interpretation 

A researcher in any discipline – that is, any subject area—begins with a question, and takes it to the sources for that discipline. For example, if it’s History, the sources might be letters, diaries, public records, newspaper reports, oral memories of living people, film, buildings and various other objects from the time they’re studying, and they use the methods of the discipline to get information out of those sources. If it’s oral memories, for example, the methods would be interviews, and the historian would probably tape record people, or even video them, talking about what they remember. Then the researcher makes some selection, because nobody can usually use all the information there is, but they select what they think is relevant to their question, and what they think is reliable, what seems accurate. They work out what they think it means, developing an interpretation, and come to some conclusions; and their conclusions usually throw up some further questions, things they hadn’t thought about until this stage, but that seem worth pursuing now, and so the cycle starts again, and so on and so forth. 

At the stage where a researcher publishes his or her conclusions, there’s often some disagreement by colleagues, who may raise problems about any part of the process – whether the interpretation makes good sense of the information the person has presented; whether the information is adequate and reliable; whether the researcher made the right selection from all the information available; whether s/he used the best methods of finding it; even, whether the researcher asked the right kind of questions in the first place. And what we think of as knowledge is an interpretation that’s been through this process and survived. It’s been judged by fellow experts to be soundly based and reasonable, so it’s what we have to go on for the time being. But we expect it to change and develop as people ask different questions about it and do more research. We do the best we can, but we don’t ever think that our knowledge is fixed and finished. 

So, this is the process by which academics make knowledge: questions, research into sources, selection, interpretation, conclusions, and the “so what?” that leads into the next cycle and the next. Now, in most of the things you’ll read, the authors present an idea by working backwards through this process – they start with their conclusion, then explain their interpretation, that is, how the person reached this conclusion from the research they did. This is what we call argument, and that term has a special meaning at uni that’s different from the way we’re used to using it in general. We’d normally think of an argument as a quarrel, a disagreement, a contest between opposing points of view. The uni meaning is broader, and less dramatic, and the difference between the general meaning and the academic one causes students a lot of confusion at first. At uni an argument doesn’t mean a debate, like in the papers, about what should happen – except in a few cases, like Ethics or Social Policy Studies – but most often it’s a demonstration of some idea about what does happen – usually it’s an idea about why something happens, or how it happens, making knowledge by relating bits of information to each other.  

For example, the other week on the radio there was a lot of discussion about a report on how the lives of this generation of 25-34 year olds are different from the generations before, and one of the ways is that home ownership is declining. The commentators were trying to work out how this information relates to other things – for example, is the decline in home buying a result of the casualisation of work, people earning less and feeling less secure about their prospects of regular work? Is it related to the drop in marriages; do people just go on renting while they’re single? They were also wondering about how it might affect things like voting: if people have less investment in long-term stability, because they’re not property owners, will their values change and will fewer people vote for conservative political parties? All of these are questions that it might be possible to answer, and you’d need to figure out what kind of evidence would give you the answers, and how to get it. Then you’d present it as an argument that the decline in home buying is caused by a lack of job security, or that renters vote Labour (or not, if it turns out they don’t). 

How is this different from the kind of arguments on public issues that you examine at VCE?  – for example, should there be public injecting rooms? Should the government let boat people in? These are questions about what should happen. At uni, questions are more likely to be about what does happen, or what has happened in the past. For example,  

·         How did humans first settle

These are questions about what is the case, not what should be, and for that reason it seems strange to say that we’re reading and writing arguments about them. Aren’t they matters of fact, rather than things you could argue about? But when people at uni talk about a writer’s argument, they mean, what does she think is the case, with regard to some question, and why does she think so, in terms of the information she’s looked at? A fact, like climate change, is the product of interpreting happenings, not the happenings themselves. The climate might be changing, but we only know about it if we’ve thought to ask what’s happening. Facts are the result of wondering about happenings, suggesting connections between them, using them as evidence that your idea is right. So knowledge is made by asking particular questions and answering them on the basis of evidence that seems relevant. What kinds of information would be evidence for answers to these questions?  

