Okay, I’m taking advantage of an obvious typo (page 51) in an interesting article by Manuela L. Ungureanu (“Olson’s Domestication of Goody’s Literacy Hypothesis: (How) Can Philosophers of Language Help?”) on David Olson’s The Mind on Paper, just because I like the way changing a single consonant in a single preposition can make such a difference in the meaning of a phrase, and which also ties into the larger question of when such tinkering with minor points of grammar became commonplace. (Hmm. What are some potential meanings for “the mind of paper”? Can paper have a mind of its own? Or can a mind somehow be composed of paper? I can certainly make a case that my mind is mostly comprised of papers I’ve read, whether or not I cite them, which is actually my topic here.)
Anyway, much to my chagrin, in my book I didn’t cite Olson’s two books (The World on Paper and The Mind on Paper), although I should have, since he is the foremost interpreter and contemporary defender of someone I did cite, the late Sir Jack Goody (though, again, I could have cited two of Goody’s books, The Domestication of the Savage Mind and The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society, along with the one seminal paper of his that I did cite, “The Consequences of Literacy,” (1963) by Goody and Watts, which introduced their thesis that the invention (and diffusion) of writing was crucial to cognitive and cultural changes that were to transform human thinking on the individual level and, ultimately, lead to the social transformations that enabled societal institutionalization of various kinds over time.
Goody was not the first or only scholar to argue for the transformative impact of writing and literacy; Eric Havelock and Walter Ong both wrote extensively on the topic. But Goody’s work, especially his view that there was a sharp dichotomy between oral and literate cultures in terms of the ability to engage in abstract thought and logical argument (his “Literacy Thesis” or LT), attracted wide attention. John Halverson, for instance, noted in his “Goody and the Implosion of the Literacy Thesis” that the syllogism, a classic form of logic, was being used by Socrates in dialogues as recorded by Plato well before Aristotle formalized it in written form, so there is little evidence that writing itself was fundamental to the development of Greek philosophy. Other scholars have noted that it is education, which may in some cultures be entirely oral, that allows students to absorb more abstract modes of thought rather than through instruction in writing and reading. Saheed Adesumbo Bello observes also that the colonial imposition of hegemonic languages such as English, French and Spanish on indigenous peoples, and the accompanying requirements for literacy in the hegemonic language, often eroded and even eradicated the practices of quite sophisticated oral cultures and philosophies.
Ruth Finnegan criticized Goody’s impoverished account of oral traditions (largely informed by his research on the Bagre cult in West Africa) as compared to his richer accounts of written cultures, though she acknowledged both his seminal influence on the anthropology of writing and his willingness to modify his theoretical positions in accordance with new empirical evidence. Goody died in 2015, so it is unknown as to how far he’d modify his LT in response to developments in anthropology, cognitive science, and related fields.
Olson, however, is very much alive, and is pursuing his extensive program of research on how literacy affects the mind today, particularly as exemplified in the minds of pre-literate children. His findings show that the acquisition of literacy does have a significant effect on their ability to understand words as abstractions, not just as a specific sequence of sounds that can be used to refer to concrete objects. He argues that this type of meta-representation of language is the ultimate scaffolding for knowledge creation and preservation (though I am sure that proponents of other ways of knowledge, such as this one, would disagree.)
His current view is that “My studies of language and literacy are motivated by two overarching concerns. The first is the need to offer a theory of writing that goes beyond simply thinking of writing as a technology for preserving speech. Rather writing, as I have argued, should be seen as a technology that allows a distinctive way of using our language for thinking. The second, is to insist that writing be restored to it position as a privileged mode of expression in the school. Unfortunately, an overemphasis on the written form may lead teachers to discount the importance of student talk, and sometimes leads to “drill and practice” of forms without meaning. However, the current threat is not an overemphasis on writing but rather its neglect. Privileging oral discourse in which each learner is encouraged to “make his or her own meaning” overlooks the critical importance of making one’s meanings explicit in a written form that can be re-read, revised, criticized and, if all goes well, actually believed (Olson, 2020, pp. 95-6).”
In response Ungureanu called for philosophers of language to address some linguistic issues raised by Olson’s attempts at “domesticating” Goody’s LT: “Much of the argument in The Mind of Paper tries to identify a conception of social normativity specific to literate communities, one that includes a specific conception of words and sentences. Although Olson stresses many times that this type of linguistic normativity is social, he also proposes different characterizations of the social aspects of language. I found at least three such characterizations, and am not sure whether all three are required by his concept of writing. And, if not, which are specifically literate conceptions of language: (i) language as a set of norms which are social in that they are monitored by others; (ii) language is social because it includes a set of conventions (p. 76), and so learning a language is learning the implicit conventions for participation in a social practice; (iii) learning a literate form of language involves learning a metalinguistic lexicon tied to literate practices. Thus, Olson’s project of defining writing practices and their particular linguistic normativity has implications for the philosophical theory of the social aspects of language, and the many ways in which, or layers at which, language is social. But its success in domesticating Goody’s original insight also requires some genuine, substantive exchanges between philosophers of language on the one hand, and cognitive psychologists, and anthropologists of literacy, on the other. The Mind on Paper makes it clear that such exchanges are due, and opens up some pathways on which they can take place; for this we should be grateful to its author (2020, p. 51).”
And, of course, Olson has recently written another book, which I haven’t yet read (Making Sense: What It Means to Understand) and I could probably engage in a little more wordplay somehow related to Brenda Dervin’s notion of sensemaking, but I’ll leave that for another post.
Keywords In and Out of Context 