Today very few scholars engage in the art of epistolary exchange in the medium of paper as opposed to exchanging thoughts mainly through electronic and social media. I will return to this later. David Olson's main question applies to the world on paper: how was the mind changed by writing and reading using the medium of paper? It is commonplace to mention that Socrates in the Phaedrus noticed the change—Socrates argued that writing replaces memory as the main source for storing and relating stories and moreover, freezes the open-endedness of discussion, thereby killing dialectics.

Indirectly, Socrates poses a challenge to David Olson's answer to the question of how literacy—writing and reading with the medium of paper—changed the human mind. According to David Olson, writing created critical thought, and all that goes with it—awareness of spoken language as the medium for thought, articulation of the implicit logic and grammar of language, and the development of the norms for reason and rationality. For Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, rationality and speech are innate features of the human animal. Writing had the unintended consequence of extinguishing rationality as dialectics. I will also return to this later. Moreover, there is a more severe indirect challenge to David Olson's thesis. Karl Popper in his Aristotelian Society Presidential address of 1959, “Back to the Pre-Socratics”, accepts the assumption that rationality or critical thinking is cultural and so historical but argues that critical thinking arose within the early days of Greek philosophy/cosmology and then developed into a tradition that we, at best, carry forward in our various intellectual disciplines—in all the sciences, at the least. A corollary to Popper's argument is that the occurrence of rationality and reason is indifferent to whatever technology and medium is in currency: the technology of writing and the medium of paper functions as a recording and storage device; and rationality, indeed, may have been the driving force to the very development of that technology, as it has been to most technologies. Just as music pre-existed the wax record, CDs and Youtube, so too did rationality—though cultural—pre-exist writing.

Let me stop here and switch modes. I switch out of the standard expository and critical meta-mode of book reviews that state the thesis and argument of a book, and present objections and appraisals. Below, I will switch to an epistolary mode that actually engages with the book on the same level, the object-mode level of the book. I do this to illustrate a corollary to one of David Olson's main sub-theses and arguments—which I state now for the sake of clarity, in the standard meta-mode of book reviews: According to Olson, classical prose embodies the principles of logic, argument, and rationality developed through writing. Writing created rationality mainly by allowing for the development of metarepresentational language and thought. Writing both requires and encourages the development of the recognition that we speak in words and sentences and so encouraged the articulation of a meta-language that contains grammar, norms, logic, and principles of argument that describe and assess our oral and written discussions. My proposed corollary to Olson's main thesis is that epistolary exchange is a form of remote and virtual dialogue, and so, is an indirect response to Socrates, if not Popper. Now to my review in the form of a simulated a-temporal imaginary epistolary exchange between Karl Popper and David Olson.

Fallowfield

Manor Road

Penn

Buckinghamshire

Undated

Dear David,

Thank you for sending me your nice book. Now to the criticism that you request of me. I found some gross errors due to your reliance on the so-called “linguistic turn” and what you term the “New Pragmatism”. Pragmatism is basically a form of instrumentalism, and I have argued over and over that treating hypotheses as instruments is a dogmatic strategy. I won't cover that ground again. That is your first gross error. The second gross error has to do with your reliance on linguistic philosophy. The only worthwhile element of linguistic philosophy is its borrowing the theory of a hierarchy of types from Russell—which linguistic philosophers call meta-language and object-language, mention and use. Russell's letter to Frege, set the problem-situation for Russell's development of type hierarchies. Your own theory of language-use as transparent to the naive user and to most of us in our ordinary, daily use of language in specific contexts, reminds me of my teacher Karl Bühler's theory of language.

The truly novel part of your theory is that metarepresentation or consciousness of language developed through the gradual recognition that written language is a representation of spoken language. Thus, not only the development of written language, but also the learning of how to write and read, articulates the logical, grammatical, and rational components in our natural use of language. Your cognitive science theory of the metarepresentational function of written language, deepens the mathematical-philosophical theory of meta-language.

You seem to ignore my own theory of the problem of how rationality developed and how the tradition of rationality transcends its roots in a specific historical moment and cultural platform, to apply universally regardless of so-called “frameworks”. Moreover, your theory, though not a complete explanation of the development of rationality, is subsumed by my theory of Objective Mind or World 3. Writing or more specifically written works, institutions, theories, technologies, are part of World 3 and shape consciousness, or World 2, psycho-social reality. Though I don't think that rationality was actually created by writing, writing does push rationality—the norms of rational argumentation, and the logic of argumentation—into World 3. As a function of World 3, rationality itself can be rationally improved through creating a whole new set of problem-situations and theories for rational argumentation. Rationality as a function of World 3, can boot-strap itself.

I look forward to your response.

Yours ever,

Karl

Sir Karl Popper FRS.

* * *

OISE

University of Toronto

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Undated + 14 days

Dear Sir Karl,

Thank you for your comments. I think you conflate pragmatism with instrumentalism. Pragmatism is broader than instrumentalism. But my use of pragmatism is to merely underline how the ordinary, daily use of language is contextualized. Moreover, I go beyond pragmatism in recognizing that writing introduces some extra-ordinary functions into language: what I call the laboratory effect. This is similar to the use of inertial frames in physics. The laboratory effect of writing is to introduce impersonal, decontextualized, argumentation that transcends specific social situations and specific personal perspectives. In laboratory argumentation, ad hominem arguments, common in political discourse, are in principle invalid.

The extra-ordinary functions are summed up in what cognitive scientists call metarepresentations that humans have developed to think about thinking. We don't have to retreat to a supposed Metaphysical Realm to explain how consciousness, and cognition, can be treated as something we can be conscious of. Your World 3 is a hypothesis that cognitive science does not need. Cognitive scientists who study learning in children, develop experiments, all be it real laboratory experiments which are basically artificial settings, questionnaires and test-questions, to test theories of how children develop concepts and learn cognitive tasks such as reading, by matching letters with sounds, and matching words with phonemes. Moreover, with the learning of literacy, children learn the distinction between sense—the semantic web of meanings—and reference (or denotation). Indeed, the cognitive development involved in learning literacy, recapitulates the historical development of literacy in our species, sapiens. Embedded in learning literacy is learning the norms of prose and rationality. With the learning and development of literacy our speech and our consciousness became transformed, where we think and speak in prose.

So, my reply to your theory of the development of rationality goes as follows. The pre-socratics were writers and we have fragments to prove it. Their development of the tradition of critical rationality, as you call it, depended on the prior development of writing. QED.

How then did the technology of writing develop before formal, critical rationality came on the scene? As you say, rationality is a boot-strap process: informal instrumental rationality is part of human tool-making by trial and error in goal-directed contexts, and the development of written language is a long story. I tell that story in my current book and at more length in a previous book.

Respectfully, David

The above fictional epistolary exchange demonstrates a response to Socrates's argument that writing kills dialectics. On the contrary. dialectics not only occurred historically in epistolary exchange, but dialectics was boot-strapped through essays, journal articles, and books in paper, feeding off each other in the history of the varieties of prose writing in paper packaged in a variety of forms.

If this review were an epistle to David Olson, let me end in asking: Since the medium of argumentation and rationality is shifting to the electronic world of e-writing-- email, ebooks, blogs, and virtual social (e)media—how has the media-shift transformed, if at all, rationality and argumentation and the way we think, learn, and discover? Does critical rationality even have a future?