Description
Although the importance of literacy is widely acknowledged in society and remains at the top of the political agenda, writing has been slow to establish a place in the cognitive sciences. Olson argues that to understand the cognitive implications of literacy, it is necessary to see reading and writing as providing access to and consciousness of aspects of language, such as phonemes, words and sentences, that are implicit and unconscious in speech. Reading and writing create a system of metarepresentational concepts that bring those features of language into consciousness as a subject of discourse. This consciousness of language is essential not only to acquiring literacy but also to the formation of systematic thought and rationality. The Mind on Paper is a compelling exploration of what literacy does for our speech and hence for our thought, and will be of interest to readers in developmental psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, and education.
Chapter
Part II Theories of the Relation between Writing and Mind
Signs for Preserving and Communicating Information
The Invention of Signs for Language
The Invention of the Alphabet
How Children Reinvent Writing
3 Dewey and the New Pragmatists
A Place for Writing in Philosophical and Educational Theory
Dewey’s Pragmatism in Educational Theory
4 Vygotsky and the Vygotskians
Writing as a Cognitive Tool
Limitations of the “Tool” Metaphor
Writing as Consciousness of Language
5 The Cognitive Science of Metarepresentation
Reflection on Language as Metarepresentation
Language Transparency and Metarepresentational Development
From Norms Implicit in Practice to Rules Explicit in Language
Metarepresentation and the Theory of Mind
Part III Reading and the Invention of Language about Language
6 Phonemes and the Alphabet
Reading and Phonological Awareness
Uses of the Discovery of Phonology
7 The Discovery of Words and Thinking about Words
The History of Consciousness of Words
Literacy and Consciousness of the Sense of Words
Thinking about Words, Their Meaning and Their Sense
Consciousness of Sentences
Learning to Think about Sentences
The Ontology of Sentences
Logical Connectives In and Between Sentences
The Two Languages of Thought
Sentence as a Metarepresentational Object
Reasoning about the World and Reasoning about the Language
9 Prose and Rational Argument
Recognizing Classical Prose
Learning to Write Classical Prose
10 The Testing of Rationality and the Rationality of Testing
Tests for Rationality are Tests for Metarepresentational Attitude to Language
Testing Rationality as Metarepresentation
Language and Metalanguage in the Theory of Thinking
Part IV The Implications and Uses of Metarepresentational Language
11 The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading
The Place of Metarepresentational Knowledge in Two Perspectives on Reading
Metalinguistics in Its Place
The Uses of Metalanguage in Reading and Learning to Read
General Perspectives on Reading and Learning to Read
Assessing Reading Ability
12 The Psychology and Pedagogy of Rationality
The Evolution of Reason and Rationality
Reasons about Reasons: Knowing Through a Consciousness of Language
The Pedagogy of Rationality
Does a Literate Rationality Constitute a Universal Standard for Rationality?
13 Reading, Consciousness and Rationality
Consciousness of Language
Making Knowledge about Language Explicit
Transparency: What is Unconscious Knowledge of Language?
The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading
The Languages of Thinking
The Mind on Paper
：Reading, Consciousness and Rationality
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