• How did humans first settle Australia?

(maybe, archaeological remains of settlements – rubbish heaps, rock art, hearths, bones—the sequence of dates as people moved from north to south – similarities with languages elsewhere in the world; similar plants appearing; DNA) 

• Why is the coliseum in Rome designed the way it is?

( purpose – symbolism – building technology) 

• Which character has the  real power in the world of the novel Pride and Prejudice?

(focus of novel is on a woman, but crucial economic power is with the man) 

• How is the idea of a nation under pressure from globalisation?

(influence of multinational companies, and global decision-making bodies like Group of Eight overriding national priorities) 

• Are children of divorced families at more risk of failing in school than children of stable marriages?

(survey of family situation, correlated with marks of children; one study has shown that they are more at risk, but only compared with children of happy marriages – it’s not the legal status of the marriage, but the quality of it, that makes the difference) 

This brings us to the question of whether you should give your opinion in an essay. You should, but opinion, here, doesn’t mean what you already thought, or what you want to think about the question, but what the evidence has led you to conclude. For example, the last question could have been answered with a straightforward , no, children of divorce are not at more risk, because divorce can be better than staying married – that’s an opinion, but not in the academic sense. It’s not backed up by any information. Sometimes students ask, why did my tutor ask for my opinion, when he didn’t want it? How can an opinion be wrong? And the problem is that they’ve given their personal view about something, Where “what is your opinion?” meant what do you think about it, in view of the arguments and evidence that you’ve read? 

To sum up so far: the things you read are largely arguments; the things you write are largely arguments; and although some of them will be about controversial topics, a lot of them won’t be. Argument means a demonstration of the reasons why you think that something is the case, laying out the evidence for each reason.  

First year is like an apprenticeship in making knowledge, and different kinds of tasks will give you practice in different parts of this process. That can be quite frustrating, because you’ve just done one kind of assignment, and the next one is something quite different, and you may wonder how you can apply what you’ve learned to this new task – that’s worth bringing up in a tutorial if you’re concerned about it, because the tasks are always related, but you may need some help with seeing how they’re related! Sometimes you’ll be familiarising yourself with the raw materials that people in your field go to, when they’re looking for evidence (e.g. letters, diaries, statistics, bones & stones), sometimes examining people’s arguments to understand what they think, why they think it, and whether they’re right to think it. You’re always expected to evaluate what you read, which your tutors call reading “critically”. This doesn’t mean finding fault, necessarily, but questioning as you go – appreciating what’s been done carefully and thoroughly, but at the same time being aware of places where the argument doesn’t follow, or there isn’t enough evidence, or the evidence doesn’t seem to mean what the author thinks it means. You may be just a new chum, and you may feel that you’re not in a position to be critical of what an expert has written, but anybody can ask themselves those kinds of questions.  

And you’ll notice that a lot of assignments are worded in a way that suggests that there is something problematic or incomplete about an expert’s idea: wording like “Is it accurate/ or adequate/ or fair to say such and such? How far do you agree with such and such?” Even “discuss” some opinion, which doesn’t mean just say anything that occurs to you, but it means, “Explain this idea and say how true you think it is, in light of the reading that you’ve done about it.” You’ll also notice that a lot of assignments ask you to compare two or more ideas about the same topic, and again, this is to make you aware of what kinds of disagreements, or sometimes just different emphases, there are, and the reasons for these, and to form your own judgement of which version makes better sense of the material you’re looking at. 

To give you an example of a question that’s asking you to think critically about some idea, here’s one from Cinema Studies:  

It is often said that

What do you think? Is it an adequate position? What evidence would you need to show that it isn’t? What about considering how far it IS true, as well? This is another difference between academic argument and the kind where you just pursue one position and don’t consider the other – an academic argument considers the reasons on all sides of a question, and comes down to reasons for thinking one is better, or sometimes for thinking that none of them are adequate, or that some need to be brought together rather than opposed to each other.  

