During the writing of this book, several articles were published
and lectures presented on themes pertinent to the subject. None
was taken over in this work. Among these are:
J. Deely and M. Lenhard, editors. The Civilization of Illiteracy,
in Semiotics 1981. New York: Plenum, 1983.
H. Stachowiak, editor. Pragmatics in the Semiotic Framework, in
Pragmatik, vol. II. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1986.
La civilization de l'analphabetisme, in Gazette de Beaux-Arts,
vol. iii, no. 1430, March 1988, pp. 225- 228.
Writing is Rewriting, in The American Journal of Semiotics, vol.
5, no. 1, 1987, pp. 115-133.
Sign and Value. (Lecture)Third Congress of the International
Association of Semiotic Studies, Palermo, Italy, June 25-29,
1984.
The Civilization of Illiteracy. (Lecture) Sixth Annual Meeting of
the Semiotic Society of America, Vanderbilt University,
Nashville, October 1-4, 1981.
Philosophy in the Civilization of Illiteracy. (Lecture) XVII
World Congress of Philosophy, Montreal, August, 1983.
Values in the Post-Modern Era: The Civilization of Illiteracy.
(Lecture) Institute Forum, Rochester Institute of Technology,
November 9, 1984.
A Case for the Hacker. (Lecture) University of Oregon, Oct. 27,
1987.
Communication in a time of integration and awareness. (Lecture)
New York University, April, 1989.
De plus ça change... Creativity in the context of scientific and
technological change. (Lecture) University of Michigan, January,
1993.
The bearable impertinence of rationality. (Lecture)
Multimediale, the1st International Festival of Multimedia,
February, 1993.
From a very broad literature on literacy, including the emergence
of writing and early written documents, the following proved
useful in defining the position stated in this book:
John Hladczuk, William Eller, and Sharon Hladczuk.
Literacy/Illiteracy in the World. A Bibliography. New York:
Greenwood Press, 1989.
David R. Olson, Nancy Torrance, and Angela Hildyard, editors.
Literacy, Language, and Learning: The Nature and Consequences of
Reading and Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Robert Pattison. On Literacy: The Politics of the Word from Homer
to the Age of Rock. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Gerd Baumann, editor. The Written Word: Literacy in Transition.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
National Advisory Council on Adult Education. Literacy Committee.
Illiteracy in America: Extent, Causes and Suggested Solutions,
1986.
Susan B. Neuman. Literacy in the Television Age. The Myth of the
TV Effect. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1991.
Edward M. Jennings and Alan C. Purves, editors. Literate Systems
and Individual Lives. Perspectives on Literacy and Schooling.
Albany: SUNY Press, 1991.
Harald Haarman. Universalgeschichte der Schrift. Frankfurt/Main:
Campus Verlag, 1990.
David Diringer. The Alphabet. A Key to the History of Mankind
(3rd edition). New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968.
Colin H. Roberts. The Birth of the Codex. London: Oxford
University Press,1987.
Martin Koblo. Die Entwicklung der Schrift. Wiesbaden:
Brandsetter, 1963.
R. Hooker. Reading the Past. Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to
the Alphabet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Donald Jackson. The Story of Writing. New York: Taplinger
Publishing Co., 1981.
Hannsferdinand Dobler. Von der Keilschrift zum Computer.
Schrift, Buch, Wissenschaften. Munich: Bertelsmann, 1974.
Colin Clair. A History of European Printing. New York: Academic
Press, 1976.
Lucien Paul Victor Febre. The Coming of the Book. The Impact of
Printing 1450-1800. Trans. David Gerard. London: N.L.B., 1976.
Karlen Mooradian. The Dawn of Printing. Lexington, KY:
Association for Education in Journalism, 1972.
Warren Chappel. A Short History of the Printed Word. New York:
Knopf, 1970.
Peter S. Bellwood. Prehistory in the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago.
Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1985.
Andrew Sherrat, editor. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of
Archaeology. New York: Crown Publishers, 1980.
Peirce's pragmatic perspective was extracted from his writings.
In the absence of a finished text on the subject, various
scholars chose what best suited their own viewpoint. A selection
from an unusually rich legacy of manuscripts and published
articles was made available in The Collected Papers of Charles
Sanders Peirce (eight volumes). Volumes 1-6 edited by Charles
Hartshorne and Paul Weiss; volumes 7-8 edited by A. Burks.
Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1931-1958.
The standard procedure in citing this work is "volume.paragraph"
(e.g., 2.227 refers to volume 2, paragraph 227).
