Translated into the language of our considerations, all this means that education cannot be changed independent of change in society. Education is not an autonomous system. Its connections to the rest of the pragmatic context are through students, teachers, parents, political institutions, economic realities, racial attitudes, culture, and patterns of behavior in our commercial democracy. In today's education, parochial considerations take precedence over global concerns. Bureaucratic rules of accumulated imbecility literally annihilate the changes for a better future of millions of students. What appears as the cultivation of the mind and spirit is actually no more than the attempt to polish a store window while the store itself lost its usefulness long ago. It makes no sense to require millions of students to drive daily to schools that can no longer be maintained, or to pass tests when standards are continuously lowered in order to somehow justify them.
Consumption and interaction
In view of the fundamental changes in patterns of human activity, not only students need education, but practically everyone, and probably educators first of all. Connection to education centers needs to be different from the expectation of children sitting in a class dominated by a teacher. On the interactive education networks, age no longer serves as a criterion. Learning is self-paced, motivated by individual interests and priorities and by the perspectives that learning opens. A sense of common interest is expressed through interaction, unfolding through a diversity of perspectives and ways of thinking and doing. Nothing can help generations that are more different and more antagonistic than ours to find a common ground than an experience of education emancipated from hierarchies, freed of authoritarian expectations, challenging and engaging at the same time. Education will be part of the continuous self-definition of the human being throughout one's entire life.
Whether we like it or not, the economy is driven by consumer spending. This does not automatically mean that we can or should let the feedback loop follow a course that will eventually lead to losing the stability of the system to which we belong. If consumption were to remain the driving force, however, we would all end up enjoying ourselves to death. But the solution to this state of affairs is not to be found in political or educational sermonizing. To blame consumption, expectations of abundance, or entertainment will not help in finding answers to educational worries. Education will have to integrate the human experience of consumption and facilitate the acquisition of common sense. A sense of quality can be instilled by pursuing cooperative projects involving not only the production of artifacts, but also self-improvement. Generations that grow up with television as their window to reality cannot be blamed for lack of interest in reading, or for viewing reality as a show interrupted by thirty-second messages. Young minds acquire different skills, and education ought to provide a context for their integration in captivating practical experiences, instead of trying to neutralize them. Television is here for good, although changes that will alter the relation between viewers and originators of messages will change television as well.
The cognitive characteristics and motor patterns of couch potatoes and moderate viewers in the age of generalized TV and interactive networking are very different from those of people educated as literate. These characteristics will be further reshaped as digital television becomes part of the networked world. Where reading about history, or another country, is marginally relevant to praxis in the new context of life and work, the ability to view, understand images, perceive and effect changes, and the ability to edit them and reuse, to complete them, moreover to generate one's own images, is essential to the outcome of the effort. Without engaging the student, education heads into oblivion. As difficult as it is to realize that there are no absolute values, unless this realization is shared by all generations, we will face more inter- generational conflicts than we already face. Television is not the panacea for such conflicts, but a broad ground for reaching reciprocal awareness of what it takes to meet an increasingly critical challenge. Sure, we are focused here on a television that transcended its mass communication industrial society status, and reached the condition of individual interaction.
Understanding differences cannot be limited to education, or reduced to a generalized practice of viewing TV (digital or not). It has to effectively become the substance of political life. While all are equal with respect to the law, while all are free and encouraged to become the best they can be, society has to effectively abandon expectations of homogeneity and uniformity, and to dedicate energies to enhancing the significance of what makes its members different. This translates into an education freed from expectations that are not rooted in the process of self-affirmation as scientists, dancers, thinkers, skilled workers, farmers, sportspeople, and many other pragmatically sanctioned professionals. The direction is clear: to become less obsessed with a job, and more concerned with a work that satisfies them, and thus their friends and relatives. The means and methods for moving in this direction will not be disbursed by states or other organizations. We have to discover them, test, and refine, aware of the fact that what replaces the institution of education is the open-ended process through which we emerge as educated individuals.
Does education henceforth become a generic trade school? For those who so choose, yes. For others, it will become what they themselves make of it through their involvement. Remaining an open enterprise, education will allow as many adjustments as each individual is willing to take upon oneself for the length of one's life. The education of interactive skills, of visualization technologies, of methods of search and retrieval, of thinking in images, sounds, colors, odors, textures, and haptic perception requires contexts for their discovery, use, and evaluation which no school or university in the world can provide. But if all available educational resources are used to establish learning centers based on the paradigms of interactivity, data processing, multimedia, virtual reality, neural networks, and genetic engineering, using powerful carriers such as digital TV or high-speed and broadband networks, we will stop managing a bankrupt enterprise and open avenues for successful alternatives.
As humanity ages, and societies have to cope with a new age structure, education will have to focus also on how to constitute one's identity past the biological optimum. Among the fastest growing segments on the Internet, the elderly represent a very distinct group, of high motivation, and of abilities that can better benefit society.
Access to knowledge in the form of interactive projects, pursued by classes constituted of individuals as different as the world is, is not trivial, and obviously not cheap. The networked world, the many challenges of new means of communication already in place, the new medium of digital TV-closer to reality than many realize- and computers, are already widely available. A major effort to provide support to many who are not yet connected to this world, at the expense of the current bureaucracy of education, will provide the rest. Instead of investing in buildings, bureaucracies, norms, and regulations, instead of rebuilding crumbling schools, and recycling teachers who intellectually died long ago in the absence of any real challenge, we can, and should, design a global education system. Such a system will effect change not only in one country, not only in a group of rich countries, but all over the world. The practice of networking and the competence in integrating work produced independently in functional modules can be attained by tackling real problems, as these are encountered by each person, not invented assignments by teachers or writers of manuals.
Education can succeed or fail only on the terms of efficiency expected in our pragmatic framework. Scores, religiously accounted for in literacy-based political life, are irrelevant. Practical experiences of self-constitution are not multiple-choice examinations. They involve the person in his entirety, and result in instances of personal growth and increased social awareness. A global world requires a live global system of education that embodies the best we can afford, and is driven by the immense energy of variety.
Unexpected opportunities
We have heard the declaration over and over: This is the age of knowledge. The statement describes a context of human practical experiences in which the major resources are cognitive in nature. In the civilization of literacy, knowledge acquisition could take place at a slow pace, over long periods of time. The interlocking factors that defined the pragmatic context were such that no other gnoseological pattern was possible. Knowledge arising from practical experiences of industrial society progressively contributed to making life easier for human beings. Eventually, everything that had been done through the power of human muscle and dexterity-using mainly hands, arms, and legs-was assigned to machines and executed using energy resources found in the environment. Cognition supported the incremental evolution of machines through a vast array of applications. Human knowledge allowed for the efficient use of energy to move machines which executed tasks that might have taken tens, even hundreds of men to perform.
