essay reading is the best source of knowledge

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Benefits of Reading: Why You Should Read More

A large percentage of the population is missing out on the significant benefits of reading. According to Statistic Brain , about a third of U.S. high school graduates will never read another book after graduating and 42 percent of college students will never read another book after obtaining their degree.

Reading can improve your life in several ways leading to better well-being and mental health, personal growth, and a boost in confidence. These benefits will carry over to your school work, career and social life.

If you haven’t read a book in years or think reading is for nerds, perhaps you should reconsider. The following are just a few of the benefits associated with reading and the reasons why you should read more.

Reading expands your vocabulary

The more you read, the more words you’ll be exposed to. Consistent exposure to new words, learning their meanings and seeing the context in which they’re used will increase your mental dictionary. You will have more words available to use and more ways to use them in conversation and in writing. This will improve your ability to communicate effectively, allowing you to better articulate your thoughts and more accurately express how you feel. Most writers would attest that reading makes them better at writing.

Reading stimulates your brain

Your brain needs to be kept active and engaged in order to stay healthy. Reading is great exercise for the mind. From a neurobiological standpoint, reading is more demanding on the brain than processing speech and images. Mental stimulation from reading will improve your memory and learning capacity, keep your mind sharp by slowing cognitive decline as you age, and strengthen your brain against disease like Alzheimer’s or dementia.

Reading improves your memory

Reading creates new memories. With each of these new memories, your brain forms new connections between neurons called synapses and strengthens existing ones. As you read you are memorizing and recalling words, ideas, names, relationships, and plots. You’re essentially training your brain to retain new information.

Reading makes you smarter

Reading makes you smarter, it’s that simple. In the paper What Reading Does for the Mind by Anne E. Cunningham and Keith E. Stanovich, reading was found to compensate for average cognitive ability by building vocabulary and expanding general knowledge. Development of intelligence is not dependent on cognitive ability alone, it’s only one variable.

Reading increases knowledge

Reading is one of the primary ways to acquire knowledge. The knowledge you gain is cumulative and grows exponentially. When you have a strong knowledge base, it’s easier to learn new things and solve new problems. Reading a wide range of books will help expand your general knowledge. Specific knowledge can be acquired by taking a deep-dive on a subject or topic. Filling your mind with new facts, new information, and new ideas will make you a better conversationalist as you’ll always have something interesting to talk about.

Reading strengthens focus and concentration

In order to comprehend and absorb what you’re reading, you need to focus 100% of your attention on the words on the page. When you’re fully immersed in a book, you’ll be able to tune out external distractions and concentrate on the material in front of you. A consistent reading habit will strengthen your attention span which will carry over to other aspects of your life.

Reading enhances analytical thinking skills

You can develop your analytical thinking skills over time by consistently reading more books. Reading stimulates your brain, allowing you to think in new ways. Being actively engaged in what you’re reading allows you to ask questions, view different perspectives, identify patterns and make connections. Compared to other forms of communication, reading allows you more time to think by pausing to comprehend, reflect and make note of new thoughts and ideas.

Reading relieves stress

A 2009 study has shown that reading is more effective at reducing stress than listening to music, going for a walk, having a cup of coffee or tea, or playing video games. Reading for only six minutes is enough to slow your heart rate, ease tension in your muscles and lower stress hormones like cortisol. “Losing yourself in a book is the ultimate relaxation” according to Dr. David Lewis, who conducted the study.

Reading improves your imagination

Reading a good novel can transport you to another place, another time or another world. You can escape reality and temporarily forget about what’s bothering you. Exercising your imagination will improve your ability to visualize these new worlds, characters and perspectives. Opening your mind to new ideas and new possibilities makes you more creative and more empathetic.

Reading helps you sleep better

The addition of reading to your bedtime ritual will reduce stress and train your brain to associate reading with sleep. This will make it easier to fall asleep and allow you to enter into a deeper sleep. TV, smartphone and tablet screens emit blue light which disrupts your internal clock and negatively impacts the quantity and quality of your sleep. Avoid reading on a screen at least an hour before bed and read a physical book instead.

You might also like:   How To Read More Books

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Research and Critical Reading

Pavel Zemilansky

Learning Objectives

• Read critically to discover the meaning, purpose, and content of a piece
• Respond critically to written works using reading strategy

INTRODUCTION

Good researchers and writers examine their sources critically and actively. They do not just compile and summarize these research sources in their writing, but use them to create their own ideas, theories, and, ultimately, their own, new understanding of the topic they are researching. Such an approach means not taking the information and opinions that the sources contain at face value and for granted, but to investigate, test, and even doubt every claim, every example, every story, and every conclusion. It means not to sit back and let your sources control you, but to engage in active conversation with them and their authors. In order to be a good researcher and writer, one needs to be a critical and active reader.

This chapter is about the importance of critical and active reading. It is also about the connection between critical reading and active, strong writing. Much of the discussion you will find in this chapter in fundamental to research and writing, no matter what writing genre, medium, or academic discipline you read and write in. Every other approach to research writing, every other research method and assignment offered elsewhere in this book is, in some way, based upon the principles discussed in this chapter.

Reading is at the heart of the research process. No matter what kinds of research sources and, methods you use, you are always reading and interpreting text. Most of us are used to hearing the word “reading” in relation to secondary sources, such as books, journals, magazines, websites, and so on. But even if you are using other research methods and sources, such as interviewing someone or surveying a group of people, you are reading. You are reading their subjects’ ideas and views on the topic you are investigating. Even if you are studying photographs, cultural artifacts, and other non-verbal research sources, you are reading them, too by trying to connect them to their cultural and social contexts and to understand their meaning. Principles of critical reading which we are about to discuss in this chapter apply to those research situations as well.

I like to think about reading and writing as not two separate activities but as two tightly connected parts of the same whole. That whole is the process of learning and making of new meaning. It may seem that reading and writing are complete opposite of one another. According to the popular view, when we read, we “consume” texts, and when we write, we “produce” texts. But this view of reading and writing is true only if you see reading as a passive process of taking in information from the text and not as an active and energetic process of making new meaning and new knowledge. Similarly, good writing does not come from nowhere but is usually based upon, or at least influenced by ideas, theories, and stories that come from reading. So, if, as a college student, you have ever wondered why your writing teachers have asked you to read books and articles and write responses to them, it is because writers who do not read and do not actively engage with their reading, have little to say to others.

We will begin this chapter with the definition of the term “critical reading.” We will consider its main characteristics and briefly touch upon ways to become an active and critical reader. Next, we will discuss the importance of critical reading for research and how reading critically can help you become a better researcher and make the research process more enjoyable. Also in this chapter, a student-writer offers us an insight into his critical reading and writing processes. This chapter also shows how critical reading can and should be used for critical and strong writing. And, as all other chapters, this one offers you activities and projects designed to help you implement the advice presented here into practice.

WHAT KIND OF READER ARE YOU?

You read a lot, probably more that you think. You read school textbooks, lecture notes, your classmates’ papers, and class websites. When school ends, you probably read some fiction, magazines. But you also read other texts. These may include CD liner notes, product reviews, grocery lists, maps, driving directions, road signs, and the list can go on and on. And you don’t read all these texts in the same way. You read them with different purposes and using different reading strategies and techniques. The first step towards becoming a critical and active reader is examining your reading process and your reading preferences. Therefore, you are invited to complete the following exploration activity.

Writing Activity: Analyzing Your Reading Habits

List all the reading you have done in the last week. Include both “school” and “out-of school” reading. Try to list as many texts as you can think of, no matter how short and unimportant they might seem. Now, answer the following questions.

• What was your purpose in reading each of those texts? Did you read for information, to pass a test, for enjoyment, to decide on a product you wanted to buy, and so on? Or, did you read to figure out some complex problem that keeps you awake at night?

• You have probably come up with a list of different purposes. How did each of those purposes influence your reading strategies? Did you take notes or try to memorize what you read? How long did it take you to read different texts? Did you begin at the beginning and read till you reached the end, or did you browse some texts? Consider the time of day you were reading. Consider even whether some texts tired you out or whether you thought they were “boring.” Why?

• What did you do with the results of your reading? Did you use them for some practical purpose, such as buying a new product or finding directions, or did you use them for a less practical purpose, such as understanding some topic better r learning something about yourself and others?

When you finish, share your results with the rest of the class and with your instructor.

Having answered the questions above, you have probably noticed that your reading strategies differed depending on the reading task you were facing and on what you planned to do with the results of the reading. If, for example, you read lecture notes in order to pass a test, chances are you “read for information,” or “for the main” point, trying to remember as much material as possible and anticipating possible test questions. If, on the other hand, you read a good novel, you probably just focused on following the story. Finally, if you were reading something that you hoped would help you answer some personal question or solve some personal problem, it is likely that you kept comparing and contrasting the information that you read your own life and your own experiences.

You may have spent more time on some reading tasks than others. For example, when we are interested in one particular piece of information or fact from a text, we usually put that text aside once we have located the information we were looking for. In other cases, you may have been reading for hours on end taking careful notes and asking questions.

If you share the results of your investigation into your reading habits with your classmates, you may also notice that some of their reading habits and strategies were different from yours. Like writing strategies, approaches to reading may vary from person to person depending on our previous experiences with different topics and types of reading materials, expectations we have of different texts, and, of course, the purpose with which we are reading.

Life presents us with a variety of reading situations which demand different reading strategies and techniques. Sometimes, it is important to be as efficient as possible and read purely for information or “the main point.” At other times, it is important to just “let go” and turn the pages following a good story, although this means not thinking about the story you are reading. At the heart of writing and research, however, lies the kind of reading known as critical reading. Critical examination of sources is what makes their use in research possible and what allows writers to create rhetorically effective and engaging texts.

KEY FEATURES OF CRITICAL READING

Critical readers are able to interact with the texts they read through carefully listening, writing, conversation, and questioning. They do not sit back and wait for the meaning of a text to come to them, but work hard in order to create such meaning. Critical readers are not made overnight. Becoming a critical reader will take a lot of practice and patience. Depending on your current reading philosophy and experiences with reading, becoming a critical reader may require a significant change in your whole understanding of the reading process. The trade-off is worth it, however. By becoming a more critical and active reader, you will also become a better researcher and a better writer. Last but not least, you will enjoy reading and writing a whole lot more because you will become actively engaged in both.

One of my favorite passages describing the substance of critical and active reading comes from the introduction to their book Ways of Reading , whose authors David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky write:

Reading involves a fair measure of push and shove. You make your mark on the book and it makes its mark on you. Reading is not simply a matter of hanging back and waiting for a piece, or its author, to tell you what the writing has to say. In fact, one of the difficult things about reading is that the pages before you will begin to speak only when the authors are silent and you begin to speak in their place, sometimes for them—doing their work, continuing their projects—and sometimes for yourself, following your own agenda (1).

Notice that Bartholomae and Petrosky describe reading process in pro-active terms. Meaning of every text is “made,” not received. Readers need to “push and shove” in order to create their own, unique content of every text they read. It is up the you as a reader to make the pages in front of you “speak” by talking with and against the text, by questioning and expanding it.

Critical reading, then, is a two-way process. As reader, you are not a consumer of words, waiting patiently for ideas from the printed page or a web-site to fill your head and make you smarter. Instead, as a critical reader, you need to interact with what you read, asking questions of the author, testing every assertion, fact, or idea, and extending the text by adding your own understanding of the subject and your own personal experiences to your reading.

The following are key features of the critical approach to reading:

• No text, however well written and authoritative, contains its own, pre-determined meaning.
• Readers must work hard to create meaning from every text.
• Critical readers interact with the texts they read by questioning them, responding to them, and expanding them, usually in writing.
• To create meaning, critical readers use a variety of approaches, strategies, and techniques which include applying their personal experiences and existing knowledge to the reading process.
• Critical readers seek actively out other texts, related to the topic of their investigation.

The following section is an examination of these claims about critical reading in more detail.

TEXTS PRESENT IDEAS, NOT ABSOLUTE TRUTHS

In order to understand the mechanisms and intellectual challenges of critical reading, we need to examine some of our deepest and long-lasting assumptions about reading. Perhaps the two most significant challenges facing anyone who wants to become a more active and analytical reader is understanding that printed texts doe not contain inarguable truths and learning to questions and talk back to those texts. Students in my writing classes often tell me that the biggest challenge they face in trying to become critical readers is getting away from the idea that they have to believe everything they read on a printed page. Years of schooling have taught many of us to believe that published texts present inarguable, almost absolute truths. The printed page has authority because, before publishing his or her work, every writer goes through a lengthy process of approval, review, revision, fact-checking, and so on. Consequently, this theory goes, what gets published must be true. And if it is true, it must be taken at face value, not questioned, challenged, or extended in any way.

Perhaps, the ultimate authority among the readings materials encountered by college belongs to the textbook. As students, we all have had to read and almost memorize textbook chapters in order to pass an exam. We read textbooks “for information,” summarizing their chapters, trying to find “the main points” and then reproducing these main points during exams. I have nothing against textbook as such, in fact, I am writing one right now. And it is certainly possible to read textbooks critically and actively. But, as I think about the challenges which many college students face trying to become active and critical readers, I come to the conclusion that the habit to read every text as if they were preparing for an exam on it, as if it was a source of unquestionable truth and knowledge prevents many from becoming active readers.

Treating texts as if they were sources of ultimate and unquestionable knowledge and truth represents the view of reading as consumption. According to this view, writers produce ideas and knowledge, and we, readers, consume them. Of course, sometimes we have to assume this stance and read for information or the “main point” of a text. But it is critical reading that allows us to create new ideas from what we read and to become independent and creative learners.

Critical reading is a collaboration between the reader and the writer. It offers readers the ability to be active participants in the construction of meaning of every text they read and to use that meaning for their own learning and self-fulfillment. Not even the best researched and written text is absolutely complete and finished. Granted, most fields of knowledge have texts which are called “definitive.” Such texts usually represent our best current knowledge on their subjects. However, even the definitive works get revised over time and they are always open to questioning and different interpretations.

READING IS A RHETORICAL TOOL

To understand how the claim that every reader makes his or her meaning from texts works, it is necessary to examine what is know as the rhetorical theory of reading. The work that best describes and justifies the rhetorical reading theory is Douglas Brent’s 1992 book Reading as Rhetorical Invention: Knowledge, Persuasion, and the Teaching of Research-Based Writing . I like to apply Brent’s ideas to my discussions of critical reading because I think that they do a good job demystifying critical reading’s main claims. Brent’s theory of reading is a rhetorical device puts significant substance behind the somewhat abstract ideas of active and critical reading, explaining how the mechanisms of active interaction between readers and texts actually work.

Briefly explained, Brent treats reading not only as a vehicle for transmitting information and knowledge, but also as a means of persuasion. In fact, according to Brent, knowledge equals persuasion because, in his words, “Knowledge is not simply what one has been told. Knowledge is what one believes, what one accepts as being at least provisionally true.” (xi). This short passage contains two assertions which are key to the understanding of mechanisms of critical reading. Firstly, notice that simply reading “for the main point” will not necessarily make you “believe” what you read. Surely, such reading can fill our heads with information, but will that information become our knowledge in a true sense, will we be persuaded by it, or will we simply memorize it to pass the test and forget it as soon as we pass it? Of course not! All of us can probably recall many instances in which we read a lot to pass a test only to forget, with relief, what we read as soon as we left the classroom where that test was held. The purpose of reading and research, then, is not to get as much as information out of a text as possible but to change and update one’s system of beliefs on a given subject (Brent 55-57).

Brent further states:

The way we believe or disbelieve certain texts clearly varies from one individual to the next. If you present a text that is remotely controversial to a group of people, some will be convinced by it and some not, and those who are convinced will be convinced in different degrees. The task of a rhetoric of reading is to explain systematically how these differences arise— how people are persuaded differently by texts (18).

Critical and active readers not only accept the possibility that the same texts will have different meanings for different people, but welcome this possibility as an inherent and indispensable feature of strong, engaged, and enjoyable reading process. To answer his own questions about what factors contribute to different readers’ different interpretations of the same texts, Brent offers us the following principles that I have summarized from his book:

• Readers are guided by personal beliefs, assumptions, and pre-existing knowledge when interpreting texts. You can read more on the role of the reader’s pre-existing knowledge in the construction of meaning later on in this chapter.

• Readers react differently to the logical proofs presented by the writers of texts.

• Readers react differently to emotional and ethical proofs presented by writers. For example, an emotional story told by a writer may resonate with one person more than with another because the first person lived through a similar experience and the second one did not, and so on.

The idea behind the rhetorical theory of reading is that when we read, we not only take in ideas, information, and facts, but instead we “update our view of the world.” You cannot force someone to update their worldview, and therefore, the purpose of writing is persuasion and the purpose of reading is being persuaded. Persuasion is possible only when the reader is actively engaged with the text and understands that much more than simple retrieval of information is at stake when reading.

One of the primary factors that influence our decision to accept or not to accept an argument is what Douglas Brent calls our “repertoire of experience, much of [which] is gained through prior interaction with texts” (56). What this means is that when we read a new text, we do not begin with a clean slate, an empty mind. However unfamiliar the topic of this new reading may seem to us, we approach it with a large baggage of previous knowledge, experiences, points of view, and so on. When an argument “comes in” into our minds from a text, this text, by itself, cannot change our view on the subject. Our prior opinions and knowledge about the topic of the text we are reading will necessarily “filter out” what is incompatible with those views (Brent 56-57). This, of course, does not mean that, as readers, we should persist in keeping our old ideas about everything and actively resist learning new things. Rather, it suggests that the reading process is an interaction between the ideas in the text in front of us and our own ideas and pre-conceptions about the subject of our reading. We do not always consciously measure what we read according to our existing systems of knowledge and beliefs, but we measure it nevertheless. Reading, according to Brent, is judgment, and, like in life where we do not always consciously examine and analyze the reasons for which we make various decisions, evaluating a text often happens automatically or subconsciously (59).

Applied to research writing, Brent’s theory or reading means the following:

• The purpose of research is not simply to retrieve data, but to participate in a conversation about it. Simple summaries of sources is not research, and writers should be aiming for active interpretation of sources instead
• There is no such thing as an unbiased source. Writers make claims for personal reasons that critical readers need to learn to understand and evaluate.
• Feelings can be a source of shareable good reason for belief. Readers and writers need to use, judiciously, ethical and pathetic proofs in interpreting texts and in creating their own.
• Research is recursive. Critical readers and researchers never stop asking questions about their topic and never consider their research finished.

ACTIVE READERS LOOK FOR CONNECTIONS BETWEEN TEXTS

Earlier on, I mentioned that one of the traits of active readers is their willingness to seek out other texts and people who may be able to help them in their research and learning. I find that for many beginning researchers and writers, the inability to seek out such connections often turns into a roadblock on their research route. Here is what I am talking about.

Recently, I asked my writing students to investigate some problem on campus and to propose a solution to it. I asked them to use both primary (interviews, surveys, etc.) and secondary (library, Internet, etc.) research. Conducting secondary research allows a writer to connect a local problem he or she is investigating and a local solution he or she is proposing with a national and even global context, and to see whether the local situation is typical or a-typical.

One group of students decided to investigate the issue of racial and ethnic diversity on our campus. The lack of diversity is a “hot” issue on our campus, and recently an institutional task force was created to investigate possible ways of making our university more diverse.

The students had no trouble designing research questions and finding people to interview and survey. Their subjects included students and faculty as well as the university vice-president who was changed with overseeing the work of the diversity task force. Overall, these authors have little trouble conducting and interpreting primary research that led them to conclude that, indeed, our campus is not diverse enough and that most students would like to see the situation change.

The next step these writers took was to look at the websites of some other schools similar in size and nature to ours, to see how our university compared on the issue of campus diversity with others. They were able to find some statistics on the numbers of minorities at other colleges and universities that allowed them to create a certain backdrop for their primary research that they had conducted earlier.

But good writing goes beyond the local situation. Good writing tries to connect the local and the national and the global. It tries to look beyond the surface of the problem, beyond simply comparing numbers and other statistics. It seeks to understand the roots of a problem and propose a solution based on a local and well as a global situation and research. The primary and secondary research conducted by these students was not allowing them to make that step from analyzing local data to understanding their problem in context. They needed some other type of research sources.

At that point, however, those writers hit an obstacle. How and where, they reasoned, would we find other secondary sources, such as books, journals, and websites, about the lack of diversity on our campus? The answer to that question was that, at this stage in their research and writing, they did not need to look for more sources about our local problem with the lack of diversity. They needed to look at diversity and ways to increase it as a national and global issue. They needed to generalize the problem and, instead of looking at a local example, to consider its implications for the issue they were studying overall. Such research would not only have allowed these writers to examine the problem as a whole but also to see how it was being solved in other places. This, in turn, might have helped them to propose a local solution.

Critical readers and researchers understand that it is not enough to look at the research question locally or narrowly. After conducting research and understanding their problem locally, or as it applies specifically to them, active researchers contextualize their investigation by seeking out texts and other sources which would allow them to see the big picture.

Sometimes, it is hard to understand how external texts which do not seem to talk directly about you can help you research and write about questions, problems, and issues in your own life. In her 2004 essay, “Developing ‘Interesting Thoughts’: Reading for Research,” writing teacher and my former colleague Janette Martin tells a story of a student who was writing a paper about what it is like to be a collegiate athlete. The emerging theme in that paper was that of discipline and sacrifice required of student athletes. Simultaneously, that student was reading a chapter from the book by the French philosopher Michel Foucault called Discipline and Punish. Foucault’s work is a study of the western penitentiary system, which, of course cannot be directly compared to experiences of a student athlete. At the same time, one of the leading themes in Foucault’s work is discipline. Martin states that the student was able to see some connection between Foucault and her own life and use the reading for her research and writing (6). In addition to showing how related texts can be used to explore various aspects of the writer’s own life, this example highlights the need to read texts critically and interpret them creatively. Such reading and research goes beyond simply comparing of facts and numbers and towards relating ideas and concepts with one another.

FROM READING TO WRITING

Reading and writing are the two essential tools of learning. Critical reading is not a process of passive consumption, but one of interaction and engagement between the reader and the text. Therefore, when reading critically and actively, it is important not only to take in the words on the page, but also to interpret and to reflect upon what you read through writing and discussing it with others.

CRITICAL READERS UNDERSTAND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN REACTING AND RESPONDING TO A TEXT

As stated earlier in this chapter, actively responding to difficult texts, posing questions, and analyzing ideas presented in them is the key to successful reading. The goal of an active reader is to engage in a conversation with the text he or she is reading. In order to fulfill this goal, it is important to understand the difference between reacting to the text and responding to it.

Reacting to a text is often done on an emotional, rather than on an intellectual level. It is quick and shallow. For example, if we encounter a text that advances arguments with which we strongly disagree, it is natural to dismiss those ideas out of hand as not wrong and not worthy of our attention. Doing so would be reacting to the text based only on emotions and on our pre-set opinions about its arguments. It is easy to see that reacting in this way does not take the reader any closer to understanding the text. A wall of disagreement that existed between the reader and the text before the reading continues to exist after the reading.

Responding to a text, on the other hand, requires a careful study of the ideas presented and arguments advanced in it. Critical readers who possess this skill are not willing to simply reject or accept the arguments presented in the text after the first reading right away. To continue with our example from the preceding paragraph, a reader who responds to a controversial text rather than reacting to it might apply several of the following strategies before forming and expressing an opinion about that text.

• Read the text several times, taking notes, asking questions, and underlining key places.
• Study why the author of the text advances ideas, arguments, and convictions, so different from the reader’s own. For example, is the text’s author advancing an agenda of some social, political, religious, or economic group of which he or she is a member?
• Study the purpose and the intended audience of the text.
• Study the history of the argument presented in the text as much as possible. For example, modern texts on highly controversial issues such as the death penalty, abortion, or euthanasia often use past events, court cases, and other evidence to advance their claims. Knowing the history of the problem will help you to construct meaning of a difficult text.
• Study the social, political, and intellectual context in which the text was written. Good writers use social conditions to advance controversial ideas. Compare the context in which the text was written to the one in which it is read. For example, have social conditions changed, thus invalidating the argument or making it stronger?
• Consider the author’s (and your own) previous knowledge of the issue at the center of the text and your experiences with it. How might such knowledge or experience have influenced your reception of the argument?

Taking all these steps will help you to move away from simply reacting to a text and towards constructing informed and critical response to it.

CRITICAL READERS RESIST OVERSIMPLIFIED BINARY RESPONSES

Critical readers learn to avoid simple “agree-disagree” responses to complex texts. Such way of thinking and arguing is often called “binary” because is allows only two answers to every statement and every questions. But the world of ideas is complex and, a much more nuanced approach is needed when dealing with complex arguments.

When you are asked to “critique” a text, which readers are often asked to do, it does not mean that you have to “criticize” it and reject its argument out of hand. What you are being asked to do instead is to carefully evaluate and analyze the text’s ideas, to understand how and why they are constructed and presented, and only then develop a response to that text. Not every text asks for an outright agreement or disagreement. Sometimes, we as readers are not in a position to either simply support an argument or reject it. What we can do in such cases, though, is to learn more about the text’s arguments by carefully considering all of their aspects and to construct a nuanced, sophisticated response to them. After you have done all that, it will still be possible to disagree with the arguments presented in the reading, but your opinion about the text will be much more informed and nuanced than if you have taken the binary approach from the start.

TWO SAMPLE STUDENT RESPONSES

To illustrate the principles laid out in this section, consider the following two reading responses. Both texts respond to a very well known piece, “A Letter from Birmingham Jail,” by Martin Luther King, Jr. In the letter, King responds to criticism from other clergymen who had called his methods of civil rights struggle “unwise and untimely.” Both student writers were given the same response prompt:

Example: Student A

Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is a very powerful text. At the time when minorities in America were silenced and persecuted, King had the courage to lead his people in the struggle for equality. After being jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, King wrote a letter to his “fellow clergymen” describing his struggle for civil rights. In the letter, King recounts a brief history of that struggle and rejects the accusation that it is “unwise and untimely.” Overall, I think that King’s letter is a very rhetorically effective text, one that greatly helped Americans to understand the civil rights movement.

Example: Student B

King begins his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by addressing it to his “fellow clergymen.” Thus, he immediately sets the tone of inclusion rather than exclusion. By using the word “fellow” in the address, I think he is trying to do two things. First of all, he presents himself as a colleague and a spiritual brother of his audience. That, in effect, says “you can trust me,” “I am one of your kind.” Secondly, by addressing his readers in that way, King suggests that everyone, even those Americans who are not directly involved in the struggle for civil rights, should be concerned with it. Hence the word “fellow.” King’s opening almost invokes the phrase “My fellow Americans” or “My fellow citizens” used so often by American Presidents when they address the nation.

King then proceeds to give a brief background of his actions as a civil rights leader. As I read this part of the letter, I was wondering whether his readers would really have not known what he had accomplished as a civil rights leader. Then I realized that perhaps he gives all that background information as a rhetorical move. His immediate goal is to keep reminding his readers about his activities. His ultimate goal is to show to his audience that his actions were non-violent but peaceful. In reading this passage by King, I remembered once again that it is important not to assume that your audience knows anything about the subject of the writing. I will try to use this strategy more in my own papers.

In the middle of the letter, King states: “The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.” This sentence looks like a thesis statement and I wonder why he did not place it towards the beginning of the text, to get his point across right away. After thinking about this for a few minutes and re- reading several pages from our class textbook, I think he leaves his “thesis” till later in his piece because he is facing a not- so-friendly (if not hostile) audience. Delaying the thesis and laying out some background information and evidence first helps a writer to prepare his or her audience for the coming argument. That is another strategy I should probably use more often in my own writing, depending on the audience I am facing.

REFLECTING ON THE RESPONSES

To be sure, much more can be said about King’s letter than either of these writers have said. However, these two responses allow us to see two dramatically different approaches to reading. After studying both responses, consider the questions below.

• Which response fulfills the goals set in the prompt better and why?
• Which responses shows a deeper understanding of the texts by the reader and why?
• Which writer does a better job at avoiding binary thinking and creating a sophisticated reading of King’s text and why?
• Which writer is more likely to use the results of the reading in his or her own writing in the future and why?
• Which writer leaves room for response to his text by others and why?

CRITICAL READERS DO NOT READ ALONE AND IN SILENCE

One of the key principles of critical reading is that active readers do not read silently and by themselves. By this I mean that they take notes and write about what they read. They also discuss the texts they are working with, with others and compare their own interpretations of those texts with the interpretations constructed by their colleagues.

As a college student, you are probably used to taking notes of what you read. When I was in college, my favorite way of preparing for a test was reading a chapter or two from my textbook, then closing the book, then trying to summarize what I have read on a piece of paper. I tried to get the main points of the chapters down and the explanations and proofs that the textbooks’ authors used. Sometimes, I wrote a summary of every chapter in the textbook and then studied for the test from those summaries rather than from the textbook itself. I am sure you have favorite methods of note taking and studying from your notes, too.

But now it strikes me that what I did with those notes was not critical reading. I simply summarized my textbooks in a more concise, manageable form and then tried to memorize those summaries before the test. I did not take my reading of the textbooks any further than what was already on their pages. Reading for information and trying to extract the main points, I did not talk back to the texts, did not question them, and did not try to extend the knowledge which they offered in any way. I also did not try to connect my reading with my personal experiences or pre-existing knowledge in any way. I also read in silence, without exchanging ideas with other readers of the same texts. Of course, my reading strategies and techniques were dictated by my goal, which was to pass the test.

Critical reading has other goals, one of which is entering an on-going intellectual exchange. Therefore it demands different reading strategies, approaches, and techniques. One of these new approaches is not reading in silence and alone. Instead, critical readers read with a pen or pencil in hand. They also discuss what they read with others.

STRATEGIES FOR CONNECTING READING AND WRITING

If you want to become a critical reader, you need to get into a habit of writing as you read. You also need to understand that complex texts cannot be read just once. Instead, they require multiple readings, the first of which may be a more general one during which you get acquainted with the ideas presented in the text, its structure and style. During the second and any subsequent readings, however, you will need to write, and write a lot. The following are some critical reading and writing techniques which active readers employ as they work to create meanings from texts they read.

UNDERLINE INTERESTING AND IMPORTANT PLACES IN THE TEXT

Underline words, sentences, and passages that stand out, for whatever reason. Underline the key arguments that you believe the author of the text is making as well as any evidence, examples, and stories that seem interesting or important. Don’t be afraid to “get it wrong.” There is no right or wrong here. The places in the text that you underline may be the same or different from those noticed by your classmates, and this difference of interpretation is the essence of critical reading.

Take notes on the margins. If you do not want to write on your book or journal, attach post-it notes with your comments to the text. Do not be afraid to write too much. This is the stage of the reading process during which you are actively making meaning. Writing about what you read is the best way to make sense of it, especially, if the text is difficult.

Do not be afraid to write too much. This is the stage of the reading process during which you are actively making meaning. Writing about what you read will help you not only to remember the argument which the author of the text is trying to advance (less important for critical reading), but to create your own interpretations of the text you are reading (more important).

Here are some things you can do in your comments

• Ask questions.
• Agree or disagree with the author.
• Question the evidence presented in the text
• Offer counter-evidence
• Offer additional evidence, examples, stories, and so on that support the author’s argument
• Mention other texts which advance the same or similar arguments
• Mention personal experiences that enhance your reading of the text

WRITE EXPLORATORY RESPONSES

Write extended responses to readings. Writing students are often asked to write one or two page exploratory responses to readings, but they are not always clear on the purpose of these responses and on how to approach writing them. By writing reading responses, you are continuing the important work of critical reading which you began when you underlined interesting passages and took notes on the margins. You are extending the meaning of the text by creating your own commentary to it and perhaps even branching off into creating your own argument inspired by your reading. Your teacher may give you a writing prompt, or ask you to come up with your own topic for a response. In either case, realize that reading responses are supposed to be exploratory, designed to help you delve deeper into the text you are reading than note-taking or underlining will allow.

When writing extended responses to the readings, it is important to keep one thing in mind, and that is their purpose. The purpose of these exploratory responses, which are often rather informal, is not to produce a complete argument, with an introduction, thesis, body, and conclusion. It is not to impress your classmates and your teacher with “big” words and complex sentences. On the contrary, it is to help you understand the text you are working with at a deeper level. The verb “explore” means to investigate something by looking at it more closely. Investigators get leads, some of which are fruitful and useful and some of which are dead-ends. As you investigate and create the meaning of the text you are working with, do not be afraid to take different directions with your reading response. In fact, it is important resist the urge to make conclusions or think that you have found out everything about your reading. When it comes to exploratory reading responses, lack of closure and presence of more leads at the end of the piece is usually a good thing. Of course, you should always check with your teacher for standards and format of reading responses.

Try the following guidelines to write a successful response to a reading:

Remember your goal—exploration. The purpose of writing a response is to construct the meaning of a difficult text. It is not to get the job done as quickly as possible and in as few words as possible.

