‘‘A cat,’’ a child may make a scribble; if asked to write ‘‘Two cats,’’ they
may make two squiggles, and so on. But if asked to write ‘‘No cats,’’ they
may say, ‘‘I didn’t write anything because there are no cats.’’ Writing
requires sustained attention to the linguistic form as opposed to what
the language is about. To oversimplify somewhat, writing distinguishes
what is said from what is meant, capturing only the former. American
linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956) suggested that we dissect nature
along lines laid down by our native language to show how our thought
tends to run in conventional linguistic ruts. I revised this claim to the
context of literacy to say, ‘‘We introspect our language along lines laid
down by our scripts’’ (Olson 1994, 90).
The literacy hypothesis, then, is the hypothesis that a writing system
and a tradition of writing is not a neutral practice; it allows us, indeed
invites us, to think about language and mind in some new ways. Eric
Havelock (1982) pioneered some of these ideas, claiming that the fixity of
text allowed writing to take over the mental functions previously carried
by memory. He traced some of the properties of Homeric texts to their
oral composition and contrasted that with the beginnings of written
poetry and especially written prose, views that have been importantly
elaborated and extended by Powell (2002). Certainly it remains an inter-
esting project to trace the ways that writing influenced discourse and the
specialization of genre in both speech and writing.
But it is also possible to examine how writing contributes to two very
specialized uses of language, one that may be described as the isolation of
‘‘pure thought’’ and the second as the elaboration of subjectivity. For
more than a century anthropologists and sociologists have associated
cultural development with two features of language use: the increase of
rational thought and rationalized practices on one hand and the growth
of subjectivity, the consciousness of the mental states, on the other.
My question, the central point of this chapter, is to ask how literacy
could contribute to these two special properties of social and cultural
evolution.
THOUGHTS WITHOUT THINKERS—LITERACY
AND ABSTRACT PROSE
The unit of thought that a sentence expresses is a proposition, the unit of
language first systematically analyzed by Frege (reprinted 1970) at the
end of the last century. One of Frege’s important contributions was to
show that a simple declarative sentence is actually composed of two parts,
an ‘‘assertoric force’’ and a ‘‘predicate.’’ Thus, an utterance, Frege argued,
does two things at once: it both mentions a thought, the predicate, and
asserts it as true, its assertoric force. Thus there are two things hidden
inside the utterance of an ordinary declarative sentence. His distinction
later provided the basis for Austin’s (1962) theory of speech acts (Lee
Why Literacy Matters, Then and Now 393