To make this more clear, let us compare some of the tasks of the Machine Age with those of the Age of Cognition we live in. Within industrial pragmatics, the machine supplanted the muscle and the limited mechanical skills needed for processing raw materials, manufacturing cars, washing clothes, or typing. Discoveries of more sources of coal, gas, and oil kept the machine working and led to its extension from the factory to the home. Literacy, embodying characteristics of industrial pragmatics, kept pace with the demands and possibilities of the Machine Age. In our age, computer programs supplant our thinking and the limited knowledge involved in supervising complex production and assembly lines that process raw materials or synthesize new material. Computer programs are behind the manufacture of automobiles; they integrate household functions-heating, washing clothes, preparing meals, guarding our homes. Publishing on the World Wide Web relies on computers. The scale of all these efforts is global. Many languages, bearing the data needed by each specific sub-task, go into the final product or outcome. Older dependencies on natural resources and on a social model shaped to optimally support industrial praxis are partially overcome as the focus changes from permanence to transitory communities of interest and to the individual- the locus of the Cognitive Age.
Cognitive resources arise from experiences qualitatively different from those of the Machine Age. Digital engines do not burn coal or gas. Digital engines burn cognition. The source of cognition lies in the mind of each human being. The resources of the Machine Age are being slowly depleted. Alternative resources will be found in what was typically discarded. Recycling and the discovery of processes that extract more from what is available depend more on human cognition than on brute force processing methods. The sources of cognition are, in principle, unlimited. But if the cognitive component of human practical experiences were to stagnate or break down for some unimaginable reason, the pragmatics based on the underlying digital process of the Age of Cognition would break down. To understand this, one need only think of being stuck in a car on an untravelled road, all because the gasoline ran out. Compare this situation with what would happen if the most complex machine, more complicated than anything science fiction could describe, came to a halt because there was no human thought to keep it going.
In the current context, the dynamics of cognition, distributed between processing information and acquiring and disseminating knowledge, stands for the dynamics of the entire system of our existence. Embodied in technologies and processing procedures, cognition contributes to the fundamental separation of the individual human from the productive task, and from a wide variety of non-productive activities. It is not necessary that an individual possess all knowledge that a pragmatic experience requires. This means, simply, that operators in nuclear power plants need not be eminent physicists or mathematicians. Neither do all workers in a space research program need to be rocket scientists. A programmer might be ignorant of how a disk drive works. A brain surgeon does not know how the tools he or she uses are made. Each facet of a pragmatic instance entails specific requirements. The whole pragmatic experience requires knowledge above and beyond what the individuals directly involved can or should master. Instead of limited knowledge uniformly dispensed through literate methods, knowledge is distributed and embodied in tools and methods, not in persons. The advantage is that programs and procedures are made uniform, not human beings. For example, data management does not substitute for advanced knowledge, but a data management system as such can be endowed with knowledge in the form of routines, procedures, operation schemes, management, and self-evaluation.
Just as everyone kept the mechanical engine going, everyone, layperson or expert, contributes to the functioning of the digital engine. The only source of cognition that we can count on is within people self-constituted through practical experiences involving the digital. This does not mean that everyone will become a thinker and everyone will produce knowledge. Two sources of knowledge are relevant in the Age of Cognition within which the civilization of illiteracy unfolds. One source is the advanced work of experts and researchers, in areas of higher abstraction, way beyond what literacy can handle. The other, much more critical, source is to be found in common- sense human interaction, in day-to-day human experience.
We know that the knowledge of experts will continue to be integrated in the pragmatics of this age. The specific motivations of human practical experiences resulting in knowledge have to be recognized and stimulated. And we must also be aware of circumstances that could have a negative effect on these experiences.
We know less about the second source of knowledge because in previous pragmatic contexts it was less critical, and widely ignored. In particular, we do not know how to tap into the infinite reservoir of cognitive resources that are manifested through the routine work and everyday life of the overwhelming portion of the world's population. Taken individually, each person can contribute cognitive resources to the broader dynamics of the world. But these individual contributions are random, difficult to identify, and do not necessarily justify the effort of mining them. In our lives, many decisions and choices are made on the basis of extremely powerful procedures of which we, as individuals, are almost never aware. There is a grain of genius in some of the most mundane ways of doing things. Here the nodal points of integration in the multi-dimensional array that constitutes the globality of humankind are what counts. Delving into the dynamic collective persona makes such an effort worthwhile.
Years ago, in a dialogue with a prominent researcher in education, who used to maintain interactive simulations for youngsters who logged in at his institute, I discussed the then fashionable Game of Life (developed by John Horton Conway). As an open-ended simulation of the rules of birth and death, and based on the theory of cellular automata, the game required quite a bit of thinking. There is no winner or loser in the Game of Life. Although the rules of the game are relatively simple, highly complex forms of artificial life arise on the matrix: a cell going from empty to full describes birth, from full to empty, death. Satisfaction in playing is derived from reaching complex forms of life.
The idea we discussed was to make the game widely available on the network. The hundreds of thousands of players would leave traces of cognitive decisions that, over time, would add up to an expression of the intelligence of the collective body who shared an interest in the game. The cognitive sum total is of a Gestalt nature-much higher than the sum of its parts. That is, the sum has a different qualitative condition, probably comparable to that of the experts and geniuses, or even much higher! Considering all the instances of human application to tasks that range from being frankly useless to highly productive, one can surmise that the second source of knowledge and intelligence is much more interesting than that of the dedicated thinkers. There is more to what we do and how we choose than rationality and thinking, never mind literate rationality.
This collective persona need not comprise the entire population of the world (minus the knowledge professionals). It would help to start with groups formed ad hoc, groups which share an interest in a certain activity, such as playing games, or surfing for a particular piece of information, from the trivial "How do I get from here to there?" to whatever people are looking for-football scores, pornography, crossword puzzles, recipes, investment information, support in facing a certain problem, love, inter- generational conflicts, religion-anything. The challenge comes in capturing the cognitive resources at work, making inferences from the small or vast collective bodies of common focus, and coming up with viable procedures that can be utilized to enhance individual performance-all this without shaping future individual performance into grotesque repetitive patterns, no matter how successful they might be.
If there is validity to the notion that we are in the age of knowledge, we cannot afford to limit ourselves to the knowledge of a few, no matter how exceptional these few are. The civilization of illiteracy transcends the literate model of individual performance considered a guarantee of the performance of society at large.
As practical experiences become more complex, breakdowns can be avoided only at the expense of more cognitive resources. We know that it took millennia before primitive notation progressed to writing and then to generalized literacy. In the Age of Cognition, we cannot afford such a long cycle for integrating human cognitive resources. Marvin Minsky once pointed out how much mind activity is lost in the leisure of watching football games on TV. While relaxation is essential to human existence, nobody can claim, in good faith, that what has resulted from the enormously increased efficiency of cognition-based practical experiences is not wasted to a great extent. Short of giving up, one has to entertain alternatives. But alternatives to this situation cannot be legislated. It is clear that within the motivations of the global economy, the need to identify and tap more sources of cognition will result in ways to stimulate human interaction. Watching TV probably generates thoughts that only die on the ever larger screens in our homes. Surfing the Web, where millions of hits are counted on the pornography sites-not on mathematics or literature sites-is also a waste and a source of mediocrity. Mouse potatoes are not necessarily better than the couch variety.
If we could derive cognition even from the many experiences of human self- constitution in computer games, we could not only further the success of the industry that changed the way humans play, but gain some insight into motivations, cognitive and emotional aspects of this elementary form of human identity. Above and beyond the speculation on playful man (Homo Ludens), there are quantifiable aspects of competition, satisfaction, and pleasure. And as the Internet effectively maps our journey through a maze of data, information, and sources of knowledge, we can ask whether such cognitive maps are not too valuable to be abandoned to marketing experts, instead being utilized for understanding what makes us tick as we search for a word, an image, an experience. Data regarding how and what we buy is not always representative of what we are. For many people, buying a book or a work of art, a fashionable shirt, a home, or a car is only an experience in mediation performed by the agents of these objects. But there are authentic experiences in which no one can replace us human beings. Games belong to this domain, and so do joking and interactions with friends. No agent can replace us. Within such authentic moments of self-constitution, cognitive resources of exceptional value are at work.
Many people from very different locations and of different backgrounds might simultaneously be present on a certain Web site, without ever knowing it. The server's performance could suggest that there is quite a crowd at a Web site, but it cannot say who the others are, what they are looking for, what kind of cognition drives the digital engine of their particular experiences.
While the medium of networking is more transparent than literacy experiences, it still maintains a certain opaqueness, enhanced by the firewalls meant to protect us from ourselves. Many individuals present at the same time on a Web site is not a situation one can duplicate in literacy, in which the ratio was one reader to one book, or one magazine, or even one videotape (although more than one can watch it on the family TV set, in a class, or on an airplane). Thousands of viewers simultaneously landing on a Web site is a chance and a challenge. We should accordingly think of methods for identifying ourselves, to the extent desired, and declare willingness to interact. This next level of self-constitution and identification is where the potential of rich interactions and further generation of cognition becomes possible. Tapping into cognitive resources in such situations is an opportunity we should not postpone.
Burning cognition, digital engines allow us to reach efficiency that is higher by many orders of magnitude in comparison to the efficiency attained by engines burning coal and oil. But the experience introduces the pressure of accelerated accumulation of data, information processing, and knowledge utilization. To understand the intimate relation between the performance of the digital engine and our own performance, one has only to think of a coal-burning steam engine driving a locomotive uphill. The civilization of illiteracy is a rather steep ascent, facing many obstacles-our physical abilities, limited natural resources, ecological concerns, ability to handle social complexity. To pull the brake will only make the effort of the engine more difficult, unless we want to tumble downhill, head first. Feeding the furnace faster is the answer that every sensible engineer knows. This would sound like a curse, were it not for the excitement of discovery, including that of our own cognitive resources.
Analogy aside, what drives the digital engine is not abstract computing cycles of faster chips, but human cognition embodied in experiences that support further diversification of experiences. It has yet to be the case that we had enough computing cycles to burn and we did not know what to do with the extra computing power available. On the contrary, human practical experiences are always ahead of technology, as we challenge ourselves with new tasks for which the chips of yesterday and the memory available are as inappropriate as the methods and means of literacy.
Bio-electric signals associated with the activity of our minds have been measured for quite a number of years. We learned from such measurements that minds are constituted in anticipation of our practical experience of self-identification as human beings. The idea seemed far-fetched, despite the strong scientific evidence on which it was ultimately founded. Cognition is process, and bio-electric signals are indicative of cognitive processes in our minds. Sensors attached to the skin, such as through a simple finger glove, can read such signals. In effect, they read unfolding mind processes based on our cognitive resources. Feeding digital engines hungry to burn cognition, we arrive not only at mind-controlled prosthetic devices for people with disabilities, but also at a mind-driven painter's brush, or desktop film directing, allowing us to get involved with cinematographic projects of scripting and affecting variations of the plot. From pinball games to tennis and skiing, from virtual bowling to virtual football, our thoughts make new experiences possible. For those affected by disabilities, this is a qualitatively new horizon. Einstein, but many others as well, was quite convinced that only 10 percent of our cognitive abilities are effectively engaged in what we do. As the digital engine burns more and more cognition, this number will change, as probably our physical condition, already marked by forms of degeneration, will change too.
If, by using only one-tenth of our cognitive resources, we reach the level of possibilities open to us, it is not too hard to imagine what only one more tenth might bring. The civilization of illiteracy, with all the dangers and inequities it has to address, is only at its beginning. That its duration will be shorter than the one preceding it is another subject.
1982-1996: Providence RI; Rochester NY; Bexley OH; New York NY; Little Compton RI; Wuppertal, Germany.
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Literacy in a Changing World
During the writing of this book, several articles were published and lectures presented on themes pertinent to the subject. None was taken over in this work. Among these are:
J. Deely and M. Lenhard, editors. The Civilization of Illiteracy, in Semiotics 1981. New York: Plenum, 1983.
H. Stachowiak, editor. Pragmatics in the Semiotic Framework, inPragmatik, vol. II. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1986.
La civilization de l'analphabetisme, in Gazette de Beaux-Arts, vol. iii, no. 1430, March 1988, pp. 225- 228.
Writing is Rewriting, in The American Journal of Semiotics, vol. 5, no. 1, 1987, pp. 115-133.
Sign and Value. (Lecture)Third Congress of the International Association of Semiotic Studies, Palermo, Italy, June 25-29, 1984.
The Civilization of Illiteracy. (Lecture) Sixth Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, October 1-4, 1981.
Philosophy in the Civilization of Illiteracy. (Lecture) XVIIWorld Congress of Philosophy, Montreal, August, 1983.
Values in the Post-Modern Era: The Civilization of Illiteracy.(Lecture) Institute Forum, Rochester Institute of Technology,November 9, 1984.
A Case for the Hacker. (Lecture) University of Oregon, Oct. 27, 1987.
Communication in a time of integration and awareness. (Lecture)New York University, April, 1989.
De plus ça change… Creativity in the context of scientific and technological change. (Lecture) University of Michigan, January, 1993.
The bearable impertinence of rationality. (Lecture)Multimediale, the1st International Festival of Multimedia,February, 1993.
From a very broad literature on literacy, including the emergence of writing and early written documents, the following proved useful in defining the position stated in this book:
John Hladczuk, William Eller, and Sharon Hladczuk.Literacy/Illiteracy in the World. A Bibliography. New York:Greenwood Press, 1989.
David R. Olson, Nancy Torrance, and Angela Hildyard, editors.Literacy, Language, and Learning: The Nature and Consequences ofReading and Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Robert Pattison. On Literacy: The Politics of the Word from Homer to the Age of Rock. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Gerd Baumann, editor. The Written Word: Literacy in Transition.New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
National Advisory Council on Adult Education. Literacy Committee. Illiteracy in America: Extent, Causes and Suggested Solutions, 1986.
Susan B. Neuman. Literacy in the Television Age. The Myth of theTV Effect. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1991.
Edward M. Jennings and Alan C. Purves, editors. Literate Systems and Individual Lives. Perspectives on Literacy and Schooling. Albany: SUNY Press, 1991.
Harald Haarman. Universalgeschichte der Schrift. Frankfurt/Main:Campus Verlag, 1990.
David Diringer. The Alphabet. A Key to the History of Mankind (3rd edition). New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968.