As you write, “talk back to the text.” Make comments, ask questions, and elaborate on complex thoughts. This part of the writing becomes much easier if, prior to writing your response, you had read the assignment with a pen in hand and marked important places in the reading.

If your teacher provides a response prompt, make sure you understand it. Then try to answer the questions in the prompt to the best of your ability. While you are doing that, do not be afraid of bringing in related texts, examples, or experiences. Active reading is about making connections, and your readers will appreciate your work because it will help them understand the text better.

While your primary goal is exploration and questioning, make sure that others can understand your response. While it is OK to be informal in your response, make every effort to write in a clear, error-free language.

Involve your audience in the discussion of the reading by asking questions, expressing opinions, and connecting to responses made by others.

USE READING FOR INVENTION

Use reading and your responses to start your own formal writing projects. Reading is a powerful invention tool. While preparing to start a new writing project, go back to the readings you have completed and your responses to those readings in search for possible topics and ideas. Also look through responses your classmates gave to your ideas about the text. Another excellent way to start your own writing projects and to begin research for them is to look through the list of references and sources at the end of the reading that you are working with. They can provide excellent topic-generating and research leads.

KEEP A DOUBLE-ENTRY JOURNAL

Many writers like double-entry journals because they allow us to make that leap from summary of a source to interpretation and persuasion. To start a double-entry journal, divide a page into two columns. As you read, in the left column write down interesting and important words, sentences, quotations, and passages from the text. In the right column, right your reaction and responses to them. Be as formal or informal as you want. Record words, passages, and ideas from the text that you find useful for your paper, interesting, or, in any, way striking or unusual. Quote or summarize in full, accurately, and fairly. In the right-hand side column, ask the kinds of questions and provide the kinds of responses that will later enable you to create an original reading of the text you are working with and use that reading to create your own paper.

DON’T GIVE UP

If the text you are reading seems too complicated or “boring,” that might mean that you have not attacked it aggressively and critically enough. Complex texts are the ones worth pursuing and investigating because they present the most interesting ideas. Critical reading is a liberating practice because you do not have to worry about “getting it right.” As long as you make an effort to engage with the text and as long as you are willing to work hard on creating a meaning out of what you read, the interpretation of the text you are working with will be valid.

IMPORTANT: So far, we have established that no pre-existing meaning is possible in written texts and that critical and active readers work hard to create such meaning. We have also established that interpretations differ from reader to reader and that there is no “right” or “wrong” during the critical reading process. So, you may ask, does this mean that any reading of a text that I create will be a valid and persuasive one? With the exception of the most outlandish and purposely-irrelevant readings that have nothing to do with the sources text, the answer is “yes.” However, remember that reading and interpreting texts, as well as sharing your interpretations with others are rhetorical acts. First of all, in order to learn something from your critical reading experience, you, the reader, need to be persuaded by your own reading of the text. Secondly, for your reading to be accepted by others, they need to be persuaded by it, too. It does not mean, however, that in order to make your reading of a text persuasive, you simply have to find “proof” in the text for your point of view. Doing that would mean reverting to reading “for the main point,” reading as consumption. Critical reading, on the other hand, requires a different approach. One of the components of this approach is the use of personal experiences, examples, stories, and knowledge for interpretive and persuasive purposes. This is the subject of the next section of this chapter.

ONE CRITICAL READER’S PATH TO CREATING A MEANING: A CASE STUDY

Earlier on in this chapter, we discussed the importance of using your existing knowledge and prior experience to create new meaning out of unfamiliar and difficult texts. In this section, I’d like to offer you one student writer’s account of his meaning- making process. Before I do that, however, it is important for me to tell you a little about the class and the kinds of reading and writing assignments that its members worked on.

All the writing projects offered to the members of the class were promoted by readings, and students were expected to actively develop their own ideas and provide their own readings of assigned texts in their essays. The main text for the class was the anthology Ways of Reading edited by David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky that contains challenging and complex texts. Like for most of his classmates, this approach to reading and writing was new to Alex who had told me earlier that he was used to reading “for information” or “for the main point”.

In preparation for the first writing project, the class read Adrienne Rich’s essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision.” In her essay, Rich offers a moving account of her journey to becoming a writer. She makes the case for constantly “revising” one’s life in the light of all new events and experiences. Rich blends voices and genres throughout the essay, using personal narrative, academic argument, and even poetry. As a result, Rich creates the kind of personal-public argument which, on the one hand, highlights her own life, and on the other, illustrates that Rich’s life is typical for her time and her environment and that her readers can also learn from her experiences.

To many beginning readers and writers, who are used to a neat separation of “personal” and “academic” argument, such a blend of genres and styles may seem odd. In fact, on of the challenges that many of the students in the class faced was understanding why Rich chooses to blend personal writing with academic and what rhetorical effects she achieves by doing so. After writing informal responses to the essay and discussing it in class, the students were offered the following writing assignment:

Although Rich tells a story of her own, she does so to provide an illustration of an even larger story—one about what it means to be a woman and a writer. Tell a story of your own about the ways you might be said to have been named or shaped or positioned by an established or powerful culture. Like Rich (and perhaps with similar hesitation), use your own experience as an illustration of both your own situation and the situation of people like you. You should imagine that the assignment is a way for you to use (and put to the test) some of Rich’s terms, words like “re-vision,” “renaming,” and “structure.” (Bartholomae and Petrosky 648).

Notice that this assignment does not ask students to simply analyze Rich’s essay, to dissect its argument or “main points.” Instead, writers are asked to work with their own experiences and events of their own lives in order to provide a reading of Rich which is affected and informed by the writers’ own lives and own knowledge of life. This is critical reading in action when a reader creates his or her one’s own meaning of a complex text by reflecting on the relationship between the content of that text and one’s own life.

In response to the assignment, one of the class members, Alex Cimino-Hurt, wrote a paper that re-examined and re- evaluated his upbringing and how those factors have influenced his political and social views. In particular, Alex was trying to reconcile his own and his parents’ anti-war views with the fact than a close relative of his was fighting in the war in Iraq as he worked on the paper. Alex used such terms as “revision” and “hesitation” to develop his piece.

Like most other writers in the class, initially Alex seemed a little puzzled, even confused by the requirement to read someone else’s text through the prism of his own life and his own experiences. However, as he drafted, revised, and discussed his writing with his classmates and his instructor, the new approach to reading and writing became clearer to him. After finishing the paper, Alex commented on his reading strategies and techniques and on what he learned about critical reading during the project:

ON PREVIOUS READING HABITS AND TECHNIQUES

Previously when working on any project whether it be for a History, English, or any other class that involved reading and research, there was a certain amount of minimalism. As a student I tried to balance the least amount of effort with the best grade. I distinctly remember that before, being taught to skim over writing and reading so that I found “main” points and highlighted them. The value of thoroughly reading a piece was not taught because all that was needed was a shallow interpretation of whatever information that was provided followed by a regurgitation. [Critical reading] provided a dramatic difference in perspective and helped me learn to not only dissect the meaning of a piece, but also to see why the writer is using certain techniques or how the reading applies to my life.

ON DEVELOPING CRITICAL READING STRATEGIES

When reading critically I found that the most important thing for me was to set aside a block of time in which I would’t have to hurry my reading or skip parts to “Get the gist of it.” Developing an eye for…detail came in two ways. The first method is to read the text several times, and the second is to discuss it with my classmates and my teacher. It quickly became clear to me that the more I read a certain piece, the more I got from it as I became more comfortable with the prose and writing style. With respect to the second way, there is always something that you can miss and there is always a different perspective that can be brought to the table by either the teacher or a classmate.

ON READING RICH’S ESSAY

In reading Adrienne Rich’s essay, the problem for me was’t necessarily relating to her work but instead just finding the right perspective from which to read it. I was raised in a very open family so being able to relate to others was learned early in my life. Once I was able to parallel my perspective to hers, it was just a matter of composing my own story. Mine was my liberalism in conservative environments—the fact that frustrates me sometimes. I felt that her struggle frustrated her, too. By using quotations from her work, I was able to show my own situation to my readers.

ON WRITING THE PAPER

The process that I went through to write an essay consisted of three stages. During the first stage, I wrote down every coherent idea I had for the essay as well as a few incoherent ones. This helped me create a lot of material to work with. While this initial material doesn’t always have direction it provides a foundation for writing. The second stage involved rereading Rich’s essay and deciding which parts of it might be relevant to my own story. Looking at my own life and at Rich’s work together helped me consolidate my paper. The third and final stage involved taking what is left and refining the style of the paper and taking care of the mechanics.

ADVICE FOR CRITICAL READERS

The first key to being a critical and active reader is to find something in the piece that interests, bothers, encourages, or just confuses you. Use this to drive your analysis. Remember there is no such thing as a boring essay, only a boring reader.

• Reading something once is never enough so reading it quickly before class just won’t cut it. Read it once to get your brain comfortable with the work, then read it again and actually try to understand what’s going on in it. You can’t read it too many times.
• Ask questions. It seems like a simple suggestion but if you never ask questions you’ll never get any answers. So, while you’re reading, think of questions and just write them down on a piece of paper lest you forget them after about a line and a half of reading.

Reading and writing are rhetorical processes, and one does not exist without the other. The goal of a good writer is to engage his or her readers into a dialog presented in the piece of writing. Similarly, the goal of a critical and active reader is to participate in that dialog and to have something to say back to the writer and to others. Writing leads to reading and reading leads to writing. We write because we have something to say and we read because we are interested in ideas of others.

Reading what others have to say and responding to them help us make that all-important transition from simply having opinions about something to having ideas. Opinions are often over-simplified and fixed. They are not very useful because, if different people have different opinions that they are not willing to change or adjust, such people cannot work or think together. Ideas, on the other hand, are ever evolving, fluid, and flexible. Our ideas are informed and shaped by our interactions with others, both in person and through written texts. In a world where thought and action count, it is not enough to simply “agree to disagree.” Reading and writing, used together, allow us to discuss complex and difficult issues with others, to persuade and be persuaded, and, most importantly, to act.

Reading and writing are inextricably connected, and I hope that this chapter has shown you ways to use reading to inform and enrich you writing and your learning in general. The key to becoming an active, critical, and interested reader is the development of varied and effective reading techniques and strategies. I’d like to close this chapter with the words from the writer Alex Cimino-Hurt: “Being able to read critically is important no matter what you plan on doing with your career or life because it allows you to understand the world around you.”

Bartholomae, David and Anthony Petrosky, Eds. Introduction. Ways of Reading . 8th Ed. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008.

Brent, Douglas. 1992. Reading as Rhetorical Invention. NCTE , Urbana, Illinois. Cimino-Hurt, Alex. Personal Interview. 2003.

Martin, Janette. 2004. “Developing ‘Interesting Thoughts:’ Reading for Research.” In Research Writing Revisited: A Sourcebook for Teachers , eds. Pavel Zemliansky and Wendy Bishop, Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH. (3-13).

Rich, Adrienne. 2002. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision.” In Ways of Reading , 6th ed. Eds. Bartholomae, David and Anthony Petrosky. Bedford/St. Martin’s Boston, (627-645).

Research and Critical Reading Copyright © 2016 by Pavel Zemilansky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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2a. Critical Reading

An introduction to reading in college.

While the best way to develop your skills as a writer is to actually practice by writing, practicing critical reading skills is crucial to becoming a better college writer. Careful and skilled readers develop a stronger understanding of topics, learn to better anticipate the needs of the audience, and pick up sophisticated writing “maneuvers” and strategies from professional writing. A good reading practice requires reading text and context, which you’ll learn more about in the next section. Writing a successful academic essay also begins with critical reading as you explore ideas and consider how to make use of sources to provide support for your writing.

Questions to ask as you read

If you consider yourself a particularly strong reader or want to improve your reading comprehension skills, writing out notes about a text—even if it’s in shorthand—helps you to commit the answers to memory more easily. Even if you don’t write out all these notes, answering these basic questions about any text or reading you encounter in college will help you get the most out of the time you put into your reading. It will also give you more confidence to understand and question the text while you read.

• Is there  context  provided about the author and/or essay? If so, what stands out as important?

Context in this instance means things like dates of publication, where the piece was originally published, and any biographical information about the author. All of that information will be important for developing a critical reading of the piece, so track what’s available as you read.

• If you had to guess, who is the author’s intended  audience ? Describe them in as much detail as possible.

Sometimes the author will state who the audience is, but sometimes you have to figure it out by context clues, such as those you tracked above. For instance, the audience for a writer on  Buzzfeed  is very different from the audience for a writer for the  Wall Street Journal —and both writers know that, which means they’re more effective at reaching their readers. Learning how to identify your audience is a crucial writing skill for all genres of writing.

• In your own words, what is the  question  the author is trying to answer in this piece? What seems to have caused them to write in the first place?

In nonfiction writing of the kind we read in Writing 121, writers set out to answer a question. Their thesis/main argument is usually the answer to the question, so sometimes you can “reverse engineer” the question from that. Often, the question is asked in the title of the piece.

• In your own words, what’s the author’s  main   idea or argument ? If you had to distill it down to one or two sentences, what does the author want you, the reader, to agree with?

If you’ve ever had to write a paper for a class, you’re probably familiar with a thesis or main argument. Published writers also have a thesis (or else they don’t get published!), but sometimes it can be tricky to find in a more sophisticated piece of writing. Trying to put the main argument into your own words can help.

• How many  examples  and types of  evidence  did the author provide to support the main argument? Which examples/evidence stood out to you as persuasive?

It’s never enough to just make a claim and expect people to believe it—we have to support that claim with evidence. The types of evidence and examples that will be persuasive to readers depends on the audience, though, which is why it’s important to have some idea of your readers and their expectations.

• Did the author raise any  points of skepticism  (also known as counterarguments)? Can you identify exactly what page or paragraph where the author does this?

As we’ll see later when the writing process, respectfully engaging with points of skepticism and counterarguments builds trust with the reader because it shows that the writer has thought about the issue from multiple perspectives before arriving at the main argument. Raising a counterargument is not enough, though. Pay careful attention to how the writer responds to that counterargument—is it an effective and persuasive response?  If not, perhaps the counterargument has more merit for you than the author’s main argument.

• In your own words, how does the essay  conclude ? What does the author “want” from us, the readers?

A conclusion usually offers a brief summary of the main argument and some kind of “what’s next?” appeal from the writer to the audience. The “what’s next?” appeal can take many forms, but it’s usually a question for readers to ponder, actions the author thinks people should take, or areas related to the main topic that need more investigation or research. When you read the conclusion, ask yourself, “What does the author want from me now that I’ve read their essay?”

Reading Like Writers: Critical Reading

Reading as a creative act.

“The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him life; it went out from him truth. It came to him short-lived actions; it went out from him immortal thoughts. It came to him business; it went from him poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar”

• Consider the  discourse community  when you read and write in your college classes
• Analyze any reading for  text and context
• Read like a writer so you can write for your readers

By the end of this lesson, you’ll be able to apply the concept of  discourse community  to honing your college-level critical reading skills.

Good writers are good readers, so let’s start there. When you can confidently identify the  audience, context, and purpose of a text —position it within its discourse community—you’ll be a stronger, savvier reader.

Strong, savvy readers are more effective writers because they consider their own audience, context, and purpose when they write and communicate, which makes their writing clearer and to the point.

So the goal of this lesson is to help you read like a writer!

The Savvy Reader

Good writers are good readers! And good readers. . .

• get to know the author
• get to know the author’s community + audience
• accurately summarize the author’s argument
• look up terms you don’t know
• “listen” respectfully to the author’s point of view
• have a sense of the larger conversation
• think about other issues related to the conversation
• put it in current context
• analyze and assess the author’s reasoning, evidence, and assumptions

Why read critically?  While the best way to develop your skills as a writer is to actually practice by writing, practicing critical reading skills is crucial to becoming a better writer. Careful and skilled readers develop a stronger understanding of topics, learn to better anticipate the needs of the audience, and pick up writing “maneuvers” and strategies from professional writing.

Reading Like Writers

How do you read like a writer?  When you read like a writer, you are practicing deeper reading comprehension. In order to understand a text, you are reading not just what’s  in  it but what’s  around  it, too: text and context.

Practice: Reading Like Writers

In-class discussion : Advertisements are helpful for practicing reading like writers because advertisers make deliberate choices with text and images based on audience (target consumer), context (where they are reaching them), and purpose (buy this product).

• But I’m not trying to sell a product! How can I use my newfound understanding of audience, context, and purpose to improve my writing?

It’s true! You aren’t selling a product. You aren’t (I hope) trying to manipulate your audience. You aren’t relying on discriminatory assumptions or stereotypes to appeal to your audience. But when you write, let’s say, an essay, you are asking readers to “buy into” your point of view. The goal doesn’t have to be for them to agree with you; it can be for your readers to respectfully consider, understand, or sympathize with your point of view or analysis of an issue.  The point is you’re thinking of your reader when you write, and that will make your writing process smoother and your writing clearer.

Writing for Your Readers

When you write for your readers, you. . .

• Learn from your reading and communication experience:  What makes texts work? How are ideas conveyed clearly?
• Analyze the writing situation:  What are the goals and purpose for a writing project? Who is your audience?
• Explore and play as you draft:  What are different ways to respond? Can you use a better word or phrase?
• Consider your audience:  What might a reader expect to see? What does your reader need to understand your point of view? What questions might a reader have?

Writing as a process of inquiry

Just as you want your readers to take you seriously, you want to approach texts with an open and curious mind. Whatever the topic, it was important enough for this person to want to write on it. While we don’t have to agree with the point someone is making, we can respect their opinion and appreciate reading a different perspective.

Approach reading and writing in college in a learning zone.  Be open, be curious, ask questions, seek answers. Share, stretch, experiment.

Guides and Worksheets

• Use this guide for any of your college reading!
• Learn a basic study skill–annotating or taking notes on your readings

Critical Reading Guide: Text + Context

Title of the text:                                                                                  Author:

Reading the text: Comprehension

Main idea . In one sentence, summarize the main point or argument of the text.

Claim . Identify one claim in the text.

Key points . Paraphrase a key point, example, or passage that interested you.

Evidence . In your own words, describe 1-2 compelling examples or pieces of evidence that support the point/argument of the text.

Conclusion . What is the ultimate takeaway the text gives us on the topic/issue?

Personal experience . What is your experience of the topic? Have you had problems related to it?

Vocabulary . What is a word or phrase in the text you didn’t know? Look it up. What does it mean?

Inquiry . What is one thing you need more information about? Or, what is one question you have about the content of the text?

Reading for context: Rhetorical analysis

The author . Do an internet search on the author. What did you find out?

Ethos . Do you trust the author on the topic/issue? Why or why not?

Container . When and where was the text first published? Who will read/see it?

Audience . How does the author address or appeal to their readers? What tone does the author use in the text?

Bias . What knowledge, values, or beliefs does the author assume the reader shares?

Types of evidence . What types of evidence does the author use? Types of evidence include facts, examples, statistics, statements by authorities (references to or quotes from other sources), interviews, observations, logical reasoning, and personal experience

Structure . How does the author organize the text?

Purpose . What question does the author seek to answer in the text? In other words, why do you think they wrote this piece?

Mark-up Assignment: The Savvy Reader Practice

The object is to fill the empty space of the margins with your thoughts and questions to the text. By reading sympathetically (reading to understand what the writer is saying) and critically (reading to analyze and critique what the writer is saying), you are reading mindfully and creatively. You are finding those passages that you are drawn to, asking questions that you have, and beginning to develop your reaction, response, and ideas about a topic or issue. It’s a useful tool in the “getting started” phase of the writing process. Learning how to read effectively will be an invaluable skill in your college career and beyond because it means engaging in a task actively rather than passively.

Choose 1-2 paragraphs from READING X to fully annotate. This passage should be one that interests you, i.e. seems important, confusing, and/or prompted agreement, disagreement, or questions for you.

• Circle any word you think is crucial for the passage, including ones you cannot easily define.
• Underline phrases or images you think crucial for the meaning of the passage/essay.
• Put a bracket around ideas or assertions you find puzzling or questionable.
• Then write notes around the margins of the passage defining these terms, identifying the important ideas, or raising questions with the bracketed phrases. For each item you have circled, underlined, or bracketed, there should be a margin note. For this assignment, your margin notes should be substantive: they should meaty statements and full questions.

Photocopy or clear, legible photograph of paragraphs with your annotations or type up the paragraphs and annotate.

Writing as Inquiry Copyright © 2021 by Kara Clevinger and Stephen Rust is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Reading as a source of knowledge

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• Published: 13 December 2018
• Volume 198 , pages 723–742, ( 2021 )

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• René van Woudenberg   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1169-6539 1  

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This paper argues that reading is a source of knowledge. Epistemologists have virtually ignored reading as a source of knowledge. This paper argues, first, that reading is not to be equated with attending to testimony, and second that it cannot be reduced to perception. Next an analysis of reading is offered and the source of knowledge that reading is further delineated. Finally it is argued that the source that reading is, can be both transmissive and generative, is non-basic, once was a non-essential but has become essential for many people, and can be unique.

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Introduction

Knowing as Simply Being Correct

Cook Wilson on knowledge and forms of thinking

Guy Longworth & Simon Wimmer

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

1 Introduction

I shall be arguing that reading is a source of knowing or warranted belief. Footnote 1 Perception, memory, consciousness and reason have standardly been called sources of knowledge (e.g. Chisholm 1977 : p. 122; Audi 1998 : part I). As of lately testimony has been explicitly added to this illustrious list (Coady 1992 : p. 6; Plantinga 1993 : p. 77; Audi 1998 : ch. 5; Lackey 2008 ; McMyler 2011 : pp. 4–5; Faulkner 2011 ; Gelfert 2014 ). Footnote 2 One wonders, however, why certain items that intuitively seem to qualify as a “source of knowledge”, such as reading, Footnote 3 occur on no epistemologist’s list of sources. Footnote 4

One wonders, for it has been suggested that a source of knowledge is that “from” which knowledge or warranted belief “comes”. (Moser et al. 1998 : p. 101; Audi 2002 : p. 82) It has also been suggested that a source of knowledge is “roughly, something in the life of a knower … that yields belief constituting knowledge” (Audi 2002 : p. 72). Given these suggestions, reading would seem to qualify as a source, as much knowledge that we have does “come from” reading. In this paper I discuss two possible explanations why epistemologists in the broadly analytic tradition have never considered reading as a source of knowledge, and argue that both are unsatisfactory. The first explanation is that reading is just one form of attending to testimony and hence requires no special attention (Sect.  1 ), the second that reading is a special case of perception and hence requires no special attention (Sect.  2 ). In Sect.  3 I offer an analysis of reading, while Sect.  4 gives a richer delineation of the source of knowledge that is associated with reading. Section  5 applies a number of epistemological distinctions that can be found in the literature to this source, so as to further delineate its nature. The final section summarizes the main conclusions.

2 Reading isn’t necessarily attending to testimony

The first possible explanation that I want to consider as to why reading isn’t considered as a separate source of knowledge is that reading is just an instantiation of the more general phenomenon of acquiring knowledge through testimony. The idea is that acquiring knowledge through testimony comes in a variety of forms of which reading is one, listening another, and that whatever epistemically relevant can be said about acquiring knowledge through testimony, carries over to reading. Hence, so the explanation goes, there is no need for epistemologists to pay special attention to reading.

In order to be able to evaluate this explanation, we need to be clear about what testimony is. Various accounts of testimony have been offered. I will discuss three such accounts and argue that on each of them knowledge acquired through reading is not identical with knowledge acquired through testimony. C.A.J. Coady has offered the following account of ‘natural’ testimony (as opposed to ‘formal’ testimony of the sort that is offered in court rooms):

A speaker S testifies by making some statement p, iff (1) S’s stating that p is evidence that p and is offered as evidence that p (2) S has the relevant competence, authority, or credentials to state truly that p (3) S’s statement that p is relevant to some disputed or unresolved question (which may or may not be whether p?) and is directed to those who are in need of evidence on the matter. (Coady 1992 : p. 42)

There are two points I should like to make about Coady’s account. First, given this account of testimony there are many cases of acquiring knowledge or warranted belief through reading that just aren’t cases of acquiring knowledge or warranted belief through testimony . Suppose you open a copy of Graham Greene’s A Gun for Hire , read the opening sentence “Murder didn’t mean much to Raven”, and thereby acquire the knowledge that Greene’s novel opens with that sentence, then you aren’t acquiring this knowledge on the basis of Coadyan testimony, for condition (1) isn’t satisfied: Greene doesn’t offer his statement as evidence that murder didn’t mean much to Raven; nor is condition (3) satisfied: Greene’s opening sentence isn’t relevant to some disputed or unresolved question, and it isn’t directed to people who are in need of evidence on the matter of Raven. And this isn’t an isolated case. All of the following are things one may come to know, in the contexts sketched between square brackets, through reading, without that knowledge qualifying as being acquired on the basis of Coadyan testimony (for ease of future reference I include the example just given):

That the first line Graham Greene’s novel reads “Murder didn’t mean much to Raven” [you have opened the book that you know is written by Graham Greene, and have read the opening sentence]

That the text contains a lot of metaphorical expressions [you have read the text and noticed this fact]

That the poem is a sonnet [you are familiar with the formal characteristics of a sonnet]

That the book is humorous [the writer doesn’t say or imply so much, but upon reading you find yourself laughing]

That the article contains an invalid argument [you followed the argument on offer, and notice that the conclusions doesn’t follow from the argument]

That the review is based on a misunderstanding of the book [you know the book very well]

That the book is a warning call not to harbor grudges in one’s heart [this point is not explicitly stated, but from the development of the book’s main character you conclude so much]

That the author of the novel assumes that p [not that he says this explicitly, but it is the inevitable though unobvious conclusion you must draw, given the points that the author does explicitly make]

That the author is intimately familiar with the Scottish Enlightenment [you are an historian that specializes in that period, and even though the book is not a history book, it contains so many adequate allusions to the Scottish Enlightenment, that the conclusion forces itself upon you]

That what the Dutch did in the Caribbean was wrong [the reader is offered a ‘clean’ neutral statement of facts and figures without the author making any moral or evaluative statement whatsoever]

That the square root of 2 is not a rational number [you have followed and comprehended the proof that was offered, and judged it, rightly, to be sound]

The point of this list is not that these things can not be known through Coadyan testimony. For surely there are contexts, others than the ones indicated between the square brackets, in which one can and does come to know the things described on the list on the basis of Coadyan testimony. Knowledge of all the propositions listed can be acquired when Coady’s three conditions are satisfied. Rather, the point of the list is that one can come to know these things through reading in a way that does not qualify as believing on the basis of Coadyan testimony, viz. in the contexts that are sketched between the square brackets. For in none of these cases are Coady’s three conditions jointly satisfied. Condition (1) is not satisfied in any of the cases on the list, as the propositions specified aren’t offered as evidence. Neither is condition (2) satisfied: the sketches of the contexts provide no indication about the authors’ competence, credentials, and authority. Nor is condition (3) satisfied, as the propositions aren’t relevant to some disputed or unresolved question, nor are they directed to people who are in need of evidence on the matters at hand. But even though Coady’s conditions aren’t jointly satisfied, and so knowing the specified propositions in the contexts as sketched can not be considered as knowledge based on Coadyan testimony, knowing the specified propositions (in the contexts specified) does qualify as knowledge acquired through reading. From which it follows that reading isn’t coextensive with attending to Coadyan testimony.

My second point about Coady’s account is that, as Jennifer Lackey has argued, it doesn’t capture what we ordinarily take testimony to be, as there are clear cases of testimony that don’t satisfy (1), (2) and/or (3). Statements in posthumously published private journals and diaries that were never intended by their writers to be read by others, fail Coadyan condition (1): they aren’t offered as evidence, nor need they be relevant to some disputed question. But now suppose, to adapt an example from Lackey ( 2008 : p. 18), you read Sylvia Plath’s posthumously published diary in which she says that she was regularly deeply depressed. Then you likely come to know that she was regularly deeply depressed. When asked what the epistemic source of your knowledge is, the intuitively correct answer is that it is testimony. For you don’t know this through sense perception (you haven’t seen her depressed), nor through memory (you don’t remember it), or reason (you don’t derive this as a conclusion from a number of facts that you are aware of) or introspection or any combination of these sources. You acquired this knowledge from an expression of Plath’s own thoughts—her thoughts are, for you, testimony. This example also shows that Coady’s condition (3) isn’t necessary for someone’s testifying: after reading her diary, you will know through Plath’s own testimony that she was regularly depressed, but you had no evidential needs.

As Lackey ( 2008 : p. 17) has also argued, Coady’s condition (2) isn’t necessary for what we ordinarily take testimony to be either. This condition entails that one doesn’t testify, unless one has the competence, authority or credentials to state truly that p. Now someone who lacks these properties may not be a very reliable testifier. But she is still capable of testifying. Her testimony may not be an epistemically good source of belief. But she can testify nonetheless. People who give false testimonies about, for example, others testify nonetheless; they testify falsely. And false testimony is testimony as much as a bad squash player is still a squash player.

All of this is obviously relevant for my argument that reading is a source of knowledge that is not coextensive with attending to testimony. For if Coady’s account of testimony is wrongheaded, my list of things that we may come to know through reading even though that doesn’t qualify as attending to Coadyan testimony won’t bear much weight. Let us therefore turn to another account and see whether on that account acquiring knowledge of the things that are on the list (in the contexts as sketched between square brackets), does qualify as the acquisition of knowledge through testimony. On this account, testimony is “people’s telling us things” (Audi 1998 : p. 131), or “tellings generally” with “no restrictions either on subject matter or on the speakers epistemic relation to it” (Fricker 1995 : pp. 396–7). Related is the view that testimony requires “only that it be a statement of someone’s thoughts or beliefs, which they might direct to the world at large and to no one in particular” (Sosa 1991 : p. 219). The essence of this broad view, as Lackey ( 2008 : p. 20) states, can be put as follows:

S testifies that p, iff S’s statement that p is an expression of S’s thought that p.

It is clear that this account is not vulnerable to the objections just raised against Coady’s account. On this account Sylvia Plath’s statements in her private diary qualify as testimony, as do expressions of thoughts that are false. That is to say: on this account one can testify that p, even if one doesn’t offer one’s thought as evidence, even if one doesn’t have the relevant competence, authority or credentials to state truly that p (i.e. even if the testimony is false), and even if one doesn’t express one’s thought that p to people who are in need of evidence regarding p.

Regarding the broad view of testimony, I also make two remarks. First, on this account too, we can acquire knowledge of the propositions on the list, in the contexts as sketched, while it doesn’t qualify as knowledge acquired by broad testimony. Take (b) for example, that the text contains a lot of metaphors : someone can know this through reading, even if this proposition is not an expression of the author’s thought. The same holds for (c), that the poem is a sonnet : this can be known through reading, even when this proposition is no part of the thought that the poet wanted to express. The same holds for most, or even all, of the other items on the list. Let me just cover case (a) that may seem an exception.

It may seem an exception, because the fact that Greene’s A Gun for Hire opens with “Murder didn’t mean much to Raven” might be considered to express a thought that Green had about one of his fictional characters, and so as testimony. However, we must tread carefully here. For the knowledge that the reader acquires upon reading the opening page of the novel is that the first line of the book reads “Murder didn’t mean much to Raven”. This proposition, however, is not a thought that is expressed in the opening page of Greene’s fine novel. Hence that proposition is not broadly testified by Greene, which means, in turn, that the reader’s knowing that proposition on the basis of reading, is not an instance of knowing that proposition on the basis of broad testimony.

I am not going down my list any further here, as the point I want to make should be clear by now: there are cases of acquiring knowledge through reading that don’t qualify as instances of acquiring knowledge on the basis of broad testimony. The point is well made even if some of the items on the list were to qualify as instances of acquiring knowledge through broad testimony.

My second remark, however, is that this account is too broad. There are expressions of thought that, intuitively, do not qualify as testimony. What prevents these expressions of thought from qualifying as testimony is that they are non-informational. Here is an example. It is a beautiful day, you are hiking in the mountains with a friend, and you say “Oh, what a beautiful day it is!” This is an expression of your thought, but it isn’t testimony, for, as Lackey says, this expression of your thought “is neither offered nor taken as conveying information”. (Lackey 2008 : p. 21) Of course, in special circumstances, the very same expression of your thought can qualify as testimony, for in stance when the person your are with is blind and takes the expression of your thought as conveying the information that it is a beautiful day. What this suggests, Lackey says, is that when an expression functions merely as a conversational filler, as it does in the initial example, it doesn’t qualify as testimony.

In addition to mere conversation fillers there are other kinds of expressions of thought that do not qualify as testimony. Adapting a point from Lackey, think of exhortations. You say to your son who is training for half the marathon “You can do it!” By saying this, you express a thought of yours, but it isn’t testimony, as you don’t offer what you say as conveying the information that your son can do it, nor does your son take what you say as conveying the information that he can do it.

