Rationality and the Literate Mind

by Roy Harris

Overview

This book re-examines the old debate about the relationship between rationality and literacy. Does writing "restructure consciousness?" Do preliterate societies have a different "mind-set" from literate societies? Is reason "built in" to the way we think? How is literacy related to numeracy? Is the "logical form" that Western philosophers recognize anything more than an extrapolation from the structure of the written sentence? Is logic, as developed formally in Western education, intrinsically beyond the reach of the preliterate mind? What light, if any, do the findings of contemporary neuroscience throw on such issues? Roy Harris challenges the received mainstream opinion that reason is an intrinsic property of the human mind, and argues that the whole Western conception of rational thought, from Classical Greece down to modern symbolic logic, is a by-product of the way literacy developed in European cultures.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415850230
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/23/2013
Series:	Routledge Advances in Communication and Linguistic Theory
Pages:	206
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Roy Harris is Emeritus Professor of General Linguistics in the University of Oxford and an Honorary Fellow of St Edmund Hall.

Table of Contents

Series Editor’s Forward

Preface

Chapter 1 Rationality, the mind and scriptism

Chapter 2 The primitive mind revisited

Chapter 3 Logicality and prelogicality

Chapter 4 Reason and primitive languages

Chapter 5 The great divide

Chapter 6 Aristotle’s language myth

Chapter 7 Logic and the tyranny of the alphabet

Chapter 8 Literacy and numeracy

Chapter 9 Interlude: constructing a language-game

Chapter 10 The literate revolution and its consequences

Chapter 11 The fallout from literacy

Chapter 12 Epilogue: rethinking rationality

Bibliography

Index