So, academic work consists of people trying to explain things, and producing arguments for why they think those explanations are helpful. And it also consists of testing explanations to see whether they hold up – if so, good, and we see how far it’s possible to extend that explanation – if not, why not, and how might we try instead to make sense of whatever we’re looking at? So one person’s work in academic life responds to another’s, testing, confirming, adding to it, questioning, challenging or modifying it. You need to be aware that each theory is not a one-off idea, in isolation from others. They all appear as contributions to an international conversation in the discipline, which takes place in journal articles, in books, at conferences, and in communications on the internet. And they tend to shake down into different schools of thought.  

Not only do different disciplines explain things in different ways, but also within each discipline there are different perspectives that generate different kinds of questions, and lead people to look in different places for answers, and this is also something that your subjects are likely to introduce you to. They’ll talk about different theoretical frameworks, different theories, different models. This is kind of talk can be alarming if you’re not used to it. Therefore, it is important to clarify the meaning of these terms. Whatever subject you’re in, you’re going to be looking at what happens in that area, and the big questions are how these things happen and why they happen that way. HOW and WHY. Both of these questions are included in the meaning of a theory or a model. Now questions about why and how things happen tend to be answered within a particular theoretical framework, which means a system of assumptions about how the world works, that lead you to look for particular kinds of patterns and reasons for them. Look at this example.  

Suppose we’re interested in the problem of child abuse within families, and we want to explain why people murder their children. One kind of explanation for this is that women who have post-partum depression, that is, depression caused by hormonal changes after childbirth, can’t cope with the demands of the new baby and sometimes they kill it. This explanation belongs to a medical theoretical framework; it’s saying that the woman is ill, and not fully responsible because she isn’t fully capable. So the solution will also be medical, in terms of therapies and support for her during this period of hormonal change. A different way of looking at this is a social inequality perspective, where you notice that this happens more often in poorer families, so the problems of coping are not necessarily just hormonal but problems of resources as well, and this perspective would emphasise the need for social supports for new mothers to address the problem.  But then, how do you explain the fact that a lot of murders of children are done by the mother’s de facto boyfriend? A feminist theoretical framework might explain this in terms of the power relations between men and women, that men often use violence to impose their authority on their families. This explanation may be unsatisfactory after further research. For example, a recent seminar at this university, presented by a Ugandan scholar, focused on a growing problem in Uganda of women in polygamous families (that is, families with one husband and several wives) killing the children of co-wives when their mother has died and the surviving co-wife is expected to look after the dead woman’s children as well as her own – an increasing situation with the high incidence of AIDS in Uganda. This is a bit like the wicked stepmothers in European fairy tales, which come from a time in European history when it was more common for widowers to marry again, in the hope of getting a new mother to look after their children. This suggests that the killing isn’t a gender thing, it’s a structural thing: when the family structure requires people to take on additional responsibilities for children that aren’t theirs, they may kill them. Now you could explain this, again, in terms of the strain of making inadequate resources stretch further.  Alternatively, you might take a view from biology and say that the priority of organisms is to reproduce their genes, and a parent won’t tolerate another person’s offspring competing with their own – (the David Attenborough explanation!) 

Now you can see from this how different ways of understanding the world lead to different theories about why a particular kind of thing happens, and also that these tend to be partial and when we think we’ve reached an understanding it can be challenged by information that isn’t explained by the theory we’ve got – for example, theories about female hormones don’t explain why men kill young children, and theories about male violence don’t explain why women kill step-children, and there you can’t fall back on the hormones either, because it’s not their own children they’re killing. And so we move around, even within a discipline, between competing explanations, sometimes rejecting one and proposing another, and sometimes trying to put different perspectives together to explain something more adequately. Sometimes different kinds of explanations can be combined to explain something better; other times they’re incompatible, and you have to choose one explanation or the other. Sometimes, too, people are more committed to one kind of explanation, and part of being critical is being aware of the assumptions behind the questions we ask and the ways we go about answering them, and to be aware when the framework we’re using may limit us in understanding what’s going on. 