Let me finally consider Lackey’s so-called disjunctive account of testimony that takes its cue from the distinction between testimony as an intentional act on the part of a speaker or writer and testimony as a source of belief or knowledge for the hearer or reader (Lackey 2008 : p. 27) and which forms the basis for her distinction between speaker testimony (s-testimony) and hearer testimony (h-testimony). Before presenting the full account, some terminology need be introduced. First, the notion of an “act of communication”:

A is an act of communication iff by performing A, a speaker or writer intends to express communicable content. (It does not require that the speaker or writer also intends to communicate that content to others.)

When Plath wrote in her diary for only private purposes, she was engaging in acts of communication, as she had the intention to express communicable content, even if she had no intention to communicate that content to others. It is possible, then, to engage in acts of communication without intending to communicate to others, i.e. it is possible to express communicable content, without intending to communicate that content to others. Of course, the two intentions may go together, but the point is that they needn’t.

Second, the notion of “conveying information”. Acts of communication, for instance Plath’s writing in her diary, “convey information”. What does it mean for an act of communication A to convey the information that p? Rather than defining this notion, Lackey provides paradigmatic cases. An act of communication A conveys the information that p, she says, when, for example, (1) A is the utterance of a declarative sentence that expresses proposition p, or (2) when < p > is an obvious (uncancelled) pragmatic implication of A. (Lackey 2008 : p. 31)

With the notions of “acts of communication” and “conveying information” thus clarified, Lackey defines speaker testimony and hearer testimony as follows:

Speaker Testimony S s-testifies that p by performing A iff, in performing A, S reasonably intends to convey the information that p (in part) in virtue of A’s communicable content. (Lackey 2008 : p. 30)

Hearer Testimony S h-testifies that p by performing A iff H, S’s hearer, reasonably takes A as conveying the information that p (in part) in virtue of A’s communicable content. (Lackey 2008 : p. 32)

The account of s-testimony requires that a speaker intends to convey information to her hearer and in that sense requires that a speaker’s A be offered as conveying information. The clause “in part in virtue of A’s communicable content” is included in order to exclude cases like the following: you sing in a soprano voice “I have a soprano voice” and you intend to convey the information that you have a soprano voice in virtue of the perceptual content of your sung assertion, not in virtue of the communicable content of your sung assertion; you intend to convey the information that you have a soprano voice by your singing in soprano voice , and not by the content of the words that you sing . In this case you are not s-testifying that you have a soprano voice. But you would be s-testifying that you have a soprano voice when you would just say “I have a soprano voice” or say “I have one of the women’s voices, but not the alto”. Had you said the latter, you would still have conveyed the information that you have a soprano voice—for there is a reasonably obvious connection between “I have a soprano voice” and “I have one of the woman’s voices, but not the alto”.

Whereas s-testimony requires some intention on the part of the speaker to convey information, no such intention is required for h-testimony. H-testimony captures the sense in which testimony can serve as a source of belief or knowledge for others, regardless of the testifier’s intention to be such an epistemic source. Crucial for h-testimony is that the hearer or reader takes the speaker’s or writer’s A to convey information.

It follows from these accounts that a speaker or writer can s-testify without h-testifying, vice versa. But they can also go together. Lackey’s official statement of the Disjunctive Account of Testimony is as follows:

S testifies that p by making an act of communication A iff (in part) in virtue of A’s communicable content (1) S reasonably intends to convey the information that p and/or (2) A is reasonably taken as conveying the information that p. (Lackey 2008 : pp. 35–36)

Let me now return to the question for which the presentation of Lackey’s account was propaedeutic: is all knowledge we can acquire through reading, knowledge based on Lackyan testimony? Let me go down the list. Regarding (a): as indicated, the knowledge a reader of the first line of A Gun for Hire acquires through reading is that the first line of that book reads “Murder didn’t mean much to Raven”. This knowledge is not based on Greene’s s-testimony, as Greene did not intend to convey the information that the first line of A Gun for Hire reads “Murder didn’t mean much to Raven” . This is not to deny that it is possible to think up a scenario in which someone’s knowing this is based on Greene’s s-testimony. Suppose Jane is Greene’s neighbor, and she has asked him what the title of his new book will be and what its opening sentence will be. Greene’s answer is that the title is A Gun for Hire , and its opening line “Murder didn’t mean much to Raven”. Jane’s knowledge that the first line of A Gun for Hire reads “Murder didn’t mean much to Raven” in this case is based on Greene’s s-testimony. But in the case as originally described, the reader acquires the indicated knowledge not through s-testimony. Nor does she acquire it through h-testimony, for it is not the case that a reader, upon reading “Murder didn’t mean much to Raven” takes this to convey the information that the first line of A Gun for Hire reads “Murder didn’t mean much to Raven” . So, the knowledge acquired in the context as described in case (a) is knowledge through reading, but it is not knowledge through Lackeyan testimony.

That a specific text contains a lot of metaphorical expressions , or that it is a sonnet , or that it is humorous , as in cases (b), (c), and (d) is, in the contexts as sketched, knowledge acquired through reading. But it surely isn’t acquired through the author’s s-testimony: the author’s acts of communication aren’t intended to convey the information that the text contains a lot of metaphorical expressions , or that it is sonnet , etc. Nor is it acquired through the author’s h-testimony: the reader doesn’t take the author’s acts of communication to convey the information that the text contains a lot of metaphorical expressions , etc. This means that the knowledge acquired in these cases is not based on Lackey testimony.

Likewise, that the article contains an invalid argument , or that the review is based on a misunderstanding , or that the book is a warning call not to harbor grudges in one’s heart , or that the author assumes that p, as in (e), (f), (g) and (h), in the contexts as sketched, is known through reading. But that knowledge isn’t based on either s-testimony, nor on h-testimony. To write this out for (f): the reviewer certainly doesn’t intend to convey the information that his review is based on a misunderstanding, so the review doesn’t qualify as s-testimony; nor can a reader reasonably take the review’s communicable content to express the information that the review is based on a misunderstanding , so the review doesn’t qualify as h-testimony either. Which means that the knowledge acquired just isn’t based on Lackey testimony.

Likewise, that the author is intimately familiar with the Scottish Enlightenment , or that what the Dutch did in de Caribbean was wrong , or that the square root of 2 is not a rational number , as in (i), (j), and (k), is, in the contexts as sketched, knowledge acquired through reading. But it isn’t knowledge based on Lackeyan testimony. To write this out for (k): when you come to know that the square root of 2 is not a rational number, because you have read, followed and comprehended the proof, then your knowledge isn’t based on s- or h-testimony, as you now “see”, intellectually, for yourself that this is true.

The conclusion of this section should be clear by now. The lack of attention that reading has received among analytic epistemologists, cannot be explained by reference to the alleged fact that knowledge acquired through reading just is a token of the type knowledge acquired through testimony. What a reader may come to know through reading isn’t, or isn’t necessarily, coming to know through testimony . I showed that this is true given three different accounts of testimony: Coady’s, Audi’s (and others) and Lackey’s. The list that I offered lists things that someone may come to know through reading, while the knowledge thus acquired does not qualify as testimonial knowledge. I have indicated that we may come to know any of the things on this list also through testimony, as someone may testify any of these things to us. But the point I have been eager to establish is that when we read texts, we can, in the appropriate circumstances, also just through reading come to know things. If I am correct in arguing that acquiring knowledge through reading isn’t coextensive with acquiring knowledge through testimony, then there is a prima facie case that reading merits special epistemological attention.

3 Reading isn’t just seeing words

The second possible explanation of the inattention that epistemologists have paid to reading is that reading just is an instance of perception, and therefore merits no special attention. “Reading” is just the name for the perception of a particular kind of objects, viz. words Footnote 5 and sentences. The fact that we have no special name for seeing horses, or paintings, but that we do have a special name for seeing words and sentences, this explanation says, should not seduce us into thinking that reading is in any principled way different from seeing horses and paintings.

This explanation is uncompelling. Reading is not just seeing a particular kind of objects, viz. words and sentences, whereas seeing a horse just is seeing a certain kind of animal, and seeing Van Gogh’s Sunflowers just is seeing a particular painting. One is just seeing something when one is having certain visual experiences of shapes, colors, and their relative positions in one’s visual field. One may just see a horse, without knowing or believing that it is a horse one is seeing, without even knowing or believing that it is an animal one is seeing, without even knowing or believing anything at all about what one is seeing. What I have referred to as just seeing , is what Fred Dretske initially called “object-perception” (as contrasted with fact-perception: seeing that the animal is a horse), and later on “simple seeing”. Footnote 6 According to Dretske simple seeing X is marked by the fact that it is compatible with having no beliefs about X. Footnote 7

It seems clear that reading isn’t just seeing words and sentences, it isn’t just looking at what are in fact words and sentences. For suppose you don’t know Greek, but have opened a Greek edition of Homer’s Odyssey ; then you are seeing words and sentences, but you aren’t reading. Footnote 8 Moreover, if reading would be just seeing words and sentences, it would have to be compatible with forming no beliefs about what one is reading. But that seems wrong. One isn’t reading unless one is forming such beliefs as that

this sentence is a statement, that sentence is a question the word W that is used here, means that the sentence S that is written here, means this the point that the author is navigating towards seems to be p given what is said about her, the main character could be a hero, but also a villain what the author says here, is rather implausible

If reading requires such beliefs to be occurrent, the requirement seems overly intellectually demanding. For when we read we don’t normally form explicit beliefs about words or sentences, what they mean, or what their illocutionary force is, etc. Normally we find ourselves understanding what a sentence says or means, without forming such explicit beliefs. That is to say, normally we form such beliefs dispositionally . It is only on special occasions, such as when we read difficult passages, that we form such beliefs occurrently. But if we take the notion of “belief” to cover both occurrent and dispositional belief, then we must say that reading involves believing.

So, reading isn’t just seeing . Still, there is a relation, or even multiple relations, between reading and seeing. What relation(s)? Here we do well to keep in mind that, as Nikolas Gisborne has said, “see” is a massively polysemous verb. (Gisborne 2010 : p. 118) Three senses are especially relevant for present purposes. First, there is a sense that we have already encountered when discussing the notion of “object perception”, which Gisborne calls the prototypical sense of”see”. In this sense to “see” is to perceive visually . In such sentences as “I can see the King and the Queen from here”, and “I saw the horse in the field”, “see” is used in the prototypical sense. Second, “see” has a sense in which it is a knowledge ascription. And here two different classes of cases must be distinguished. First, there is the purely propositional sense of “see” that we find, for example, in such sentences as “I can see that the argument is valid”, and “The King saw that the Queen was right”. Here “see” has no visual meaning whatsoever. Second, there is the so-called perceptual propositional sense of “see that” that we find, for example, in such sentences as “Jane saw through the window that the child had crossed safely”, and “Harold sees that it is raining”. In these sentences “see” has both a prototypical sense and an epistemic sense. As Craig French has observed, “see” in propositional contexts where it has a prototypical sense, is evidential , by which he means that in such contexts “see” indicates that the source of the information in the that-clause is visual . (French 2012 : p. 122)

Returning to the relation between reading and seeing, we have already observed that reading involves “seeing” words and sentences in the prototypical sense, but that it is not identical with it. If one is reading, one may be “seeing” something in another sense as well. Suppose you read in the newspaper that the Queen is in Dublin, then you may say “I see in the newspaper that the Queen is in Dublin”. In this sentence “see” has not merely a prototypical sense (it is not just seeing words and sentences) but also an epistemic sense. Here “reading” involves “seeing” in the perceptual propositional sense. For “see” is used here in a propositional context and has a prototypical sense. Should we go further and say that reading is identical to “seeing” in the perceptual propositional sense? Footnote 9

Let us consider this matter starting from a slightly different question. Suppose we ask ourselves whether we can know what a word or sentence means through seeing . I want to approach this question via a detour through Thomas Reid’s distinction between original and acquired perception:

Our perceptions are of two kinds: some are natural and original, others acquired and the fruit of experience. When I perceive that this is the taste of cyder, that of brandy; that this is the smell of an apple, that of an orange … these perceptions are not original, they are acquired. But the perception which I have by touch, of the hardness and softness of bodies, of their extension, figure and motion, is not acquired, it is original. (Reid 1764 : p. 171)

The idea behind the distinction is that certain things can be perceived without any learning process, for example the hardness or softness of an object, while other perceptions do require learning, such as perceiving that this is the taste of brandy. The distinction also applies to seeing. Says Reid: “By sight we perceive originally the visible figure and color of bodies only, and their visible place”. Footnote 10 So original seeing includes seeing 2-dimensional shapes and patches of colors. Seeing a sphere, Reid held, is an instance of acquired perception, as it requires a learning process in which certain visual appearances become associated with certain tactile sensations. Other examples of acquired seeing are seeing that that is a horse, or seeing that it is one’s neighbor’s horse.

Reid’s distinction can be applied to reading. Reading involves seeing little curved and straight lines on a page, which instances original perception. Original visual perceptions can be described in sentences in which “see” has the prototypical sense. For example, in the sentences “Agnes saw black little curves on a white sheet of paper”, and “Agnes saw words on a page” “saw” has the prototypical sense. (I note that in these sentences “saw” denote simple seeing .)

But seeing that those little lines are Dutch words and sentences qualifies as acquired perception. For to see so much, one has to go through a learning process. Once one has the acquired perception that the little lines are the Dutch words “de”, “klomp”, “is” and “gebroken” respectively, one may furthermore see that these words, in this order, jointly constitute a grammatical Dutch sentence, which is yet another instance of acquired perception. These acquired perceptions can be described by sentences in which “see” has the perceptual propositional sense, as, for example, in the sentences “Agnes saw that the little lines formed a Dutch word”, and “Agnes saw that the words compose a Dutch sentence”. (I note that “saw” in these sentences is fact - perception .)

Upon seeing that the sequence of Dutch words “de”, “klomp”, “is” and “gebroken” form a grammatical sentence, one may “see” that that sentence expresses the proposition that the wooden shoe is broken . This is, again, an acquired perception. But this kind of acquired perception can not be described by sentences in which “see” has the perceptual propositional sense. It can only be described by sentences in which “see” has the purely epistemic sense. Take for example the sentence “Agnes saw that the string of Dutch words expresses the proposition that the wooden shoe is broken.” Here “saw” has no visual sense at all. (I note that here too “saw” denotes fact-perception.)

So, reading involves “seeing” in different senses:

just seeing little lines, just seeing words and sentences (original seeing; “see” has the prototypical sense)

seeing that the little lines are words and sentences (acquired seeing; “see” has the perceptual propositional sense)

seeing that the sentences express a particular proposition (acquired seeing; “see” has the purely epistemic sense)

Some more illustrations of “see” in the purely epistemic sense, used in the context of reading, might be helpful. When someone says, upon reading a particular text, that she now “sees” that the word ‘scientism’ is not used by its author in a pejorative way, then “see” is used in the purely epistemic, non visual, sense. When we read, and on that basis acquire a sense of what the words and sentences mean and “see” what the writer intended to say, then “see” is again used in a purely epistemic sense. Finally, when we don’t know what “to procrastinate” means, consult a dictionary and there “see” that it means “to put things of”, “see” is again used in the purely epistemic sense.

All of this goes to show that reading isn’t just seeing , which is the main point of this section. But what I said also goes to show that reading is not merely “seeing” in the perceptual propositional sense, but that it also involves “seeing” in the purely epistemic sense.

4 What is reading? An analysis

In this section I offer an analysis of reading, by formulating necessary and sufficient conditions for “person S is reading”. The previous section already made a start on this, by noting that someone may be just seeing words and sentences, and yet not be reading, because she doesn’t know that what she is seeing are words. This strongly suggests that (object-)seeing words and sentences is insufficient for reading, even if it is necessary for it.

One may also (fact-)see words and sentences, for instance see that what one is looking at are words, or see that they are Italian or Dutch words, but still not be reading. For example, you may know enough to be able to see that the words you are looking at are Italian or Dutch words, but since you don’t know what the words mean and have no grasp of the syntax of these languages, you still aren’t reading. One isn’t reading in these cases, because one doesn’t know the language, or doesn’t know it well enough. This strongly suggests, first, that fact-seeing words and sentences is insufficient for reading, even if it is necessary for it; and second that knowing the language to which the words belong is also necessary for reading.

Now one may (object-)see the words, fact-see that they are Italian or Dutch words, and even know these languages (so know what their words mean, know their syntaxes) and still not be reading. The graphic designer who is working on the lay-out of the pages of a book that is to be published, (object-)sees words, sees that they are English words, and, even knows the language, and yet may not be reading, for example because she is not focused on the content of the words, isn’t trying to get a sense of what the words jointly mean. This strongly suggests that focusing on the content, trying to get a sense of what the words jointly mean, is also necessary for reading. Footnote 11

This condition rules out the following interactions with words as instances of reading: someone is reading aloud words that belong to a language that he knows, but he does it, so to speak, “mechanically”; he reads up the words alright, but he is not attending to their content , not to what they mean . That person is parroting, i.e. “articulating sounds that have meaning”, but isn’t reading. So-called “reading-machines”, pieces of assistive technology that scan words and sentences and use a speech synthesizer to read them out loud, are also parroting; they aren’t reading.

The expression “what words jointly mean”, is complex Footnote 12 but I intend it to cover the meaning sentences Footnote 13 as well as the meaning of paragraphs or even larger textual unit. Footnote 14 The meaning of these items can be understood, or apprehended, with greater or lesser accuracy, in greater or lesser depth. But some apprehension of the joint meaning of words is required if there is to be reading. That is why stones and cats are incapable of reading—they don’t understand, or apprehend, the joint meaning of words. This is not to deny that certain animals can be trained to respond to words and sentences in ways that mimic the responses of humans who do apprehend their meaning. Upon being confronted with a blackboard on which the words “Now stamp with your right leg five times!” are written, both a horse and a person may respond by stamping five times with their right leg. But only be the person, not the horse, has read the words, as only the person, not the horse, has understood the joint meaning of the words. The horse is at best trained to behaviorally respond in a certain way to what are in fact words composing a sentence, but doesn’t understand the words, because he doesn’t see that they are words, and doesn’t know the language to which they belong.

It should be noted that a person can be reading even when he mis apprehends the words, when he mis understands what they mean. That is why, as we say, there are good, not so good, and bad readers. But even bad readers are readers, as they have some kind of understanding, some form of apprehension of what the units they are reading mean . It should also be noted that a person is still reading, even when she is unsure about the precise meaning of certain words, or passages.

The discussion so far suggests the following analysis of reading:

S is reading, iff (i) S object-sees words and sentences; (ii) S knows the language to which the words and sentences belong; (iii) S fact-sees words and sentences, i.e. S believes (mostly dispositionally) that what she is looking at are words and sentences that belong to this particular language, that this particular words means such and so, etc. (iv) S acquires, through object- and fact-seeing the words and sentences, some understanding of what the words and sentences jointly mean.

Three remarks should further elucidate this account. One . My analysis of reading is in terms of seeing. However, blind people who have mastered Braille can also read. For although they can’t see words and sentences, they can touch them—and touch them in such a way that by touching them, they acquire a sense of what the words jointly mean. Isn’t that reading? Well, if one thinks about reading in more general terms, for instance in terms of one’s sense organs “taking in” words with the effect that one thereby acquires an understanding or apprehension of what the words jointly mean, blind people using Braille can read. However, this approach also renders listening to an audio book an instance of reading, which is unwanted, as it entails that even analphabetic persons can read, which is a contradiction in terms. We should therefore, perhaps, say that in a literal sense only a seeing person can read—but that in an analogical sense also blind persons that know Braille can read. It is an interesting exercise to provide an account of reading in an analogical sense that doesn’t entail that listening to an audio book also qualifies as reading. I leave that for another occasion.

Two . Gestalt-psychologists have argued that when humans form a “percept” (a Gestalt ), the “whole” of what is perceived has a reality of its own, that is, in a way that I won’t try to specify, independent of the reality of the perceived parts. We can see a whole face even if we are only subsidiarily aware of the face’s parts; the reality of seeing a whole face is, in some way, independent of seeing the parts that jointly compose the face. Reading also involves Gestalt -perception, in the sense that at least experienced readers don’t read texts by reading letter by letter and word by word. Rather they read by seeing larger “wholes”, not individual letters, but whole words; and often not even individual words, but entire parts of sentences, and even full sentences (when they are not too long). That is why clause (iii) explains S’s fact-seeing letters and words dispositionally : even if, when reading, readers mostly don’t form occurrent beliefs such as this is the letter “E” , or here is the word “Everything” , they do either dispositionally believe such things (in the way you dispositionally believe that Paris is the capital of France even when sound asleep, or mentally occupied by rather different matters) or have a disposition to believe them (in the way you have a disposition to believe you are shorter than 40 m upon being asked whether you are—and you have never ever entertained the proposition I am shorter than 40 m ).

Three . The proffered analysis isn’t committed to any view how reading and “interpreting” relate. It is not assuming that reading always involves interpretation, nor that it never does, nor that it sometimes does. The proposed analysis of reading is supposed to be such that the activity picked out by it, may yield knowledge of propositions of the sort listed in the beginning of Sect.  1 . Footnote 15

With this account of reading in place, I next discuss how to specify the source of knowledge that is, or is associated with, reading.

5 Reading as a source of knowledge

I have argued in Sects.  1 and 2 that we can come to know many things through reading, where reading is not attending to testimony, nor just seeing words and sentences. In other words, I have argued that reading is a source of knowledge that is coextensive with neither testimony, nor visual perception. However, the precise delineation of that source requires more attention. For what exactly, in the case of reading, is that “something in the life of a knower” that yields belief that can constitute knowledge? Three initially perhaps somewhat plausible candidates present themselves:

words and sentences

the reading of words and sentences

the reader’s emotive, logical, moral and other kinds of responses to the reading of words and sentences.

Candidate (A) can be written off almost immediately, as words on surfaces as such don’t yield beliefs, just as horses and paintings as such don’t yield perceptual beliefs. It is the reading of words and sentences that yields belief, just as it is the perception of horses and paintings that may yield belief. Yet we cannot simply settle on (B) as the best delineation of the source that reading is.

For the following reason. One of the things that we may come to know through reading, I suggested in Sect.  1 , example (d), is that a particular book humorous (Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim , for example), or horrifying (Bram Stoker’s Dracula , for example). However, we might need to be a bit more specific here. For the question arises: do we come to know these things (assuming we do come to know them) through reading (these) books , or do we come to know this through reading these books and through noticing our emotive responses to what we read ? If the former, then (B) is a sound delineation of the source, but if the latter, then (C). The argument for (C) is that we laugh out loud when we read Amis, and likely feel scared when we read Stoker, and that hadn’t we actually had these emotive responses, we wouldn’t have known through reading these books that they are humorous and horrifying respectively. Footnote 16 These examples suggest that the emotive responses we have while reading should be considered parts of the “something” in the life of the knower that can yield belief constituting knowledge.

In the same vein, we can come to know through reading, as in (e) on the list, that the article contains an invalid argument. But we cannot come to know this through reading, unless we also attend to our logic-sensitive responses to the argument that is presented in the article. This suggest that our logical responses to what we read must also be considered as parts of the source of knowledge that is associated with reading. This logical response is also operative in example (h), where the reader comes to know that the author assumes that p, as that is the inevitable though unobvious conclusion from what the author explicitly says. It is also operative in example (k), where the reader comes to know, through reading the proof, that the square root of 2 is not a rational number.

Also, one can come to know through reading, as in example (f), that the review is based on a misunderstanding. But in order to come to know this that way, one must remember what the work reviewed did say. So, to obtain the knowledge as described in (e), one must attend to what is stored in one’s memory, which suggests that the memorial responses to what is read must be considered part of the source that is associated with reading. This memorial response also accounts for example (i), where the reader comes to know that the author is intimately familiar with the Scottish Enlightenment.

Acquiring the knowledge that what the Dutch did in the Caribbean was wrong, as in example (j), from reading a ‘clean’ statement of facts and figures, requires that the reader attains to his moral sensibilities. These sensibilities should therefore also be considered as parts of the source of knowledge that is associated with reading.

Likewise, we can come to know that words are aesthetically pleasing, beautiful, sublime, uplifting, grave and the like; again in order to come to know this through reading , we must attend to the responses of our aesthetic sensibilities while reading.

The conclusion of this section thus seems to be that the “something” in the life of the knower that is connected with reading and that yields beliefs that constitute knowledge, is delineated by (C) rather than by (B). The source of knowledge that reading is, is the reader’s emotive, logical, moral and other kinds of responses to the words and sentences read.

However, it is also possible, given the cases that I have presented, to conclude that (B) delineates the source that reading is, and add to this that reading works the cognitive effects (provides knowledge) as specified in the cases on the list, often in conjunction with other sources. Case (e), for example, in which one comes to know through reading that the article contains an invalid argument, should then be analyzed as a case in which reading works its cognitive effect in conjunction with reason: through reading one comes to know what the argument is, and through reason one comes to know that it is invalid. And case (f), coming to know through reading that the review is based on a misunderstanding, should then be analyzed as a case in which reading works in conjunction with memory and reason: through reading one comes to know what it is that the reviewer says about the book, and in conjunction with memory and reason one comes to know that what the reviewer says is based on a misunderstanding. Similar kinds of things could be said about the other cases.

It seems to me that we should prefer the latter conclusion over the former. The reason is that someone can come to know through reading what the argument in the article is, and not see that it is invalid; yet that person has certainly read the article, and through it he has come to know what the argument was, even if his logical acumen left him. Or one can come to know through reading the facts and figures related to the Dutch presence in the Caribbean, and fail to come to know that what the Dutch did was wrong; yet the person has surely read the facts and figures, even if his moral sense didn’t work as it should. So, the reason why we should prefer the latter conclusion is that it more elegantly accounts for cases of these kinds, i.e. cases in which sources do not work in conjunction with each other.

6 The kind of source that reading is

In this section I attempt to further characterize the kind of source that reading is. I present some well-known distinctions that epistemologists have used to differentiate between kinds of sources, and apply them to reading.

Ernest Sosa has said, “There are faculties of two broad sorts: those that lead from beliefs to beliefs, and those that lead to beliefs but not from beliefs”. (Sosa 1991 : p. 225) The former he calls transmission faculties , the latter generation faculties . An example that he offers of the former is rationalist deduction: you believe that you are 1.94 m, from which you deduce that you are shorter than 30 m—which is a proposition that you also believe. An example that he offers of the latter is visual perception: this may generate the belief that the object you are looking at is round and yellow.

Sosa’s distinction can be recast in terms of “sources”. If we do that, we can see that reading often is a transmission source: I read your message that you will arrive at O’Hare airport next Tuesday on 6 pm: this is something you believe, and even know, and that I, through reading your message, now also believe (and know). However, reading is not only a transmission source. For as I have suggested, someone may come to know, by reading the book, that Lucky Jim is a very funny. Coming to know this that way, however, is not a matter of belief transmission. It isn’t that Kingsley Amis believed the book to be funny, and that he made This book is funny part of the propositional content of the book, and that I, by reading the book, picked up that proposition. Reading the book didn’t transmit belief or even knowledge, but generated it. In a similar vein: one may come to know, as in example (j), that what the Dutch did in the Caribbean was wrong by reading a ‘clean’ statement of facts and figures; if we assume that the author of the statement had no evaluative response to these facts and figures, it seems clear that when you come to know, through reading, that what the Dutch did was wrong, is not a matter of transmission but of generation of belief. So, reading is both a transmission and a generative source.

Audi distinguishes between sources that are ‘basic’ in the sense that they “yield knowledge without positive dependence on the operation of some other source of knowledge” and sources that are non-basic. (Audi 2002 : p. 72) Perception and reflection, he argues, are basic sources. One might know through perception that the flowers are yellow, and one might know through reflection that if two persons are first cousins, they share a pair of grandparents. In neither case does this knowledge positively depend on the operation of other sources. At the same time a basic source may be negatively dependent on the operation of some other source, in that one may acquire a defeater from other sources for a belief yielded by a basic source. If you believe, upon seeing them, that the flowers are yellow, but also remember that the shopkeeper tends to manipulate the lightning, then, even if the flowers are in fact yellow, your belief doesn’t constitute knowledge. This negative dependence on memory, however, doesn’t compromise the basicality of perception.

Reading is not a basic source—it is not a source that “yields knowledge without positive dependence on the operation of some other source of knowledge”. As argued in Sect.  2 , reading is positively dependent on perception. It is also positively dependent on memory; for when one reads a paper or newspaper or whatever, one needs to have some recollection of the earlier parts of what one has been reading in order to get a sense of what the words jointly mean. Also, as was argued in the previous section, reading is also positively dependent on sources like our aesthetic and moral sense, our reason and memory. There are many things we could not know through reading that we in fact can come to know through reading, without these other sources lending a helping hand.

Audi qualifies a source of knowledge as “essential” if “what we think of as ‘our knowledge’ in an over all sense would collapse” without it. (Audi 2002 : p. 74) He argues that memory, while not a basic source (as we cannot know anything from memory without coming to know it through some other source earlier), is an essential source. For without memory we would only know those parts and aspects that present themselves immediately to our senses. We wouldn’t recognize things, we wouldn’t know the past. Without memory, what we think of as ‘our knowledge in an overall sense’ would collapse indeed. Footnote 17

Audi’s category suggests there might also be epistemically in essential sources. Audi gives no examples, but might reading be one? Prior to the invention of writing, reading was not a source at all, and a fortiori not an essential source. Since the invention of writing, reading, for most people, seems to have been an inessential source, one that, although perhaps convenient, is not necessary to keep “what we think of as our knowledge in an overall sense” in tact. As we reach our own times, however, and note the ubiquity and centrality of the written media, the expansion of libraries and the world wide web, it seems that without reading these media, “what we think of as ‘our knowledge’ in an overall sense” would collapse indeed. Reading once was an inessential source, but as time went by it became for ever more people an essential source.

Audi defines a “unique source of knowledge” as a source that yields knowledge that “is not otherwise acquirable”. (Audi 2002 : p. 75) What we know through memory, can sometimes also be known through perception. One may remember that the flowers are wilting, but one may also see that they are. This means that neither memory nor visual perception is a unique source.

Is reading a unique source of knowledge? In many cases it is not. Much knowledge acquired through reading can or could also be acquired through some other source. Through reading so much in the newspaper, I may come to know that the Tate Gallery is open again; but I may also come to know this by just seeing that it is open again. However, a case could be made that sometimes at least reading is a unique source, depending on the sort of text that the words one is reading belong to. Reading certain kinds of poetry, for instance, or reading elaborate historical narratives may yield in a reader beliefs that constitute knowledge that could not be yielded by any other source. That particular knowledge of human psychology that can be yielded by reading John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men , may, perhaps, not be yielded by any other source. Footnote 18 If this is correct, reading can sometimes be a unique source of knowledge.

7 Conclusion

What I have been arguing, then, is, first, that reading isn’t coextensive with attending to testimony, nor with just seeing words and sentences. Next I proposed an analysis of reading in terms of (i) object-seeing words and sentences, (ii) knowing the language to which the words belong, (iii) fact-seeing words and sentences, so forming beliefs about them, (iv) an apprehension of what the words jointly mean. Next I argued that the source of knowledge that reading is, often works its cognitive effects in conjunction with other sources. Finally I suggested that the source of knowledge that reading is, is both transmissive and generative, non-basic, once not essential, but currently essential for many people, and sometimes unique. Footnote 19

In this paper, “source of knowledge” should be read as shorthand for “source of knowledge or warranted belief”, where “warrant” is a positive epistemic status but doesn’t entail truth.

Other important discussions of testimony don’t call testimony a source of knowledge, e.g. Foley ( 2001 ).

Listening intuitively also qualifies as a source of knowledge. In what follows I shall focus exclusively on reading, leaving it for another occasion to explore similarities and dissimilarities between reading and listening.

None of the following textbooks and non-textbooks even mention reading: Alston ( 1993 ), Audi ( 1998 ), BonJour ( 2002 ), Chisholm ( 1957 ), Dancy ( 1985 ), Dretske ( 1969 ), Gendler and Hawthorne ( 2006 ), Moser ( 1989 ), Plantinga ( 1993 ) and Pritchard ( 2006 ). The only philosopher on the analytic side that I know of who has written about reading is Wittgenstein ( 2009 ), sections 156–171; the concern there, however, is not epistemological.

“Words” must be understood here as including numerals and proper names.

Dretske ( 1969 : chapter 1) and Dretske ( 2000 : chapter 6). Audi ( 1998 : p. 15) calls this ‘simple perception’ too.

Simple seeing X and having no beliefs about X are compatible, even if much simple seeing in actual practice is accompanied by beliefs about X. Fact-seeing normally “builds on” simple seeing, in the sense that normally when one fact-sees that the animal is a horse , one also object-sees the horse. This is ‘normally’ so, but not always. For example, I can fact-see see that there is no horse in my study but that is not “built on” object-seeing a horse.

“Knowing a language” is a graded phenomenon, as a language can be known to rather different degrees; one person can know a particular language better than another person. But it is also the case that reading is a graded phenomenon: one person can be a better reader than another. And there is a relation between the two: the better one knows a language, the better a reader one tends to be. For an attempt to understand the metaphysics of graded phenomena, see Van Woudenberg and Peels ( 2018 ).

Dretske and many others as well, endorsed the so-called Entailment Thesis, according to which seeing that p, entails knowing that p. The Entailment Thesis has come under some attack in Turri ( 2010 ) and Pritchard ( 2012 ). Ranalli ( 2014 ) argues, convincingly, it seems to me, that the attack is unsuccessful.

Reid ( 1764 : p. 171). Reid, then, like Berkeley, held that what is given originally to sight is only two-dimensional (colors and 2D shapes, and 2D locations), and that three-dimensional shapes (cubes, spheres, etc.) are given originally only to touch. Van Cleve has argued that Reid and Berkeley were wrong here, due to the at the time unknown mechanism of stereopsis (Van Cleve 2015 : pp. 486–487). But even if Van Cleve is right, and Reid wrong here, this doesn’t vitiate the distinction between original and acquired perception.

Like “knowing a language” (see fn. 8), “getting a sense of the content, or capturing what the words jointly mean” is a graded phenomenon too. One reader can have a much better sense of what the words read jointly mean than another. So this condition too indicates a dimension in which one person can be a better reader than another. The condition suggests that the greater one’s understanding of the joint meaning of the words read, the better a reader one is.

See for that Van Woudenberg ( 2018 : pp. 112–122).

See Alston ( 2000 ): chapters 6 and 7.

A still very informative discussion of this notion is Skinner ( 1969 ).

It may be objected: doesn’t the account, focused as it is on words and meaning , imply that one cannot read the alphabet, as the letters of the alphabet aren’t words and individually (except from the alphabet’s first letter and the letter between ‘h’ and ‘j’) don’t mean anything? My response is: right, that isn’t reading; it fails the reading conditions. So when we say “S is reading the alphabet”, we are using “reading”, compared to Braille reading, in an even further extended analogical way.

It goes without saying that we could also come to know that these books are humorous and horrifying not through reading these books themselves, but because some authoritative person reports this fact.

BonJour ( 1998 ) is a forceful argument for the claim that reason (apriori rational insight) is an essential source.

A point in this direction is made by Gibson ( 2009 ).

For comments on material presented in an earlier version of this paper I am much indebted to Valentin Arts, Lieke Asma, Robert Audi, Wout Bisschop, Hans van Eyghen, Naomi Kloosterboer, Jennifer Lackey, Baron Reed, Rik Peels, Chris Ranalli, Jeroen de Ridder, Emanuel Rutten, and Nick Wolterstorff. Work on this paper was made possible by a grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation on “The Epistemic Responsibilities of the University”. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author, and don’t necessarily coincide with those of the Foundation.

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van Woudenberg, R. Reading as a source of knowledge. Synthese 198 , 723–742 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-02056-x

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So if we want our students to actualize their full potential as human beings and their capacity to participate in a democracy, and if we want to overcome social inequalities, we must actively promote pleasure reading in our schools, classrooms, and homes.

The Pleasures of Reading

Pleasure reading can be defined as reading that is freely chosen or that readers freely and enthusiastically continue after it is assigned. Our students (like all other human beings!) do what they find pleasurable. You get good at what you practice, and then outgrow yourself by deliberately developing new related interests and capacities.

In our study, we found that reading pleasure has many forms, and that each form provides distinct benefits:

• Play pleasure/immersive pleasure is when a reader is lost in a book. This is prerequisite to experiencing all the other pleasures; it develops the capacity to engage and immerse oneself, visualize meanings, relate to characters, and participate in making meaning.
• Intellectual pleasure is when a reader engages in figuring out what things mean and how texts have been constructed to convey meanings and effects. Benefits include developing deep understanding, proactivity, resilience, and grit.
• Social pleasure is when the reader relates to authors, characters, other readers, and oneself by exploring and staking one’s identity. This pleasure develops the capacity to experience the world from other perspectives; to learn from and appreciate others distant from us in time, space, and experience; and to relate to, reciprocate with, attend to, and help others different from ourselves.
• Work pleasure is when the reader develops a tool for getting something functional done—this cultivates the transfer of these strategies and insights to life.
• Inner work pleasure is when the reader imaginatively rehearses for her life and considers what kind of person she wants to be and how she can connect to something greater or strive to become something more. When our study participants engaged in this pleasure, they expressed and developed a growth mindset and a sense of personal and social possibility.

Taken together, these pleasures explain why pleasure reading promotes cognitive progress and social possibility, and even a kind of wisdom and wholeness, and, in a larger sense, the democratic project.

Promoting the Pleasures of Reading

We need to help less engaged readers experience these same pleasures. That is our study’s major takeaway: We must make all five pleasures central to our teaching. We need to name them, actively model them, and then assist students to experience them.

To promote play pleasure, use drama techniques like revolving role play, in-role writing, and hot seating of characters in order to reward all students for entering and living through story worlds and becoming or relating to characters in the way that highly engaged readers do.

To promote intellectual pleasure, frame units as inquiry, with essential questions. Read a book for the first time along with your students—figure it out along with them, modeling your fits and starts and problems through think-alouds and discussion. Or pair an assigned reading with self-selected reading from a list, or a free reading choice that pertains to the topic. Use student-generated questions for discussion and sharing. Use discussion structures like Socratic seminar that make it clear there is no teacherly agenda to fulfill as far as topics or insights to achieve.

To promote social pleasure, be a fellow reader with students. Put a sign on your door: “Dr. Wilhelm is reading _____.” Read one of their favorite books. Foster peer discussion of reading and response in pairs, triads, small groups, literature circles, book clubs, etc. Do group projects with reading that are then shared and even archived. Have a free reading program and promote books through book talks, online reviews, etc.

To foster work pleasure, use inquiry contexts and work toward culminating projects, including service and social action projects.

To foster inner work pleasure, engage students in imaginative rehearsals for living, inquiry geared toward current and future action, or inquiry for service. Have students think as authors making choices and plan scenarios for characters in dilemmas or those trying to help the characters. Write to the future or to a future self.

Make no mistake, the next-generation standards worldwide require profound cognitive achievements. Meeting such standards and the demands of navigating modern life will require student effort and the honing of strategies over time. Promoting the power of pleasure reading is a proven path there.

• Peterborough

Efficient and Effective Reading

Read with purpose.

• Read for general knowledge
• Read for detailed understanding
• Read critically

Good research notes are a result of active and critical reading. Active readers think about what they read and how they can use their reading in their essays.  Critical readers consider implications, biases, and assumptions and critically question the reading.

Determine a clear purpose before you read and maintain that purpose while you read to avoid collecting too many unnecessary notes. The purpose of your reading is guided by your thesis, research questions, and essay outline, so it is helpful to review these prior to reading a source.

Start by skimming each source. Look at the title, the abstract, the introduction, and conclusion; this helps you to understand the main argument (or thesis) in each source.

Plan your reading approach: you can read key texts first, read general before specific works, read more recent texts before older ones, or read texts grouped by a particular argument.

Read for General Knowledge

Before you begin to read, you should determine the reason you are reading the source. Skimming will help you to get the gist of a reading without noting all its supporting details.

Follow these four steps to read for general knowledge:

• Skim the introductory paragraph(s) to establish the author’s thesis or main argument.
• Read the first sentence or two of each paragraph to give you the main idea of the paragraph. Together, these should show the development of the thesis.
• Read the concluding sentence of each paragraph.
• Take notes (3 to 4 sentences) about the essence of the article and what ideas are most relevant to your essay.

Read for Detailed Understanding

Detailed reading is important when the source contains a central argument related to your topic or the author is an outstanding scholar in the field. Detailed reading may occupy a good deal of your research time. Learn more about reading argumentative texts and empirical articles.

Read carefully:

• Check for patterns of argument and organizational development. Pay particular attention to transitional words and phrases, for they can supply a context for the sentence or paragraph to come.
• A paragraph should contain one main idea and the topic sentence will help you to determine the main idea of the paragraph. The topic sentence is often the first sentence of the paragraph.
• Break down the sentences if the sentences are extremely complex. Read aloud through difficult passages, and concentrate on key phrases.
• Use a dictionary or a discipline-specific glossary for terms. Keep a list of important new terms and their meanings.

Read Critically

To read critically, you must carefully consider the argument, context, author, and author's perspective, while at the same time you must be aware of your own perspective and bias.

• Try to judge arguments on their merits: be aware of how your own bias may affect your judgment.
• Where a text comes from and who it is written for can affect meaning. Think how the historical and cultural context influences the reading.
• What does the author hope to achieve (to convince the reader, arouse sympathy, inspire indignation)? You may see an author emphasize certain points but ignore others in an effort to achieve his or her purpose.
• Do not accept authorities unquestioningly. Authorities do not always agree; the word of one is not indisputable.
• Watch for generalizations. Does the author draw conclusions on the basis of similarities between things that are not similar?
• Does the author think in extremes, ignoring possibilities in between? Anything neatly divided into polar opposites should be suspect.
• Watch for faulty reasoning. Does the author avoid a question, talking around it by tackling other issues? Does the author avoid answering the question?

Reading and making notes

• Introduction

Setting reading goals

Choosing the right texts, how many sources should you read, going beyond the reading list, active reading, reading techniques, common abbreviations in academic texts.

• Effective note-making
• Reading e-books for university study
• Using and evaluating websites

This guide will suggest ways for you to improve your reading skills and to read in a more focused and selective manner.

• Reading academic texts (video) Watch this brief video tutorial for more on the topic.
• Reading academic texts (transcript) Read along while watching the video tutorial.
• The best file formats and how to use them An interactive guide by the Technology Enhanced Learning team on the key features of alternative formats (such as PDF and ePUB), and how to make the most of these in developing your reading habits.

Before starting to read you need to consider why you are reading and what you are trying to learn. You will need to vary the way you read accordingly.

• If you are reading for general interest and to acquire background information for lectures you will need to read the topic widely but with not much depth.
• If you are reading for an essay you will need to focus the reading around the essay question and may need to study a small area of the subject in great depth. Jot down the essay question, make a note of any questions you have about it, and don't get side-tracked and waste time on non-relevant issues.

Below is an excellent short video tutorial on  reading and notemaking  developed by the Learning Development team at the University of Leicester.

• Reading and note making (video) Video tutorial from the Study Advice Team.
• Researching your assignment (video) A brief screencast on what you need to think about when starting your research.
• Researching for your assignment (transcript) Read along while watching the video tutorial.

It is unlikely that you will be able - or be expected - to read all the books and articles on your reading list. You will be limited by time and by the availability of the material.

To decide whether a book is relevant and useful:

• Look at the author's name, the title and the date of publication. Is it essential reading? Is it out of date?
• Read the publisher's blurb on the cover or look through the editor's introduction to see whether it is relevant.
• Look at the contents page. Does it cover what you want? Is it at the right level? Are there too few pages on the topic - or too many?
• Look through the introduction to get an idea of the author's approach.
• Look up an item in the index (preferably something you know a bit about) and read through one or two paragraphs to see how the author deals with the material.
• Look though the bibliography to see the range of the author's sources.
• Are the examples, illustrations, diagrams etc. easy to follow and helpful for your purpose?

To select useful articles from journals or research papers :

• Read the summary or abstract. Is it relevant?
• Look at the Conclusions and skim-read the Discussion, looking at headings. Is it worth reading carefully because it is relevant or interesting?
• Look through the Introduction. Does it summarise the field in a helpful way? Does it provide a useful literature review?
• It is a seminal piece of work – essential reading.
• It is highly relevant to your essay, etc.
• It is likely that you can get ideas from it.
• There is nothing else available and you are going to have to make the most of this.
• It is so interesting that you can't put it down!

If there is no reading list...

• Use the library website and look up  Subject help .
• Find a general textbook on the subject.
• Use encyclopaedias and subject based dictionaries.
• Do a web search BUT stay focused on your topic AND think about the reliability of the web sites. (For help with this, see the Library's guide to  Evaluating websites .)
• Browse the relevant shelves in the library and look for related topics.
• Ask your tutor for a suggestion for where to start.
• The Library also have advice on how to  and a series of brief videos  showing you how to find and access Library resources.
• To help you decide whether a source is appropriate for academic research, try this short training resource from the University of Manchester -  Know your sources 
• Subject guides Guides to specialist resources in subjects studied at the University.
• Evaluating websites Hints on assessing the reliability of information you find on the Internet.
• Library videos A link to Library videos on how to use the Library and access resources
• Know your sources On-line training tutorial from Manchester University on evaluating academic sources

It is not a good idea to rely on 1 or 2 sources very heavily as this shows a lack of wider reading, and can mean you just get a limited view without thinking of an argument of your own.

Nor is it useful (or possible) to read everything on the reading list and try to fit it all into your assignment. This usually leads to losing your own thoughts under a mass of reading.

The best way is to be strategic about your reading and identify what you need to find out and what the best sources to use to find this information.

It can be better to read less and try to think about, and understand, the issues more clearly - take time to make sure you really get the ideas rather than reading more and more which can increase your confusion.

• Use the Library catalogue to find other books on that topic. Either click on the subject headings in the full record of the books you wanted; or make a note of their Call Numbers and check on the shelves for similar titles.
• Look for relevant journal articles using the Summon search box on the Library homepage or using key resources listed on the guide for your subject.
• Use online resources BUT always evaluate them to see if they are appropriate for academic purposes. (For help with this, see the Library's guide to  Evaluating websites .)  
• Ask around to see if any of your fellow students has the books you need. You may be able to borrow them briefly to photocopy any material you need. But be careful to return it promptly - and if you lend a Library book taken out with your ticket to someone else, make sure they take it back on time, or your account will be blocked!
• Don't forget to ask your friendly Academic Liaison Librarian for advice - they are happy to help you find relevant, academic sources for your assignments.
• Contact your Academic Liaison Librarian

Keep focused on your reading goals. One way to do this is to ask questions as you read and try to read actively and creatively. It is a good idea to think of your own subject related questions but the following may be generally useful

• What do I want to know about?
• What is the main idea behind the writing?
• What conclusions can be drawn from the evidence?
• In research, what are the major findings?

Questioning the writing

• What are the limitations or flaws in the evidence?
• Can the theory be disproved or is it too general?
• What examples would prove the opposite theory?
• What would you expect to come next?
• What would you like to ask the author?

Forming your own opinion

• How does this fit in with my own theory/beliefs?
• How does it fit with the opposite theory/beliefs?
• Is my own theory/beliefs still valid?
• Am I surprised?
• Do I agree?

Your reading speed is generally limited by your thinking speed. If ideas or information requires lots of understanding then it is necessary to read slowly. Choosing a reading technique must depend upon why you are reading:

• To enjoy the language or the narrative.
• As a source of information and/or ideas.
• To discover the scope of a subject - before a lecture, seminar or research project.
• To compare theories or approaches by different authors or researchers.
• For a particular piece of work e.g. essay, dissertation.

It is important to keep your aims in mind. Most reading will require a mixture of techniques e.g. scanning to find the critical passages followed by reflective reading.

Good for searching for particular information or to see if a passage is relevant:

• Look up a word or subject in the index or look for the chapter most likely to contain the required information.
• Use a pencil and run it down the page to keep your eyes focusing on the search for key words

Skim reading

Good to quickly gain an overview, familiarise yourself with a chapter or an article or to understand the structure for later note-taking

• Don't read every word.
• Do read summaries, heading and subheadings.
• Look at tables, diagrams, illustrations, etc.
• Read first sentences of paragraphs to see what they are about.
• If the material is useful or interesting, decide whether just some sections are relevant or whether you need to read it all.

Reflective or critical reading

Good for building your understanding and knowledge.

• Think about the questions you want to answer.
• Read actively in the search for answers.
• Look for an indication of the chapter's structure or any other "map" provided by the author.
• reasons, qualifications, evidence, examples...
• Look for "signposts" –sentences or phrases to indicate the structure e.g. "There are three main reasons, First.. Secondly.. Thirdly.." or to emphasise the main ideas e.g. "Most importantly.." "To summarise.."
• Connecting words may indicate separate steps in the argument e.g. "but", "on the other hand", "furthermore", "however"..
• After you have read a chunk, make brief notes remembering to record the page number as well as the complete reference (Author, title, date, journal/publisher, etc)
• At the end of the chapter or article put the book aside and go over your notes, to ensure that they adequately reflect the main points.
• Ask yourself - how has this added to your knowledge?
• Will it help you to make out an argument for your essay?
• Do you agree with the arguments, research methods, evidence..?
• Add any of your own ideas – indicating that they are YOUR ideas use [ ] or different colours.

Rapid reading

Good for scanning and skim-reading,  but  remember that it is usually more important to understand what you read than to read quickly. Reading at speed is unlikely to work for reflective, critical reading.

If you are concerned that you are really slow:

• Check that you are not mouthing the words – it will slow you down
• Do not stare at individual words – let your eyes run along a line stopping at every third word. Practise and then lengthen the run until you are stopping only four times per line, then three times, etc.
• The more you read, the faster you will become as you grow more familiar with specialist vocabulary, academic language and reading about theories and ideas. So keep practising…

If you still have concerns about your reading speed, book an  individual advice session  with a Study Adviser.

• ibid : In the same work as the last footnote or reference (from ibidem meaning: in the same place)
• op.cit: In the work already mentioned (from operato citato meaning in the work cited)
• ff: and the following pages
• cf: compare
• passim: to be found throughout a particular book.

You may also find journal titles abbreviated. You will often find a list in your Course Handbook of the most often used in your discipline. Or ask the Academic Liaison Librarian for your subject.

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3 Effectively and Efficiently Reading the Credibility of Online Sources

Ellen C. Carillo and Alice Horning

Because reading and writing are related interpretive practices, attending to critical reading is an important part of teaching writing. [1] This chapter defines critical reading and offers students strategies for undertaking a specific kind of critical reading, namely reading for credibility, particularly of online sources. The chapter gives examples of the importance of reading for credibility in a variety of situations, including one’s day-to-day life and while engaged in academic projects. Specifically, students are introduced to what is called “lateral reading,” an approach that helps students determine a source’s credibility by leaving the source and seeing what is said about it elsewhere on the Web. To support this approach, the chapter provides definitions of misinformation and disinformation, addresses the difference between primary and secondary sources, and teaches students the importance of recognizing bias in sources and in themselves.

Both of us writing this chapter are scholars who teach our own students that good reading skills are essential to developing effective writing abilities. We have both published books and articles in this area and over the years have claimed to know a lot about the best ways to teach critical reading. With this background, you would think that we’d both be really effective critical readers, but Alice recently had her come-uppance at the hands of the Internet. Here’s what happened: At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when information about ways to stay safe was being circulated, Alice received an e-mail from a colleague she considers a highly reliable source. The message had been forwarded to her colleague from someone purporting to be a physician whose daughter works in infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins, one of the nation’s leading hospitals. It seemed like a good source: it contained a number of pieces of familiar, general advice about handwashing, social distancing, and masks, all information we have heard dozens of times. But it also contained what Alice later realized was some suspicious advice for killing the virus. For instance: “Any mix with 1 part bleach and 5 parts water directly dissolves the protein, breaks it down from the inside,” and “UV LIGHT on any object that may contain it breaks down the virus protein.” The email also described how alcohol could be used to kill the virus, but warned in all caps, “NO SPIRITS, NOR VODKA” but “Listerine will work—65% alcohol” (“Covid Precautions”).

Looking back now, Alice realizes that various other wacky points appeared in the message. Still, she sent it along to friends and family including her daughters, one of whom is a public health nurse. Her daughter fired back quite soon to point out an assortment of errors and misleading claims, noting that she and her professional colleagues were very concerned about the amount of misinformation and disinformation being passed around in just this way. As a reading scholar who has taught others about the importance of credible sources, Alice was appalled and embarrassed. She had to send follow-up messages telling one and all to disregard what she had just sent. Where, oh where, were her critical reading skills?

Alice’s daughter’s response also points to two words that sound a lot alike, but actually mean two different things. In the MLA Guide to Digital Literacy , Ellen has defined these terms carefully and we want you to have these definitions in mind as you read this chapter because they will help you understand the two different ways you can be misled by information on the Web: “Both [misinformation and disinformation] describe factually incorrect information. The difference between the two is intent. Disinformation involves maliciously spreading wrong information. Misinformation is incorrect information, but it is not spread with malicious intent” (Carillo 13). Among all of the credible information on the Web there is also misinformation and disinformation, and critical reading skills are crucial to identifying the differences. We will come back to these terms a bit later, but we hope you will keep them, as well as Alice’s cautionary tale, in mind.

What Do We Mean by Critical Reading?

You may be thinking to yourself, “I already know how to read.” We realize that if you are reading this chapter you are likely in college and have been reading—as in decoding language—for more than a decade, maybe more than two or three decades. Critical reading is different from just reading or decoding language, though. Critical reading is really an umbrella term— an expansive and encompassing term—for focused, purposeful, and deep reading practices. In other words, critical reading is more than simply passing your eyes over words. This chapter will teach you about reading for credibility, one kind of critical reading. Specifically, we will describe how “reading laterally”—or across many sources—can help you judge the credibility of a single source and find quality information online.

What Is Credibility?

If a source is credible, that means it is trustworthy. While you can trust the nonfiction and informational texts (e.g., textbooks and scholarly articles) that your instructors assign because these have likely already been vetted— or approved—by experts in that field, you will often find yourself in the position of needing to locate additional sources as you conduct research in a first-year writing course or as you move into your chosen major. The Web has plenty of credible information on it, but the sheer volume of information can make the process of finding this information more challenging. What we say in this chapter to help you judge a source’s credibility is applicable across disciplines and even in your personal life, too, as evidenced by the example that opened this chapter.

Moving Beyond Your Source to Evaluate Its Credibility

There are many ways of evaluating sources, some of which you are likely familiar with. You may have experience applying different kinds of checklists—such as the CRAAP (Credibility, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose) Checklist, which allows you to determine whether the source you are reading is “CRAAP.” This approach, wherein you ask a series of questions about the source and answer these questions by looking more closely at the source itself, has been used for decades, but as Stanford University researcher Sarah McGrew and her colleagues explain:

the checklist approach falls short because it underestimates just how sophisticated the web has become. Worse, the approach trains students’ attention on the website itself, thus cutting them off from the most efficient route to learning more about a site: finding out what the rest of the web has to say (after all, that’s why we call it a web). (7)

To replace this outdated approach, these educators offer what they call “lateral reading,” which, instead, involves leaving the source and moving to other sources across (i.e., laterally) the Web to assess the source’s credibility.

McGrew and her colleague Sam Wineburg at Stanford introduced the concept of “lateral reading” after they conducted a study of how three different groups of people assessed the credibility of sources, among other tasks. Wineburg and McGrew gave professional fact checkers, Stanford undergraduate students, and historians with PhDs various digital sources that addressed social and political issues and asked them to evaluate them in various ways, including for credibility. Wineburg and McGrew observed how these three groups did so. They found that the undergraduates and historians took the traditional “vertical” approach to assessment, remaining tethered to the single source/site and looked closely—up and down it in a vertical fashion—to consider the different elements of the source itself, including site design; whether there were any errors or typos; and if the source included references. The professional fact checkers, however, immediately left the source to assess its credibility. They opened tab after tab to search for information about the source, including about the site’s sponsoring organization and the author (Wineburg and McGrew 19). They also reviewed references to the source, site, organization, or author they found elsewhere (Wineburg and McGrew 19).

Professional fact-checkers capitalize on what the Web has to offer—a seemingly limitless number of other sources to use for the purpose of cross-referencing and corroboration. This practice holds promise for students as well (Rodrigue; Wineburg and McGrew; McGrew et al.; Caulfield). In the following sections, we share some steps for taking this approach to reading the credibility of online sources.

Steps for Reading Laterally to Assess the Credibility of Online Sources

• Leave the site to do a quick check as to whether it appears on other fact-checking or hoax-busting sites. This step can save you a lot of time, especially if someone has already reported the site. You may already be familiar with Snopes, perhaps the most well-known fact-checking site, but there are other nonpartisan sites such as PolitiFact and FactCheck.org that can be helpful, too.
• Leave the site in question to explore more about the author of the piece. What can you find out about the author elsewhere on the Web? Does the author seem like an expert on the subject? What else has the author written? Is the author affiliated with any organizations or groups? How might this information allow you to recognize any biases the author may have?
• Leave the site in question to explore more about the site itself. If you did not locate the site on one of the fact-checking sites listed above, then do a simple Google search. What can you find out about the site? Who or what (i.e., a company or organization) sponsors or owns the site? Does that ownership suggest any biases? What seems to be the intended purpose of the site? Is the site selling anything? Who is the audience for the site? Are visitors to the site looking to purchase something? Does a commercial aspect the site may have potentially conflict with the information it provides?

As you move through these steps you want to do so deliberately and “take your bearings” as you do so. The successful fact checkers in Wineburg and McGrew’s study regularly took their bearings, which amounted to making a plan for moving forward (12). Applying the steps above, the following plan emerges: Beginning with #1, keep track of any fact-checking sites that suggest the source/site in question is not credible. As you move onto #2 and #3 to other sites where you read about the author and the site in question, track the credibility of those sites, too. Move outward from them to read about those sites on at least three other sites or until you feel confident and have not found any conflicting information about their credibility. Make notes as you go. Finally, review your notes in order to make an informed determination about the credibility of the source in question.

Recognizing the Difference Between Primary Sources and Secondary Sources While Reading Laterally

As you are reading laterally you will likely encounter both primary and secondary sources. Primary sources provide first-hand or direct information and include photographs, video and audio recordings, letters, diaries, government documents, speeches, historical documents, pieces of literature, art, research studies, and interviews. Secondary sources offer secondary accounts of the information or evidence in a primary source. Secondary sources are about primary sources. Secondary sources include book and movie reviews, scholarly articles about novels, and news stories about scientific studies. Secondary sources summarize, interpret, or draw on primary sources in some way.

Going to a primary source can be an important part of reading laterally because it will allow you to recognize bias in the secondary sources you locate, which is important to judging the credibility of a source (more on that below). While finding different perspectives on a subject in the form of secondary sources is useful—and your instructor may require you to locate secondary sources—going to the primary source allows you to first form your own judgments, interpretations, and conclusions without being swayed by what others think. For example, an article that draws on a scientific study may contain a hyperlink to that study, the primary source. By reading the study before you read the article about the study (the secondary source) you can form your own ideas without allowing the article to influence you. Even if a secondary source does not contain a hyperlink to the primary source you can usually locate the primary source by consulting the reference information included either in the secondary source or on a reference page at its end. The Web is filled with secondary sources, which sometimes makes it difficult to find primary sources, but locating primary sources while reading laterally will give you the freedom to form your own judgments about the information rather than relying on a secondary source to do so for you.

Using Lateral Reading to Determine the Credibility of Online Images

Lateral reading is a useful practice when it comes to determining the credibility of online images, too. The saying goes, “seeing is believing,” but with so many ways to manipulate images, seeing is no longer believing. Unfortunately, some primary sources, such as photographs, may be manipulated by Photoshop and other software that has become widely available. Photoshop and similar software have been used in many ways and to a range of ends. For example, Fox News cropped President Donald Trump from a picture in which he appears alongside convicted sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislane Maxwell (Davidoff Studios/Getty Images). You can see the original picture contains four people, including Trump, and the cropped picture, which appeared during a Fox News program, contains all but Trump (Fox News). Fox News later apologized for what was described as an error. In other instances, two or more photographs have been merged to do the exact opposite— to put someone alongside another person or people in order to discredit them. For example, as Senator John Kerry was campaigning for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2004, a picture of him from 1971 was merged with a picture of Jane Fonda from 1972 (Mikkelson). The composite was intended to discredit Kerry, a Vietnam War veteran, by placing him alongside Fonda who was an anti-Vietnam war activist and thought to be unpatriotic by many Americans.

You can conduct a reverse image search on the Web to validate the authenticity of images, which, when paired with lateral reading, can give you insight into a photograph’s credibility. Google’s support pages offer specific instructions. Conducting a reverse image search will render a list of other places on the Web where the image appears. You can then read laterally to locate the original image, as well as other versions of that image, which will help you establish the credibility of the image in question.

You can use the same lateral reading approach to assess the credibility of videos. You may have heard of deepfake videos, which are videos that have been manipulated to show people saying and doing things that they did not actually do. Deepfake technology is advancing very quickly, making it difficult to discern a video that has been manipulated. As of writing this chapter, the best way to recognize a deepfake video is to look for inconsistencies between what people are saying in the video and what they have said in other contexts; depending on when you’re reading this, you may need to search for more ways to recognize deepfakes based on rapidly changing technology. Reading laterally to locate those other contexts— whether videos, articles, or interviews—will help you recognize these inconsistencies. Additionally, recognizing inconsistencies in the video itself can also suggest that it has been manipulated, whether the lighting seems to change throughout, or the way the person’s face or eyes are illuminated changes over the course of the video (Sample). There may also be more glaring issues, including bad lip-syncing. The point is that we are seeing disinformation circulate at a faster pace than ever before and the technologies to manipulate images and videos are moving at a similarly fast pace. Be cautious with primary sources, particularly if the source is a photograph or video, and be sure to use available resources, including the lateral reading approach, to assess credibility.

Addressing Bias While Reading Laterally

Reading laterally can help you assess the credibility of everything from news articles to videos, but as you read laterally, you need to recognize how bias informs both what you read and how you read. You are likely familiar with the term “bias,” usually thought of as a personal opinion or preference that makes it impossible to see an idea objectively. Keep in mind the difference between biased information and incorrect information. While biased information is skewed in some way, incorrect information is just plain wrong. Although some media outlets have been criticized because of their dissemination of incorrect information, bias is the more common culprit. For example, a few minutes on Fox News, MSNBC and the PBS Newshour will give you a sense of bias, particularly if you are careful to watch the reporting on the same event. One helpful resource for considering the potential bias in news sources is the free, basic version of the Interactive Media Bias chart, which gives an overview of many news outlets and their relative political positions, which provide insight into their biases.

Beyond recognizing the role bias plays across media outlets, you will also need to be able to negotiate bias when completing source-driven writing assignments in your classes. Suppose your class has been discussing the regulation of the Internet, and you are assigned to investigate the controversial subject of Internet privacy protection. You know personal information, financial status, and health issues should be stored securely. However, businesses might want access to this information in order to offer you products and services related to your needs as revealed by your searches. Each side would be biased in its own favor, and your job as a critical reader is to provide a fair discussion of these differing views of appropriate regulation. Remember that you cannot somehow remove bias from these sources. Instead, your role is to recognize the bias in each perspective, consider its effect on the source’s credibility, and negotiate it as you develop your own point of view or argument.

If you are writing about the regulation of the Internet, for example, you would want to begin by searching for sources on the subject. An article by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) will give you an overview of Internet privacy legislation, including by state, while an article from a different source, ProPublica, will give you a more targeted and detailed look at how Facebook seeks to protect its users’ privacy through policies that prohibit advertisers from misusing the platform (“Status of Internet Privacy Legislation By State”; Angwin and Parris). Reading vertically on each site’s “About” link will give you a sense of who is behind each site, but as we have pointed out, reading vertically is problematic. For example, while the ACLU claims to be a non-partisan, nonprofit organization engaged in defense of civil liberties, a lateral search of critics of the ACLU produces a 2020 article by the overtly conservative Heritage Foundation that makes clear that the ACLU has its own biases (Canaparo). In other words, moving beyond the ACLU’s own site provides relevant information about its biases that its own “About” section doesn’t reveal.

The same series of steps with ProPublica show that it, too, claims to be a nonprofit, non-partisan reporting site, but moving away from the source reveals that it leans left, according to AllSides, another valuable site that evaluates bias (“About Us”; “ProPublica Media Bias Ranking”). At this point, you would want to take your bearings and move forward by locating sources that balance those liberal perspectives that are likely to value an individual’s privacy over the freedoms of large companies and corporations. Further lateral reading of the sources cited in each article (by following embedded links or opening new tabs), as well as the citations in the other sources you locate will help you to see bias more clearly. Thus, taking bearings and using lateral reading strategies can reveal bias in all kinds of material, which is crucial to negotiating the credibility of sources and representing controversial issues in fair and balanced ways.

Recognizing Your Own Biases

It’s not just sources that are biased. All of us are biased, and this can get in the way of effective reading and research habits. Some of our biases come from our backgrounds and experiences, plus what you learn at home and school. Each day we are exposed to large amounts of information that attempt to sway our views. When people get stuck in their own beliefs, and only seek out and believe evidence to support their views, the process is known as confirmation bias. Confirmation bias can be especially problematic when you are conducting research because it can get in the way of your valuing sources that offer different perspectives from your own. As dangerous as this practice is, it’s fairly common, according to Stanford University psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt: “People tend to seek out and attend to information that already confirms their beliefs. We find such information more trustworthy and are less critical of it, even when we are presented with credible, seemingly unassailable facts that suggest otherwise” (33). Confirmation bias can result in choosing sources that confirm ideas or information you already know or believe, which can be counterproductive whether you are writing a research essay, seeking information for health and safety reasons, or making a decision about which candidate to vote for.

