it is thought about thought rather than about what anyone believes.
Deriving conclusions from premises, as in Aristotelean logic, would be
an example. But further, it is the language that defines public, essentially
authorless, documents. Quoted expressions are in a sense mentioned
rather than used. Literal meaning, like the definition of a word, is the
meaning of a quoted, decontextualized expression. The advantage of such
a decontextualized or autonomous or authorless meaning is that one can
work out rules for strict inference; inferences that follow from the verbal
form rather than from the speaker’s intention or from the local utterance
meaning. If ‘‘the world is getting smaller every day’’ then it follows that it
is reduced in diameter or mass. It does not necessarily follow, as the
mouse presumably intended, that he feels that the world is closing in.
Stated more generally, it is that strict implication, unlike paraphrase, is
difficult, to the point of impossibility, to derive from utterance meaning.
On the other hand, the logical implications of quoted expressions are
relatively straightforward as they derive from the sense of the sentence,
the verbal form, rather than the intended meaning of the utterance. All of
formal logic depends upon the availability of such, as we say, timeless
meanings. Speakers, on the other hand, rely upon the speaker’s inten-
tions, goals, contexts, as well as the utterance itself. Speakers express their
beliefs and they rely on quotation to express what I have called ‘‘pure
thought,’’ that is, thought as distinguished from belief.
Educated persons take it as a matter of course to distinguish thoughts
from beliefs. Havelock (1982) traced the distinction between knowledge
and the knower to the growth of literacy in classical Greece. Knowledge
could be distinguished from the knower not only because it could be
stored in documents, but also because they had learned to think about
ideas rather than or in addition to their beliefs. Our contemplative habits
are not universal but, it may be argued, a by-product of our literacy. One
may recall Luria’s (1976) famous study of reasoning among nonliterate
adults in which he found that subjects frequently failed to draw the
expected inference as in 1.
- All the bears in Novaya Zemla are white. Ivan went to Novaya Zemla and
saw a bear there. What colour was the bear?
To which the subjects tended to reply as in 2.
- I’ve never been to Novaya Zemla, you’ll have to ask Ivan, etc.
The subject, an unschooled, illiterate peasant, tended to treat 1 as an
expression of the speaker’s belief rather than as a ‘‘pure thought.’’ Con-
sequently, he disagreed with the speaker’s assertion and failed to draw
what we would regard as a necessary implication of that pure thought.
Stated another way, the subject failed to notice that the expression was to
be treated as if in quotation marks; the subject failed to treat the state-
ment as a premise. Premises are statements in quotation marks. Note, this
Why Literacy Matters, Then and Now 397