Salam everyone!
Something I realized recently was that everyone enjoys analysis in some form or another, but there is no clear definition to what that process is. We practice analysis in many forms: when solving riddles, when trying to understand humans (e.g. our children, colleagues), or when trying to understand what’s going on in the world. (Gossiping is also a form of analysis).
Good analysis skills is really what qualifies a good knowledge worker (a knowledge worker is someone who thinks for a living). One can have all the information in the world, and they wouldn’t make a thing out of it if they have zero analysis skills.
Anything that we see, hear, or read, is information. It can be experienced (e.g. your eyes saw fire), or learned through ‘spoken/written words’ (e.g. you read in a trusted Twitter account that there’s fire), or learned though logic (e.g. you saw a plume of smoke + fire trucks heading there, you infer that there’s a fire).
Most of our daily interactions with reality manifest through news. We don’t experience poverty or famine, but we hear about it. We don’t infer the election results, we hear about it. We don’t feel the vaccines, we take Pfizer’s word for it. We also don’t build large hadron colliders 10 billion $ to see the Higgs Boson in action, we take CERN’s word for it.
Nonetheless, we deal with information in bundles of news, empirical evidence and logical inference. Knowledge has been studied extensively from a philosophical standpoint, while there are debates on truth and certainty, there is a general definition on what knowledge is. Analysis, on the other hand, does not enjoy a consensual take. I’ll take you through Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'’s documentation of how analysis was conceived throughout the ages [1].
(note: you can read the headings for a summary of this short summary)
Analysis as told in its entry in Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
There is no consensus on what ‘analysis’ really is.
We think of analysis as a process of making a thing into more fundamental things that we can explain and work with. But throughout the ages, there has been different conceptualizations of what analysis is.
“The word ‘analysis’ derives from the ancient Greek term ‘analusis’. The prefix ‘ana’ means ‘up’, and ‘lusis’ means ‘loosing’, ‘release’ or ‘separation’, so that ‘analusis’ means ‘loosening up’ or ‘dissolution’. The term was readily extended to the solving or dissolving of a problem, and it was in this sense that it was employed in ancient Greek geometry and philosophy.”
From the Greeks’ days until today, analysis and synthesis has usually been studied and used together.
In essence, ‘synthesis’ is the opposite of ‘analysis’, but they work together.
Analysis is the process of bringing a thing back to its basics. Synthesis is the process of reconstructing and explaining an analyzed thing(s).
So even though there is no clear definition on analysis, analysis was applied through three conceptualized lenses throughout the ages.
These conceptual views are: decompositional, regressive, and transformative/interpretive.
In decompositional analysis we reduce things to fundamental elements.
Here, we’re breaking a thing into something more fundamental, something which we can explain. For example, we decompose poverty related issues into segments such as health, crime, or social exclusion issues, we keep on doing that until every segment is a micro concept.
“If we perfectly understand a problem we must abstract it from every superfluous conception, reduce it to its simplest terms and, by means of an enumeration, divide it up into the smallest possible parts.” - Descartes’ Rules for the Direction of the Mind
Decompositional analysis became dominant in science after the Scientific Revolution because more sophisticated mathematical techniques were available. Nowadays, it’s the most used view on analysis. In my opinion, it’s the most intuitive to process.
In regressive analysis we try to link things to their first principles.
That could be cause-effect analysis, theorem-axiom analysis, or any conception that takes a thing back to its roots and causes.
Interestingly, this particular view on analysis makes it a method of discovery. When we analyze the issue of poverty through this lens, we uncover the different causes for each individual effect. We also uncover patterns that allow us to create theorems or map to existing ones. Regressive analysis is usually contrasted/complemented with synthesis.
In transformative analysis we map the thing to a language we can work with.
Math, logic and system’s thinking tools are all examples of languages we use to understand things better. Trends for example help us structure the problem and understand it quantitatively.
These three conceptual views work together.
To understand something we would need to interpret it into a language we can work with (transformational analysis), then we decompose it to micro-concepts (decompositional analysis), then we uncover the causes and roots (regressive analysis).
When we analyze climate change, for example, we translate the issue into mathematical equations, statistics (modeling) and system’s thinking (mapping players/effects) to understand the problem in our language; then we break it down to something micro, such as grouping issues into different ecosystems (biological, economic, political social, etc.); finally, we dig out the various causes and externalities caused by the issue in order to construct a view of the solution.
In conclusion,
I only covered the 3 main conceptions on analysis that were used throughout recorded history.
But the piece offers an era by era meta-analysis, detailing the different traditions and methodologies alongside criticisms each conceptualization faces.
The author concludes that even though analysis is typically seen as a reductionist process today, connective forms of analysis can help us understand things better, including analysis itself.
p.s. Most etymologies of analysis in different languages define analysis as a reductionist process. For example, analysis in Arabic is called tahleel تَحْلِيل, which means the act of loosening things up. In Japanese and Chinese, it’s 分析 (divide)(chop). In almost every language I googled, it meant the same thing.
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References:
[1] Beaney, Michael, "Analysis", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/analysis/>.
Also, here is a list of definitions on analysis.