Important references to Peirce's semiotics are found in his
correspondence with Victoria, Lady Welby. This was published by
Charles Hardwick as Semiotics and Significs. The Correspondence
between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, Bloomington
and London: Indiana University Press, 1977.
Peirce's manuscripts are currently being published in a new
edition, The Writings of Charles S. Peirce. A Chronological
Edition (E. Moore, founding editor; Max A. Fisch, general editor;
C. Kloesel, Director), Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1984-present.
Peirce's pragmaticism was defined in a text dated 1877, during
his return journey from Europe aboard a steamer, "...a day or
two before reaching Plymouth, nothing remaining to be done except
to translate it into English," (5.526): "Considerer quels sont
les effets pratiques que nous pensons pouvoir être produits par
l'objet de notre conception. La conception de tous ces effets est
la conception complète de l'objet."
In respect to Peirce, his friends William James and John Dewey
wrote words of appreciation, placing him "in the forefront of
the great seminal minds of recent times," (cf. Morris R. Cohen,
Chance, Love, and Logic, Glencoe IL: 1954, p. iii). C. J. Keyser
stated, "That this man, who immeasurably increased the
intellectual wealth of the world, was nevertheless almost
permitted to starve in what in his time was the richest and
vainest of lands is enough to make the blood of any decent
American boil with chagrin, indignation, and vicarious shame,"
(cf. Portraits of Famous Philosophers Who Were Also
Mathematicians, in Scripta Mathematica, vol. III, 1935).
C.P. Snow. The Two Cultures and a Second Look (An Expanded
Version of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution).
Cambridge: At the University Press, 1965 (first printed in 1955).
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). From the few works
published during his lifetime, reference is made to Dissertatio
de Arte Combinatoria (Leipzig, 1666). G.H. Parkinson translated
some works in Leibniz Logical Papers (London, 1966). Another
edition considered for this book is by Gaston Grua, Leibniz.
Textes inédits (Paris, 1948), which offers some of the many
manuscripts in which important ideas remained hidden for a long
time.
Humberto R. Maturana. The Neurophysiology of Cognition, in
Cognition: A Multiple View (P. Garvin, Editor). New York:
Spartan Books, 1969.
Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela. El árbol del
conocimiento, 1984. The work was translated as The Tree of
Knowledge. The Biological Roots of Human Understanding.
Boston/London: Shambala New Science Library, 1987.
Terry Winograd. Understanding Natural Language. New York:
Academic Press, 1972.
-. Language as Cognitive Process. Reading MA: Addison-Wesley,
1983.
Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores. Understanding Computers and
Cognition. A New Foundation for Design. Norwood NJ: Ablex
Publishing Corporation, 1986.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1980.
George Lakoff. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. (What
Categories Reveal about the Mind). Chicago/London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1987.
"The point is that the level of categorization is not independent
of who is doing the categorizing and on what basis" (p. 50).
With his seminal work on fuzzy sets, Lotfi Zadeh opened a new
perspective relevant not only to technological progress, but
also to a new philosophic perspective.
Fuzzy Sets, in Information and Control, 8 (1965), pp. 338-353.
Fuzzy Logic and Approximate Reasoning (in Memory of Grigore
Moisil), in Synthèse 30 (1975), pp. 407- 428.
Coping with the impression of the real world, in Communications
of the Association for Computing Machinery, 27 (1984), pp.
304-311.
George Steiner. Language and Silence. New York: Atheneum, 1967.
-. After Babel. Aspects of Language and Translation. London:
Oxford University Press, 1975.
-. Real Presence: Is There Anything in What We Say?
London/Boston: Faber & Faber, 1989.
-. The End of Bookishness? in The Times Literary Supplement, July
8-14, 1988, p. 754.
Marshall McLuhan. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of
Typographic Man. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1962.
Ivan Illich. Deschooling Society. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
Illich states bluntly: "Universal education through schooling is
not feasible" (Introduction, p. ix).
Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders. The Alphabetization of the Popular
Mind. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988.
Y. M. Lotman. Kul'tura kak Kollektvinji Intellekt i Problemy
Iskusstuennovo Razuma (Culture as collective intellect and
problems of artificial intelligence). Predvaritel'naya
Publicacija, Moskva: Akademija Nauk SSSR (Nauchinyi Soviet po
Kompleksnoi Problemi Kibernetika), 1977.
Jean Baudrillard. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton,
Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.