Recognizing confirmation bias, though, is a first step toward mitigating it, as psychologist Raymond S. Nickerson of Tufts University points out: “Perhaps simply being aware of the confirmation bias—of its pervasiveness and of the many guises in which it appears—might help one both to be a little cautious about making up one’s mind quickly on important issues and to be somewhat more open to opinions that differ from one’s own than one might otherwise be” (211). In terms of critical reading this means that you should regularly monitor the perspectives in the sources you choose to ensure that you are not only relying on sources that always already confirm your ideas. Additionally, you should deliberately seek out sources that oppose your ideas so you have a more well-rounded understanding of the subject and offer a fair appraisal of a topic or issue.

Additional Tips that Draw on Lateral Reading

Reading laterally can help you assess the credibility of the information, including photographs and videos, you find online and help you read more deeply. To further support your lateral reading, we offer the following tips that draw on the lateral reading approach

Tip 1: Click on Hyperlinks

Research has shown that in many cases students don’t take full advantage of what the Web has to offer (Rodrigue; Wineburg and McGrew; McGrew et al.; Purdy). Even though studies suggest that students prefer texts with hyperlinks, particularly when they are conducting research, they don’t always click on them (Purdy; Vassileva and Chankova; Rodrigue). Does this characterize your way of reading online? Instead of clicking on hyperlinks embedded in news stories and other online texts students often simply read online texts as if they were print texts. Keep in mind that online texts are connected to other texts, and those texts are connected to others. Actively following hyperlinks can deepen your reading experience by directing you to primary sources, related sources, and texts that can provide additional context for what you are reading.

Tip 2: Open New Tabs

Just as you can deepen your reading experience by following hyperlinks you can do the same by opening new tabs to further explore your subject. Not all online texts have hyperlinks embedded in them. As such, it may be up to you to take the initiative to seek out additional information. Like hyperlinks, opening new tabs can help you learn more about a subject, create some context for it, explore what others have said about it, and read up on relevant definitions or related ideas. The possibilities really are endless but only if you allow your curiosity to guide you.

Tip 3: Move Around the Web Deliberately

We have all had the experience of starting somewhere on the Web and then two hours later having no idea how we got to where we ended up. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, and you can stumble upon useful material inadvertently. But, when you are conducting research for an assignment or out of a personal interest, it’s important to practice two behaviors that Wineburg and McGrew noticed the professional fact checkers engaging in: “taking bearings” and “click restraint.” As noted above, taking bearings involves “charting a plan for moving forward,” as do sailors, so that you are moving purposefully in a productive direction (Wineburg and McGrew 30). When you practice click restraint, you don’t trust that the first results that a search engine like Google Scholar generates are necessarily the most relevant, but instead you spend time “scanning the search engine results page and reading the snippets before clicking on any link” to make an informed decision about where to go (Wineburg and McGrew 28). Both of these practices slow you down, which is the first step toward a deeper reading experience.

Final Thoughts

Some of the strategies presented in this chapter may be new to you while you may already be familiar with others. Enriching your online reading practices involves paying closer attention to how you already read online sources and how you currently judge their credibility. Once you reflect on your current practices you can then fill in any gaps with the strategies laid out in this chapter. New reading practices may seem cumbersome at first, but they will soon enough become second nature. Just remember not to let your guard down like Alice did!

Works Cited

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ACT. The Condition of College and Career Readiness, 2019 . http://www.act.org/content/act/en/research/reports/act-publications/condition-of-college-and-career-readiness-2019.html . Accessed 25 Aug. 2020.

Angwin, Julia, and Terry Parris Jr. “Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race.” ProPublica , 28 Oct. 2016, https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers-exclude-users-by-race . Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news . Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

Buy Dehydrated Water . https://buydehydratedwatercom.weebly.com/ . Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

Canaparo, Giancarlo. “The ACLU Loses Its Way.” The Heritage Foundation, 19 May 2020, https://www.heritage.org/the-constitution/commentary/the-acluloses-its-way . Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

Carillo, Ellen C. MLA Guide to Digital Literacy . MLA, 2019.

Caulfield, Mike. “How ‘News Literacy’ Gets the Web Wrong.” Hapgood , 4 March 2017, www.hapgood.us/2017/03/04/how-news-literacy-gets-the-web-wrong .

CBC News. https://www.cbc.ca/news . Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

The Citation Project: Reframing the Conversation Around Plagiarism, http://www.citationproject.net/ . Accessed 6 April 2021.

“Covid Precautions.” Received by Alice Horning, 30 March 2020.

Davidoff Studios Photography/Getty Images. Trump, Knauss, Epstein and Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago. Palm Beach, Florida. 12 February 2000. https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/from-left-american-real-estate-developer-donald-trump-and-news-photo/700334384?adppopup=true

“Dihydrogen Monoxide – DHMO Homepage.” Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division , http://www.dhmo.org/ . Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

Eberhardt, Jennifer L. Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice that Shapes What We See, Think, and Do . Viking, 2019.

FactCheck.org . https://www.factcheck.org/ . Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

Food Babe . https://foodbabe.com/ . Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

Fox News. “Ghislane Maxwell Charged in Connection to Jeffrey Epstein Case,” https://www.wishtv.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Fox-crop.jpg . Accessed 15 April 2021.

“Homepage.” ProPublica.org , https://www.propublica.org/ . Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

“Interactive Media Bias Chart.” Ad Fontes Media , https://www.adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart/ . Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

McGrew, Sarah, et al. “Improving University Students’ Web Savvy: An Intervention Study. British Journal of Educational Psychology , vol. 89, 2019, pp. 485-500.

Mercola . https://www.mercola.com/ . Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

Mikkelson, David. “John Kerry.” Snopes , https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/john-kerry-3/ . Accessed 15 April 2021.

The New York Times , https://www.nytimes.com . Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

Nickerson, Raymond S. “Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises.” Review of General Psychology, vol. 2, no. 2, 1998, pp. 175-220.

PolitiFact . https://www.politifact.com/ . Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

“ProPublica Media Bias Rating.” All Sides , https://www.allsides.com/news-source/propublica . Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

Purdy, James P. “Why First-year College Students Select Online Research Resources as Their Favorite.” First Monday , vol. 17, no. 9-3, 2012, http://firstmonday.org/article/view/4088/3289

Rodrigue, Tanya K. “The Digital Reader, The Alphabetic Writer, and The Space Between: A Study in Digital Reading and Source-Based Writing” Computers and Composition , vol. 46, 2017, pp. 4-20 .

Sample, Ian. “What Are Deepfakes and How You Can Spot Them.” The Guardian , 13 Jan. 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jan/13/what-are-deepfakes-and-how-can-you-spot-them .

Snopes.com . https://www.snopes.com/ . Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

Stanford History Education Group. Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning . https://sheg.stanford.edu/upload/V3LessonPlans/Executive%20Summary%2011.21.16.pdf . Accessed 25 Aug. 2020.

“Status of Internet Privacy Legislation By State.” American Civil Liberties Union , https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/internet-privacy/status-internet-privacy-legislation-state . Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

“The Taxonomy of Barney.” The Annals of Improbable Research (AIR) , 1995, https://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume1/v1i1/barney.htm . Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

“US & Canada News.” Al Jazeera , https://www.aljazeera.com/us-canada . Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

Vassileva, Irena and Mariya Chankova. “Scholars’ Information Exploitation Habits in Multimedia Environment.” The Digital Scholar: Academic Communication in Multimedia Environment , edited by Irena Vassileva, Mariya Chankova, Esther Breuer, and Klaus P. Schneider, Frank and Timme, 2020, pp. 61-91.

The Washington Post . https://www.washingtonpost.com/ . Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

Wineburg, Sam and Sarah McGrew. “Lateral Reading and the Nature of Expertise: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information.” Teachers College Record , vol. 121, no. 11, 2019, pp. 1-40.

“World News.” The Jerusalem Post , https://www.jpost.com/international . Accessed 29 Mar. 2021.

Teacher Resources for Effectively and Efficiently Reading the Credibility of Online Sources

We suggest that you use this chapter early in your term, or as soon as you have students doing any kind of research project. The sooner you can help students improve their critical reading skills, the better their overall work will be. There is ample research of several different kinds that indicates students’ difficulties with reading and assessing the credibility of online material. This research includes careful studies of students’ inability to evaluate online materials (Stanford History Education Group); qualitative evaluations of students’ own writing that includes the use of sources (from the Citation Project); and standardized test data (from ACT and others). This chapter can help you support students as they develop their abilities in this area.

The central terms you will want to introduce are “critical reading,” “misinformation,” “disinformation,” “primary vs. secondary sources,” “bias,” “confirmation bias,” and “credibility.” You may have discussed some of these already in class, but may want to present or review them in the context of the more general goal of critical reading online. Of these concepts, probably the most difficult to discuss is bias. We’ve tried to give readers a clear definition; even so, bias is hard to see, most notably when the sites we look at agree with our own ideas. The news sites (see activity #3 below) will provide the most obvious examples of bias, but they are not the only ones you might use. There is bias in science reporting (e.g., FoodBabe. com; mercola.com) and in plenty of other areas. Discussions of bias should focus carefully on the language that is used and on the “facts” that are presented. The lateral reading process we describe should help students apply critical reading strategies to help them recognize the bias in these sites and ultimately find quality information online.

Before you take students to the activities below and then on to their individual projects, it might be useful to look together at a hoax site or two. The following are two examples, but there are many online that are designated as such if you would prefer to choose your own:

• Buy Dehydrated Water: https://buydehydratedwatercom.weebly.com/
• The Taxonomy of Barney: https://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume1/v1i1/barney.htm

You might have students review these or other hoax sites by contrasting them with their own favorite sites or your school’s site. Your goal in class discussion should be to raise students’ awareness of ways in which information is presented online, whether true or false. These examples should help students see why it will be useful for them to have critical reading skills for their own work.

With this background, you can move directly to lateral reading as a strongly recommended approach to evaluating Web sources. Using the subject of an upcoming source-driven assignment as the focus, have students practice the steps of lateral reading as a class, in pairs, or in small groups to give them hands-on experience with this process as they explore sources on the assigned subject. Demonstrating the process and incorporating the additional tips we discuss (clicking hyperlinks, opening new tabs, and moving deliberately around the Web) will set students up to follow the lateral reading process. Students might also want to keep a sort of “lab notebook” of their Web searches with notes on the lateral reading steps they follow in their individual projects to be submitted with their final writing assignment.

The following are four class activities that can help students apply and practice what they learn in this chapter about assessing the credibility of online sources. The first activity asks students to draw on their prior knowledge, which helps lay the foundation for applying what may be new knowledge.

• Reflect on your current reading practices as you are moving around the Web. Take notes on the following: How do you tend to move from one site to the next? Do you open new tabs? Follow hyperlinks? Do you move deliberately or haphazardly? What are you learning about yourself as a digital reader as you pay attention to your practices?
• Access your institution’s library and peruse its databases, paying attention to the titles of the databases and any additional information offered about each. Make a list of at least three databases that contain primary sources and at least three that contain secondary sources. How can you tell the difference based on the titles and any information offered about the databases?
• Al Jazeera (“US & Canada News”)
• New York Times
• The Washington Post
• The Jerusalem Post (“World News”) What do you notice about how the story is represented? Where do you see bias? How do you know? Social media sites can also give you a version of the news; evaluate what you see on your favorite site, comparing and contrasting it to what is on the news sites above.
• Following the steps laid out in this chapter, read laterally about the Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division in order to evaluate whether it is a credible scientific source about dihydrogen monoxide (“Dihydrogen Monoxide – DHMO Homepage”). Share and compare your notes and your evaluation with those of your classmates. What’s the consensus?
• This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) and is subject to the Writing Spaces Terms of Use. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ , email [email protected] , or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. To view the Writing Spaces Terms of Use, visit http://writingspaces.org/terms-of-use . ↵

Effectively and Efficiently Reading the Credibility of Online Sources Copyright © 2021 by Ellen C. Carillo and Alice Horning is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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2 The Sources of Knowledge

Robert Audi is Professor of Philosophy and David E. Gallo Chair in Ethics at the University of Notre Dame. He works in ethics and in related philosophical fields, especially epistemology. His books include Action, Intention, and Reason (1993), The Structure of Justification (1993), Moral Knowledge and Ethical Character (1997), Religious Commitment and Secular Reason (2000), The Architecture of Reason (2001), The Good in the Right: A Theory of Intuition and Intrinsic Value (2004), and Moral Value and Human Diversity (2007).

• Published: 02 September 2009
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This article identifies the sources from which one acquires knowledge or justified belief. It distinguishes the “four standard basic sources”: perception, memory, consciousness, and reason. A basic source yields knowledge or justified belief without positive dependence on another source. This article distinguishes each of the above as a basic source of knowledge, with the exception of memory. Memory, while a basic source of justification, plays a preservative rather than a generative role in knowledge. This article contrasts basic sources with nonbasic sources, concentrating on testimony. After clarifying the relationship between a source and a ground, or “what it is in virtue of which one knows or justifiedly believes,” this article evaluates the basic sources' individual and collective autonomy as well as their vulnerability to defeasibility. It examines the relationship of coherence to knowledge and justification, noting the distinction between a negative dependence on incoherence and a positive dependence on coherence.

Knowledge can be adequately explicated only in relation to its sources. This is in part why perception, intuition, and other generally recognized sources of knowledge have been so extensively discussed in epistemology. These and other apparent sources of knowledge are also widely considered sources of justification, and they can serve as such even if justification is not entailed by knowledge. My concern here will be primarily with sources of knowledge; but in order to bring out their epistemological importance, I will connect these sources with justification as well. I am speaking, of course, as if we may suppose that there is knowledge. Anyone who accepts some version of skepticism may simply take what is said to apply to what would be sources of knowledge or justification if there should be any knowledge or justification of the kind in question. I begin with what might be called the standard basic sources of knowledge, proceed to distinguish them from nonbasic sources and from grounds of knowledge, and, with the account of epistemic sources then before us, turn to questions of defeasibility and completeness.

I. Basic Sources of Knowledge and Justification

If, in the history of epistemology, any sources of knowledge deserve to be called the classical basic sources, the best candidates are perception, memory, consciousness (sometimes called introspection ), and reason (sometimes called intuition ). Some writers have shortened the list under the heading, “experience and reason.” This heading is apt insofar as it suggests that there might be some unity among the first three sources and indeed some possibility of other experiential sources; it is misleading insofar as it suggests that experience plays no role in the operation of reason as a source of knowledge. Any operation of reason that is an element in consciousness may be considered a kind of intellectual experience. The reflection or other exercise of understanding required for “reason” to serve as a source of knowledge is certainly one kind of experience.

Let us first explore what it is for a source to be basic and some of the conditions under which beliefs it yields constitute knowledge (these might be called success conditions ). We can then consider what kind of source might be nonbasic and whether the four standard basic sources are the only basic ones.

I take it that a source of knowledge (or justification) is roughly something in the life of the knower—such as perception or reflection—that yields beliefs constituting knowledge. To call a source of knowledge (or of justification) basic is to say that it yields knowledge without positive dependence on the operation of some other source of knowledge (or of justification). Thus, I might perceptually know that the clock says ten by virtue of seeing its face displaying that time; and I might know by brief reflection that if two people are first cousins, they share a pair of grandparents.

It may seem that the perceptual knowledge is possible only if I remember how to read a clock and that therefore perception cannot yield knowledge independently of memory. It is true that perceptual knowledge of the kind in question depends on memory in a certain way. But consider this. A being could acquire the concepts needed for reading a clock at the very time of seeing one, and hence would not need to remember anything in order to form the belief that the clock says ten. One possibility here is the creation of a duplicate of someone like me: reading a clock would be possible at his first moment of creation. It appears, then, that although perceptual knowledge ordinarily depends in a certain way on memory, neither the concept of perception nor that of perceptual knowledge is historical . That of memory, however, is historical, at least in this sense: one cannot remember something unless one has retained it in memory over some period of time.

The concept of a basic source can be better understood through a different kind of example, one that brings out how even a basic source can yield beliefs that fail to constitute knowledge and how its success in producing knowledge may depend on what we believe through other basic sources. Suppose that I see the clock on the wall only at dusk, but still make out the hands and come to believe (correctly) that it says ten. I now turn on a bright light that shows me a system of mirrors which I remember my son has installed to deceive me in ways that amuse him. I realize that it can display a different clock with the same appearance. I now may have good reason to doubt that the clock on the wall says ten; for I realize that I would believe it did, even if I did not actually see it, but saw only the mirror image of a similar clock that does say ten. Here my would‐be perceptual knowledge that the clock says ten is defeated by my realization that I might well be deceived. That realization, in turn, depends in part on my memory of my son's antics. We have, then, a case illustrating that, even ordinarily, I would not know the clock says ten unless there were no suitably strong “opposition” from a source different from perception. This dependence of perception on factors beyond perceptual experience, however, is what I call negative dependence ; it does not show that perception is not a source of knowledge, but only that (at least) on occasion the source can be in some way blocked. 1

One may now suggest that perception is not even a positively independent source because it depends on consciousness. The idea would be that one cannot perceive without being conscious; hence, perception cannot yield knowledge apart from the operation of another source of knowledge. Let us grant for the sake of argument that perception requires consciousness. 2 If it does, that is because it is a kind of consciousness: consciousness of an external object. We might then simply grant that perception is perceptual consciousness and treat only “internal consciousness” (consciousness of what is internal to the mind) as a source of knowledge distinct from perception. Internal consciousness, understood strictly, occurs only where the object is either internal in the way images and thoughts are (roughly phenomenal) or abstract, as in the case of concepts and (presumably) numbers. On a wider interpretation, we might have internal consciousness of dispositional mental states, such as beliefs, desires, and emotions. But even when we do, it seems to be through consciousness of their manifestations that we are conscious of them, as when we are conscious of anxiety through being aware of a sense of foreboding or of felt discomfort, or of unpleasant thoughts of failure, or the like.

To be sure, one might also treat consciousness as a kind of perception: external perception where the perceived object is outside the mind, internal where that is inside. But abstract objects are not “in” the mind, at least in the way thoughts and sensations are. In any case, it is preferable not to consider consciousness of these a kind of perception. One reason for this is that there is apparently a causal relation between the object of perception and whatever sensation or other mental element constitutes a perceptual response to it, and it is at least not clear that abstract entities have causal power, or at any rate the requisite kind. 3 This issue is too large to pursue here, but it may be enough to note that not all mental phenomena seem to be either perceptual in any sense or to be directed toward abstract objects. Consider daydreaming or planning. Neither need concern the abstract, nor must we suppose that there are objects in the mind having properties in their own right. 4 It would be unwise to assume that perception exhausts the activity of consciousness.

It does appear, however, that we may take perception to be a partly causal notion. If you see, hear, touch, taste, or smell something, then it affects you in some way. And if you may be said to perceive your own heartbeat or even your own anxiety, this is owing to their causing you to have some experiential impression analogous to a sense impression you might have through the five senses. Conceived in this way, perception is not a closed concept : it leaves room for hitherto unfamiliar kinds of experiential response to count as the mental side of perceiving an object and indeed for new or unusual kinds of objects to be perceptible. 5 This is not the place, however, to give an account of exactly what perception is. Any of the basic sources could be the subject of a deservedly long study. Let us proceed to memory as an epistemic or justificational source.

If, in speaking of perception, we are talking about a capacity to perceive, in speaking of memory we are talking about a capacity to remember. But remembering does not exhaust the operation of our memorial capacity to the extent that perceiving exhausts the operation of the perceptual capacity. There is also recalling , which entails but is not entailed by remembering; there is recollecting , which is similar to recalling but tends to imply an episode of (sometimes effortful) recall, usually of a sequence or a set of details; and there are memory beliefs , which may be mistaken and do not entail either remembering or even recalling. It is plausible to maintain, however, that remembering that p (where p is some arbitrarily chosen proposition) entails knowing it; and we also speak of knowing things from memory. When we do know things (wholly) in this way, it is not on the basis of other things we know. One may know a theorem from memory and on the basis of a simple proof from an axiom, but where one knows p wholly from memory—simply by virtue of remembering it—one does not at the time know it on the basis of knowing or believing anything else.

These points make it natural to think of memory as a basic source of knowledge. But I think it would be a mistake to claim that it is one. It is an epistemically essential source ; that is, what we think of as “our knowledge,” in an overall sense, would collapse if memory did not sustain it: we could know only what we could hold in consciousness at the time (at least this is so if what we know dispositionally at a time must be conceived as held in memory at that time, even though it is true then that if we were to try to bring any one of the propositions to consciousness then, we would normally have it there then 6 ). By virtue of playing this role, memory is an epistemic source in an important sense. But surely one cannot know anything from memory without coming to know it through some other source. If we remember it and thereby know it, we knew it, and we must have come to know it through, say, perception or reasoning. 7

If memory is not a basic source of knowledge, it surely is a basic source of justification. It is not easy to capture just how it plays this role. But consider believing that one sent a certain friend a holiday card. There is a way this belief—or at least its propositional object—can present itself to one that confers some degree of justification on the belief (I think it can confer enough to allow the belief to constitute knowledge if one is correct and there is no defeater of one's would‐be knowledge, but there is no need to try to show that here). Someone might object that it is only by virtue of knowledge, though consciousness, of one's memorial images that we can be justified in such beliefs, but I very much doubt this. 8 A remembered proposition can surface in consciousness without the help of images and, often, can spontaneously surface upon the need for the proposition as an answer to a question or as a premise for an inference one sets out to make or sees to be needed.

Given the points made about memory so far, I suggest that it is an essential source of knowledge and a basic source of justification. In the former case it is preservative , retaining knowledge already gained; in the latter it may be generative , producing justification not otherwise acquired.

It is worth noting here that we may not say ‘not otherwise acquirable ’. Whatever can be known or justifiedly believed by a given person on the basis of memory can also be known or justifiedly believed in some other way, say through the testimony of someone else. This indicates another notion we need in understanding sources of justification and knowledge. A basic source of justification need not be a unique source , even relative to a single kind of justification (or knowledge).

If, however, memory is not a unique source, it remains true that the non‐memorial source that is in principle available to one may depend, for its production of genuine knowledge, on memory or on knowledge of, or justification about, the past. If testimony is the source, for instance, the person attesting to a past event depends either on his own memory or on someone else's. If so, we might think that although memory is not a unique source for primary knowledge or primary justification regarding the past—where primary knowledge and justification are the kinds that do not (evidentially) depend on the knowledge or justification of anyone else—it is a unique source for secondary knowledge or justification regarding the past , as in the case in which I rely on someone's testimony about it. Perhaps, however, at the moment of his creation my duplicate could see smoke and know, by the visible facts, that there has been a fire. If so, then simultaneous testimony from him could give others such historical knowledge without dependence, for any of them, on (the operation of) their own memory. My duplicate would, arguably, “inherit” a capacity for induction from me, and I could not have acquired that capacity without relying on my memory; but he would still not actually have to rely on his own memory to know that there has been a fire. Here, then, we could have knowledge of the past that does not require the exercise of memory by the primary knower. Even if memory is not a unique source of any kind of knowledge or justification, the concept of such a source is significant, and it will surface again shortly.

Consciousness has already been mentioned as a basic source of knowledge. It seems clear that if any kind of experience of what is going on in the world can yield knowledge, it is introspective consciousness. Even philosophers who take pains to give skepticism its due, such as David Hume, do not deny that we have knowledge—presumably noninferential knowledge—of our own current mental life. 9 Granted, it is only consciousness of the inner world—or at least of whatever can exist “in” consciousness—that is a basic source if outer perception—consciousness of the external world—is not a basic source. But the inner world is a very important realm. It might include abstract objects, such as numbers and concepts, as well as sensations, thoughts, and other mental entities.

When we come to reason, there is, as with memory, a need to clarify what aspects of this general capacity are intended. Like ‘memory’, the term ‘reason’ can designate quite different things. One is reflection, another reasoning, another understanding, and still another, intuition. We reflect on a subject, reason from a premise, understand a concept or proposition, and intuit certain truths. These are only examples, and there is overlap: any of the objects in question must be understood (adequately, though not perfectly) if it is to be an object of reason, and one may need to reflect on a truth that one intuits in order to grasp its truth.

It will help to focus on a simple example, such as the logical truth that if all human beings are vulnerable and all vulnerable beings need protection, then all human beings need protection. We can reason from the “premises” (in the if‐clause) to the “conclusion” (in the then‐clause); but an assertive use of the if‐then sentence in question need not represent giving an argument. Moreover, the proposition it expresses is not the kind that would (normally) be known by reasoning. It would normally be known by “intuition” or, in the case in which such direct apprehension of the truth does not come to a person, by reflection that indirectly yields understanding. (The conclusion —that all human beings need protection—may of course be known wholly by reasoning from the premises. One's knowledge of it then depends on one's knowledge of them, which will surely require reliance on a different basic source. But the proposition in question is the conditional one connecting the premises with the conclusion, and knowledge of it does not require knowledge of either the former or the latter.)

I suggest, then, that “reasoning” is not a good heading under which to capture the ratiocinative basic source we are considering, and that indeed if we distinguish reasoning from reflection of a kind that yields knowledge that p apart from reliance on independent premises, it is best not to use the term ‘reasoning’ in explicating this source. What seems fundamental about the source is that when knowledge of, or justification for believing, a proposition comes from it, it derives from an exercise of reason regarding the proposition. This may take no time beyond that required to understand a sentence expressing the proposition (which may be virtually none; nor need we assume that all consideration of propositions is linguistically mediated, as opposed to conceptual in some sense). Here it is natural to speak of intuiting. But the proposition may not be so easily understood, as (for some people) in the case of the proposition that if p entails q and q entails r , and either not‐ q or not‐ r is the case, then it is false that p . Here it is more natural to speak of reflection. In either case the source seems to operate by yielding an adequate degree of understanding of the proposition in question and thereby knowledge. It does not appear to depend (positively) on any other source and is plausibly considered basic. 10

It also seems clear that reason is a basic source of justification. Such simple logical truths as those with the form of, ‘If all As are Bs and all Bs are Cs , then all As are Cs ’ can be justifiedly believed, as well as known, simply on the basis of (adequately) understanding them. In at least the vast majority of the kinds of cases in which reason yields knowledge it apparently also yields justification. It can, however, yield justification without knowledge. Careful reflection can make a proposition seem highly plausible even though it later turns out to be false. If we are talking only of prima facie (hence defeasible) justification, there are many examples in logic and mathematics. Consider Russell's paradox. There seems to be a class of nonteaspoons in addition to a class of teaspoons. The latter, however, is plainly not a teaspoon, since it is a class. So, it is a nonteaspoon and hence a member of itself. The same holds for the class of nonphilosophers: being a non‐philosopher, it is a member of itself. There must then be a class of such classes—a class of all and only those classes that are not members of themselves. But there cannot be one: this class would be a member of itself if and only if it is not a member of itself. Thus, what appears, on the basis of an exercise of reason, to be true may be false.

It may be objected that it is only inferentially that one could here believe there is a class of all and only classes that are not members of themselves and that therefore it is not only on the basis of the operation of reason that one would believe this. But surely we may take reasoning to be one kind of such operation, particularly deductive reasoning. It is true that the basic kind of knowledge or justification yielded by a source of either is noninferential; there is no good reason, however, to rule that inferential cases may not be included.

To be sure, there is still the question whether inference depends on the operation of memory, in the sense that one may draw an inference from a proposition only if one remembers it. But surely one can hold some simple premises before one's mind and at that very time draw an inference from them. If we allow that knowledge or justification deriving from simple inferences such as those in question here need not depend on memory, we may conclude that it can be on the basis of inferential reason that the proposition in question is believed. It is a contingent matter whether such an inference does depend on the operation of memory. If one must write down the premises to keep track of them, it would. If, however, one can entertain the premises and conclusion together and at that time see their logical relation, it does not. The distinction between these two cases is not sharp but is often quite clear. 11

Even regarding reason, then, we cannot say that we have an infallible source of knowledge: one whose every cognitive deliverance is a case of knowledge. To call a source basic is to affirm a measure of epistemic autonomy; it is not to affirm any wholesale epistemic guarantee. It is not even clear that every “deliverance” of a basic source has prima facie justification. But this is a plausible view, if (1) we take a deliverance of a source to be a belief based on it and not merely caused by it, and (2) we allow that a belief can be prima facie justified even when its justification is massively overridden. Let us suppose (1) and (2) hold. Plainly this would not entail indefeasible justification. If we suppose, then, that there would be no knowledge or justification without basic sources of them, we still cannot reasonably conclude that every belief those sources deliver is justified on balance or, if true, constitutes knowledge.

If we now return to the question of uniqueness, we find that, for reason, a plausible case for uniqueness is available, since some propositions, such as simple logical truths, seem (ultimately) knowable and justifiedly believable only on the basis of reason. To be sure, even simple logical truths can be known on the basis of testimony, as where someone who is logically slow first comes to know one through the testimony of a teacher. But can such truths be known or justifiedly believed without dependence on reason somewhere along the line? It would seem that the teacher must depend on it, or on testimony from someone who does, or who at least must rely on testimony from someone else who depends on reason, and so forth. 12 If this is right, then at least for primary knowledge and justification regarding simple logical truths, uniqueness holds.

Might we, however, make the parallel claim for perceptual and introspective cases? Could anyone (say) know the colors and feel of things if no one had perceptual knowledge? If we assume the possibility of an omnipotent and omniscient God, we might have to grant that God could know this sort of thing by virtue of (fully) knowing God's creation of things with these colors and textures. Still, wouldn't even God have to know what these properties are like in order to create the things in question with full knowledge of the nature of the things thus created? Suppose so. That knowledge is arguably of a phenomenal kind; if it is, the point would only show that consciousness is a unique source. Perhaps it is. If reason and consciousness are not only basic, but also the only unique sources, one can understand why both figure so crucially in the epistemology of Descartes or indeed any philosopher for whom what is accessible to conscious experience and to thought is epistemically fundamental in the far‐reaching way that is implied by the combination of basicality and uniqueness.

II. Testimony as an Essential Source

The four standard basic sources do not include testimony. At least since Thomas Reid, 13 however, there has been controversy over whether testimony belongs with these other sources or is nonbasic. There is no question of the importance of testimony. The issue is whether gaining knowledge or justification from it depends on the operation of another source.

It might seem that since to know that p on the basis of your testimony, I must perceptually know that you have attested to p , testimony‐based knowledge cannot be basic. I suggest that this admittedly natural assumption is a mistake: I do not even have to believe that you have attested to p , though to be sure I must be disposed to believe something to this effect and may not dis believe it. 14 But quite apart from whether I did have to believe this, perception would have to operate for me to receive your testimony. Granted, your attesting to p could cause a machine to produce the belief that p (perhaps even knowledge that p ) directly in me; but this would at best be a case of knowledge due to , not on the basis of , testimony. A mere cause of my knowing something is not a source of knowledge. A sudden curiosity can cause me to look up a phone number and thereby come to know it; the curiosity is not the source of my knowledge. If, by contrast, your attestation causes me to receive your testimony directly in my mind, like a message appearing in my interior monologue, I could acquire knowledge on the basis of the testimony; but this would show only that perception can be telepathic—or perhaps that there is a basic nonperceptual source of knowledge of other minds. There would still be no need for me to have my knowledge that p based (partly) on knowledge that you attested to it. 15

With justification, it seems equally clear that apart from perceptual justification for believing something to the effect that you attested to p , I cannot acquire justification for believing it on the basis of your testimony. If, however, I am right in thinking that one need not believe, as opposed to having grounds adequate for knowing or justifiedly believing, that the attester gave testimony that p , then something important about testimony emerges: it is a source of basic knowledge , that is, knowledge not grounded in other knowledge (or in justified belief of some other proposition). My knowledge that p need not be inferred from any premises nor based on a belief that p was attested to. The point that testimony is a source of basic knowledge distinguishes it from other nonbasic sources of knowledge, such as inference. (Even in the case of knowledge by virtue of an inferential operation of reason, the conclusion is known or believed on the basis of a premise, hence is not basic knowledge or basically justified.) The point also helps to explain why it is natural to consider testimony a basic source of knowledge; for it is typical of such sources that they yield noninferential knowledge.

There are four further points that distinguish testimony from the basic sources. First, one cannot test the reliability of a basic source or confirm a deliverance of it without relying on that very source. With perception one must, for instance, look again; with memory one must try harder to recall or must consult other memories—and one must remember the original belief being examined, lest the target of confirmation be lost from view. With testimony, one can check reliability using any of the basic sources.

The second point has already been suggested in connection with memory. Memory is central for our knowledge at any given moment in a way testimony is not. Even if knowledge could not be acquired without the benefit of testimony given to one at least to the extent one needs in order to learn a language (a process in which what parents or others attest to is crucial to acquiring a vocabulary), once we climb that linguistic ladder we can discard it and, given normal memory, retain what we know. With the other basic sources, reason in some minimal form is indispensable to possessing any knowledge (at least in protecting us from pervasive inconsistency), and to inferential development of knowledge, which depends on deductive and inductive logic. Consciousness and perception are essential for the development of new knowledge in their domains. There is, however, no domain (except possibly that of other minds) for which continued testimony is in principle needed for increase of knowledge. Similar (but not entirely parallel) points hold for justification.

