Reading: skilled linguistic action

Abstract

The paper links critique of ‘inner process’ to a perspective that treats language as activity that is accomplished by living beings. The view traces reading to human ways of coordinating with ‘the seen’. Having contrasted this distributed view with organism-first alternatives, I use a case study of reports to sketch how readers engage with written materials to both select details and project an imagined ‘source’ (e.g. a meaning, author or intention). Far from using inner process (‘decoding’) readers coordinate with a field of patternings. Where skilled, they use recollecting to link looking, silent thinking, expectations and strategic moves. Using judgements, they transform what they observe by setting off experience. I thus build on Wittgenstein's critique of inner process while also endorsing Trybulec’s (2019) radicalization of his view. To avoid treating the sense of ‘written words’ as subjective, the material aspect of patternings is taken to index outward criteria (roughly, standards of judgement). In seeking to replace theories that presuppose ‘text’, I stress how patternings invite directed sensorimotor activity by an intelligent person. Indeed, since persons learn to see wordings (or take a language stance) arrangements of patternings act as marks, ‘symbols’ and aggregations that set off recollection, judgements and iterated action. Skilled readers can use re-reading, the already read etc. to modulate ways of attending. Readers link the said, hints, recollections and ways of actualizing movements to grant reading experience a specific sense. By considering how outer criteria are evoked, reading is traced back to skilled linguistic action.