do: Lenore-exegesis. If you want to argue or protest, please just email me. If you're really interested in the subject, email me and I can set up a wiki just for that, if you like. --Ben Kovitz