So you can see why it’s not enough to assert what you think is the cause of something, you’ve got to lay out your reasons for thinking so and the information those reasons are based on.This is what academics mean by argument. This idea of an argument explains the shape of the things you read and the things you write, and it also guides you in taking useful notes, so here’s the practical application of all this, which we will look at now. 

How to read an article 

Articles and books that present an argument usually have a similar structure, built around the need to convince a publisher and an audience that the author is doing something that needs doing, in the context of this international conversation in the discipline. So the article will usually start with the context – what it’s discussing and what other people have identified as important about it. Then it will pose a question, or a problem, that this author thinks still needs to be answered, and then it will give his or her answer, which we call the author’s “thesis”.  These introductory steps can be demonstrated by looking at the following example from a Politics journal, which is read in a history subject in this Faculty. It’s called “The intellectual origins of mid-Victorian stability”, by Trygve Tholfsen of Columbia University, and it’s published in the Political Science Quarterly, vol 86, no 1, 1971 (57-91): 

In a well known passage Elie Halevy described Methodism as the key to the “extraordinary stability which English Society was destined to enjoy throughout a period of revolutions and crises.” [1] Although Halevy’s thesis has been subjected to cogent criticism, the general problem that he raised – the stabilizing effect of intellectual forces in the history of modern

Often, next, there will be a bit of signposting, telling you how they’re going to demonstrate this answer – maybe, what kind of information they’ve found, what kind of methods they’ve used, or what kinds of points they’re going to make, in what order. This is then followed by the argument, which occupies most of the article – that is, the author’s reasons for their answer, each one with evidence. These reasons may get a paragraph each, or maybe a longer section made up of several paragraphs; and these may or may not have headings to guide you through them. Finally, there’s a conclusion, which restates the answer and reminds you of the evidence, and may also suggest what kind of thinking or action should result from this conclusion.  

Structure of argument in an article or book:Introduction:·         Context·         Question·         Thesis·         Signposting 

Argument:Series of points, with evidence  

Conclusion 

There’s another common structure that’s slightly different, which you’ll meet in the more scientifically-minded disciplines in Humanities and Social Sciences, things like Sociology, Linguistics, and Anthropology, and this is the research article. In this kind of article, somebody has designed a research project to get the answer to some question, and they’ve carried it out and are writing to report what they found out. In these, you have an introduction that establishes the context of what other people have done on this topic before, and what question remains unanswered, which this scholar is setting out to answer; but in these things, they normally save up their answer for the end, so you can go straight there and find it, if you want, before you read the whole thing through. The structure of these articles is a very set, conventional one, with the following sections, and often actually these headings to signpost the sections:  

              Introduction:

•  
  •  
    •  
      • Context
      • Question

              Method (what was done)              Results/findings (what was learnt)              Discussion (what it means, and any problems with it)              Conclusion (implications, sometimes recommendations)  

The advantage in knowing about these typical structures is that you can skim a reading in a few minutes, to get an overview of its argument, before you read it properly right the way through. This helps you to know what’s going to be important to take notes on, and also you may discover that the author herself summarises her argument at intervals, and you only need to make notes of those summaries, which saves you heaps of time if it happens.  

When you make notes of reading, it’s a good idea to note your own thinking at the same time. That way, you’ve done a lot of the thinking by the time you get to your first draft. So your notes should record, for each thing you read:

• what does this person think?
• Why does s/he think so?
• Plus, what do you think about this?

A useful format for note-taking is shown below. These are notes from an (invented) article comparing the concepts of social class employed by two different social theorists, Karl Marx and Max Weber.
 

 A format for taking useful notes from reading: