The Literate Mind
A Study of Its Scope and Limitations
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Beschreibung
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 new 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.
Wells discusses how literacy affects human cognition from an ecological functionalism viewpoint by using the Turing machine, specifically the universal machine, as a model for the human mind. An excellent text for advanced undergraduate or graduate students of psychology, philosophy, linguistics and education.
Only 'literacy' book written from an ecological functionalism perspective
Includes models and theories from formal logic as intrinsic and integral parts of the study of literacy
Argues that the scope and limitations of literacy can be demonstrated via logical as well as more traditional literary means
Autor*in
Andy Wells
Themen in »The Literate Mind«
Computer Internet Sex cognition ecology education evolution mind nature philosophy