The third point is perhaps even subtler. There is a sense in which testimonially based belief passes through the will—or at least through agency: the attester must select what to attest to and in the process can also lie, in which case the belief does not constitute knowledge (and the justification the recipient may get is, in a certain way we need not pursue here, objectively defective). For the basic sources, there is no analogue of such voluntary representation of information. Indeed, testimonially based beliefs normally pass through agency twice over, since one can normally withhold belief from the proposition in a way one cannot when it is fully supported directly by experience or reason (to be sure, even in those cases there is such a thing as double support, as where someone attests to a plainly self‐evident proposition one had not thought of but intuitively sees to be true on hearing it asserted).

Granted, it is a contingent matter when a person can withhold belief: some of us may be able to learn to withhold even beliefs that those speaking to us are people as opposed to robots. 16 But the normal level of control here is different from that applicable to testimony, where appraisal of credibility may always involve both the kinds of doubts we may have about basic sources and any we may have about the attester's response to them. To be sure, we sometimes speak of the “testimony of the senses.” But this is metaphor, at least insofar as it suggests that the senses derive knowledge from another source, as attesters must eventually do, since knowledge that p cannot derive from an infinite or circular chain in which no person giving testimony that p knows it even in part on a nontestimonial basis. 17

A fourth point of contrast between testimony and the standard basic sources has already been suggested. It concerns the need for grounds for the semantic interpretation of what is said on the basis of which it is taken to be that p . This is not a justificatory or epistemic burden intrinsic to the standard basic sources. Granted, much a priori knowledge and justification is acquired through consideration of linguistic expression of propositions. Still, on the most plausible account of the basis of such knowledge and justification, its object is nonlinguistic; the ground is apparently a kind of understanding of the proposition in question or, perhaps more directly, of the concepts figuring in or essential to it.

It must also be granted that a lack of semantic understanding will normally restrict the range propositions that are even candidates for one's a priori knowledge or justification, since one's comprehension of language will (for most of us, at least) limit the range of propositions we can get before our minds. Moreover, semantic misunderstanding —which is of course possible even in people of wide and deep semantic comprehension—may give us the wrong proposition or range of propositions. Nonetheless, neither of these defects need affect how good our grounds are once the right object is before us. To be sure, defeaters of knowledge or justification can come from semantically interpreted items and can afflict beliefs deriving from any of the standard sources; but none of those sources seems dependent on semantic grounds in the way that testimony is.

These contrasts between testimony and the basic sources are not meant to impugn the importance of testimony. In addition to being a source of basic knowledge, testimony is, like memory, an essential source of our overall knowledge. Our overall knowledge depends on it in far‐reaching ways, though not perhaps as much as, and certainly not in quite the same ways as, it depends on memory. The most important thing memory and testimony have in common may be that they transmit , rather than generate , knowledge (the case with justification is different, since memory is a basic source of that).

As to how testimony differs from both perception and memory, there is more to say than can be said here. It is not a question of reliability; it is only a contingent matter just how reliable each is. It is not even the semantic character of the deliverances of the source; one can see a sentence (as such), as one can hear testimony—indeed, the uttered sentence may constitute someone's testimony. A crucial point made earlier bears repeating: the acquisition of knowledge or even justified belief on the basis of testimony depends on the agency of another person. Normally, the attester must not lie, or seek to deceive, in attesting to p if we are to come to know that p on the basis of the testimony. By contrast, our responses to the deliverances of the basic sources is not normally mediated by anyone else's action. Testimony may be unreliable—or otherwise unworthy of one's acceptance—both because of natural connections between the state(s) of affairs the testimony concerns and because of the person's exercise of agency. This is not normally so for the testimony of the senses or of memory or of reason. The point is not that the exercise of agency cannot be a “natural” phenomenon—though philosophers who think that freedom is incompatible with determinism are likely to insist that it cannot—but that the concepts of knowledge and justification apparently presuppose that if it is a natural phenomenon, it is nonetheless special. 18

III. Sources and Grounds

To specify a source of knowledge is to indicate where it comes from, but it is also to do something more. I have already noted that to specify a mere cause of someone's knowing something is not to specify a source of the knowledge. In part this is because a source of something need not be a ground of it. As I am understanding sources of knowledge , and as they are generally conceived in philosophical literature, they are not just where knowledge comes from; they also provide the knower with grounds of knowledge. Grounds are what it is in virtue of which (roughly, on the basis of which) one knows or justifiedly believes. If you know that my knowledge that it is raining is perceptual, as opposed, say, to testimonial, you know not only that it comes from my perceiving something, but also that I have a perceptual ground, say a visual or auditory experience, for believing the proposition.

As this example makes clear, sources indicate the kinds of grounds to expect a person to have when the person has knowledge through that source. But the source is not itself the ground. We may of course call perception a ground of knowledge so long as we understand that so speaking of a ground does not specify just what it is. What about the converse question: Does specifying a ground of knowledge that p indicate the source of the knowledge? If the ground is experiential as opposed to propositional, then ordinarily it does. But we can speak of knowledge based on an impression that (say) a car is moving, while leaving open whether it is based on visual sensations or on inference from what one can see. It also seems possible for there to be grounds of knowledge that we cannot refer to any familiar source, as might be the case with certain religious experiences. Is this a kind of perception, or might there be a new nonperceptual source? There is probably no way to answer this in the abstract.

Suppose, however, one thought that a person could have knowledge simply implanted by virtue of a true belief 's being reliably caused, where the person's brain is directly affected by a calculator and one comes to believe a truth of arithmetic that would ordinarily require calculation. If we think knowledge is possible for the idiot savant (the “lightning calculator”), we may count this as knowledge. If the person has no sense of any basis of the belief, such as a sense of “things adding up that way,” it seems more accurate to speak of a basis for knowledge rather than a ground and of a cause rather than a source. But in a generic sense there is a source; and a basis is a ground in the widest sense of that term.

This is another of the many cases in which epistemologists may diverge, depending on whether they are internalists or externalists. For an internalist, if there is nothing that is in consciousness or accessible to it by reflective or introspective efforts and that can serve as justification or some kind of evidence for p , thenwe have at best a cause, not a ground, of knowledge. For an externalist, if the process by which the belief is produced is reliable and p is indeed true, that process itself may be said to be a ground of knowledge—or at least to ground it. Perhaps the externalist would agree with the internalist, however, that there is an important sense in which it is not the subject's ground . In any event, it seems fair to say that the dominant notions of source and ground in the philosophical literature are those in which sources supply accessible grounds (grounds accessible, by reflection or introspection, to the person for whom they are grounds). The four standard sources of knowledge and justification, moreover, are commonly taken to be the only basic ones.

IV. The Epistemic Autonomy of the Basic Sources

A basic source of knowledge does not have a positive epistemic dependency on some other source; but it does not in general yield indefeasibly justified beliefs (if it ever does), and it can produce true beliefs whose status as would‐be knowledge is undermined by some defeating factor. Each source, then, is to a significant degree subject to defeasibility. Defeat can come from a different source; hence we cannot adequately account for knowledge or justification apart from an understanding of the interconnections among the basic sources.

To what extent, then, is each basic source autonomous? To answer this we need to distinguish different kinds of autonomy. One way to focus the issue and to see the role of defeasibility in understanding the basic sources is to ask whether all the epistemic defeaters of beliefs that are well grounded in the standard basic sources (i.e., all the elements that defeat their justification or prevent their constituting knowledge) derive their defeating power from those same sources. The more general question here is whether, collectively, the standard basic sources are epistemically and justificationally self‐sufficient , roughly self‐sustaining in providing for all the knowledge‐conferring and justification‐conferring grounds of belief, and self‐correcting, in potentially accounting for all the grounds of defeat of (would‐be) knowledge and of justification. A quite similar question is whether, taken together, they are necessarily such that if a true belief enjoys adequate support from at least one of them, hence is properly evidenced, and that support is not defeated by at least one other, then the belief constitutes knowledge (or is justified on balance).

This self‐sufficiency thesis has some plausibility, particularly for justification. To show whether or not it holds would take far more space than I have, but we can go some distance toward an answer by exploring the two main aspects of the question whether the standard basic sources are autonomous. First, does each source yield the knowledge or justification it does independently of confirmation of the belief in question from any other source? Call this the question of individual autonomy . Second, if not, then does only the entire set of basic sources meet this independence condition? This would be collective autonomy , a freedom from the need for confirmation by any fifth source.

There is also a kind of negative autonomy : invulnerability to defeat by beliefs from another source. Such defeat may occur where “seeing is believing.” For instance, suppose I see a stone wall. My visual experience may yield a belief that there is one at the edge of the field, and that belief may constitute knowledge and retain justification despite a memory belief that, as of a few minutes ago, there was only a line of trees in that place. The justification that my memory belief had is thus defeated. As this example can also indicate, invulnerability to defeat from one source may be combined with vulnerability to another. If seeing a wall can yield knowledge or justification that overrides, and presumably cannot be overridden by, any provided by a memory belief of the kind in question, justification of a visual belief may be overridden by that of a tactual one. If, on a walk in the hot summer, I am justified by vision in believing that there is a water fountain before me, yet I cannot feel anything as I sweep my hands where its cool surface should be resisting them, I will neither know, nor any longer be justified in believing, that there is one there and am likely to conclude I am hallucinating. 19 Here, at least, with respect to both justification and knowledge, touch apparently takes priority over sight.

Positively, there apparently is a measure of individual autonomy. Each source can by itself yield some justification (as well as knowledge). If, for instance, I have a perceptual impression of a piano being played, I am prima facie justified in believing that one is being played. By contrast, if I have a sufficiently vivid and steadfast memory impression of a grassy meadow where I now see a stone wall, I may have some small degree of justification for believing the spot was covered with grass (and the wall has appeared quickly), even if the justification of my visual belief that there is a stone wall before me cannot be overridden by that of the memory belief alone. Certainly in the normal case, justification—of some degree—from one of the four standard sources does not wait upon corroboration from other sources. The same holds for knowledge.

To be sure, one cannot be justified in believing (or know) that a lot was vacant unless one has the required concepts, such as that of vacancy; and it may be that one does not acquire concepts adequate to make justified belief possible until one has a complex group of interrelated concepts. This may imply that one gets no justification at all in isolation from justification for many related propositions. That possibility is, however, quite compatible with some grounds of one's justification being single experiences. Epistemic autonomy is consistent with conceptual dependence. We cannot believe, and hence cannot know, a proposition essentially involving concepts we do not have. But a belief might have an isolated ground without in the least being isolated conceptually or in content from other beliefs.

Regarding negative individual autonomy on the part of a source—that is, its providing justification or knowledge that is overridable only by counterevidence from the same source—plainly the four standard sources do not have it. To take a different example, the justification of a memorially justified belief that there is a wall in the field can be overridden by a perception of smooth ground there. The same perception can prevent the belief 's constituting knowledge even if it is true. It may seem that reason—our rational capacity—is privileged as a source of justification. Strong rationalists might take it to possess negative individual autonomy. But surely there are some propositions, such as some in logic or mathematics, that I might justifiedly believe on the basis of reflection but, in part on the basis of sufficiently plausible testimony, can cease to be justified in believing or cease to know. Here the authority of that testimony would depend partly on perceptual and memorial factors crucial for my justifiedly accepting the credibility of the person who is its source. Thus, the overriding power of that authority does not derive from reason alone. 20

The case for collective negative autonomy is more plausible: there is some reason to think that where a belief constitutes knowledge or is justified in virtue of support from all four sources working together, its epistemic grounding (its grounding qua knowledge) and its justification are defeasible only through considerations arising from at least one of those very sources. If we assume that such defeat can come only from what confers or at least admits of justification, and if we add the highly controversial assumption that all epistemic grounding and justification of belief derive wholly from the four standard sources, we may conclude that those sources are epistemically and justificationally self‐sufficient. I make neither assumption, but I would suggest that in fact these sources may well be self‐sufficient. For there may in fact be no other basic sources (as opposed to causes) of knowledge or justification or of defeat. 21

There are at least two reasons for the caution just expressed. One concerns collective negative autonomy. The other concerns the self‐sufficiency thesis, in particular the idea that the standard basic sources are self‐corrective in providing (in principle) for all the kinds of correction needed to rectify erroneous beliefs. Let us take these points in turn.

First, it is widely recognized that sources of unreliability in our belief‐formation processes can prevent our beliefs from constituting knowledge even if we have no way, through the standard basic sources, of detecting the error. This is a lesson of the Cartesian demon scenario, in which our belief‐forming experiences, and even our efforts to check on the truth of our beliefs, are manipulated so that we cannot detect certain false beliefs. But, in principle, inanimate factors could conspire to produce the same unfortunate results. It would be a mistake, then, to say that the basic sources are necessarily self‐correcting.

Second, there is reason to think that the concept of knowledge, as opposed to that of justification, is external in roughly this sense: knowledge is possible without the knower's having internally accessible grounds for the belief constituting it. 22 Thus, suppose that, through the operation of a special mechanism in one's brain, one could know what a person very near one was thinking. Such a mechanism might deliver the beliefs constituting the knowledge whenever one concentrates attention on the person in question in a certain way but might yield no sense of any grounds for them; nor would there have to be any access to such grounds. Granted, one might gain inductive evidence of one's success, but if such knowledge is possible at all, one could presumably have it without dependence on inductive evidence of that success. There is much controversy over whether such externally grounded knowledge is possible; but, if it is, then the standard basic sources are not necessarily collectively self‐sufficient regarding knowledge even if they are for justification. There can be other sources of knowledge.

For justification as opposed to knowledge, however, there is reason to think that the four standard sources are indeed individually autonomous and, collectively, both self‐sufficient and self‐corrective. Each can provide grounds that can by themselves confer justification (as well as knowledge where the belief in question is true), though defeat by counterevidence can arise from the same or a different source and hence each lacks autonomy in the negative sense; and the entire set of sources seems, as regards justification, to be autonomous: self‐sufficient in accounting for justification (as well as for normally grounded knowledge) and, independently of any other sources, capable of accounting for defeaters of justification and, in part in that way, for correction of our beliefs. In addition, it is arguable that, at least in the case of reason and perception, there is also uniqueness, in the sense that there are kinds of knowledge and justification not possible apart from dependence on these sources. None of these properties holds for testimony, though it is like the basic sources in being both a source of direct knowledge and also epistemically essential in the ways I have described.

It has been plausibly argued, however, that one source, and perhaps the basic source, of justification is coherence among one's beliefs. Isn't my belief that the car was moving perhaps justified by its coherence with the beliefs that its orientation to the adjacent building seemed to be changing, that I recall tire sounds, and that cars are built to move? And isn't the justification of my belief that the ground where the wall stands was smooth later undermined mainly by its in coherence with the belief that I now see one there (one that looks quite old)? Let us explore the role of coherence in justification.

V. Coherence

Unfortunately, there is no account of coherence which we may simply presuppose. The notion is elusive, and there are highly varying accounts. 23 But this much is clear: we cannot assess the role of coherence in justification unless we distinguish the thesis that coherence is a basic source of justification from the thesis that in coherence can defeat justification. The power to defeat is destructive; the power to provide grounds is constructive. To see that the destructive power of incoherence does not imply that coherence has any basic constructive power, we should first note that incoherence is not the contradictory of coherence, its mere absence. It is something with a definite negative character: two beliefs that are logically and semantically irrelevant to each other, such as my beliefs that the sun is shining and that I am thinking about sources of knowledge, are neither mutually coherent nor mutually incoherent. The paradigm of incoherence is blatant logical inconsistency; positive coherence is widely taken to be far more than mutual consistency, yet far less than mutual entailment.

Clearly, that incoherence can defeat justification does not imply that coherence can create it. If it does create it (which is far from obvious), seeing this point is complicated because wherever coherence is plausibly invoked as a source of justification, there one or more of the four standard sources apparently operates in a way that provides for an explanation according to which both the coherence and the justification arise from the same elements responsible for well‐groundedness. 24 This is best seen through cases.

Consider my belief that a leaf blower is running, grounded in hearing the usual sharp blaring sounds. This appears to be justified by the relevant auditory impressions, together with background information about what the corresponding sounds indicate. If, however, I acquired a justified belief that someone is imitatively creating the blare, my justification for believing that a leaf blower is running would be undermined by the incoherence in my belief system. Does the defeating power of incoherence imply that my original justification requires coherence among my beliefs, including the belief that no one is doing that? Does one even have that belief in such a case? It would surely not be normal to have it when there is no occasion to suspect such a thing. But suppose the belief were required. Notice how many beliefs one would need in order to achieve coherence that is of sufficient magnitude to be even a plausible candidate to generate the justification in question, for example that my hearing is normal, that there is no other machine nearby that makes the same sounds, and so on. It is not quite clear how far this must go. Do we even form that many beliefs in the normal cases in which we acquire justified beliefs of the ordinary kind in question? To think so is to fall victim to a kind of intellectualism about the mind that has afflicted coherentist theories and opposing accounts of justification alike.

A further analogy may help to show how incoherence can be a defeater of justification without its absence, or beliefs that it is absent, or justification for believing something to this effect, being a source of justification. One's job may be the source of one's income, yet a severe depression might eliminate the job. It does not follow that the absence of a depression is a source of one's income. Surely it is not. Even positive economic conditions are not a source, though one's source depends on them. The idea of (positive) dependence is central in understanding that of a source. It must be granted that there is a negative sense in which one's job does depend on the absence of a depression; but that dependence—a kind of vulnerability—is too negative a condition to count as a source (much less a ground) of income. For one thing, it provides no explanation of why one has the income. Similarly, we might say that one's justification negatively depends on the absence of defeaters and positively depends on one's sources. But negative dependence on incoherence does not imply positive dependence on anything in particular, including coherence, as a source, any more than an income's negative dependence on the absence of a depression implies any particular source of that income.

To be sure, nothing can serve as a source of anything without the existence of indefinitely many enabling conditions . Some of these are conceptual. One may, for instance, be unable to believe a proposition even when evidence for it is before one; if a child has no concept of an insurance adjuster, then seeing one examining a damaged car and talk to its owner about deductibles will not function as a source of justification for the proposition that this is an insurance adjuster. Other enabling conditions are psychological, concerning our capacities or dispositions relevant to forming beliefs. If my sensory receptors are malfunctioning, or if I do not respond to their deliverances by forming beliefs in the normal way, then I may fail to be justified in certain perceptual beliefs.

Specifying a source provides both a genetic explanation of where a thing comes from and, through supplying a ground, a contemporaneous explanation of why it is as it is; enabling conditions, by contrast, provide neither. Taken together, they explain its possibility, but not its genesis or its character. It is neither correct nor theoretically illuminating to construe the absence of the enabling conditions as part of the source or as a ground. They are indispensable, but their role should be understood in terms of the theory of defeasibility rather than the theory of sources or of positive grounds.

The importance of incoherence as a defeater of justification, then, is not a good reason to take coherence to be a source of justification. This by no means implies that justification has no relation to coherence. Indeed, at least normally, justified beliefs will cohere, in one or another intuitive sense, with other beliefs one has, typically other justified beliefs. Certainly, wherever there is justification for believing something, there at least tends to be justification for believing a number of related propositions and presumably for believing a coherent set of them. This is easily seen by reflecting on the point that a single perceptual experience provides information sufficient to justify many beliefs: that someone is blowing leaves, that there is a lawn before me, that these blaring motors should be muted, and far more.

The conception of sources of knowledge and justification that I have sketched provides a way to explain why coherence apparently accompanies justified beliefs—actual and hypothetical—namely, that both are ultimately grounded in the same basic sources. In sufficiently rich forms, coherence may, for all I have said, commonly be a mark of justification: an indication of its presence. The coherence conception of knowledge and justification, however, does not well explain why justification of beliefs is apparently dependent on the standard sources. Indeed, as an internal relation among beliefs, coherence may be at least as easily imagined in artificial situations where the coherence of beliefs is unconstrained by our natural tendencies. In principle, wishful thinking could yield as coherent a network of beliefs as the most studious appraisal of evidence. 25

There is one kind of coherence that is entirely consistent with the well‐groundedness conception of justification that goes with taking it to derive from basic sources in the ways I have suggested. To see this, note first that one cannot believe a proposition without having the concepts that figure essentially in it. Whereof one cannot understand, thereof one cannot believe. Moreover, concepts come, and work, in families. This point is the core of a coherence theory of conceptual function: of the acquisition of concepts and their operation, most notably in discourse, judgment, and inference. That theory—call it conceptual coherentism , for short—is both plausible and readily combined with the kind of view I am developing. For instance, I am not justified in believing that there is a piano before me unless I have a concept of a piano. I cannot have that unless I have many other concepts, such as the concept of an instrument, of a keyboard, of playing, of sound, of music—no one highly specific concept need be necessary, and various alternative sets will do. In part, to have a concept (of something perceptible) is (at least for remotely normal persons) to be disposed to form beliefs under appropriate sensory stimulations, say to believe a specimen of the thing to be present when one can see it and is asked if there is such a thing nearby; thus, again it is to be expected that from a single perceptual experience, many connected propositions will be justified for the perceiver.

The coherence theory of conceptual function belongs more to semantics and philosophy of mind than to epistemology. But it has profound epistemological implications. That concepts are acquired in mutual relationships may imply that justification does not arise atomistically, in one isolated belief (or desire or intention) at a time. This does not imply, however, that, once a person acquires the conceptual capacity needed to achieve justification, justification cannot derive from one source at a time. This theory of conceptual acquisition and competence is also quite consistent with the view that, far from deriving from coherence, justification, by virtue of the way it is grounded in its sources, brings coherence with it.

VI. Conclusion

We have seen reason to consider perception, memory, consciousness, and reason to be basic sources of justification and, except in the case of memory, of knowledge. All can yield beliefs that are both noninferential in not being based on other beliefs and noninferentially justified in not deriving their justification from being based on any other beliefs. Testimony can also yield noninferential beliefs and even what might be called basic knowledge, but it is not a basic source or knowledge or justification. Like inference, it yields knowledge and justification only given the positive cooperation of at least one of the basic sources, but because it (commonly) yields noninferential beliefs, it is closer than inference to constituting a basic source.

The basic sources yield not only knowledge and justified belief, but also coherence. For instance, it is common for a single observation to produce a goodly number of cohering beliefs. The operation of reason—our rational capacity—tends to employ an interconnected group of concepts, such as those involving perceptible objects, psychological concepts, and logical relations, which dispose us to discover certain apparently a priori truths and to reason with and from them in ways that produce an integrated view; and memory preserves not only individual beliefs, but also our sense of some of their interconnections.

The operation of basic sources allows for defeasibility even when it yields amply justified beliefs or knowledge. Among the defeaters that can undermine would‐be justification or would‐be knowledge is incoherence. But it is essential to see that the pervasive possibility of defeat does not entail that each basic source has a positive dependence on any of the others, in the sense that in order to yield knowledge or justification, one source must rely on the operation of another one, or that any basic source positively depends on coherence.

At several points, I have indicated something about perception that may not apply to the other basic sources. Within very wide limits, the notion of perception is open‐ended. There is no fixed a priori list of perceptual modalities. In a way the notion is schematic: definite by virtue of paradigms like sight and touch that anchor it, yet capable of being filled out by changes in our relation to the world.

Might the same be said of the notion of a basic source of knowledge or of justification? Perhaps it might. The distinction between a schematic concept being filled out over time and a change of concepts by replacement is, to be sure, not sharp. I certainly want to make room for the possibility that there are or can be basic sources of knowledge or justification not considered here. Whether we call them new basic sources or instead should say that our concepts of knowledge or justification have changed would depend in large part on how they are related to the clearly basic sources that are now essential for understanding the notions of knowledge and justification. My concern has been to clarify those in relation to their sources, especially their basic sources but also testimony and inference, which are essential though not basic sources. How those two sources extend knowledge and justification gained through the basic ones is a large problem that cannot be even be approached here. 26

For each source of knowledge or justification, I have left room for cooperation between sources: two or more basic sources can together produce knowledge or justification, as can two or more nonbasic sources. Two or more sources from the different categories can also cooperate, as where testimony, a nonbasic source of justification, supports memory, which is a basic source of it, or where reason, by producing an inference to a proposition confirmed by memory, supports that faculty. The possibility of cooperation is matched by that of conflict. Skeptics find the latter possibility highly damaging to common‐sense views of the extent of our knowledge and justification. If I have been right, it may well be that the basic sources are collectively autonomous in a way that permits adjudication of this matter. I should like to think this is so; but even if it is, on some aspects of the question the jury is still out. 27

For detailed discussion of the distinction between positive and negative epistemic dependence, see my Epistemology (London: Routledge, 1998 ), esp. chap. 7.

If “blind sight” is a case of perception, this may not be so (though it is arguable that the subject simply does not believe there are visual sensations or other experiential elements corresponding to perception).

The apparent noncausal character of abstract entities is a main reason that knowledge of them—indeed their very existence—is often considered problematic. For one kind of challenge to the causal inertness claim see Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993 ).

For introspection and consciousness, as for external perception, one can devise a plausible adverbial view, as described in chap. 1 of Epistemology .

See Fred I. Dretske, Knowledge and the Flow of Information (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981 ), and William Alston, Perceiving God (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), for indications of how broad the notion of perception is.

The need for ‘if’ here has been suggested already: a duplicate of me would, at the moment of creation, know dispositionally a great deal I now know from memory (not all of it, of course, because some depends on my actual history and it would have no history yet); but it is unclear how this depends on memory. Perhaps we should say that it does not depend on remembering —hence does not require the operation of memory—but does depend on memorial capacity , since it would not be true of me that if I needed to bring a certain item of knowledge to mind I could, unless I had sufficient memorial capacity to retain it from the moment I needed it (e.g., a phone number) to the “next” moment, at which I bring it to mind.

Granted, I could memorially believe p but not know it (having too little evidence, say) and then be told by you that p . But if I now know it, this is on the basis of your testimony; I don't know it from memory until I retain the knowledge and not just the belief. Believing from memory can instantaneously become knowing, but does not instantaneously become knowledge from memory.

For a detailed discussion of the epistemology of memory, with many references to relevant literature, see my “Memorial Justification,” Philosophical Topics 23 (1995): 31–45.

See, for example, Hume's extraordinary affirmation of privileged access in the Treatise , cited and discussed in my Epistemology , chap. 3.

The relevant kind of understanding and the notions of a priori knowledge and justification in general are discussed in detail in chap. 4 of Epistemology and in my “Self‐Evidence,” in Philosophical Perspectives 13 ( 1999 ): 205–228.

Thus, for God or any being with infinite memorial capacity, no use of reason essentially depends on the exercise of memory. I might add even if the points made here about inference and memory are mistaken, the overall point that reason may ground justification for p without yielding knowledge of it can be illustrated by many other cases, presumably including the proposition that some classes are members of themselves (since this embodies a type‐error).

This point must be qualified if W. V. Quine is right in denying that there is a viable distinction between the empirical and the a priori—at least one would have to speak in terms of, say, differences in degree. For extensive criticism of Quine, see BonJour, “Against Naturalized Epistemology,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 19 (1994): 283–300, and for the notion of a priori justification see also my “Self‐Evidence.”

See Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1969). For a defense of a Reidian view see C. A. J. Coady, Testimony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 ). For a contrasting account of testimony more sympathetic to a Humean perspective see Elizabeth Fricker's chapter on testimony in Handbook of Epistemology , ed. Ilkka Niiniluoto and Matti Sintonen (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002).

For a developed distinction between these and a case for positing fewer beliefs than most philosophers apparently do, see my “Dispositional Beliefs and Dispositions to Believe,” Nous 28 (1994): 419–434.

This point may be more controversial for internalist than for externalist views, since an externalist can hold that my belief can constitute knowledge so long as it is reliably produced, even if I do not have accessible grounds for p , as I would if I had good inferential grounds for it. I cannot discuss the contrast between internalism and externalism in this paper. For discussion see, for example William P. Alston, Epistemic Justification (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989 ), Paul K. Moser, Knowledge and Evidence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989 ), and my Epistemology , chap. 8.

I discuss the issue of voluntary control of belief and cite much relevant literature in “Doxastic Voluntarism and the Ethics of Belief,” Facta Philosophica 1, no. 1 (1999): 87–109.

This point is explained and defended in my “The Place of Testimony in the Fabric of Knowledge and Justification,” American Philosophical Quarterly 34 (1997): 404–422.

This point may support my view, defended in “The Place of Testimony,” that to acquire justification for p from testimony, one needs some degree of justification for taking the attester to be credible. (I do not think one needs this to acquire prima facie justification from one of the standard basic sources.)

This is not to imply that just any tactual belief is better justified than any conflicting visual one. Matters are far more complicated, but need not be pursued in detail here.

This is not to deny that there may be justified beliefs of logical truths so luminous that the justification of these beliefs cannot be overridden. The point is that doxastic justification grounded in reflection can be overridden by factors that are at least not entirely a priori. That can be so even when the beliefs in question are true. For further discussion of this issue see Laurence BonJour, In Defense of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and my “Self‐Evidence,” cited in note 10 .

Another possibility is that there are other basic sources which are comparatively weak, so that although they may add to the justification available through the standard sources, they are not sufficient to yield belief that is justified on balance (roughly, justified to a degree ordinarily sufficient to render a true belief knowledge). On the other hand, if they can add to justification from the standard sources, then they could render a belief that would not ordinarily defeat the justification of another belief able to do so. This would limit the self‐sufficiency of the basic sources. We should surely be cautious about affirming even the de facto self‐sufficiency of the sources, and I leave it open.

A brief treatment of externalism is provided in my Epistemology ; for a more extensive treatment see Ernest Sosa, Knowledge in Focus, Skepticism Resolved (forthcoming from Princeton University Press), and chapter 8 in the present volume.

For two major accounts see Keith Lehrer, Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974 ), and Laurence BonJour, The Structure of Empirical Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985 ); and for much discussion see John Bender, ed., The Current State of the Coherence Theory (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989). It should be noted that in “The Dialectic of Foundationalism and Coherentism,” in John Greco and Ernest Sosa, eds., The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999 ), BonJour has since abandoned coherentism.

This is suggested and to some degree argued in my Belief, Justification, and Knowledge (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1988) and The Architecture of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

If it is taken to be an internal relation among beliefs, their content does not matter, nor does their fit with experience. This sort of thing has been widely noted; see Moser, Knowledge and Evidence , and John Bender, The Current State of the Coherence Theory (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989 ), for some relevant points and many references.

An approach to understanding the inferential extension of justification and knowledge is developed in chap. 6 of Epistemology . Testimonial extension of justification and knowledge is approached in my “The Place of Testimony.”

For helpful comments on an earlier version of this article (which derives, in part, from chap. 1 of my Architecture of Reason and from my paper on testimony, cited above), I heartily thank Paul Moser and Richard Swinburne.

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Reading as a Source of Knowledge, Intelligence, and Critical Thinking

Reading has always been a source of knowledge, intelligence, and critical thinking, which is an essential element of a contemporary human being. However, books, articles, and other publications seem to be replaced by social media, TV series, and cinema. People tend to spend their free time besides a computer or smartphone with a massive flow of messages, posts, and useless information. Nevertheless, it might be supposed that with aging, a person starts dedicating himself or herself to various readings more. Such an assumption seems a relevant theme to investigate and conduct research on. In this paper, a research design for this investigation will be proposed.

The study will be designed as an experimental one – participants of different age groups will be given a certain amount of readings for one month. It will be claimed that it is important to read a minimum of 100 pages; no maximum limit will be set. After this period, to measure the results, the approach that will be applied is self-reporting because a questionnaire will be provided (Kail and Cavanuagh, 2015). The questions will be as follows; the first one will be “How much reading have you done during the past month?” The second question will be “Was the given time enough to consume all the readings?” The last one, “Was it a pleasure for you to take part in such an experiment?” The participants will be free to give as long answers as they want, so it would be easier to define their attitude to the experiment process. This is necessary to determine their fitness for reading and even their acceptance of the thought about it.

It seems apparent that the independent variable will be the age of the participants. Then, the dependent variable will be the number of pages read, as well as the extent of satisfaction of taking part in the experiment. It should be mentioned that the research will have several limitations. An exact quantity of answers may be invalid as some participants can give them being affected by bias to reading, especially the ones of young age. Nevertheless, it is expected to involve at least 120 participators, 30 for each sampling – childhood, adolescence, early and middle adulthood, and late adulthood.

Some ethical considerations are also expected – it will be vital to explain the aims of the experiment explicitly and coherently. Each participant should be acquainted with his or her role and what will be asked to do. After the above is explained, participators will be requested to give written permission of using the results of the study publicly; of course, their anonymity will be respected. For those under the age of majority, this permission will be asked from their guardians.

