Author: tom

For some reason, today it became important to know when silent reading developed. In the middle ages, and in antiquity, the custom was to always read aloud. Monastic libraries would be full of mutterings and it must have been impossible to read private letters in public.

Then i found this essay and everything started to go ‘zing!’ inside my head. Seems the diffusion of the custom of word spacing (strange to think that something as unconscious as putting spaces between words needed invention. Strangetothinkthatsomethingasunconsciousasputtingspacesbetweenwordsneededinvention) was instrumental in allowing the development of silent copying and silent reading.

And- fantastic!- you can trace the historical development of this by looking at changes in the rules of monastic orders:

Reading likewise became a silent activity, as evidenced by changing interpretation of the rule of silence. Before about the 10th century, “oral group reading and composition [were] in practice no more considered a breach of silence than were confession or the recitation of prayers. Cluniac monks were judged to have violated their vows of silence only when a word they spoke was not written in the text.” (383) But later, “silence” comes to mean real silence.

So The Word is on a historical trajectory from phonetic to visual unit (Remember Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning was the command line. Notice Jocelyn Penny Small’s essay on Psycoloquy)

And, again from Relevant History, silent reading lets us interact with the written word in new ways

Books that were meant to be read silently differed from those meant to be read aloud: they were more visually complex, and their design could incorporate metadata and visual cross-references that wouldn’t make sense in books that were read aloud. What other scholars have referred to as paratexts– .e.g, “tables of contents, alphabetical glosses, subject indexes, running headings” (408)– only really work in books that you interact with visually rather than orally.

All these changes, marking “the transformation from an oral monastic culture to a visual scholastic one between the end of the 12th and the beginning of the 14th centuries” (405) are first confined to the ecclesiastical worlds, but from the 14th century they spread in lay literate culture.

And then silent reading changes the nature of self-consciousness, another part in the development of the primacy of individual perspective. Is it coincidence that the widespread adoption of silent reading is coincident with the beginning of what we know of as the Modern period?

…private reading becomes a space for “individual critical thinking” that encourages “the development of skepticism and intellectual heresy.” (399) Likewise, spiritual literature in the 14th century was meant to be read alone, turning reading itself into a kind of meditation (that incidentally involved the highest of the senses, sight).
The privacy afforded by silent reading had the same effects in lay society that it did in scholastic circles. It made easier the cultivation of individual opinions and subversive thoughts…It also made religious feeling into a more private matter.

How did people see the world before they invented perspective, sometime in the 15th century? It would be comforting to assume that the world was the same, even though people could only imagine representations of the world which to us look awkward, childlke. If they saw the world like we do now, why was perspective not obvious sooner? Why couldn’t they see?

How did people experience the world before individual inner life was legistamised as a social object. Before we have a concept for self-consciousness, can it exist in the same way? Language might not condition our fundamental perception of the world (all the evidence I’ve seen persuades me to reject the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), but it might condition the reflexive use of cognition. In other words, until the concept exists out there, it can’t be operated upon by our words or thoughts. What affect would this have on our feelings and thoughts about our feelings and thoughts?

So many questions…

Remember guardian article from november 2002 by David Lodge. He talks about the development of the novel, about how the ‘interiority of experience’ came to be a focus of literature after Descartes’ cogito put consciousness as the foundation of philosophy:

Ian Watt, in…The Rise of the Novel , suggests that "both the philosophical and the literary innovations must be seen as parallel manifestations of larger change – that vast transformation of Western civilization since the Renaissance which has replaced the unified world picture of the Middle Ages with another very different one – one which presents us, essentially, with a developing but unplanned aggregate of particular individuals having particular experiences at particular times and in particular places.

Watt observed that whereas earlier narrative literature usually recycled familiar stories, novelists were the first storytellers to pretend that their stories had never been told before, that they were entirely new and unique, as is each of our own lives according to the empirical, historical, and individualistic concept of human life. They did this partly by imitating empirical forms of narrative like auto biography, confessions, letters, and early journalism. Defoe and Richardson are obvious examples.

Remember Baumeister‘s How the self became a problem. He observes than in Western culture people could expect to spend 25 hours of every day in other people’s company: to eat, sleep, shit, make love, play, work with others present. Privacy was a concept that just wouldn’t make sense.

Remember Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Claiming that pre-homeric humans were not conscious. Experienced a will as external direction coming from gods or leaders, sort of hive-living robots. Fascinating stuff as he looks at the literature and archaeology to try an trace the development of modern consciousness. Madness. Genius.

I’ve just finished The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris (1998, Bloomsbury). Fantastic book – and I think it says something about psychology that something so seminal can be published by a writer of textbooks rather than professional academic. Or perhaps, like Nicol suggested, it would take a writer of textbooks to be able to synthesise across fields without the blinkers of disciplinary indoctrination which are normally acquired by specialist professionals. I’d love to know more about the profressional response to the book. She must have really annoyed some people.

I put my notes online. The take-home message is this: It is a cultural myth that parenting style influences how children turn out. The nature-nurture dichotomy is a false one, because it suggests that aside from nature/genetics it is only parents who have an influence on how children develop (thank Freud for that one). Genetics makes children similar to parents. Being socialised by a peer group with the same values as the parents makes children similar to parents. Parents don’t make children similar to parents.

Think language: the children of immigrants take on the language of their host country as their native tongue, not the language of their parents.

Think twin-studies: we all know the stories about twins reared-apart who in adulthood are amazinginly similar. You don’t hear the flip side mentioned so often. Twins reared together are no more similar. Having the same parental up-bringing doesn’t add anything to the existing effect of genetics.

There is no scientific evidence that parents have any affect beyond providing genes and a socio-economic peer group which is most likely congruent with their own socialisation.

That’s the important thing, I think. No scientific evidence. We have to remember that what is real isn’t the same as what is scientifically demonstrable. But if psychology wants to be a science it needs to rely on the scientifically demonstrable and I think Judith Rich Harris shows that the discipline has spent too long chasing confirmation of a folk myth, rather than doing properly controlled stuides. ‘Group Socialisation Theory’, as JRH calls the alternative hypothesis that peers are more influential than parents, is another good example of the use of using evolutionary theory as an integrative framework within psychology. Not that you should naively apply evolutionary theory to all aspects of psychology, but that nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution. And psychology is ultimately biological, and you need to use the same principles – ie trying to work out function – to understand either.