Learning to Analyse

Of course, not all the questions you tackle will offer up their concepts so easily as the authority/power question. In many of them the concept will hide, lurking behind the most innocent word. And in some questions it will be difficult to decide whether it’s worth analysing the concept at all – it may not be central to the issues the question raises, taking you in a direction that’s irrelevant. In these cases you just have to take the concept and analyse it carefully to see what’s there. In most questions you’ll find that by doing this you will open up a treasure house of all sorts of ideas you can use. The question just seems to unfold before your eyes and you know exactly the arguments to pursue and the research you need to do. But, obviously, the key to this is to learn to analyse the concepts well. Of all the thinking skills we use this is the most neglected, even though it’s probably the most useful. Without it we have no means of seeing a problem clearly, so that we can use our creative abilities to fashion a solution. Similarly, we have no means of seeing what it is about an argument that we dislike, so we can go on to criticise and improve it. In fact almost every intellectual activity begins with some form of analysis to make it clear what we’re trying to tackle. It gives direction and purpose to our work.