To conclude, the primary expected outcome of the study is to determine whether age is a substantial factor within the scope of reading or not. Given the fact that it is a crucial element of human development, the described above research design seems relevant and appropriate. Furthermore, the extent to which the character of readings is affected by age might also be defined as their range will be broad – starting from scientific studies and ending with short novels. All the ethical considerations will be addressed; thus, both the conductors and participants of the experiment will benefit from it.

Kail, R. V., & Cavanuagh, J. C. (2015). Human development: A life-span review (7 th ed.). Cengage Learning.

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Chapter 10: Sources and Research

10.3 Reading Academic Sources

Academic sources (also called scholarly sources) are different from what most of us read each day. We are constantly exposed to “popular” media – news websites, TV channels, magazines and newspapers. It is generally only in college that we get exposure and access to scholarly articles and books.

An Academic Source (Scholarly Source) is material that is

• Authoritative : The article has been produced by an expert in his or her field (often this means that a person has a Ph.D. in his or her field and/or works as researcher or professor at colleges or universities), and therefore has the authority that expertise affords.
• Peer-reviewed: The article has been rigorously read and reviewed by other experts or authorities in that same field.  and, only after that rigorous review,
• Published in a Scholarly Research Journal : Academic articles are often published in special journals that focus on one academic discipline or one topic of study. These articles are published for an audience who is also highly involved in that academic discipline (often other people who have Ph.D.s in the same field or are pursuing studies within it). While in recent years some freely accessible open source peer reviewed journals have begun publishing, most scholarly research journals require a paid subscription. As a college student, you have access to many academic articles because your university pays for access to academic research databases that give students and faculty members access to these scholarly research journals.

Academic articles tend to more challenging to read than popular sources. They often contain academic jargon, highly specialized vocabulary that is used within a particular academic field. They tend to be longer than a typical popular source article in a newspaper or magazine. They may contain many in-text citations,  diagrams, tables, or other visual representations of data.

While academic articles can be intimidating to read, there are strategies that you can use to effectively engage these challenging texts, as Karen Rosenberg discusses in her essay, “ Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources.”

Moreover, there are ways in which academic articles can be critiqued and evaluated just like popular articles.

Considerations for Evaluating Academic Sources

While academic sources are often deemed credible because they come out of a rigorous process of peer review-before-publication and are written both by and for the academic community, we should still take time to examine and evaluate such sources before we use them. Yes, even scholarly sources contain embedded biases.

How prolific is the author in his or her field? Has he or she written extensively on the topic that is addressed in this paper? Often you can check the Works Cited to see if the author has any previous publications on the topic addressed in the current paper. If so, that could be an indication of the author’s long term commitment to this research topic or question.

Length of the Article

Sometimes articles will be labeled in academic databases as “scholarly articles” even though they are only a couple of pages long. If your article seems rather short and does not follow the general structure of an academic article (Abstract, Literature Review, Methodology, Results, Discussion, Conclusions, List of Works Cited), then you should spend time considering whether or not the article is a relevant or credible source for the purposes of your assignment? Is there a more thorough or detailed source that you could use?

Date of Publication

How current is the article? If you are looking for a historical perspective on your topic, then an older article may be useful. But if you need current information and your article is 10 or 15 years old, is it as relevant and useful for your assignment?

Perhaps you have a wonderful academic article that is authoritative, credible, interesting, full of credible and compelling research. But if the article is not answering your research question or the assignment question in any meaningful way, perhaps the source is not relevant to you. Just because a source is “good” does not mean that it is good for your particular assignment.

Joe Moxley’s article “ Questions to Evaluate the Authority of the Researcher’s Methods ,” is an excellent resource for thinking about how to approach a critique of scholarly work. His article can be found by clicking on the hyperlink above and by going to directly to the   W riting Commons website.

A Guide to Rhetoric, Genre, and Success in First-Year Writing by Melanie Gagich & Emilie Zickel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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• Importance Of Reading Essay

Importance of Reading Essay

500+ words essay on reading.

Reading is a key to learning. It’s a skill that everyone should develop in their life. The ability to read enables us to discover new facts and opens the door to a new world of ideas, stories and opportunities. We can gather ample information and use it in the right direction to perform various tasks in our life. The habit of reading also increases our knowledge and makes us more intellectual and sensible. With the help of this essay on the Importance of Reading, we will help you know the benefits of reading and its various advantages in our life. Students must go through this essay in detail, as it will help them to create their own essay based on this topic.

Importance of Reading

Reading is one of the best hobbies that one can have. It’s fun to read different types of books. By reading the books, we get to know the people of different areas around the world, different cultures, traditions and much more. There is so much to explore by reading different books. They are the abundance of knowledge and are best friends of human beings. We get to know about every field and area by reading books related to it. There are various types of books available in the market, such as science and technology books, fictitious books, cultural books, historical events and wars related books etc. Also, there are many magazines and novels which people can read anytime and anywhere while travelling to utilise their time effectively.

Benefits of Reading for Students

Reading plays an important role in academics and has an impactful influence on learning. Researchers have highlighted the value of developing reading skills and the benefits of reading to children at an early age. Children who cannot read well at the end of primary school are less likely to succeed in secondary school and, in adulthood, are likely to earn less than their peers. Therefore, the focus is given to encouraging students to develop reading habits.

Reading is an indispensable skill. It is fundamentally interrelated to the process of education and to students achieving educational success. Reading helps students to learn how to use language to make sense of words. It improves their vocabulary, information-processing skills and comprehension. Discussions generated by reading in the classroom can be used to encourage students to construct meanings and connect ideas and experiences across texts. They can use their knowledge to clear their doubts and understand the topic in a better way. The development of good reading habits and skills improves students’ ability to write.

In today’s world of the modern age and digital era, people can easily access resources online for reading. The online books and availability of ebooks in the form of pdf have made reading much easier. So, everyone should build this habit of reading and devote at least 30 minutes daily. If someone is a beginner, then they can start reading the books based on the area of their interest. By doing so, they will gradually build up a habit of reading and start enjoying it.

Frequently Asked Questions on the Importance of Reading Essay

What is the importance of reading.

1. Improves general knowledge 2. Expands attention span/vocabulary 3. Helps in focusing better 4. Enhances language proficiency

What is the power of reading?

1. Develop inference 2. Improves comprehension skills 3. Cohesive learning 4. Broadens knowledge of various topics

How can reading change a student’s life?

1. Empathy towards others 2. Acquisition of qualities like kindness, courtesy

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Reading is Good Habit for Students and Children

 500+ words essay on reading is good habit.

Reading is a very good habit that one needs to develop in life. Good books can inform you, enlighten you and lead you in the right direction. There is no better companion than a good book. Reading is important because it is good for your overall well-being. Once you start reading, you experience a whole new world. When you start loving the habit of reading you eventually get addicted to it. Reading develops language skills and vocabulary. Reading books is also a way to relax and reduce stress. It is important to read a good book at least for a few minutes each day to stretch the brain muscles for healthy functioning.

Benefits of Reading

Books really are your best friends as you can rely on them when you are bored, upset, depressed, lonely or annoyed. They will accompany you anytime you want them and enhance your mood. They share with you information and knowledge any time you need. Good books always guide you to the correct path in life. Following are the benefits of reading –

Self Improvement: Reading helps you develop positive thinking. Reading is important because it develops your mind and gives you excessive knowledge and lessons of life. It helps you understand the world around you better. It keeps your mind active and enhances your creative ability.

Communication Skills: Reading improves your vocabulary and develops your communication skills. It helps you learn how to use your language creatively. Not only does it improve your communication but it also makes you a better writer. Good communication is important in every aspect of life.

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Increases Knowledge: Books enable you to have a glimpse into cultures, traditions, arts, history, geography, health, psychology and several other subjects and aspects of life. You get an amazing amount of knowledge and information from books.

Reduces Stress: Reading a good book takes you in a new world and helps you relieve your day to day stress. It has several positive effects on your mind, body, and soul. It stimulates your brain muscles and keeps your brain healthy and strong.

Great Pleasure: When I read a book, I read it for pleasure. I just indulge myself in reading and experience a whole new world. Once I start reading a book I get so captivated I never want to leave it until I finish. It always gives a lot of pleasure to read a good book and cherish it for a lifetime.

Boosts your Imagination and Creativity: Reading takes you to the world of imagination and enhances your creativity. Reading helps you explore life from different perspectives. While you read books you are building new and creative thoughts, images and opinions in your mind. It makes you think creatively, fantasize and use your imagination.

Develops your Analytical Skills: By active reading, you explore several aspects of life. It involves questioning what you read. It helps you develop your thoughts and express your opinions. New ideas and thoughts pop up in your mind by active reading. It stimulates and develops your brain and gives you a new perspective.

Reduces Boredom: Journeys for long hours or a long vacation from work can be pretty boring in spite of all the social sites. Books come in handy and release you from boredom.

Read Different Stages of Reading here.

The habit of reading is one of the best qualities that a person can possess. Books are known to be your best friend for a reason. So it is very important to develop a good reading habit. We must all read on a daily basis for at least 30 minutes to enjoy the sweet fruits of reading. It is a great pleasure to sit in a quiet place and enjoy reading. Reading a good book is the most enjoyable experience one can have.

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Module 10: The Research Process—Finding and Evaluating Sources

Reading and using scholarly sources, learning objectives.

• Examine strategies for reading and using scholarly sources

How to Read Scholarly Articles

Academic papers are essentially reports that scholars write to their peers—present and future—about what they’ve done in their research, what they’ve found, and why they think it’s important. Depending on the discipline, they often have a structure reminiscent of the lab reports you’ve written for science classes. They often look like this:

• Abstract : A one-paragraph summary of the article: its purpose, methods, findings, and significance.
• Introduction : An overview of the key question or problem that the paper addresses, why it is important, and the key conclusion(s) (i.e., thesis or theses) of the paper.
• Literature review : A synthesis of all the relevant prior research (the so-called “academic literature” on the subject) that explains why the paper makes an original and important contribution to the body of knowledge.
• Data and methods : An explanation of what data or information the author(s) used and what they did with it.
• Results : A full explanation of the key findings of the study.
• Conclusion/discussion : Puts the key findings or insights from the paper into their broader context; explains why they matter.

Link to Learning: Scholarly Articles

Visit this webpage from North Carolina State University to see an example of the main components in a scholarly article.

Not all papers are scholarly in the traditional sense. For example, a historical or literary analysis does not necessarily have a “data and methods” section; but they do explain and justify the research question. They also describe how the authors’ own points relate to those made in other relevant articles and books, and they develop the key insights yielded by the analysis. They also conclude by explaining their significance. Some academic papers are review articles, in which the “data” are published papers and the “findings” are key insights, enduring lines of debate, and/or remaining unanswered questions.

This video gives useful tips for how to read scholarly articles:

As shown in the video above, understanding the structure of scholarly articles tells you a lot about how to find, read and use these sources:

• Find them quickly . Instead of paging through mountains of dubious web content, go right to the relevant scholarly article databases in order to quickly find the highest quality sources.
• Use the abstracts . Abstracts tell you immediately whether or not the article you’re holding is relevant or useful to the paper you’re assigned to write. You shouldn’t ever have the experience of reading the whole paper just to discover it’s not useful.
• Read strategically . Knowing the anatomy of a scholarly article tells you what you should be reading for in each section. For example, you don’t necessarily need to understand every nuance of the literature review. You can just focus on why the authors claim that their own study is distinct from the ones that came before.
• Don’t sweat the technical stuff . Not every social scientist understands the intricacies of log-linear modeling of quantitative survey data; just focus on the passages that explain the findings and their significance in plainer language.
• Use one article to find others . If you have one really good article that’s a few years old, you can use article databases to find newer articles that cited it in their own literature reviews. That immediately tells you which ones are on the same topic and offer newer findings. On the other hand, if your first source is very recent, the literature review section will describe the other papers in the same line of research. You can look them up directly.

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Essays About Reading: 5 Examples And Topic Ideas

As a writer, you love to read and talk to others about reading books. Check out some examples of essays about reading and topic ideas for your essay.

Many people fall in love with good books at an early age, as experiencing the joy of reading can help transport a child’s imagination to new places. Reading isn’t just for fun, of course—the importance of reading has been shown time and again in educational research studies.

If you love to sit down with a good book, you likely want to share your love of reading with others. Reading can offer a new perspective and transport readers to different worlds, whether you’re into autobiographies, books about positive thinking, or stories that share life lessons.

When explaining your love of reading to others, it’s important to let your passion shine through in your writing. Try not to take a negative view of people who don’t enjoy reading, as reading and writing skills are tougher for some people than others.

Talk about the positive effects of reading and how it’s positively benefitted your life. Offer helpful tips on how people can learn to enjoy reading, even if it’s something that they’ve struggled with for a long time. Remember, your goal when writing essays about reading is to make others interested in exploring the world of books as a source of knowledge and entertainment.

Now, let’s explore some popular essays on reading to help get you inspired and some topics that you can use as a starting point for your essay about how books have positively impacted your life.

For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essay checkers

Examples Of Essays About Reading

• 1. The Book That Changed My Life By The New York Times
• 2. I Read 150+ Books in 2 Years. Here’s How It Changed My Life By Anangsha Alammyan
• 3. How My Diagnosis Improved My College Experience By Blair Kenney

4. How ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’ Saved Me By Isaac Fitzgerald

5. catcher in the rye: that time a banned book changed my life by pat kelly, topic ideas for essays about reading, 1. how can a high school student improve their reading skills, 2. what’s the best piece of literature ever written, 3. how reading books from authors of varied backgrounds can provide a different perspective, 4. challenging your point of view: how reading essays you disagree with can provide a new perspective, 1.  the book that changed my life  by  the new york times.

“My error the first time around was to read “Middlemarch” as one would a typical novel. But “Middlemarch” isn’t really about plot and dialogue. It’s all about character, as mediated through the wise and compassionate (but sharply astute) voice of the omniscient narrator. The book shows us that we cannot live without other people and that we cannot live with other people unless we recognize their flaws and foibles in ourselves.”  The New York Times

In this collection of reader essays, people share the books that have shaped how they see the world and live their lives. Talking about a life-changing piece of literature can offer a new perspective to people who tend to shy away from reading and can encourage others to pick up your favorite book.

2.  I Read 150+ Books in 2 Years. Here’s How It Changed My Life  By Anangsha Alammyan

“Consistent reading helps you develop your  analytical thinking skills  over time. It stimulates your brain and allows you to think in new ways. When you are  actively engaged  in what you’re reading, you would be able to ask better questions, look at things from a different perspective, identify patterns and make connections.” Anangsha Alammyan

Alammyan shares how she got away from habits that weren’t serving her life (such as scrolling on social media) and instead turned her attention to focus on reading. She shares how she changed her schedule and time management processes to allow herself to devote more time to reading, and she also shares the many ways that she benefited from spending more time on her Kindle and less time on her phone.

3.  How My Diagnosis Improved My College Experience  By Blair Kenney

“When my learning specialist convinced me that I was an intelligent person with a reading disorder, I gradually stopped hiding from what I was most afraid of—the belief that I was a person of mediocre intelligence with overambitious goals for herself. As I slowly let go of this fear, I became much more aware of my learning issues. For the first time, I felt that I could dig below the surface of my unhappiness in school without being ashamed of what I might find.” Blair Kenney

Reading does not come easily to everyone, and dyslexia can make it especially difficult for a person to process words. In this essay, Kenney shares her experience of being diagnosed with dyslexia during her sophomore year of college at Yale. She gave herself more patience, grew in her confidence, and developed techniques that worked to improve her reading and processing skills.

“I took that book home to finish reading it. I’d sit somewhat uncomfortably in a tree or against a stone wall or, more often than not, in my sparsely decorated bedroom with the door closed as my mother had hushed arguments with my father on the phone. There were many things in the book that went over my head during my first time reading it. But a land left with neither Rhyme nor Reason, as I listened to my parents fight, that I understood.” Isaac Fitzgerald

Books can transport a reader to another world. In this essay, Fitzgerald explains how Norton Juster’s novel allowed him to escape a difficult time in his childhood through the magic of his imagination. Writing about a book that had a significant impact on your childhood can help you form an instant connection with your reader, as many people hold a childhood literature favorite near and dear to their hearts.

“From the first paragraph my mind was blown wide open. It not only changed my whole perspective on what literature could be, it changed the way I looked at myself in relation to the world. This was heavy stuff. Of the countless books I had read up to this point, even the ones written in first person, none of them felt like they were speaking directly to me. Not really anyway.” Pat Kelly

Many readers have had the experience of feeling like a book was written specifically for them, and in this essay, Kelly shares that experience with J.D. Salinger’s classic American novel. Writing about a book that felt like it was written specifically for you can give you the chance to share what was happening in your life when you read the book and the lasting impact that the book had on you as a person.

There are several topic options to choose from when you’re writing about reading. You may want to write about how literature you love has changed your life or how others can develop their reading skills to derive similar pleasure from reading.

Middle and high school students who struggle with reading can feel discouraged when, despite their best efforts, their skills do not improve. Research the latest educational techniques for boosting reading skills in high school students (the research often changes) and offer concrete tips (such as using active reading skills) to help students grow.

It’s an excellent persuasive essay topic; it’s fun to write about the piece of literature you believe to be the greatest of all time. Of course, much of this topic is a matter of opinion, and it’s impossible to prove that one piece of literature is “better” than another. Write your essay about how the piece of literature you consider the best positive affected your life and discuss how it’s impacted the world of literature in general.

The world is full of many perspectives and points of view, and it can be hard to imagine the world through someone else’s eyes. Reading books by authors of different gender, race, or socioeconomic status can help open your eyes to the challenges and issues others face. Explain how reading books by authors with different backgrounds has changed your worldview in your essay.

It’s fun to read the information that reinforces viewpoints that you already have, but doing so doesn’t contribute to expanding your mind and helping you see the world from a different perspective. Explain how pushing oneself to see a different point of view can help you better understand your perspective and help open your eyes to ideas you may not have considered.

Tip: If writing an essay sounds like a lot of work, simplify it. Write a simple 5 paragraph essay instead.

If you’re stuck picking your next essay topic, check out our round-up of essay topics about education .

Amanda has an M.S.Ed degree from the University of Pennsylvania in School and Mental Health Counseling and is a National Academy of Sports Medicine Certified Personal Trainer. She has experience writing magazine articles, newspaper articles, SEO-friendly web copy, and blog posts.

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3 Sources of Knowledge: Rationalism, Empiricism, and the Kantian Synthesis

K. S. Sangeetha

Chapter Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of this chapter, readers will be able to:

• Identify the main theories of the sources of knowledge, including rationalism, empiricism, and the Kantian synthesis.
• Employ each theory to reconstruct the origins of a given instance of knowledge.
• Differentiate the categories of knowledge that arise from the a priori / a posteriori , necessary/contingent, and analytic/synthetic distinctions.
• Evaluate the merits of each theory.

Introduction

We all have many things going on in our minds, such as beliefs, desires, hopes, dreams, imaginary figures, knowledge, love, and hatred—to name a handful. Have you ever considered their source? How do they come to be part of the thinking process? How do they become ideas in our minds? Some philosophers attribute the source of our ideas to the senses, including the inward senses (such as emotions) and the five outward senses (sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch). We might sense the world directly or indirectly through the thoughts of others. Some philosophers even claim that all our ideas must come from our senses. This claim holds that each of us is born with a mind that is like a tabula rasa (Latin for a “blank slate” or “blank tablet”) on which nothing is written and to which we add contents through experience as we become exposed to the world. Knowledge that is dependent on experience, or which arises after experience, is called a posteriori (Latin for “from the latter”). Since a posteriori knowledge is empirical (based on observation or experience), this view is called empiricism .

Opposed to empiricism is rationalism , the view that reason is the primary source of knowledge. Rationalists promote mathematical or logical knowledge as paradigm examples. Such knowledge can be grasped, they claim, through reason alone, without involving the senses directly. They argue that knowledge accessed through reasoning is eternal (i.e., it exists unchanged throughout the past, present, and future). For instance, two plus three remains five. Rationalists are impressed by the certainty and clarity of knowledge that reasoning provides, and they argue that this method should be applied to gaining knowledge of the world also. The evidence of the senses should be in conformity with the truths of reason, but it is not a prerequisite for the acquisition of these truths.

Knowledge that is independent of (or prior to) observation and experience is called a priori (Latin for “from the former”). Rationalists maintain that reason is the basis of a priori knowledge . But where do we ultimately get the ideas on which reason is based, if not from observation or experience? Rationalists tend to favor innatism , the belief that we are born with certain ideas already in our minds. That is, they are “innate” in us. Potential examples include mathematical or logical principles, moral sense, and the concept of God. While innatists claim that such ideas are present in us from birth, this does not guarantee our immediate awareness of their presence. Reason is the faculty that enables us to realize or access them. In what follows, innate ideas thus serve as the foundation of a model for rationalism. [1]

Rationalism’s Emphasis on A Priori Knowledge

French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) and German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), two important rationalist thinkers, support the existence of innate ideas and their realization through reason. They argue that the truths revealed by such ideas are eternal, necessary, and universal.

For Descartes, there are different modes through which we acquire knowledge: some ideas are innate, some are externally sourced, and others are constructed by us. Descartes gives the example of the idea of God as innate in us, as well as the idea of one’s own existence ([1641] 1985, Third Meditation). According to Descartes, innate ideas like truths of geometry and laws of logic are known through reason independently of experience, because experience gives us only particular instances from which the mind discovers the universal ideas contained in them. Therefore, they are a priori . Descartes’s innate ideas have been compared to the stored information in a book. The ideas are in us, though not always present to the mind. Once we start reading the book, the contents reveal themselves to us, just as reasoning reveals our innate ideas to us. In other words, it is only through careful “reading” (thinking) that we come to understand which ideas are innate and which come to us from elsewhere.

Leibniz  calls innate ideas “principles.” Like Descartes, Leibniz maintains that principles are accessed by reason. The universal nature of mathematical truths, for example, is not revealed by the senses. It is the faculty of reason that acquires universal truths from individual instances. Leibniz argues that a collection of instances based on the senses cannot lead us to necessary truths. At the same time, it is also clear that we can grasp many necessary truths, such as mathematics. Therefore, the mind is the source, which means these truths are there innately. However, innate ideas are not full-fledged thoughts for Leibniz: he holds that our minds are structured so that certain ideas or principles will occur to us once prompted by the senses, although they are not derived from the senses. Ideas and truths are innate in us initially as dispositions or tendencies rather than as actual conscious thoughts ([1705] 2017, Preface).

Opposing A Priori Knowledge by Rejecting Innate Ideas

The empiricist claim that all our knowledge comes from experience is in stark contrast to the concept of innate ideas. For empiricists, all knowledge is a posteriori , meaning acquired through or after experience. John Locke (1632–1704), a British empiricist philosopher, adopts two approaches to question innate ideas as the basis of a priori knowledge. Firstly, he shows that innate ideas are based on dubious claims; secondly, along with Scottish empiricist David Hume (1711–1776), Locke shows how empiricism is able to offer a better theory of knowledge through the a posteriori .

Locke starts by questioning the “universal nature” of innate ideas. He opposes the claim that innate ideas are present in all of us by noting that sufficiently young children, and adults without the requisite education, lack a concept of God or knowledge of logical or mathematical principles. Therefore, it is baseless to say that innate ideas are universal. It is through experience and observation that we acquire such ideas. That is, they are a posteriori ([1690] 2017, Book I).

Here Leibniz defends the innatist view from Locke’s objection by showing how children and those without the requisite education are capable of employing logical and mathematical principles in their everyday lives without understanding what they are or being able to articulate them in words ([1705] 2017, Book I). A child, to use an example of my own, knows without any confusion that she cannot be sitting in both parents’ laps at the same time. Similarly, those without formal mathematical training could still know that two adjacent triangular cornfields separated by a fence on their longest side can make a square cornfield by removing the fence that divides them. Evidently, as Leibniz argues, general principles of logic and mathematics are innate. But this does not mean that all innate ideas are universally held. It is possible that we all have innate ideas yet some of us are unaware of them.

Locke further argues, however, that there can be nothing in the mind of which it is unaware ([1690] 2017, Book II). Having innate ideas without being aware of them is not a viable position for Locke. An idea first has to be experienced or thought. How else could it be “in” the mind? On this point Leibniz disagrees with Locke: it is possible to have a plethora of ideas in our minds without being aware of them ([1705] 2017, Preface). For instance, suppose you absorb a “tune” playing in the marketplace without being consciously aware of it. The tune is not readily accessible or transparent to your mind, in that you cannot recall it; however, it may be recognizable upon hearing it again. So, it must have been “in” you somewhere in some sense. Similarly, an innate idea could be in your mind, without you yet being aware of it. We are born with the facility to realize innate ideas when favorable conditions obtain later in life, such as the ideas of beauty, justice, and mathematical truths.

Locke’s reply is that the realization of ideas or capacities in the right circumstances is applicable to all ideas—not just those which are purportedly innate ([1690] 2017, Book I). He challenges innatists to produce a criterion to distinguish innate from non-innate ideas. Leibniz responds with such a criterion: innate ideas are necessary (they must be true, cannot be false), whereas non-innate ideas are merely contingent (possibly true, possibly false). We can distinguish truths that are necessary (and therefore eternal on Leibniz’s view) from contingent truths dependent on varying matters of fact ([1705] 2017, Preface).

Empiricism’s Emphasis on A Posteriori Knowledge

Locke claims to show how the mind, which is like a tabula rasa at birth, acquires knowledge. For empiricists, experience alone furnishes our mind with simple ideas , which are the basic elements of knowledge. Once shown that all ideas can come from experience, it would be redundant to additionally posit innate ideas. So, does a posteriori knowledge lead us to reject a priori knowledge? Let us find out.

For Locke, knowledge based on experience is easy to understand. He asks us to suppose that we have innate ideas of colors and that we can also see colors with our eyes. In this case, since we don’t need to rely upon both, we go with our senses, because it is easier and simpler to understand knowledge derived from sense experience than from knowledge derived from some source of which we are unaware ([1690] 2017, Book I, Chapter ii, Para. 1). Here Locke applies the principle of Ockham’s razor , which suggests that as far as possible we should adopt simple explanations rather than complicated ones. [2] Simple explanations have the advantage of being less prone to error and more friendly to testing than complicated ones that do not add explanatory value.

The next question is whether a posteriori knowledge alone gives us adequate knowledge of the world. Let us take an instance of experiencing and thereby knowing a flower, such as a rose. As we experience the rose, its particular color, texture, and fragrance are the ideas through which we become aware of the object. But when we are not experiencing or sensing the rose, we can still think about it. We can also recognize it the next time we see the flower and retain the belief that it is sweet smelling, beautiful to look at, and soft to the touch. This shows that, in addition to sensing, the ability to form concepts about the objects we encounter is crucial for knowing the world. Experience also makes it possible for us to imagine what we have not directly experienced, such as a mermaid ([1690] 2017, Book III, Chapter iii, Para. 19). Such imaginings are made possible because we have directly experienced different parts of this imagined object separately. Conjoining these experiences in the mind in an ordered manner yields the imagined object ([1690] 2017, Book II, Chapter iii, Para. 5). Had we not experienced and thereby formed the concepts of a fish and a woman separately before, we would not be able to imagine a mermaid at present.

These considerations lead Locke to categorize all our sense experiences into simple and complex ideas. Simple ideas are basic and indivisible, such as the idea of red. Complex ideas are formed by the mind, either from more than one simple idea or from complex impressions ([1690] 2017, Book II, Chapters ii & xii). Complex ideas are divisible because they have parts. Examples include golden streets, an army, and the universe. My idea or concept of an object, whether simple or complex, can be ultimately traced back to its corresponding sense impressions.

Hume, another important empiricist philosopher, writes of ideas as the “copies” of “impressions.” Impressions are “vivid” and “lively” as received directly from sense experience. Hume also allows inward impressions, including jealousy, indignation, and so on. Ideas are mental copies of inward or outward impressions, rendering them “faint” or “feeble” (try comparing a perceptual experience with recalling it from memory) ([1748] 2017, Sections 1 & 2). Hume argues that where there are no impressions, there can be no ideas. A blind man can have no notion of color, according to Hume. One cannot be born with ideas that are not derived from any impressions. So, there are no innate ideas for Hume. However, he agrees that our tendencies to avoid pain, or to seek many of our passions and desires, are innate. Here I would argue that even these tendencies are based on our sense impressions and the corresponding ideas we form from those impressions. The mental inclination to repeatedly seek pleasure or avoid pain comes to us only after the first incident of exposure to either sensation.

In contrast to Descartes, even the idea of God falls under the a posteriori for Hume. Since none of us has experienced God directly, Hume argues, there is no impression of God available to us from which to form the corresponding idea. In Hume’s view, our imagination forms this idea by lavishly extending our experience of the good qualities possessed by people around us ([1748] 2017, Sections 1 & 11). Given that even the idea of God can be derived from sense impressions, this lends further support to the empiricist claim that all our ideas are a posteriori . Therefore, according to Hume, the rationalist claims for the existence of innate ideas and a priori knowledge are mistaken.

The Inadequacy of the Tabula Rasa Theory

A weakness of the empiricist’s tabula rasa theory can be exposed if we can show that not all our ideas are derived from corresponding impressions. However, this would not mean we must return to the rationalist’s theory of innate ideas, as we shall see. The plan is to explore a third alternative.

The presence of general concepts in our minds shows there is not always a one-to-one relation between ideas and corresponding sense impressions. For example, we see different instances of the color blue around us, and from these instances we form a general concept of blue. This general concept is not copied from one particular impression of blue, nor even from a particular shade of blue. We also have abstract concepts (such as justice, kindness, and courage), which are not traceable to corresponding sense impressions. In such cases, we experience different acts or instances of justice, kindness, and courage. But if these abstract concepts are copied from their particular impressions, then only these instances—and not the concepts themselves—would be in our minds. It follows that concepts are formed or understood rather than copied . Similarly, relational concepts (such as “on”-ness, betweenness, sameness, and the like) are realized not by copying the impressions involved. In fact, there are no impressions at all corresponding to these relational concepts. We instead receive impressions of particulars standing in such relations—the cat sitting on the mat, the English Channel flowing between the United Kingdom and Europe, one minus one equaling zero, and so forth.

In sum, the formation of general, abstract, and relational concepts in our minds shows that an uninterrupted flow of impressions would not constitute all the ideas we have. Instead, it requires that from birth the mind is at least partially equipped with a structure or architecture that enables it to make sense of the raw impressions it receives and to form concepts where there is no one-to-one correspondence between impressions and ideas. It challenges the authenticity of a tabula rasa . This takes us to a stage where we need to figure out the indispensable third alternative, which can facilitate a more complete knowledge of the world. This necessitates a crossover between the a priori and the a posteriori , or a reconciliation of the two.

Percepts-Concepts Combination

The immediacy and direct nature of sensations, impressions, and perceptions make them certain. [3] Let us briefly unpack this idea. Consider whether we can ever be wrong about our sensations. It is commonly thought that while we can be wrong about what the world is like, we cannot be wrong about the fact that we are having particular sensations. Even if you are dreaming this very second, and there is no actual book before your eyes, you cannot deny that you are having certain sensations resembling a white page and black font in the shape of words. Therefore, our sensations are certain and we cannot doubt that they exist. However, it is possible that sometimes we are unsure how to characterize a particular sensation. For instance, you may see a flashy car and be unsure whether the color is metallic green or gray. So, you might get into confusion in describing your sensation, but that does not affect the certainty and indubitability of the sensation itself, of what is here and now for you.

German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) argues that for our perceptions to make sense to us, they should be received into concepts that exist within our minds.These structures of understanding allow our minds to process the impressions that we experience. Unless the manifold raw sensations we receive from experience are classified into different categories of understanding, we cannot make sense of them.

For instance, the mind should have the ability to recognize whether two sensations are similar or different, to say the least. Without this ability, we cannot make sense of experience. Or consider that we also perceive that objects are in space and time, stand in cause-effect relations, and belong to the categories of unity-plurality, assertion-negation, particular-universal, and the like. Here again, we are incapable of understanding any experience that is not processed through these categories. Kant argues, therefore, that space, time, causation, quantity, quality, and the like are represented to us in innate structures or concepts that our minds are fitted with prior to experience.

According to Kant, these categories are transcendental in the sense that they bridge the gap between mind and world. They are hidden structures, bridges, or concepts that occupy the otherwise blank slate and mold our way of thinking and experiencing the world. Of course, these concepts also require inputs, or percepts (the immediate objects of awareness delivered directly to us in perceptual experience through the senses). As Kant’s view is famously expressed, “Percepts without concepts are blind and concepts without percepts are empty” ([1781] 1998, 209).

So far, we have seen through various stages that rationalism and empiricism are incomplete. Kant’s transcendental idealism (as his view is called) strikes a balance, reconciling the two accounts. He combines sensory input and inborn concepts into a unified account of how we understand the world. Before we conclude the chapter with the final step in Kant’s approach, let us return to Descartes and Hume once again, the two philosophers who most influenced Kant.

