Interchange, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Fall, 1990), 56-60.

INTERCHANGE

Thinking about Interpretation: A Reply to Snyder

David Olson writes in "interchange" with Howard Snyder whose article ",4 Case Study in Defining Literacy: David Olson' s Journey from the Great Divide to the Great Beyond" appears in this issue of lnterchange. See page 1.

D a v i d R. Olson Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

For some time now I have been trying to come to grips with the cognitive implications of producing and interpreting archival, written texts - - the kinds of texts we identify with functional, prosaic discourse and to which children are introduced in the course of schooling. To characterize how such texts are written and read, I advanced the notion of"autonomous meaning" of texts to contrast with the contextualized meaning of oral utterance. The concept of autonomous meaning highlights the point that the meaning of a written text depends not on the determined intentions of the author (which in archival texts are unavailable in any case), nor on the beliefs of the properly constituted clerisy (what Luther referred to as the "dogmas of the church"), but on the meanings conventionalized in the text and available, therefore, to any reader.

I had some difficulty, and certainly considerable counter-argument as to the status of "autonomous text," most critics identifying it with the positivistic view of the objective "givenness" of the world and of the objective givenness of meaning. The corrective, so my critics urged, was to be found in the post-modernist view, sometimes referred to as the hermeneutic or "reader-response" view, which asserts that a text means, not what, by way of expressing an intention, a writer gives it as but by what a reader takes it for. It is, so to speak, a give versus take argument. In fact, I never wanted to take sides on so fragile an issue. With literacy, both authors and readers, in my view, come under the sway, to an unprecedented degree, of the autonomous, textual meaning.

Synder's patient and thorough review of the evolution of my views on the consequences of literacy has much in common with earlier critics including Street (1984), Nystrand (1986), Willinsky (1987), and Cazden (1989) all of whom point out in detail that texts are never without context and are never"self-interpreting," They would support Snyder in his claim that the idea that, once written, texts simply mean what they say, that they have an objective, determinable meaning, and that what they mean is independent of the social contexts or institutions in which they are interpreted, is simply false. Snyder' s contribution is to show that I have finally seen the light; I have, he thinks, come around to my critics in that I now, but formerly did not, acknowledge the role of social context and social use in any functioning of language, whether oral or written. And for that reason I have abandoned, he suggests, my notion of textual autonomy. Not sol What I have done is to get a clearer conception of the textual autonomy which I believe is so critical to understanding the implications of literacy.

56 Interchange, Vol. 21/3 © The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education 1990

THINKING ABOUT INTERPRETATION 57

Snyder argues that meaning is always contextualized and that my postulation of an autonomous textual meaning which is brought into consciousness by writing is false or misleading. I would now concede that I erred in not being sufficiently clear (both in my own mind and in my text) as to just what that autonomous textual meaning was. I claimed that the autonomous textual meaning was just what texts mean. Snyder and others are right in pointing out that texts never mean merely what they say. The Protestant view that Scripture simply meant what it said is now seen as oversimplified and the British Empiricist belief that they could develop a form of language which achieved that goal is now recognized as unachiev- able. In the 17th century the Royal Society, it may be recalled, urged its members to avoid all "digressions and swellings of style" and to speak and write in a "mathematical plainness of style" and in that way tried to circumvent the problem of misinterpretation. That goal is still a valuable one. But the belief that texts could mean just what they said was visionary and unachievable. What a text means depends both on the linguistic form and, as critics emphasize, on what the terms refer to in the world (the context) and what they indicate about the intentions of the writer. I was strong in identifying the meaning of a text with its sentence or textual meaning and identifying the meaning of an utterance with its intentional or conveyed meaning. In my own defence I could point out that I never adopted the "positivistic" Baconian or the Lutheran view of language. In the original article "From Utterance to Text" (1977) I wrote of the Lockean view of language as the "intellectual bias that originated at the time" (p. 275). Yet I did claim that utterances were tied to the intentions of the author in ways that texts were not and that in texts shaped up to meet the requirements of written prose, what the text meant was just what it said. And that claim cannot be sustained.

But while these critics are correct in denying any identity between what a text actually says and what it means, they are all wrong, I suggest, in thinking that the solution is a vague contextualism. Contextualism, the view that what statements mean depends upon the context in which they are produced and interpreted, is not false but it has nothing to contribute to understanding the special properties of literacy. By minimizing the differences between utterances and texts, contextualism leads these writers to miss the impact of literacy on the awareness of form. It is not that utterances and texts are essentially the same and involve the same interpretive practices depending only upon context of use; understanding literacy requires that we grasp the peculiarproperties of archival texts so that we can both exploit those properties and be protected from their biasing effects. Contextualism has little to contribute to that undertaking. Rather let me form date, briefly, what I should have said in 1977 but which became clear, at least clearer, to me since then.