Colin H. Roberts. The Birth of the Codex. London: OxfordUniversity Press,1987.
Martin Koblo. Die Entwicklung der Schrift. Wiesbaden:Brandsetter, 1963.
R. Hooker. Reading the Past. Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to the Alphabet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Donald Jackson. The Story of Writing. New York: TaplingerPublishing Co., 1981.
Hannsferdinand Dobler. Von der Keilschrift zum Computer.Schrift, Buch, Wissenschaften. Munich: Bertelsmann, 1974.
Colin Clair. A History of European Printing. New York: AcademicPress, 1976.
Lucien Paul Victor Febre. The Coming of the Book. The Impact ofPrinting 1450-1800. Trans. David Gerard. London: N.L.B., 1976.
Karlen Mooradian. The Dawn of Printing. Lexington, KY:Association for Education in Journalism, 1972.
Warren Chappel. A Short History of the Printed Word. New York:Knopf, 1970.
Peter S. Bellwood. Prehistory in the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago.Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1985.
Andrew Sherrat, editor. The Cambridge Encyclopedia ofArchaeology. New York: Crown Publishers, 1980.
Peirce's pragmatic perspective was extracted from his writings. In the absence of a finished text on the subject, various scholars chose what best suited their own viewpoint. A selection from an unusually rich legacy of manuscripts and published articles was made available in The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (eight volumes). Volumes 1-6 edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss; volumes 7-8 edited by A. Burks. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1931-1958.
The standard procedure in citing this work is "volume.paragraph" (e.g., 2.227 refers to volume 2, paragraph 227).
Important references to Peirce's semiotics are found in his correspondence with Victoria, Lady Welby. This was published by Charles Hardwick as Semiotics and Significs. The Correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1977.
Peirce's manuscripts are currently being published in a new edition, The Writings of Charles S. Peirce. A Chronological Edition (E. Moore, founding editor; Max A. Fisch, general editor; C. Kloesel, Director), Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984-present.
Peirce's pragmaticism was defined in a text dated 1877, during his return journey from Europe aboard a steamer, "…a day or two before reaching Plymouth, nothing remaining to be done except to translate it into English," (5.526): "Considerer quels sont les effets pratiques que nous pensons pouvoir être produits par l'objet de notre conception. La conception de tous ces effets est la conception complète de l'objet."
In respect to Peirce, his friends William James and John Dewey wrote words of appreciation, placing him "in the forefront of the great seminal minds of recent times," (cf. Morris R. Cohen, Chance, Love, and Logic, Glencoe IL: 1954, p. iii). C. J. Keyser stated, "That this man, who immeasurably increased the intellectual wealth of the world, was nevertheless almost permitted to starve in what in his time was the richest and vainest of lands is enough to make the blood of any decent American boil with chagrin, indignation, and vicarious shame," (cf. Portraits of Famous Philosophers Who Were Also Mathematicians, in Scripta Mathematica, vol. III, 1935).
C.P. Snow. The Two Cultures and a Second Look (An ExpandedVersion of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution).Cambridge: At the University Press, 1965 (first printed in 1955).
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). From the few works published during his lifetime, reference is made to Dissertatio de Arte Combinatoria (Leipzig, 1666). G.H. Parkinson translated some works in Leibniz Logical Papers (London, 1966). Another edition considered for this book is by Gaston Grua, Leibniz. Textes inédits (Paris, 1948), which offers some of the many manuscripts in which important ideas remained hidden for a long time.
Humberto R. Maturana. The Neurophysiology of Cognition, inCognition: A Multiple View (P. Garvin, Editor). New York:Spartan Books, 1969.
Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela. El árbol delconocimiento, 1984. The work was translated as The Tree ofKnowledge. The Biological Roots of Human Understanding.Boston/London: Shambala New Science Library, 1987.
Terry Winograd. Understanding Natural Language. New York:Academic Press, 1972.
-. Language as Cognitive Process. Reading MA: Addison-Wesley, 1983.
Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores. Understanding Computers andCognition. A New Foundation for Design. Norwood NJ: AblexPublishing Corporation, 1986.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago:Chicago University Press, 1980.
George Lakoff. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. (WhatCategories Reveal about the Mind). Chicago/London: TheUniversity of Chicago Press, 1987.
"The point is that the level of categorization is not independent of who is doing the categorizing and on what basis" (p. 50).
With his seminal work on fuzzy sets, Lotfi Zadeh opened a new perspective relevant not only to technological progress, but also to a new philosophic perspective.
Fuzzy Sets, in Information and Control, 8 (1965), pp. 338-353.
Fuzzy Logic and Approximate Reasoning (in Memory of GrigoreMoisil), in Synthèse 30 (1975), pp. 407- 428.
Coping with the impression of the real world, in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, 27 (1984), pp. 304-311.
George Steiner. Language and Silence. New York: Atheneum, 1967.
-. After Babel. Aspects of Language and Translation. London:Oxford University Press, 1975.
-. Real Presence: Is There Anything in What We Say?London/Boston: Faber & Faber, 1989.
-. The End of Bookishness? in The Times Literary Supplement, July 8-14, 1988, p. 754.
Marshall McLuhan. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making ofTypographic Man. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1962.
Ivan Illich. Deschooling Society. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
Illich states bluntly: "Universal education through schooling is not feasible" (Introduction, p. ix).
Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders. The Alphabetization of the PopularMind. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988.
Y. M. Lotman. Kul'tura kak Kollektvinji Intellekt i ProblemyIskusstuennovo Razuma (Culture as collective intellect andproblems of artificial intelligence). Predvaritel'nayaPublicacija, Moskva: Akademija Nauk SSSR (Nauchinyi Soviet poKompleksnoi Problemi Kibernetika), 1977.
Jean Baudrillard. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton,Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.
The Chasm Between Yesterday and Tomorrow
Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Mittelmaß und Wahn. GesammelteZerstreuungen. Frankfurt am Main: 1988.
Norbert Wiener. The Human Use of Human Beings. Cybernetics andSociety. 1st ed. New York: Avon Books, 1967.
Wiener was very concerned with the consequences of human involvement with machines and the consequences of the unreflecting use of technology. "Once before in history the machine had impinged upon human culture with an effect of the greatest moment. This previous impact is known as the Industrial Revolution, and it concerned the machine purely as an alternative to human muscle" (p.185).
"It is fair to say, however, that except for a considerable number of isolated examples, this industrial revolution up to present [ca. 1950] has displaced man and beast as a source of power, without making any great impression on other human functions" (p. 209).
Wiener goes on to describe a new stage, what he calls the Second Industrial Revolution, dominated by computing machines driving all kinds of industrial processes. He notes: "Let us remember that the automatic machine, whatever we think of any feelings it may have or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor" (p. 220).
"What can we expect of its economic and social consequences? In the first place, we can expect an abrupt and final cessation of the demand for the type of factory labor performing purely repetitive tasks. In the long run, the deadly uninteresting nature of the repetitive task may make this a good thing and the source of leisure necessary for a man's full cultural development. It may also produce cultural results as trivial and wasteful as the greater part of those so far obtained from the radio and the movies" (p. 219).
