The significance of literacy

It is very striking that the fathers of Western philosophy—Socrates and Plato—stand at the beginning of the development of Western writing. There is something emblematic in the fact that Plato, the first philosopher whose writings are still important to us, wrote dia­logues that reported in writing the oral discussions of Socrates.

Imagine yourself in a culture without writing and ask yourself what difference it would make to your thought. Consider, for exam­ple, how you would think about some of the questions we have dis­cussed in this book. Could you remember every step in any of the arguments I gave for the claim that knowledge is not justified true belief if you were not able to read and reread the examples, to think about them and then read them again? Could you check, without written words to look at, that what you had decided about the nature of the mind was consistent with what you thought about knowledge?

Writing makes possible a kind of consistency that nonliterate cul­ture cannot demand. Write down a sentence and it is there, in prin­ciple, forever; and if you write down another sentence inconsistent with it, you can be caught out. It is this fact that is at the root of the possibility of the sort of extended philosophical argument that I have made again and again in this book. Philosophical argument, as I said in the introduction, is rooted in a philosophical tradition. But this is possible only because we can reread—and thus rethink—the arguments of our philosophical forebears.

That written record is what grounds our adversarial style.

The Azande would have had great difficulty in testing their sys­tem of beliefs in the way I have suggested because they had no way of recording their experiments and their theorizing about the world. That is the main reason why systematic theorizing of the kind that we have been engaged in would have been difficult for the Azande.

But literacy does not matter only for our ability to examine argu­ments over and over again and to record the results of experiment and experience. It has important consequences also for the style of the language that we use. Those of us who read and write learn very quickly how different in style written communication is from oral. Indeed, we learn it so early and so well that we need to be reminded of some of the really important differences.

Consider, for example, the generality and abstractness of many of the arguments I have offered and how much these features depend upon writing. A simple example will help make this dependence clear.

Suppose you found a scrap of paper, that contained the following words:

On Sundays here, we often do what Joe is doing over there. But it is not nor­mal to do it on this day. I asked the priest whether it was permissible to do it today and he just did this.

A reasonable assumption would be that someone had transcribed what someone was saying.

When we write we have to fill in much of what context provides when we speak. We must do this not only so that we avoid the uncertainty of indexicals, but also because we cannot assume that our readers will share our knowledge of our situation, and because if they do not, they cannot ask us. We can now see why trying to avoid these possibilities for misunderstanding is bound to move you toward abstract and general questions and away from questions that are concrete and particular. The need for generality becomes clear if we consider the difference between the judgments of a traditional Zande oracle and those of experts in a written tradition. A traditional thinker can get away with saying that if three oracles have answered that the carver Kisanga has stolen a chicken, then he has. But in a written tradition, all sorts of problems can arise.

After all, everybody knows of cases where the oracles have been wrong three times because they were interfered with by witchcraft. On a particular occasion, where the possibility of witchcraft has not been raised, it will seem silly to raise this objection. But if we are try­ing to write an account of the oracle, we shall have to take other cases into account. The literate theorist has to formulate principles not just for the particular case, but more generally. Rather than saying

he or she will have to say something like this:

Three oracles constitute good prima facie evidence that something is so; but they may have been interfered with by witchcraft.

Literate theorists, in other words, will have to list those qualifying clauses that we recognize as the mark of written scholarship.

Literacy forces you to consider general claims, because it requires you to make claims that are relevant beyond the particular conversation you are having. And it is easy to see that literacy also encourages abstraction in your language. Consider a traditional proverb that has been orally transmitted, such as this proverb from the Akan region of Ghana:

If all seeds that fall were to grow, then no one could follow the path under the trees.

When someone says this, they are usually expressing the view that if everyone were prosperous, no one would work. But the proverb is about seeds, trees, and paths through the forest. The message is abstract, but the wording is concrete. The concreteness makes the proverb memorable—and in oral tradition nothing is carried on but what is carried in memory. But it also means that to understand the message—as I am sure only Akan-speaking people did before I explained it—you have to share with the speaker a knowledge of his or her background assumptions.

The proverb works because in traditional societies you talk largely with people you know; all the assumptions that are needed to interpret a proverb are shared. And it is because they are shared that the language of oral exchange (including, of course, the con­versation of literate people) can be indexical, metaphorical, and con­text-dependent.

Once you are writing, by contrast, the demands imposed by try­ing to cater to an unknown reader move you toward both greater generality and greater abstraction.

For if we speak metaphorically, then what we say can be taken and reinterpreted in a new context; the same proverb, precisely because its message is not fixed, can be used again and again. And if we can use it again and again with different messages, we may fail to notice that the messages are inconsistent with each other. After all, the proverb is being used in this situation, and why should we think now of those other occasions of its use?

Evans-Pritchard wrote:

a) [Although] Azande often observed that a medicine is unsuccessful, they do

not generalize their observations. Therefore the failure of a single medicine does not teach them that all medicines of this type are foolish. Far less does it teach them that all magic is useless             

b) Contradictions between their beliefs are not noticed by the Azande because

beliefs are not all present at the same time but function in different situa­tions     

c)      Each man and each kinship group acts alone without cognizance of the actions of others. People do not pool their ritual experiences.

But we can now see that, without literacy, it would be very hard indeed to generalize in this way, or to bring beliefs from different situations together to check their consistency, or to share the full range of Zande ritual experience.

Neither the impulse toward universality and abstraction and away from metaphorical language nor the recognition of inconsis­tencies of the traditional worldview leads automatically to formal philosophy. But without literacy it is hard to see how formal phi­losophy could have got started; it is not a sufficient condition for formal philosophy, but it certainly seems to be necessary. And, as we have seen, it is literacy that explains some of the features of for­mal philosophy.

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