Abstract
What is reading? Seeing and comprehending a contentful, written text counts as reading, of course, but that is simply the paradigm; it is not reading itself. Blind people, e.g., often read using Braille. So, my project in this paper is to address this question: What is the proper analysis of person S reads text W? Surprisingly, no philosophical attempts to analyze reading exist; this question has (to my knowledge, anyway) yet to be tackled. Can other sensory modalities be used to read? What more can be said about the nature of the objects of reading, viz., texts? After critically assessing a few proposals, I defend a final analysis of reading according to which a person reads a text when she uses some sensory modality to cognitively attend to the word structures embedded in that text for the purposes of ultimately grasping its content. Moreover, S must not relentlessly fail to map W to some of W’s contents, and S’s comprehension of W’s contents must be a causal result of W (and not vice-versa).
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Notes
I think the analysis I ultimately defend in this paper could plausibly be adjusted to account for reading musical notes and mathematical formulae as well as words, but I will here focus solely on the reading of texts, which, if contenftul, have linguistic content, rather than musical or mathematical content.
There are, of course, merely metaphorical senses of “reading” that may come into play when people employ taste or smell, just as when people employ vision, touch, or audition. My lasagna may have smelled done, and I may thus say that I read the situation properly and took it out of the oven before it burned. But while the smells from my lasagna conveyed a kind of information to me, they did not constitute a contentful text. I admit I have a hard time imagining how reading via olfactory sensation or taste could go, partly because I have very few ideas about the sorts of conventions that would have to be in place for smells or tastes to be mappable onto linguistic contents. Nonetheless, as I’ve said, it seems chauvinistic to rule out the metaphysical possibility of contentful smells or tastes out of hand, given our inclusion of contentful linguistic items that can be seen, touched, or heard.
Reading literacy thus comes in degrees, as it should. I may be somewhat reading-literate in Finnish by understanding some Finnish word tokens and some whole Finnish sentence tokens I encounter while not being fully reading-literate in Finnish. Reading literacy is a vague concept, and there is no determinate, bright line where reading-literacy takes over from reading-illiteracy.
Things like fleeting wisps of smoke and relatively more permanent pictures (e.g., hieroglyphs), and sequences of tokens of such entities, count here as well, provided linguistic content is properly encoded by them.
By “alien people,” I don’t just mean off-Earth people, I mean Earthly non-Homo sapiens people (provided there are such things) as well as merely possible people. Similar points apply to “alien sensory modalities”.
Given obvious worries about how reading via olfaction or taste would go (and given that I do not think humans in fact have this ability, nor do I think that languages comprised of smells or tastes are Earthly), I thus focus on the alleged liberality of the current analysis qua audition.
Roughly, this is the argument first given to me by Michael Mungin in support of the idea that listening to an audiobook should count as reading, and his defense of it is what inspired this paper. I don’t think this argument is sound. There are two distinct modes of grasping linguistic content, reading and understanding-via-audition, and one who has merely understood The Handmaid’s Tale via audition has not thereby read the work. I ultimately do believe that it is possible to read using audition, but a specific kind of attendance to a specific kind of audible text is required. I discuss this below.
Whether or not this criticism is successful depends on whether or not Fleming understands “text” in the same way I have been using the term, i.e., as contentful text, and it depends on whether or not something produced by a mindless computer could be about anything at all. Can an unintelligent source produce a genuinely contentful text? (The amount of literature surrounding this question is enormous. Searle (1980) would surely be an appropriate start.) If a mindless computer can produce a contentful text, then Fleming’s view implies that audiobooks and songs can be read, no matter how he understands “text.” But if a mindless computer’s output necessarily lacks content, then a person engaging with that output could still develop an “interpretation,” of course, in the sense of making the judgment that some content or other is associated with the marks or sounds so-produced. Now, if Fleming takes “text” to simply mean marks or sounds that are merely judged to have some content or other, then his view implies that the contentless productions of mindless computers can be read. But this strikes me as incorrect; in such cases, it seems there is simply nothing to be read. If by “text” Fleming means contentful text, and if the productions of mindless computers lack content, then my latter criticism here fails, and his view implies an incorrect necessary condition only.
Cognitive attendance to word structure is the key to reading, I claim, but as Ted Sider has pointed out, not all ways of attending to word structure seem equally helpful. Sider states:
Not any processing of [word structure] counts as reading. If one learns that the roots of a very complex polynomical function correspond to letters (1-A, 2-B, etc.) that spell out a story, and one calculates the story so to speak, is that reading the story? Or if one spells out a story but just remembers that ‘O’ followed by ‘N’ followed by ‘C’ followed by ‘E’ followed by a space followed by ‘U’ followed by ‘P’ followed by ‘O’ followed by ‘N’ followed by a space followed by ‘A’ followed by a space followed by ‘T’ followed by ‘I’ followed by ‘M’ followed by ‘E’ spells ‘once upon a time’, that isn't really reading. (personal correspondence)
This all seems right to me. Overly labored calculations of this sort are ways of paying too much attention, or the wrong sort of attention, to word structure. Attending to word structure in the appropriate way to facilitate reading must reside in some sort of middle ground; words are not washing over one in a wholesale fashion—their structure is being focused on—yet some skill is being deployed, one that, barring cognitive impairments, becomes easier to deploy over time.
I am grateful to Charles Bolyard, Bradford Burrow, Patrick Fleming, Joshua Linder, Ansel van Leeuwen, and Ted Sider for helpful discussion, and a special thanks to Michael Mungin, without whom this paper would have never come about. I also wish to thank anonymous reviewers at Acta Analytica for extremely helpful comments on earlier versions.
References
Chomsky, N. (1968). Language and mind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
Piaget, J. (1952). The origins of intelligence in children. New York: W. W. Norton and Co.
Searle, J. (1980). Minds, brains and programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 417–424.
Worth, S. (2017). In defense of reading. London: Rowman and Littlefield.
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Goodman, J. On Reading. Acta Anal 35, 51–59 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-019-00400-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-019-00400-5