Nick Thimmesch, editor. Aliteracy. People Who Can Read but Won't.Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for PolicyResearch, 1983. Proceedings of a conference held on September 20,1982 in Washington, DC.
According to William A. Baroody, Jr., President of the American Enterprise Institute, the aliterate person scans magazines, reads headlines, "never reads novels or poetry for the pleasures they offer." He goes on to state that aliteracy is more dangerous because it "reflects a change in cultural values and a loss of skills" and "leads to knowing without understanding."
Marsha Levine, a participant in the conference noted that although educators are concerned with universal literacy, many people read less or not at all: "A revolution in technology is having an impact on education…they [technological means] increase the level of literacy, but they might undermine the practice of what they teach."
At the same conference, an anonymous participant posed a sequence of questions: "Exactly what advantage do reading and literacy hold in terms of helping us to process information? What does reading give us that is of some social advantage that cannot be obtained through other media? Is it entirely certain that we cannot have a functioning society with an oral-aural method of communication, where we use television and its still unexploited resources of communication? […] Is it impossible to conceive of a generation that has received its knowledge of the world and itself through television?" (p. 22).
John Searle. The storm over the university, in The New YorkReview of Books, 37:19, December 6, 1990, pp. 34-42.
Plato. Phaedrus, and The Seventh and Eighth Letters. Trans.Walter Hamilton. Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1973.
In Phaedrus, Socrates, portrayed by Plato, articulates arguments against writing: "It will implant forgetfulness in their souls [of people, M.N.]: they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling these things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks; what you have discovered is a recipe [pharmakon, a potion; some translate it as recipe, M.N.] not for memory, but for reminder" (274-278e. p. 96). (References to Plato include the Stephanus numbers. This makes them independent of the particular edition used by the reader.)
Claude Lévi-Strauss. Tristes Tropiques. Paris: Plon, 1967.
The author continues Socrates' thought: "It [writing] seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment" (p. 298).
From a very broad literature on literacy, including the emergence of writing and early written documents, the following proved useful in defining the position stated in this book:
John Hladczuk, William Eller, and Sharon Hladczuk.Literacy/Illiteracy in the World. A Bibliography. New York:Greenwood Press, 1989.
David R. Olson, Nancy Torrance, and Angela Hildyard, editors.Literacy, Language, and Learning: The Nature and Consequences ofReading and Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Robert Pattison. On Literacy: The Politics of the Word from Homer to the Age of Rock. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Gerd Baumann, editor. The Written Word: Literacy in Transition.New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
National Advisory Council on Adult Education. Literacy Committee. Illiteracy in America: Extent, Causes and Suggested Solutions, 1986.
Susan B. Neuman. Literacy in the Television Age. The Myth of theTV Effect. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1991.
Edward M. Jennings and Alan C. Purves, editors. Literate Systems and Individual Lives. Perspectives on Literacy and Schooling. Albany: SUNY Press, 1991.
Dr. Harald Haarman. Universalgeschichte der Schrift.Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 1990.
David Diringer. The Alphabet. A Key to the History of Mankind. 3rd edition. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968.
Colin H. Roberts. The Birth of the Codex. London: OxfordUniversity Press, 1987.
Martin Koblo. Die Entwicklung der Schrift. Wiesbaden:Brandsetter, 1963.
Donald Jackson. The Story of Writing. New York: TaplingerPublishing Co., 1981.
Hannsferdinand Dobler. Von der Keilschrift zum Computer.Schrift, Buch, Wissenschaften. Munich: Bertelsmann, 1974.
Colin Clair. A History of European Printing. New York: AcademicPress, 1976.
Lucien Paul Victor Febre. The Coming of the Book. The Impact ofPrinting 1450-1800. Trans. David Gerard. London: N.L.B., 1976.
Karlen Mooradian. The Dawn of Printing. Lexington, KY:Association for Education in Journalism, 1972.
Warren Chappel. A Short History of the Printed Word. New York:Knopf, 1970.
C.P. Snow. The Two Cultures and a Second Look. An expanded version of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: At the University Press, 1959.
John Brockman. The Third Culture: Beyond the ScientificRevolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.
A recent criticism of the book, by Phillip E. Johnson, on the World Wide Web, states that the scientists contributing to the book "tend to replace the literary intellectuals rather than cooperate with them."
Alan Bloom. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon andSchuster, 1987.
Antoine de St. Exupéry. The Little Prince. Trans. KatherineWoods. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1943.
Helmut Schmidt, ex-Chancellor of West Germany, Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, editor-in-chief of Die Zeit, Edzard Reuter, ex-CEO of Daimler-Benz, along with several prominent German intellectuals and politicians, met during the summer of 1992 to discuss issues facing their country after reunification. In their Manifesto, they insisted that any concept for a sensible future needs to integrate the notion of renouncing (Verzicht) and sharing as opposed to growing expectations and their export through economic aid to Third World countries. See Ein Manifest: Weil das Land sich ändern muß (A Manifesto. Because the country needs to change), Reinbeck: Rowohlt Verlag, 1992
Jean-Marie Guéhenno. La Fin de la Démocratie. Paris: Flammarion, 1993.
Edmund Carpenter. They Became What They Beheld. New York:Outerbridge and Dienstfrey/Ballantine, 1970.
Nathaniel Hawthorne. Earth's Holocaust, in The Complete Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Garden City NY: Doubleday & Co., 1959.
George Steiner. The end of bookishness? in Times LiterarySupplement, July 8-14, 1988.
"To read classically means to own the means of that reading. We are dealing no longer with the medieval chained library or with books held as treasures in certain monastic and princely institutions. The book became a domestic object owned by its user, accessible at his will for re-reading. This access in turn comprised private space, of which the personal libraries of Erasmus and of Montaigne are emblematic. Even more crucial, though difficult to define, was the acquisition of periods of private silence" (p. 754).
Thomas Robert Malthus. An Essay On the Principle of Population, 1798, in The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus. E.A. Wrigley and David Souden, editors. London: W. Pickering, 1986.
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorn Clemens). The Annotated HuckleberryFinn: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. With introduction,notes, and bibliography by Michael P. Hearn. New York: C.N.Potter and Crown Publishers, 1981.
"Twain drives home just how strongly we are chained to our own literacy through Huck's illiterate silence" (p. 101). "Thus Twain brings into focus the trap of literacy. There is a whole world in Huck Finn that is closed to those without literacy. They can't, for ironic example, read this marvelous work, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And yet we must recognize a world rich with superstition and folklore, with adventure and beauty, that remains closed to those who are too tightly chained to letters" (p. 105).
George Gilder. Life After Television: The Coming Transformation of Media and American Life. New York: Norton, 1992.
Neil Postman. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture toTechnology. New York: Knopf, 1992.
America-The Epitome of the Civilization of Illiteracy
John Adams. Letters from a Distinguished American: Twelve Essays by John Adams on American Foreign Policy, 1780. Compiled and edited by James H. Hutson. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1978.
-. The Adams-Jefferson: the Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams (Lester J. Cappon, editor). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959.
Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber. The American Challenge. Trans.Robert Steel. With a foreword by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. NewYork: Atheneum, 1968.
Neil Postman. Rising Tide of Illiteracy in the USA, in TheWashington Post, 1985.
"Whatever else may be said of the immigrants who settled in New England in the 17th century, it is a paramount fact that they were dedicated and skillful readers…. It is to be understood that the Bible was the central reading matter in all households, for these people were Protestants who shared Luther's belief that printing was 'God's highest and extremest act of Grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward.' But reading for God's sake was not their sole motivation in bringing books into their homes."
Lauran Paine. Captain John Smith and the Jamestown Story. London:R. Hale, 1973.
Henry Steele Commager. The American Mind. New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1950.
Charles Dickens. American Notes. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985.
The book is a journal of Dickens's travels from Boston to St.Louis, from January through June, 1842.
Alexis de Toqueville. Democracy in America, Vol. 1 (Henry Reeve text as revised by Francis Bowen). New York: Vintage Books, 1945.
Several other writers have attempted to characterize the USA, or at least some of its aspects:
Jean Baudrillard. Amérique. Paris: Grasset, 1986.
-. America. Chris Turner, London/New York: Verso, 1988.
Gerald Messadie. Requiem pour superman. La crise du mythe américain. Paris: R. Laffont, 1988.
Rodó, José Enrique. Ariel. Liberalismo y Jacobinismo. BuenosAires: Ediciones Depalma, 1967.
In practically all her novels, Jane Austen extols the improvement of the mind (especially the female mind) through reading; see especially Pride and Prejudice, Vol. 1, chapter 8. (New York: The New American Library, 1961, p. 35).
Thomas Jefferson. Autobiography, in Writings. New York: TheLibrary of America/Literary Classics of the United States, 1984.
Jefferson's father placed him in the English school when Thomas was five years old, and at age nine in the Latin school, where he learned Latin, Greek, and French until 1757. In 1758, Jefferson continued two years of the same program of study with a Reverend Maury. In 1760, he attended the College of William and Mary (for two years), where he was taught by a Dr. William Small of Scotland (a mathematician). His education consisted of Ethics, Rhetoric, and Belles Lettres. In 1762, he began to study law.
Joel Spring. The American School 1642-1990. 2nd ed. NewYork/London: Longman, 1990.
Benjamin Franklin's model academy embodied his own education. " '…it would be well if [students] could be taught every thing that is useful, and every thing that is ornamental. But Art is long, and their Time is short. It is therefore propos'd that they learn those things that are likely to be most useful and most ornamental.' […] Franklin's early life was a model for getting ahead in the New World […] The 'useful' elements in Franklin's education were the skills learned in apprenticeship and through his reading. The 'ornamental? elements,… were the knowledge and social skills learned through reading, writing, and debating" (p. 23).
Theodore Sizer, editor. The Age of the Academics, New York:Teachers College Press, 1964.
"The academy movement in North America was primarily a result of the desire to provide a more utilitarian education as compared with the education provided in classical grammar schools" (p. 22). Lester Frank Ward. The Psychic Factors of Civilization. 2nd ed. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp, 1970. "The highest duty of society is to see that every member receives a sound education" (p. 308).
Transcendentalism: "A 19th century New England movement of writers and philosophers who were loosely bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of man, and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of deepest truths." The main figures were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller (cf. Encyclopedia Britannica, Micropedia. 1990 ed.
Paul F. Boller. American Transcendentalism, 1830-1860. An Intellectual Inquiry. New York: Putnam, 1974. Major philosophers of pragmatics:
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). Although no finished work deals explicitly with his pragmatic conception, this conception permeates his entire activity. His semiotics is the result of the fundamental pragmatic philosophy he developed.
John Dewey (1859-1952). Dewey bases his pragmatic conception on the proven useful. This explains why this conception was labeled instrumentalism or pragmatics of verification. Among the works where this is expressed are How We Think (1910), Logic, the Theory of Inquiry (1938), Knowing and Known (1940).
William James (1842-1910). James expressed his pragmatic conception from a psychological perspective. His main works dedicated to pragmatism are Principles of Psychology (1890), Pragmatism (1907), and The Meaning of Truth (1909).
Josiah Royce (1855-1916). He is the originator of a conception he called absolute pragmatics.
John Sculley, ex-CEO of Apple Computer, Inc took the bully pulpit for literacy (at President-elect Clinton's economic summit in December, 1992), stating that the American economy is built on ideas. He and other business leaders confuse ideas with invention, which is their main interest, and for which literacy is not really necessary.
Sidney Lanier. The Symphony, 1875, in The Poems of Sidney Lanier. (Mary Day Lanier, editor). Athens: University of Georgia Press, 198.
Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929). American economist and social scientist who sought to apply evolutionary dynamic approach to the study of economic constructions. Best known for his work The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), in which he coined the term conspicuous consumption.
Theodore Dreiser. American Diaries, 1902-1926. (Thomas P. Riggio, editor). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.
-. Sister Carrie (the Pennsylvania Edition). Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981.
-. Essays. Selected magazine articles of Theodore Dreiser: Life and art in the American 1890's. (Yoshinobu Hakutani, editor). 2 volumes. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985-1987.
Henry James. The American Scene. London: Chapman and Hall, 1907.
-. The Bostonians. London: John Lehmann Ltd. 1952.
"I wished to write a very American tale," James wrote in his Notebook (two years prior to the publication of the novel in 1886). He also stated, "I asked myself what was the most salient and peculiar point of our social life. The answer was: the situation of women, the decline of the sentiment of sex…."
Henry Steele Commager. The American Mind. New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1950.
In the section aptly entitled "The Literature of Revolt," Commager noticed that the tradition of protest and revolt (dominant in American literature since Emerson and Thoreau) turned, at the beginning of the 20th century (that is, with the New Economics), into an almost unanimous repudiation of the economic order. "…most authors portrayed an economic system disorderly and ruthless, wasteful and inhumane, unjust alike to working men, investors, and consumers, politically corrupt and morally corrupting," (p. 247). He goes on to name William Dean Howell (with his novels), Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and others. In the same vein, Denis Brogan (The American Character), J.T. Adams (Our Business Civilization), Harold Stearns (America: A Reappraisal), Mary A. Hamilton (In America Today), André Siegfried (America Comes of Age) are also mentioned.
Howard Gardner. Frames of Mind: Theory of MultipleIntelligences. New York: Basic Books, 1983.
Diane Ravitch. The Schools We Deserve. New York: Doubleday,1985.
Peter Cooper (1791-1883). Self-taught entrepreneur and inventor. As head of North American Telegraph Works, he made a fortune manufacturing glue and establishing iron works. In 1830, his experimental locomotive made its first 13-mile run.
The Corcoran case. The incredible secret of John Corcoran, 20/20,ABC News, April 1, 1988. (Text by byTranscripts: JournalGraphics, Inc. pp. 11-14.)
Noah Webster. The American Spelling Book: containing an easystandard of pronunciation. Being the first part of aGrammatical Institute of the English Language. Boston: IsaiahThomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1793.