Synthetic A Priori Knowledge

Descartes thinks that reason alone can provide certainty to all human knowledge. Intuition and deduction are tools through which the faculty of reason operates. Intuition is the capacity to look inward and comprehend intellectual objects and basic truths. Being a geometrician, Descartes thinks that deduction (the type of reasoning whereby the truth of the conclusion is guaranteed by the truth of the premises) should be used for gaining knowledge of the world, starting with the input of “clear and distinct” ideas. [4] Since intuition is dissociated from the evidence of the senses, the truths it unfurls can be known a priori . The result is that substantial knowledge of the world can be acquired a priori ([1701] 1985).

According to Hume, there are two ways in which reasoning aims to gain knowledge of the world: through “relations of ideas” and through “matters of fact” ([1748] 2017, Section 4). Hume thinks that the method of deduction establishes relations between the ideas we have already acquired through experience (e.g., that a mother is a woman parent). These relations of ideas are the kind of truths that we find in logic and mathematics (for instance, the proposition that a circle is round). They are true by definition. Such truths are necessary or certain (their denials lead to contradiction). They are also known a priori , since they do not rely on how the world is. For this reason, relations of ideas and deduction do not yield substantive new knowledge of the world; the knowledge they impart is already understood by us (as the above examples show), even if our understanding is merely implicit within the premises of a deductive argument whose conclusion makes it explicit.

Matters of fact , for Hume, are based on observation and experience. Some of them are generalizations arrived at by induction from particular instances. Inductive truths are uncertain. They are at best probable , since they are dependent on how the world is. For instance, we have the experience of heat from fire so far; but we cannot be certain that this will be the case tomorrow also (maybe we will unexpectedly feel some other sensation like cold from fire). We expect that the future will resemble the past, but we cannot be certain about it. [5] Matters of fact provide us with a posteriori truths, which are contingently true (their denials can be conceived without contradiction). Since matters of fact are not true by definition, they add substantive new information to our existing knowledge, unlike relations of ideas ([1748] 2017, Section 4).

A rationalist initially, Kant was influenced by the division in knowledge made by Hume. Only a combination of reason and experience can give us adequate knowledge, according to Kant. He begins by providing an account of relations of ideas, which he terms analytic truths . In sentences that express analytic truths, the predicate term is already “contained” in, or is the meaning of, the subject term. For example, in the sentence, “a circle is round,” the predicate “round” is contained in the subject, “circle.” To take another standard example, in “a bachelor is an unmarried man,” the predicate “unmarried man” is the meaning of the subject term, “bachelor.” We cannot deny such truths without contradiction. They are necessarily true, which means that they’re true regardless of how the world is. Since we do no need to examine the world to tell whether they’re true, analytic truths are knowable a priori ([1781] 1998, 146, 157). [6]

Kant terms matters of fact synthetic truths : the predicate term is neither contained within nor is the meaning of the subject term. Synthetic truths are not true by definition. As such, it stands to reason that they are based on observation, and therefore must be a posteriori (although, as we will soon see, Kant argues that this is not the case for all synthetic truths). For instance, consider the proposition, “George the bachelor is a writer.” We have new information here about a particular person named “George” being a bachelor and writer, and experience is required to find this out. Since the opposites of synthetic truths are not contradictory, they are contingent ([1781] 1998, 147, 157). [7]

Kant maintains that only synthetic truths are capable of providing substantive new information about the world. That said, our sense experiences do not passively enter our minds, but do conform to our innate mental structures to facilitate knowledge. Since these structures work independently of experience, they are a priori . These innate a priori structures of our minds—our concepts—are actively engaged in making sense of our experiences ([1781] 1998). They do so by discriminating and organizing the information received in experience. But again, the ability to perform this activity presupposes that the world which furnishes both the information and our concepts is itself structured in a way that enables intelligibility. The particular ways in which the world must be structured—its space-time and cause-effect relations, for example—yield substantive truths about reality. These truths hold not merely because of the meanings of words or the logical forms of sentences. They are synthetic. And since we arrived at this result by way of a priori reflection, Kant argues that we possess “synthetic a priori ” knowledge of the world—a previously unrecognized category of knowledge, now to be added to the standard categories of synthetic a posteriori and analytic a priori knowledge. (See Table 1 below for a summary of these categories.)

There remains the question of how our concepts discriminate and organize the information received from the senses. These goals are achieved through acts of synthesis. By “synthesis,” Kant means “the act of putting different representations [elements of cognition] together, and grasping what is manifold in them in one cognition” ([1781] 1998, 77).

Kant explains three types of synthesis: the process starts with “synthesis of apprehension in perception,” passes through “synthesis of reproduction in imagination,” and ends with “synthesis of recognition in a concept” ([1781] 1998, 228–34). For Kant, apprehension in perception involves locating an object in space and time. The synthesis of reproduction in imagination consists in connecting different elements in our minds to form an image. And synthesis of recognition in a concept requires memory of a past experience as well as recognizing its relation to present experience. By recognizing that the past and present experience both refer to the same object, we form a concept of it. To recognize something as a unified object under a concept is to attach meaning to percepts. This attachment of meaning is what Kant calls apperception (Guyer 1987).

Apperception is the point where the self and the world come together. For Kant, the possibility of apperception requires two kinds of unity. First, the various data received in experience must themselves represent a common subject, allowing the data to be combined and held together. Second, the data must be combined and held together by a unified self or what Kant calls a “unity of consciousness” or “unity of apperception.” Kant concludes that because of such unity, all of us are equally capable of making sense of the same public object in a uniform manner based on our individual, private experiences. That is, we are in an unspoken agreement regarding the mind-independent world in which we live, facilitated by our subjective experiences but regulated by the innate mental structures given to us by the world. In sum, Kant’s theory makes possible shared synthetic knowledge of objective reality. [8] In conclusion, by considering the debate between rationalists and empiricists culminating in Kant’s synthesis, this chapter has shed light on the issue of how we achieve substantive knowledge.

Box 1 – Kant’s Copernican Revolution in Epistemology

In his Critique of Pure Reason , Kant sums up his epistemology by drawing an analogy to the Copernican Revolution (the shift in astronomy from a geocentric to a heliocentric model of the universe, named after Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), the sixteenth-century Polish mathematician and astronomer):

Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to find out something about them a priori through concepts that would extend our cognition have, on this presupposition, come to nothing. Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition, which would agree better with the requested possibility of an a priori cognition of them, which is to establish something about objects before they are given to us. This would be just like the first thoughts of Copernicus, who, when he did not make good progress in the explanation of the celestial motions if he assumed that the entire celestial host revolves around the observer, tried to see if he might not have greater success if he made the observer revolve and left the stars at rest. Now in metaphysics we can try in a similar way regarding the intuition of objects. If intuition has to conform to the constitution of the objects, then I do not see how we can know anything of them a priori; but if the object (as an object of the senses) conforms to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, then I can very well represent this possibility to myself. Yet because I cannot stop with these intuitions, if they are to become cognitions, but must refer them as representations to something as their object and determine this object through them, I can assume either that the concepts through which I bring about this determination also conform to the objects, and then I am once again in the same difficulty about how I could know anything about them a priori, or else I assume that the objects, or what is the same thing, the experience in which alone they can be cognized (as given objects) conforms to those concepts, in which case I immediately see an easier way out of the difficulty, since experience itself is a kind of cognition requiring the understanding, whose rule I have to presuppose in myself before any object is given to me, hence a priori, which rule is expressed in concepts a priori, to which all objects of experience must therefore necessarily conform, and with which they must agree. ([1781] 1998, B xvi–B xviii)

Questions for Reflection

• Given the assumption that the propositions below are known to be true, label each one as (i) analytic or synthetic, (ii) necessary or contingent, and (iii) a priori or a posteriori . If any are debatable, state your opinion and explain your reasons.
• All triangles have three sides.
• The figure drawn on the board is a triangle.
• If the figure drawn on the board is a triangle, the figure has three sides.
• It is not the case that [latex]1+2 = 5[/latex].
• Some birds can fly.
• All flying birds can fly.
• The sun will rise tomorrow.
• It is morally wrong to harm innocent people for personal gain.
• The average apple is larger than the average grape.
• “Mark Twain” and “Samuel Clemens” are different names for the same person.
• Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens.
• Water is H 2 0.
• Water is more abundant on Earth than on other planets in our solar system.
• God either exists or does not exist.
• Choose your own example of a posteriori knowledge. Then write a mini-essay that carefully traces its origins in a plausible manner. Use as many of the terms in the word bank below as possible (but feel free to also use other terms that appear in the chapter, especially those in bold). For definitions, you may wish to consult the glossary.
• Explain, in your own words, the main arguments for and against innatism.
• Explain, in your own words, the main arguments for and against the tabula rasa theory.
• How is it possible to avoid both innatism and the tabula rasa ? What is the third alternative?
• Many philosophers view synthetic a priori knowledge in a skeptical light. Why might this be a difficult category to make sense of? How did Kant explain and defend it? Summarize his view in your own words.
• Consider the claim that “There is no synthetic a priori knowledge.” If this claim were true, could it be analytic? If it were true, could it be known a posteriori ? If the claim is true but cannot be analytic or a posteriori , would it have to be synthetic a priori ? If so, is it possible to consistently hold this claim?
• Which do you find most plausible—rationalism, empiricism, or the Kantian synthesis? Summarize your main reasons for thinking so.

Further Reading

Blackburn, Simon. 1999. Truth : A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Critchley, Simon. 2001. Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ellis, Addison. 2014a. “Idealism Pt. 1: Berkeley’s Subjective Idealism.” In 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology . https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2014/07/07/berkeley/ .

———. 2014b. “Idealism Pt. 2: Kant’s Transcendental Idealism.” In 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology . https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2014/08/11/idealism-pt-2-kants-transcendental-idealism .

Plato. (ca. 380 BCE) 2009. Meno . Translated by Benjamin Jowett. The Internet Classics Archive. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/meno.html .

Russell, Bertrand. (1912) 2013. The Problems of Philosophy . Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5827/5827-h/5827-h.htm .

Vernon, Kenneth Blake. 2014. “The Problem of Induction.” 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology . https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2014/05/26/the-problem-of-induction/ .

Chomsky, Noam. 1975. Reflections on Language . New York: Random House.

Descartes, René. (1641) 1985. “Meditations on First Philosophy.” In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes , translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 1–62. Volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. (1701) 1985. “Rules for the Direction of the Mind.” In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes , translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 7–77. Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Guyer, Paul. 1987. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hume, David. (1748) 2017. Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Jonathan Bennett. https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/hume1748.pdf .

Kant, Immanuel. (1781) 1998. Critique of Pure Reason . Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Leibniz, G. W. (1705) 2017. New Essays on Human Understanding. Edited by Jonathan Bennett. http://earlymoderntexts.com/authors/leibniz .

Locke, John. (1690) 2017. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding . Edited by Jonathan Bennett. https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/authors/locke .

Quine, W. V. 1951. “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” Philosophical Review 60 (1): 20–43.

Vernon, Kenneth Blake. 2014. “The Problem of Induction.” In 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology . https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2014/05/26/the-problem-of-induction/ .

• Plato (ca. 428–347 BCE) can be treated as a predecessor of rationalism. In his dialogue Meno , Plato shows how innate ideas can be realized through reason ([ca. 380 BCE] 2009). In this dialogue, the main character Socrates (based on Plato’s real-life teacher), engages a slave boy in discussion. Through a series of questions and answers—an approach known as the Socratic Method—Socrates draws out of the boy a proof about squares. Plato argues that the boy did not learn anything new; rather, the questions merely prompted the boy to recollect knowledge he possessed prior to birth as an unembodied soul. Therefore, innate ideas are like forgotten memories; we might not be aware of them. This is Plato’s “doctrine of recollection” (as scholars have called it). In recent years, some linguists consider Noam Chomsky’s theory of language to be a modern scientific version of rationalism (though perhaps it is more accurately described as Kantian). Chomsky (1975) argues that human minds contain innate structures responsible for our capacities to process language. This is because our exposure to language itself is inadequate to account for our ability to speak and understand others. He claims that this innate ability is universal across all cultures, which reiterates the claim of the early innatists that universality is an indicator of innateness. ↵
• See Chapter 2 of this volume by Todd R. Long for a discussion of the explanationist theory of epistemic justification, and Chapter 6 by Jonathan Lopez (especially Box 1) on probabilistic considerations in epistemology—both of which are closely related to Ockham’s razor. ↵
• We find an endorsement of this view in the Anglo-Irish empiricist philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753). His view of idealism is that only minds and their ideas (where sensations are counted as ideas) exist. We are only immediately aware of ideas, and so the physical world of objects does not exist independently of mind—only as a representation of a mind, finite or infinite. Therefore, Berkeley recommended “To be is to be perceived” (in Latin, “ Esse est percipi ”). However, we will not explore this view here, as we are focused on the more influential view that there is a mind-independent reality. For discussion of Berkeley, see Ellis (2014a). ↵
• See Chapter 2 of this volume by Long for further discussion of Cartesian foundationalism. ↵
• This is an aspect of “the problem of induction” that Hume is famous for. For an overview of the problem, see Vernon (2014). ↵
• See Chapter 6 of this volume by Lopez for a discussion of analytic/necessary truths in relation to probability theory. ↵
• Some philosophers, following Quine (1951), object to the analytic-synthetic distinction altogether. ↵
• Kant’s theory and its consequences were interpreted differently by post-Kantian philosophers, leading to the famous analytic-continental divide in philosophy. On the continental side, some philosophers interpret Kant as saying that we cannot know things as they are in themselves (the noumena). We can know only how they appear to us (the phenomena), resulting in a form of external-world skepticism (the view that we lack knowledge of the external world), Husserl’s phenomenology (philosophical description of inner mental life free from the traditional distinction between it and external reality), or a constructivist view (the idea that we construct reality). For a brief overview of these issues, see Ellis (2014b). For a more thorough discussion, see Critchley (2001). ↵

A mental representation, including individual concepts (such as the concepts “fire” and “hot”) and the thoughts constructed therefrom (such as “the fire is hot”).

A Latin term meaning “blank tablet” or “blank slate.” Empiricists like John Locke argue that the human mind is like a tabula rasa at the time of birth, and that the mind acquires knowledge through sense experience and from its ability to reflect upon its own internal operations.

Knowledge that is dependent on, or gained through, sense experience. A posteriori truths are truths known after experience.

Based on observation or experience.

The philosophical position according to which all our beliefs and knowledge are based on experience. Empiricism is opposed to rationalism.

The philosophical position that regards reason, as opposed to sense experience, as the primary source of knowledge. Rationalism is opposed to empiricism.

Knowledge gained without sense experience. A priori truths are truths known prior to experience.

The philosophical position, held by many rationalists, according to which we have certain ideas in our minds from birth, ideas which can be realized through reason.

When applied to claims, statements, or propositions, the term “necessary” refers to that which must be true. In other words, it is impossible for a necessary truth to be false. For example, it is a necessary truth that a triangle has three sides, which means that it is impossible for a triangle to have any other number of sides. The opposite of necessity is contingency.

When applied to claims, statements, or propositions, the term “contingent” refers to that which is possibly true and possibly false, not necessary. For example, it is a contingent truth that crows are black, since they are black but could have been white. The claim that crows are white is a contingent falsehood, since it happens to be false but could have been true.

Ideas that contain a single element, such as a patch of brown or the idea of red. Simple ideas are basic and indivisible as opposed to complex ideas.

The methodological principle which maintains that given two competing hypotheses, the simpler hypothesis is the more probable (all else being equal). As the “razor” suggests, we should “shave off” any unnecessary elements in an explanation (“Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity”). The principle is named after the medieval Christian philosopher/theologian William of Ockham (ca. 1285–1347). Other names for the principle include “the principle of simplicity,” “the principle of parsimony,” and “the principle of lightness” (as it is known in Indian philosophy).

An idea formed by combining multiple simple ideas or impressions. For example, the complex idea “diamond street” is formed by putting simpler ideas into relation: a street made of diamonds.

A general idea of something which allows us to recognize it as belonging to a category, distinguish it from other things, and think about it. For example, to have the concept “table” is to be able to think about tables, distinguish them from other types of furniture, and recognize tables upon encountering them.

Kant’s term for that which is presupposed in, and is necessary for, experience; something a priori that makes experience possible.

That which is immediately or directly presented to one’s awareness in perceptual experience (prior to attaching meaning or applying a concept in apperception).

Kant’s synthesis of rationalism and empiricism utilizing a transcendental bridge between the mind and the world, making possible synthetic a priori knowledge. The term “idealism,” when not preceded by “transcendental,” may refer to the theories of Berkeley or Hegel, both of which should be distinguished from Kant’s view.

The capacity to look inward to directly comprehend intellectual objects and recognize certain truths.

A form of reasoning in which the truth of the premises logically guarantees the truth of the conclusion.

One of the two divisions of human understanding made by David Hume. Relations of ideas concern matters like logic and mathematics. Relations of ideas do not depend on how the world actually is. They are known a priori . Truths generated by relations of ideas are certain (not merely probable), true by definition, and therefore impossible to contradict.

One of the two divisions of human understanding made by David Hume. Our knowledge of matters of fact comes from observation or generalization from experiences. In other words, it is a posteriori . Because such truths are contingent, they are merely probable rather than certain.

A form of reasoning in which the truth of the premises makes probable the truth of the conclusion.

A truth that holds in virtue of the meanings of the words in a sentence (and the sentence’s logical form). In an analytic sentence, the predicate term is contained in, or is the meaning of, the subject term. Therefore, analytic truths are true by definition.

A truth expressed by a sentence in which the predicate term is neither contained in, nor is the meaning of, the subject term; the predicate adds some new information about the subject. That is, synthetic truths are not true by definition; therefore, they can be denied without contradiction.

The attachment of meaning to a perceptual input based on our past and present experiences and concepts.

Sources of Knowledge: Rationalism, Empiricism, and the Kantian Synthesis Copyright © 2021 by K. S. Sangeetha is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Reading Fluency: The Neglected Key to Reading Success

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The first post-pandemic National Assessment of Educational Progress results for reading achievement came out last year, and the results were dismal. The average reading achievement score for 13-year-olds is at the lowest level in the past 40 years! How can that be?

With the strong focus in recent years on teaching the code (i.e., phonics), it seems that reading achievement among students should be improving. However, that is not the case. Yes, the pandemic brought massive disruption to education, and that is probably part of it. But reading and teaching reading are complex, and when we focus primarily on one part of the reading-instruction puzzle, other important reading competencies (such as vocabulary, comprehension, motivation) are largely relegated to second-tier status.

One cliche I often hear is “readers can’t comprehend if they can’t decode the words.” While not denying the essential role of phonics, it is also critical that we not neglect those other important competencies. Reading fluency is one of them, one that I have been exploring, researching, and writing about for close to 50 years.

My own initiation with fluency began as an intervention teacher in Elkhorn, Neb., in 1979 (I know, I’m old), where I worked with elementary students struggling with reading. I was able to help most students by focusing on words—phonics, spelling, and vocabulary. However, there was a significant number of students who did not seem to benefit much from such instruction. They could already decode words, though they did so at a remarkably slow pace with little expression or enthusiasm. It was clear in their reading that they simply did not enjoy or value reading because it was so painful for them. I clearly was not helping these children. What to do?

Fortunately for me, I was also working on my master’s degree in reading education, and one of my professors had me read some recent articles on fluency, in particular “The Method of Repeated Readings” by Jay Samuels. Samuels reported that when students were asked to read a text more than once, not only did they improve their reading on the piece practiced, but there was also improvement that generalized to new texts never before read.

Since what I had been doing with these students was not working, I gave repeated readings a try. Lo and behold, these students who previously were making next-to-zero progress began to take off. In some cases, the improvement was close to spectacular. Best of all, these young students who previously did not see themselves as readers, now discovered that they could read as well as their more proficient classmates. They only needed to develop fluency through intentional practice.

Lo and behold, these students who previously were making next-to-zero progress began to take off.

Why does fluency matter? Since the report of the National Reading Panel in 2000, reading fluency—the ability to read the words in text accurately, effortlessly, and with appropriate expression and phrasing—has been identified as essential for reading success. As readers become automatic in their word recognition, they can devote their cognitive resources from word decoding to comprehension. Additionally, the meaningful expression readers embed in their reading (oral or silent) is evidence of reading for meaning. Scientific research has demonstrated that fluency is highly correlated with reading comprehension and overall reading achievement and that fluency-focused instruction leads to improvements in comprehension, the ultimate goal of reading. Moreover, research has also shown that significant numbers of students who struggle in reading are not sufficiently fluent.

In their 2021 and 2023 active view of reading , Nell Duke, Kelly Cartwright, and Matt Burns identify fluency as a bridging process to comprehension. Researchers have estimated that the effect size of the bridging processes, including vocabulary and morphology (understanding of meaningful word parts) as well as fluency, are substantially larger than the effect size for word decoding.

Yet, fluency continues to be neglected. Why?

First, and perhaps foremost, the obsessive focus on phonics leaves little room for fluency to be given consideration. But there are other reasons for the neglect as well. Fluency, largely associated with oral reading, is often wrongly seen as a reading competency important only in the primary grades. Unfortunately, we see fluency difficulties in middle and high school, too, yet, by then, there are often few teachers adequately versed in fluency instruction to provide effective intervention. Finally, reading fluency is often viewed as a competency that is taught after decoding is mastered. Research has shown that fluency instruction can be implemented simultaneously with phonics as early as 1st grade and that fluency and phonics instruction can support each other. For struggling readers in particular, we cannot wait for them to master word decoding before moving on to fluency.

Given the current state of reading achievement in the United States, it seems to me that now is the time to make fluency an instructional priority in our reading curriculum. The great thing is that fluency can be nurtured in a number of authentic and relatively easy-to-implement ways.

Repeated reading is one approach. Rehearsing and performing texts, such as readers-theater scripts, poetry, song lyrics, speeches, and the like have been found to improve fluency, word recognition, and even comprehension. Those texts can easily draw on content students are already exploring in their disciplinary studies.

Another approach, assisted reading, also works. Students read a text while simultaneously hearing a fluent rendering of the same text, which can be a prerecorded version of the same text on a digital tablet, the reading of an adult classroom volunteer, or a group rendition in speech or song of a poem or other short text at the beginning of every school day.

With colleagues, I have developed two instructional protocols for increasing fluency ( Fluency Development Lesson and Read Two Impress ) that have been shown to improve reading outcomes. When students engage in repeated and assisted reading, they succeed.

In 1983, Richard Allington wrote that reading fluency, although critical for reading success, was a “neglected goal of the reading curriculum.” Forty-plus years later, I fear that fluency continues to be neglected. If we really want to see significant improvements in reading outcomes for our students, we must embrace a more complete, complex, and scientific view of reading and reading instruction—including the competency of fluency.

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Source Of Knowledge – IELTS Academic Reading Passage

A  What counts as knowledge? What do we mean when we say that we know some-thing? What is the status of different kinds of knowledge? In order to explore those questions we are going to focus on one particular area of knowledge medicine.

B  How do you know when you are ill? This may seem to be an absurd question. You know you are ill because you feel ill; your body tells you that you are ill. You may know that you feel pain or discomfort knowing you are ill is a bit. more complex. At times, people experience the symptoms of illness, but intact they are simply tired or over-worked or they may just have a hangover. At other times, people may be suffering from a disease and fail to be aware of the illness until it has reached a late stage in its development. So how do we know we are ill, and what counts as knowledge?

C  Think about this example. You feel unwell. You have a bad cough and always seem to be tired. Perhaps it could be stress at work, or maybe you should give up smoking. You tool worse. You visit the doctor who listens to your chest and heart, take’s your temperature and blood pressure, and then finally prescribes antibiotics for your cough.

D  Things do not improve but you struggle on thinking you should pull yourself together, perhaps things will ease off at work soon. A return visit to your doctor shocks you. This time the doctor, drawing on yours of training and experience, diagnoses pneumonia. This means that you will need bed rest and a consider able time off work. The scenario is transformed. Although you still have the same symptoms, you no longer think that these are caused by pressure at work. You now have proof that you are ill. This is the result of the combination of your own subjective experience and the diagnosis of someone who has the stains of a medical expert. You have a medically authenticated diagnosis and it appears that you are seriously ill; you know you are ill and have evidence upon which to base this knowledge.

E  This scenario shows many different sources of knowledge. For example, you decide to consult the doctor in the first place because you feel unwell – this is personal knowledge about your own body. However, the doctor’s expert diagnosis is based on experience and training, with sources of knowledge as diverse as other experts, laboratory reports, medical textbooks and yours of experience.

F  One source of knowledge is the experience of our own bodies; the personal knowledge we have of change’s that might be significant, as well as the subjective experience of pain and physical distress. These experiences are mediated by other forms of knowledge such as the words we have available to describe our experience and the common sense of our families and friends as well as that drown from popular culture. Over the post decade, for example, Western culture has seen a significant emphasis on stress-related illness in the media. Reference to being ‘stressed end’ has become a common response in daily exchanges in the workplace and has become port of popular common-sense knowledge. It is thus not surprising that we might seek such an explanation of physical symptoms of discomfort.

G  We might also rely on the observations of others who know us. Comments from friends and family such as ‘you do look ill’ or ‘that’s a bad cough’ might be another source of knowledge. Complementary health practices, such as holistic medicine, produce their own sets of knowledge upon which we might also draw in deciding the nature and degree of our ill health and about possible treatments.

H  Perhaps the most influential and authoritative source of knowledge is the medical knowledge provided by the general practitioner. We expect the doctor to have access to expert knowledge. This is socially sanctioned. It would not be acceptable to notify our employer Unit we simply felt too unwell to turn up for work or that our faith healer, astrologer, therapist or even our priest thought it was not a good idea. We need on expert medical diagnosis in order to obtain the necessary certificate it we need to be off work for more than the statutory self-certificaion period. The knowledge of the medical sciences is privileged in this respect in contemporary Western culture. Medical practitioners are also seen as having the required expert knowledge that permits then legally to pre-scribe drugs and treatment to which patients would not. otherwise have access. However there is a range of different knowledge upon which we draw when making decisions about our own state of health.

I  However, there is more than existing knowledge in this little story; new knowledge is constructed within it. Given the doctor’s medical training and background, she may hypothesize ‘is this now pneumonia?’ and then proceed to look for evidence about it. She will use observations and instruments to assess the evidence and-critically-interpret it in the light of her training and new experience both for you and for the doctor. This will then be added to the doctor’s medical knowledge and may help in future diagnosis of pneumonia.

Questions 35-40 Complete the notes below. Choose  NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS  from the passage for each answer.

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NPR defends its journalism after senior editor says it has lost the public's trust

David Folkenflik

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust.

NPR's top news executive defended its journalism and its commitment to reflecting a diverse array of views on Tuesday after a senior NPR editor wrote a broad critique of how the network has covered some of the most important stories of the age.

"An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America," writes Uri Berliner.

A strategic emphasis on diversity and inclusion on the basis of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation, promoted by NPR's former CEO, John Lansing, has fed "the absence of viewpoint diversity," Berliner writes.

NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday afternoon that she and the news leadership team strongly reject Berliner's assessment.

"We're proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories," she wrote. "We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world."

NPR names tech executive Katherine Maher to lead in turbulent era

She added, "None of our work is above scrutiny or critique. We must have vigorous discussions in the newsroom about how we serve the public as a whole."

A spokesperson for NPR said Chapin, who also serves as the network's chief content officer, would have no further comment.

Praised by NPR's critics

Berliner is a senior editor on NPR's Business Desk. (Disclosure: I, too, am part of the Business Desk, and Berliner has edited many of my past stories. He did not see any version of this article or participate in its preparation before it was posted publicly.)

Berliner's essay , titled "I've Been at NPR for 25 years. Here's How We Lost America's Trust," was published by The Free Press, a website that has welcomed journalists who have concluded that mainstream news outlets have become reflexively liberal.

Berliner writes that as a Subaru-driving, Sarah Lawrence College graduate who "was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother ," he fits the mold of a loyal NPR fan.

Yet Berliner says NPR's news coverage has fallen short on some of the most controversial stories of recent years, from the question of whether former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election, to the origins of the virus that causes COVID-19, to the significance and provenance of emails leaked from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden weeks before the 2020 election. In addition, he blasted NPR's coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

On each of these stories, Berliner asserts, NPR has suffered from groupthink due to too little diversity of viewpoints in the newsroom.

The essay ricocheted Tuesday around conservative media , with some labeling Berliner a whistleblower . Others picked it up on social media, including Elon Musk, who has lambasted NPR for leaving his social media site, X. (Musk emailed another NPR reporter a link to Berliner's article with a gibe that the reporter was a "quisling" — a World War II reference to someone who collaborates with the enemy.)

When asked for further comment late Tuesday, Berliner declined, saying the essay spoke for itself.

The arguments he raises — and counters — have percolated across U.S. newsrooms in recent years. The #MeToo sexual harassment scandals of 2016 and 2017 forced newsrooms to listen to and heed more junior colleagues. The social justice movement prompted by the killing of George Floyd in 2020 inspired a reckoning in many places. Newsroom leaders often appeared to stand on shaky ground.

Leaders at many newsrooms, including top editors at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times , lost their jobs. Legendary Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron wrote in his memoir that he feared his bonds with the staff were "frayed beyond repair," especially over the degree of self-expression his journalists expected to exert on social media, before he decided to step down in early 2021.

Since then, Baron and others — including leaders of some of these newsrooms — have suggested that the pendulum has swung too far.

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New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger warned last year against journalists embracing a stance of what he calls "one-side-ism": "where journalists are demonstrating that they're on the side of the righteous."

"I really think that that can create blind spots and echo chambers," he said.

Internal arguments at The Times over the strength of its reporting on accusations that Hamas engaged in sexual assaults as part of a strategy for its Oct. 7 attack on Israel erupted publicly . The paper conducted an investigation to determine the source of a leak over a planned episode of the paper's podcast The Daily on the subject, which months later has not been released. The newsroom guild accused the paper of "targeted interrogation" of journalists of Middle Eastern descent.

Heated pushback in NPR's newsroom

Given Berliner's account of private conversations, several NPR journalists question whether they can now trust him with unguarded assessments about stories in real time. Others express frustration that he had not sought out comment in advance of publication. Berliner acknowledged to me that for this story, he did not seek NPR's approval to publish the piece, nor did he give the network advance notice.

Some of Berliner's NPR colleagues are responding heatedly. Fernando Alfonso, a senior supervising editor for digital news, wrote that he wholeheartedly rejected Berliner's critique of the coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict, for which NPR's journalists, like their peers, periodically put themselves at risk.

Alfonso also took issue with Berliner's concern over the focus on diversity at NPR.

"As a person of color who has often worked in newsrooms with little to no people who look like me, the efforts NPR has made to diversify its workforce and its sources are unique and appropriate given the news industry's long-standing lack of diversity," Alfonso says. "These efforts should be celebrated and not denigrated as Uri has done."

After this story was first published, Berliner contested Alfonso's characterization, saying his criticism of NPR is about the lack of diversity of viewpoints, not its diversity itself.

"I never criticized NPR's priority of achieving a more diverse workforce in terms of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. I have not 'denigrated' NPR's newsroom diversity goals," Berliner said. "That's wrong."

Questions of diversity

Under former CEO John Lansing, NPR made increasing diversity, both of its staff and its audience, its "North Star" mission. Berliner says in the essay that NPR failed to consider broader diversity of viewpoint, noting, "In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans."

Berliner cited audience estimates that suggested a concurrent falloff in listening by Republicans. (The number of people listening to NPR broadcasts and terrestrial radio broadly has declined since the start of the pandemic.)

Former NPR vice president for news and ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin tweeted , "I know Uri. He's not wrong."

Others questioned Berliner's logic. "This probably gets causality somewhat backward," tweeted Semafor Washington editor Jordan Weissmann . "I'd guess that a lot of NPR listeners who voted for [Mitt] Romney have changed how they identify politically."

Similarly, Nieman Lab founder Joshua Benton suggested the rise of Trump alienated many NPR-appreciating Republicans from the GOP.

In recent years, NPR has greatly enhanced the percentage of people of color in its workforce and its executive ranks. Four out of 10 staffers are people of color; nearly half of NPR's leadership team identifies as Black, Asian or Latino.

"The philosophy is: Do you want to serve all of America and make sure it sounds like all of America, or not?" Lansing, who stepped down last month, says in response to Berliner's piece. "I'd welcome the argument against that."

"On radio, we were really lagging in our representation of an audience that makes us look like what America looks like today," Lansing says. The U.S. looks and sounds a lot different than it did in 1971, when NPR's first show was broadcast, Lansing says.

A network spokesperson says new NPR CEO Katherine Maher supports Chapin and her response to Berliner's critique.

The spokesperson says that Maher "believes that it's a healthy thing for a public service newsroom to engage in rigorous consideration of the needs of our audiences, including where we serve our mission well and where we can serve it better."

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.