Publication Date
2019
Faculty Department
Department of Philosophy and Religion
Document Type
Article
Abstract
What is reading? Seeing and comprehending a contentful, written text counts as reading, of course, but that is simply the paradigm; it is not reading itself. Blind people, e.g., often read using Braille. It is sometimes claimed that one engages in reading when one listens to an audiobook. So, my project in this paper is to address this question: What is the proper analysis of person S reads text W? Surprisingly, no philosophical attempts to analyze reading exist; this question has (to my knowledge, anyway) yet to be tackled. Can other sensory modalities be used to read? What more can be said about the nature of the objects of reading, viz., texts? After critically assessing a few proposals, I defend a final analysis of reading according to which a person reads a text precisely when she uses some perceptual faculty to cognitively attend to the word structures embedded in that text for the purposes of ultimately grasping its content.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
“On Reading,” Acta Analytica, Vol. 35, No. 1 (2019)