William Holmes McGuffey. McGuffey's Newly Revised Eclectic First Reader: containing progressive lessons in reading and spelling (revised and improved by Wm. H. McGuffey). Cincinnati: Winthrop B. Smith, 1853. It is doubtful that all the clever remarks attributed to Yogi Berra came from him. What matters is the dry sense of humor and logical irreverence that make these remarks another form of Americana.
Akiro Morita, et al. Made in Japan. New York: Dutton, 1989.
United We Stand, the political interest group founded by H. Ross Perot, is probably another example of how difficult it is, even for those who take an active stand (no matter how controversial), to break the dualistic pattern of political life in the USA. This group became the Reform Party.
Gottfried Benn. Sämtliche Werke. (Gerhard Schuster, editor).Vols. 3-5 (Prosa). Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1986.
Benn maintains that the language crisis is actually the expression of the crisis of the white man.
Andrei Toom. A Russian Teacher in America, in Focus, 16:4, August 1996, pp. 9-11 (reprint of the same article appearing in the June 1993 issue of the Journal of Mathematical Behavior and then in the Fall 1993 issue of American Educator).
Among the many articles dealing with American students' attitudes towards required subject matter, this is one of the most poignant. It involves not literature, philosophy, or history, but mathematics. The author points out not only the expectations of students and educational administrators, but also the methods in which the subject matter is treated in textbooks. Interestingly enough, he recounts his experience with students in a state university, where generalized, democratic access to mediocrity is equated with education.
From Orality to Writing
Peter S. Bellwood. Prehistory in the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago.Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1985.
Andrew Sherrat, Editor. The Cambridge Encyclopedia ofArchaeology. New York: Crown Publishers, 1980.
Eric A. Havelock. Schriftlichkeit. Das griechische Alphabet alsKulturelle Revolution. Weinheim: Verlag VCH, 1990.
Ishwar Chandra Rahi. World Alphabets, Their Origin andDevelopment. Allahabad: Bhargava Printing Press, 1977.
Current alphabets vary in number of letters from 12 letters of the Hawaiian alphabet (transliterated to the Roman alphabet by an American missionary) to 45 letters in modern Indian (Devnagari). Most modern alphabets vary from 24 to 33 letters: modern Greek, 24; Italian, 26; Spanish, 27; modern Cambodian, 32; modern Russian Cyrillic, 33. Modern Ethiopian has 26 letters representing consonants, each letter modified for the six vowels in the language, making a total of 182 letters.
Walter J. Ong. Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of theWorld. London and New York: Methuen, 1982.
The comparison between orality and writing has had a very long history. It is clear that Plato's remarks are made in a different pragmatic framework than that of the present. Ong noticed that: "…language is so overwhelmingly oral that of all the many thousands of languages-possibly tens of thousands-spoken in the course of human history, only around 106 have even been committed to writing to a degree sufficient to have produced literature, and most have never been written at all" (p.7). Ong also refers to pictographic systems, noticing that "Chinese is the largest, most complex, and richest: the K'anglisi dictionary of Chinese in 1716 AD lists 40,545 characters" (p. 8).
Recently, the assumption that Chinese writing is pictographic came under scrutiny. John DeFrancis (Visible Speech. The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989, p. 115) categorizes the Chinese system as morphosyllabic.
Harald Haarman. Universalgeschichte der Schrift. Frankfurt:Campus Verlag, 1990.
David Diringer. The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind. 2nd ed. New York: Philosophical Library, 1953.
-. The Story of Aleph Beth. New York/London: Yoseloff, 1960.
-. Writing. Ancient Peoples and Places. London: Thames of Hudson, 1962.
Ignace J. Gelb. A Study of Writing. Chicago: Chicago UniversityPress, 1963.
Gelb, as well as Ong, assumes that writing developed only around 3500 BCE among the Sumerians in Mesopotamia. Many scripts are on record: Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Minoan or Mycenean Linear B, Indus Valley script, Chinese, Mayan, Aztec, and others.
Ritual: a set form or system of rites, religious or otherwise.
Ralph Merrifield. The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic. London: B.T. Ratsford, 1987.
Catherine Bell. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1992.
Rite: a ceremonial or formal, solemn act, observance, or procedure in accordance with prescribed rule or custom, as in religious use (cf. Webster's Unabridged Dictionary).
Roger Grainger. The Language of the Rite. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1974.
Mythe-rite-symbole: 21 essais d'anthropologie littéraire sur des textes de Homère. Angers: Presses de l'Université d'Angers, 1984.
Weltanschauung: one's philosophy or conception of the universe and of life (cf. Webster's Unabridged Dictionary). A particular philosophy or view of life; a conception of the world (cf. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English).
Francesco d'Errico. Paleolithic human calendars: a case of wishful thinking? in Current Anthropology, 30, 1989, pp. 117-118.
He regards petroglyphs were looked at as a possible mathematical conception of the cosmos, a numbering or even a calculation system, a rhythmical support for traditional recitation, a generic system of notation.
B.A. Frolov. Numbers in Paleolithic graphic art and the initial stages in the development of mathematics, in Soviet Anthropology and Archaeology, 16 (3-4), 1978, pp. 142-166.
A. Marshack. Upper paleolithic notation and symbol, in Science, 178: 817-28, 1972.
E.K.A. Tratman. Late Upper Paleolithic Calculator? Gough's Cave,Cheddar, Somerset, in Proceedings, University of Bristol,Speleological Society, 14(2), 1976, pp.115-122.
Iwar Werlen. Ritual und Sprache: Zum Verhältnis von Sprechen undHandeln in Ritualen. Tübingen: Narr Verlag, 1984.
Inner clock, or biological clock, defines the relation between a biological entity and the time-based phenomena in the environment. As with the so-called circadian cycles (circadian meaning almost the day and night cycle, circa diem), rhythms of existence persist even in the absence of external stimuli. The appearance, at least, is that of an inner clock.
The notion of genetic code describes a system by which DNA and RNA molecules carry genetic information. Particular sequences of genes in these molecules represent particular sequences of amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) and thereby embody instructions for making of different types of proteins. On the same subject, but obviously at a deeper level than a dictionary definition, is James D. Watson's celebrated book, The Double Helix: a personal account of the discovery of the structure of DNA. (A new critical edition, including text, commentary, reviews, original papers, edited by Gunther S. Stent). London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981.
Homeostasis: the tendency towards a relatively stable equilibrium between interdependent elements of the human body. Physiological processes leading to body equilibrium are interlocked in dynamic processes.
References to the oral phase of language in Claude Lévi-Strauss:La Pensée Sauvage (1962). Translated as The Savage Mind. Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1966. Le Cru et le Cuit (1964) TheRaw and the Cooked. Trans. John and Doreen Weightman. New York:Harper and Row, 1970.
Andrew and Susan Sherrat (quoted by Peter S. Bellwood, Op.cit): A distinction accepted is that between unvocalized (Hebrew, Arabic) and vocalized alphabets (starting with the Greek, in which the vowels are no longer omitted). Some languages use syllabaries, reuniting a consonant and a following vowel (such as in the Japanese Katakana: ka, ke, ki, ko, ku). When two different conventions are applied, the writing system is hybrid: the Korean language has a very powerful alphabet, hangul, but also uses Chinese characters, but pronouned in Korean. The hangul system (15th century) expressed, for Koreans, a desire for self- identity.