What I should have said (I could say"what I actually meant to say" but, if my theory is right, what I meant to say has nothing to do with the case; I'm on trial not for my good intentions but for what I actually said in the article in question) is not that the meaning of a text is its textual meaning - - that texts mean neither more nor less than what they say - - but rather that writing encourages, indeed permits, the reader or writer to differentiate two strands of meaning, the intentional and the textual, in ways that oral language does not. It does this by freezing and preserving the actual utterance, the locutionary act as Austin (1962) would say, independently from the intentions of the speaker/writer or the interpretations of the listener/ reader. The fixed text specifies an autonomous sentence or textual meaning which provides an inescapable constraint on interpretation. In the absence of writing, what was actually said tends to be confiated with what was intended by the speaker or expected by the listener. The primary difference between speech and writing is this independent, objective, fixed, autono- mous evidence or testimony as to the appropriate interpretation of an utterance or text.

To avoid adopting the view that a text's meaning is either what the author intended or what the reader interpreted it to mean, I developed the notion of autonomous textual meaning which was independent of both. I thought of it as the kind of linguistic meaning that Frege (1896/

58 DAVID R. OLSON

1977) referred to as sense and Grice (1989) referred to as sentence meaning. Such meaning, however, does not capture truth and reference, problems which have to be handled pragmati- cally by the writer and the reader. My vague hope was that those problems may also somehow be conventionalized; Ca'ice's "conversational maxims" go some distance in that direction. However, I would now admit that the meaning of a text, even its literal meaning, goes beyond sentence meaning, so some other formulation is required. But the central point remains; a text can be seen as having a meaning which is independent of that intended by the writer or constructed by a reader. That meaning serves as fixed evidence or testimony as to the appropriate interpretation.

My claim was that the rise of literacy was responsible for building into a writer, no less than a reader, the twin consciousness of the textual meaning and its possible interpretations. It was not a claim that only written text has such a meaning; rather it was (or should have been) a metalinguistic hypothesis, namely, that writers began to think about the relations between these two meanings-- what a sentence means and what a speaker or writer means by it. That was the origin of the say/mean distinction and a body of research my colleagues and I have carried out in the attempt to understand just what children make of this distinction. The question was, do children distinguish what a text means from what a speaker intends by it or what a listener interprets it to mean? By studying the question developmentally, we hoped to establish whether or not literate experience conlributes to that development.

It comes as no surprise to those who have studied the cognitive implications of literacy that literacy (experience with written text whether through reading, being read to, or writing) helps to bring linguistic structures into consciousness. The study of segmental or phonological awareness, particularly those studies of non-literate adults conducted by Scholes and Willis (in press) and Bertelson and de Gelder (in press) have established the fact that familiarity with a writing system is critical to one's awareness of the segmental structure of language. People exposed to an alphabet hear words as composed of the sounds represented by the letters; those not so exposed simply cannot hear those linguistic constituents. Thus those familiar with an alphabet, for example, are able to delete the sound/f/from the word fish to produce the sound pattern/ish/. Those unfamiliar with an alphabet cannot.

Similar observations have been reported of the consequences of exposure to a writing system on people's understanding of words as linguistic units. Goody and Watt (1963) and Finnegan (1979) reported how the oral poets they studied had a somewhat different conception of words than did the literate recorders. For the oral poet, a word was a unit of meaning; for the literate recorder it was a unit of form. Developmental studies, too (Francis, 1987), have shown that children have no metalinguistic concept of words as spoken entities until they have come to think of words as written entities. Bugarski (1970) stated this point generally when he claimed that'% unit of a language is that element which prevailing graphic practice recognizes as such" (9. 454).

My hypothesis is the analogous metalinguistic hypothesis but expressed at a higher level of structure than either sound pattern or morphology. It is that that the concept of, and hence the awareness of, sentence meaning, a linguistic form that can be cognized independently of the intention it expresses, is also tied to literacy.

Now, on one hand, that hypothesis has to be right. An awareness of grammatical and semantic form of the sort that fuelled the writing of grammars and the formation of dictionaries was dearly dependent upon writing. IUich and Sanders (1988) tell how the Spanish grammarian, Nebrija, in the year of Columbus's famous voyage, submitted his grammar to Queen Isabella, with the intention of turning oral Castillian from a "loose and unruly" possession of the people into a systematic written language modelled on Latin and Greek. And as is well known, grammars are not merely descriptive accounts of language but, more importantly, prescriptive or normative. They specify the rules for correct speech and

THINKING ABOUT INTERPRETATION 59

writing, for ortho-grammar, And obviously the construction and use of dictionaries are literate undertakings. The very recognition that language consists of a f'mite set of words, set in ordered relations is a literate insight.

But my hypothesis was not only that writing facilitated formation of grammars and dictionaries but that it also contributed to a changing consciousness, from a concern with meaning and intention to a concern with linguistic form and meaning. One of the byproducts of literacy was a new awareness of and concern for what sentences mean as opposed to what speakers or writers mean by them. I still believe that that theory is true.

