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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.>
List of contents
Literacy in the World Today
Social Construction and Independent Reality
Universal Human Nature and the Study of Literacy
The Literate Ecology
The Evolution of Cooperation and Selfishness
Sexual Selection, Sex Differences and Social Evolution
Turing Machines: Syntactic Foundations for the Study of Literacy
The Scope of the Literate Mind
Literacy in the Age of Computers and the Internet
Grounding the Literacy Episteme The Limitations of the Literate Mind
The Consequences of Literacy.
About the author
ANDREW WELLS is Lecturer in Psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.