Plato. Phaedrus, and The Seventh and Eighth Letters (translated from the Greek), with an introduction by Walter Hamilton. Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1973.
In Phaedrus, Socrates, portrayed by Plato, articulates arguments against writing: "it will implant forgetfulness in their souls [of people, M.N.]; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling these things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks; what you have discovered is a recipe [pharmakon, a potion; some translate it as recipe] not for memory, but for reminder" (274-278e).
Oraltity and Language Today: What Do People Understand When TheyUnderstand Language?
Ludwig Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. Guinness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961.
Amos Oz refers to self-constitution in language as follows: "…a language is never a 'means' or a 'framework' or a 'vehicle' for culture. It is culture. If you live in Hebrew, if you think, dream, make love in Hebrew, sing in Hebrew in the shower, tell lies in Hebrew, you are 'inside'. […] If a writer writes in Hebrew, even if he rewrites Dostoevksy or writes about a Tartar invasion of South America, Hebrew things will always happen in his stories. Things which are ours and which can only happen with us: certain rhythms, moods, combinations, associations, longings, connotations, atavistic attitudes towards the whole of creation, and so forth," (Under This Blazing Light, Cambridge, England: University Press, 1979, p. 189).
J. Lyons. Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Semantics requires that one "abstract from the user of the language and analyze only the expressions and their designata" (Vol. 1., p.115).
Noam Chomsky. The distinction between competence and performance in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965. Many scholars noticed the dualism inherent in the Chomskyan theory. Competence is "the speaker- hearer's knowledge of his language;" performance is "the actual use of language in concrete situations" (p.4).
Noam Chomsky started to formulate the idea of the innate constitution of a speaker's competence in the famous article A review of B.K. Skinner's Verbal Behavior in Language, 35 (1959), an idea he has developed through all his scholarly work. In the review, he considered the alternatives: language is learned (within Skinner's scheme of stimulus-response), or it is somehow innate. In Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1965), Reflections on Language (London: Fontana, 1976), and Rules and Representations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), the thought is constantly refined, though not necessarily more convincing (as his critics noticed).
Roman Jakobson. Essais de Linguistique Générale, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1963.
Jakobson refused to ascertain any "private property" in the praxis of language. Everything in the domain of language "is socialized" (p. 33).
Feedback: "The property of being able to adjust future conduct by past performance" (Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, p.47).
In 1981, Martin Gardner and Douglas Hoffstaedter shared a column in Scientific American, which Hoffstaedter called Metamagical Themes. In his first article, he defined self-reference: "It happens every time anyone says 'I' or 'me' or 'word' or 'speak' or 'mouth.' It happens every time a newspaper prints a story about reporters, every time someone writes a book about writing, designs a book about design, makes a movie about movies, or writes an article about self-reference. Many systems have the capability to represent or refer to themselves, or elements of themselves, within the system of their own symbolism" (Scientific American, January, 1981, vol. 244:1, pp. 22-23). Hofstaedter finds that self-reference is ubiquitous. Para-linguistic elements are discussed in detail in Eduard Ataian's book Jazyk i vneiazykovaia deistvitelnost: opyt ontologicheskovo sravnenia (Language and paralinguistic activity, an attempt towards an ontological comparison). Erevan: Izd. Erevanskovo Universiteta, 1987.
Luciano Canepari. L'internazione linguistica e paralinguistica,Napoli: Liguori, 1985.
Canepari insists on prosodic elements.
The pragmatic aspect of arithmetic is very complex. Many more examples relating to the use of numbers and their place in language can be found in Crump (the examples given are referenced in The Anthropology of Numbers, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 34 and 37).
Face-to-face communication, or iteration, attracted the attention of semioticians because codes other than those of language are at work. Adam Kendon, among others, thought that non-verbal communication captures only a small part of the face-to-face situation. The need to integrate non-verbal semiotic entities in the broader context of a communicative situation finally leads to the discovery of non-verbal codes, but also to the question of how much of the language experience is continued where language is not directly used. Useful reading can be found in Aspects of Non-Verbal Communication (Walburga Raffler-Engel, Editor), Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger, 1980.
Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: William Morrow & Co, 1994. (His book appeared eight years after this chapter was written.)
As opposed to pictograms, which are iconic representations (based on likeness) of concrete objects, ideograms are composites (sometimes diagrams) of more abstract representations of the same. Chao Yuen Ren (in Language and Symbolic Systems, Cambridge: At the University Press, 1968) shows how Chinese ideograms for the sequence 1,2,3 are built up: yi, represented as -; ér as -
; san as -
.
François Cheng. Chinese Poetic Writing, Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1982. (Translation by D.A. Riggs and J.P.Seaton of L'écriture poétique chinoise, Paris: Editions du Seuil,1977).
"The ideogram for one, consisting of a single horizontal stroke, separates (and simultaneously unites) heaven and earth" (p. 5). He goes on to exemplify how, "By combining the basic strokes,…one obtains other ideograms." The example given is that of combining [one] and [man, house] to obtain [large, big] and further on [sky, heaven].
On protolanguage: Thomas V. Gamkredlidze and V.V. Ivanov, TheEarly history of Indo-European Languages, in ScientificAmerican, March 1990, pp.110-116.
Reading by machines, i.e., scanning and full text processing (through the use of optical character recognition programs) led some companies to advertise a new literacy. Caere and Hewlett-Packard, sponsors of Project Literacy US and Reading is Fundamental came up with the headline "We'd Like to Teach the World to Read" to introduce optical character recognition technology (a scanner and software), which makes machine reading (of texts, numbers, and graphics) possible. In another ad, Que Software depicts English grammar, punctuation and style books, and the dictionary opposite a red key. The ad states: "RightWriter improves your writing with the touch of a hot key." The program is supposed to check punctuation and grammar. It can also be customized for specific writing styles (inquiry to your insurance agent, answer to the IRS, complaints to City Hall or a consumer protection agency). As a matter of fact, the phenomena referred to are not a matter of advertisement slogans but of a new means for reading and even writing. A program such as VoiceWorks (also known as VoiceRad) was designed for radiologists who routinely review X-rays and generate written reports on their findings. Based on patterns recognized by the physician, the program accepts dictation (from a subset of natural language) and generates the ca. 150-word report without misspelling difficult technical terms. VoiceEm (for Emergency Room doctors) is activated by voice clues (e.g., "auto accident"), displaying a report from which the physician chooses the appropriate words: "(belted/non-belted,) (driver/passenger) in (low/moderate/high) velocity accident struck from (rear/head-on/broadside) and (claims/denies) rolling vehicle." Canned medical and legal phrases summarize situations that correspond to circumstances on record. When the doctor states "normal throat," the machine spells out a text that reproduces stereotype descriptions: "throat clear, tongue, pharynx without injections, exudate tonsilar hypertrophy, teeth normal variant." The 1,000-word lexicon can handle the vast majority of emergencies. Those beyond the lexicon usually surpass the competence of the doctor.