The kinds of evidence for this theory that we have gathered over the past few years is of the following kind. Pre-school children are told stories in which, through inadvertence, a speaker says something which could be taken to mean something different from what the speaker meant or intended by it. A listener misinterprets the utterance and the child subjects are asked what went wrong. Only when they are seven or eight years old do they begin to point out that the speaker "meant such-and-such" but the listener "thought he meant such-and- such." Younger children tend to conflate what was said and what was meant claiming that the listener "did not listen" or "made a mistake."

Let me describe briefly one study conducted by Rick MacLaren (1989). He presents children with three wooden blocks, a large and a small white block and a large black block under one of which is hidden a gold star. Two puppets are introduced, a speaker and a listener puppet. The listener puppet goes "out to play" and in his absence, the child subject and the speaker puppet are shown that the gold star is under, let's say, the small white block. The listener puppet then returns and asks where the gold star is. The speaker puppet says "It's under a white block." The children are then queried as to where the listener puppet would think the block was.

The interesting question is the one in which the experimenter points to the large white block and asks, "Could he think it's under this one?" Note that the child subjects know that it is not really under that block and they also know that the speaker meant to say the small white block, and yet the correct answer is "Yes, the listener could think that the star is under the large white block." That is, to answer "Yes," the child would have to recognize that the listener could interpret the expression "white block" as referring to the large block as well as to the small white one. As predicted, four and five year olds answer "No" to the question whereas six and seven year olds answer correctly by saying "Yes." We infer that they, but not the younger children, recognize that what the sentence means may be distinguished from what the speaker means by it. They still have little awareness of just how these two are related but they begin to make the criticaldistinctions about the time they begin formal schooling.

The connection to literacy is somewhat indirect. Children may come to be aware of just "what was said," the fixed text, through means other than simply learning to read. Being read to may serve the same function. And fixed oral rituals may serve the same purpose but only for particular texts and then only under ritual conditions. But the general awareness of the possibility of consulting the fixed text as independent evidence for determining the appropri- ate interpretation of an utterance or a text-- this new form of metalinguistic awareness J is, I continue to believe, tied to literacy.

Without the clear acknowledgement of this new form of awareness of language promoted by the availability of and exposure to written texts, psychologists will never come to terms with the decisive and revolutionary implications of writing.

There is a deep irony in the fact that Snyder and others claim that oral utterances and written texts are basically identical, differing only in the situational contexts in which they function. While denying the autonomy of my written text on the one hand, in their counter-argument they appeal only to my written text on the other. Why, if they do not take my text as autonomous, do they not telephone me and ask me what my thoughts, beliefs, and intentions are or were. They do not, and quite appropriately so. They disregard my beliefs and intentions

60 DAVID R. OLSON

while poring over the written text. Why? The answer is that scientific discourse is not about mine or anyone else's psychological states, but rather about the linguistic artifacts that we produce and analyze. It is the fact that such texts are accorded that status, that autonomy, that indicates we have succeeded, in a literate society, in constructing and advancing an archival, scientific, and literary tradition. A contextualism of the sort defended by Snyder would constitute not a great step forwards but rather a return to the in~rpretive practices of the Dark Ages in which texts, like nat~e, could be seen as meaning, symbolizing, anything. To doubt the autonomy of textual meaning is equivalent to denying the autonomy of evidence, testimony, and facts from the theories, inferences and interpretations they sustain. It is to give away, for nothing, much too much.

Correspondence Address: David Olson, Centre for Applied Cognitive Science, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1V6.

References

Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bertelson, P., & Gelder, B. (in press). The erasrgence of phonological awareness. In I. G. Mattingly & M. Studdert-Kannedy (Eds.), Modularity and the motor theory of speech perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Edbaum.

Bugarski, R. (1970). Writing systems and phonological insights. Papers from the sixth regional meeting. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Circle.

Cazden, C. (1989). The myth of autonomous meaning. In D. C. Topping & V. N. Kobayashi (Eds.), Thinking across cultures: The third international conference on thinking. HiUsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Finnsgan, R. (1977). Oralpoetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Francis, H. (1987). Cognitive implications of learning to read. Interchange, 18(1/2), 97-108.

Frege, G. (1977). Translated in Geach, P., & Black, M. (Eds.), Translations from the philosophical writings of Gottlob Frege. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (Original work published 1896).

Goody, J., & Watt, I. (1963). The consequences of literacy. Reprinted in J. Goody, (1968), Literacy in traditional societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Grice, P. (1989). Studies in the way of words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Illieh, I., & Sanders, B. (1988). ABC: The alphabetization of the popular mind. New York: Vintage Books.

MacLaren, R. (1989). Children's understanding of thinking and lawwing. Unpublished manuscript, Centre for Applied Cognitive Science, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto.

Nystrand, M. (1986). The structure of written communication: Studies in reciprocity between writers and readers. Orlando, b'L: Academic Press.

Olson, D. R. (1977). From utterance to text: The bias of language in speech and writing. Harvard Educational Review, 47(3), 257-281.

Scholes. R. & Willis, B. (in press). Linguists, literacy and the intensionality of Marshall McLuhan's Western man. In D. R. Olson & N. Torrance (Eds.), Literacy and orality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Street, B. (1984). Literacy in theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.