Olson’s Domestication of Goody’s Literacy Hypothesis: (How) Can Philosophers of Language Help?

Abstract

With, The Mind on Paper, Olson hopes to amass the strongest empirical evidence needed, in his view, to support a more promising version of Goody’s insights on literacy’s impact on social and psychological change (Goody, The domestication of the savage mind, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977). The book is also the synthetic work in which Olson looks at analytic philosophy of language as a great resource for the conceptual clarifications needed. Albeit implicitly, Olson’s investigations deploy an insight many philosophers of language will not find surprising, namely that language is a sui generis cognitive ability and practice, and that even its social or normative aspects are to some extent special or unique. This now separates Olson’s construal of Goody’s position from those of cultural anthropologists or sociologists of literacy who vigorously attacked Goody’s work (Collins, American Review of Anthropology 24:75–93, 1995, Finnegan, in: Wagner DA, Venezky RL, Street BV (eds) Literacy: An international handbook, Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 1999, Raven, Social Science Information 40:37, 2001, Ungureanu, AVANT 2:97–123, 2013). It is still unclear, however, whether the philosophical positions juxtaposed in Olson’s book can provide a consistent view of literate competenclies. But the book succeeds to highlight a blind spot in contemporary philosophy of language: a construal of writing and literate competencies is needed also for those interested in a naturalized philosophy of language, i.e., connected to inquiries in the psychological and social sciences of language.