The literate mind : a study of its scope and limitations / Andrew Wells.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wells, Andrew, 1952-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literacy--Social aspects.

Literacy.

Literacy--Psychological aspects.

Cognition.

Physical Description:

xiii, 264 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Houndsmill, Basingstoke, Hampshire : Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Summary:

Literacy is about 5,000 years old Since it was invented it has transformed human societies and knowledge fundamentally. Indeed, civilisation is built on literacy. What is it about the process of making marks on paper or other surfaces that gives literacy this remarkable power?

The Literate Mind: A Study of Its Scope and Limitations proposes that the evolved, pre -literate qualities of the human mind combined with the representational capacities of alphabets and other symbol systems provide uniquely powerful means for the generation and storage of knowledge. The creation, storage and sharing of texts augment the social and cognitive capacities of human minds and allow us to develop social institutions within which further now knowledge can be deployed and used.

Taking an approach that is equally applicable to print and digital media, the book draws on evolutionary theory and the theory of computation to explain the remarkable power of literacy and its transformational effects on human society and knowledge It demonstrates that the universe of possible texts is infinite in extent, and proposes that the combination of a reader and a text can be treated as an ecosystem of unlimited scope. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Literacy in the World Today l

1.1 Introduction 1

1.2 Benefits of literacy 4

1.3 Negative effects of literacy 5

1.4 The objectivity of mathematics 6

1.5 The multidisciplinary study of literacy 6

1.6 Realism and constructivism 8

1.7 Science, society, and language 9

1.8 Skills and social practices 9

1.9 Literacy is a contested domain 11

1.10 Literacy and computation 12

1.11 Autonomy versus social practices? 14

1.12 Literacy and evolution 16

1.13 The ecological study of literacy 19

1.14 Literacy and human nature 23

1.15 Literacy and the imagination 24

1.16 Summary 25

2 Social Construction and Independent Reality 28

2.1 The social construction of reality 28

2.2 Constructivism and language games 31

2.3 Social construction and biology 37

2.4 Intentionality 38

2.5 Biological naturalism 39

2.6 The literate ecology has objective and subjective aspects 43

2.7 Multiple interpretations 44

2.8 The syntactic foundations of meaning 45

2.9 Syntax and semantics 51

2.10 The social construction of literacy 52

3 Universal Human Nature and the Study of Literacy 53

3.1 The case for evolutionary theory 53

3.2 Darwinism provides a new approach to the study of literacy 57

3.3 Universal human nature 58

3.4 Literacy builds on human universals 61

3.5 Donald Brown's list of Human Universals (from Pinker 2002) 66

4 The Literate Ecology 76

4.1 The ecological approach emphasises both the environment and the organism 77

4.2 The ecological approach emphasises both ideas and external representations of them 78

4.3 Literacy requires a range of types of environmental support 79

4.4 The literate ecology has two principal levels 80

4.5 The literate ecology rests on a set of assumptions called the Background 83

4.6 The analysis of the Background is Darwinian 86

5 The Evolution of Cooperation and Selfishness 88

5.1 Evolution results in the appearance of design 88

5.2 Evolution explains the appearance of design 89

5.3 The literacy literature typically does not refer to evolutionary theory 90

5.4 Evolutionary theory explains the non-literate mind 90

5.5 Evolutionary time scales are hard to grasp intuitively 91

5.6 The evolutionary process has three fundamental drivers 93

5.7 Competition leads to the evolution of selfishness 96

5.8 Selfishness is relevant to the study of literacy 98

5.9 Altruism and co-operation are also products of evolution 99

5.10 Group selection is a weaker force than individual selection 101

5.11 Evolution and education for all 105

6 Sexual Selection, Sex Differences, and Social Evolution 108

6.1 Sexual selection 108

6.2 Competition and choice 114

6.3 Sex ratios 115

6.4 Fertility rates 115

6.5 Sexual selection and human universals 116

6.6 Sex differences and literacy 116

6.7 The social functions of the intellect 117

7 Turing Machines: Syntactic Foundations for the Study of Literacy 123

7.1 A syntactic perspective on texts 123

7.2 A syntactic perspective on minds 127

7.3 Turing machines 132

7.4 The co-design of functional states and symbol structures 140

7.5 Summary 141

8 The Scope of the Literate Mind 142

8.1 Literacy separates syntax from semantics 142

8.2 The literate mind is infinitely powerful 146

8.3 Literacy augments the powers of the non-literate mind 151

8.4 Stable, durable texts provide new opportunities for human minds 152

8.5 Symbol systems have objective properties 155

8.6 Mathematics underpins objective science 157

8.7 Literacy promotes objectivity in nonmathematical disciplines 159

8.8 Literacy transforms the social ecology 161

8.9 Summary 165

9 Literacy in the Age of Computers and the Internet 166

9.1 Computers and the fundamental syntax of literacy 166

9.2 Computers are practical versions of universal Turing machines 167

9.3 Stand alone computing 169

9.4 The internet revolution 170

9.5 The added value of the internet 172

9.6 Summary 178

10 Grounding the Literacy Episteme 179

10.1 The literacy episteme 179

10.2 Against relativism 180

10.3 Literacy scholarship in the 1960s 181

10.4 Autonomy and ideology revisited 183

10.5 The capabilities approach 190

10.6 Summary 194

11 The Limitations of the Literate Mind 196

11.1 Reasoning cannot be captured fully by formal methods (but without literacy we would not know this) 196

11.2 Evolved limitations of literate processes 204

11.3 Summary 211

12 The Consequences of Literacy 212

12.1 The consequences of literacy are not automatic 213

12.2 Positive consequences for individuals 214

12.3 Negative consequences for individuals 222

12.4 Positive consequences for society 224

12.5 Negative consequences for society 228

12.6 A game of consequences 228

12.7 Looking to the future: the literate construction of what it means to be human 229

12.8 Conclusions 232.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 238-254) and index.

ISBN:

9780230201194

0230201199

9781137025500

1137025506

OCLC:

789668478