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| List of Tables | |
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| Acknowledgements | |
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| Literacy in the World Today | |
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| Introduction | |
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| Benefits of literacy | |
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| Negative effects of literacy | |
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| The objectivity of mathematics | |
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| The multidisciplinary study of literacy | |
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| Realism and constructivism | |
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| Science, society, and language | |
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| Skills and social practices | |
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| Literacy is a contested domain | |
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| Literacy and computation | |
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| Autonomy versus social practices? | |
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| Literacy and evolution | |
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| The ecological study of literacy | |
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| Literacy and human nature | |
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| Literacy and the imagination | |
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| Summary | |
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| Social Construction and Independent Reality | |
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| The social construction of reality | |
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| Constructivism and language games | |
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| Social construction and biology | |
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| Intentionality | |
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| Biological naturalism | |
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| The literate ecology has objective and subjective aspects | |
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| Multiple interpretations | |
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| The syntactic foundations of meaning | |
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| Syntax and semantics | |
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| The social construction of literacy | |
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| Universal Human Nature and the Study of Literacy | |
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| The case for evolutionary theory | |
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| Darwinism provides a new approach to the study of literacy | |
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| Universal human nature | |
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| Literacy builds on human universals | |
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| Donald Brown's list of Human Universals (from Pinker 2002) | |
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| The Literate Ecology | |
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| The ecological approach emphasises both the environment and the organism | |
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| The ecological approach emphasises both ideas and external representations of them | |
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| Literacy requires a range of types of environmental support | |
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| The literate ecology has two principal levels | |
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| The literate ecology rests on a set of assumptions called the Background | |
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| The analysis of the Background is Darwinian | |
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| The Evolution of Cooperation and Selfishness | |
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| Evolution results in the appearance of design | |
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| Evolution explains the appearance of design | |
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| The literacy literature typically does not refer to evolutionary theory | |
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| Evolutionary theory explains the non-literate mind | |
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| Evolutionary time scales are hard to grasp intuitively | |
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| The evolutionary process has three fundamental drivers | |
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| Competition leads to the evolution of selfishness | |
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| Selfishness is relevant to the study of literacy | |
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| Altruism and co-operation are also products of evolution | |
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| Group selection is a weaker force than individual selection | |
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| Evolution and education for all | |
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| Sexual Selection, Sex Differences, and Social Evolution | |
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| Sexual selection | |
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| Competition and choice | |
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| Sex ratios | |
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| Fertility rates | |
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| Sexual selection and human universals | |
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| Sex differences and literacy | |
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| The social functions of the intellect | |
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| Turing Machines: Syntactic Foundations for the Study of Literacy | |
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| A syntactic perspective on texts | |
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| A syntactic perspective on minds | |
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| Turing machines | |
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| The co-design of functional states and symbol structures | |
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| Summary | |
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| The Scope of the Literate Mind | |
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| Literacy separates syntax from semantics | |
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| The literate mind is infinitely powerful | |
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| Literacy augments the powers of the non-literate mind | |
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| Stable, durable texts provide new opportunities for human minds | |
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| Symbol systems have objective properties | |
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| Mathematics underpins objective science | |
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| Literacy promotes objectivity in nonmathematical disciplines | |
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| Literacy transforms the social ecology | |
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| Summary | |
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| Literacy in the Age of Computers and the Internet | |
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| Computers and the fundamental syntax of literacy | |
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| Computers are practical versions of universal Turing machines | |
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| Stand alone computing | |
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| The internet revolution | |
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| The added value of the internet | |
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| Summary | |
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| Grounding the Literacy Episteme | |
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| The literacy episteme | |
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| Against relativism | |
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| Literacy scholarship in the 1960s | |
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| Autonomy and ideology revisited | |
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| The capabilities approach | |
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| Summary | |
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| The Limitations of the Literate Mind | |
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| Reasoning cannot be captured fully by formal methods (but without literacy we would not know this) | |
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| Evolved limitations of literate processes | |
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| Summary | |
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| The Consequences of Literacy | |
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| The consequences of literacy are not automatic | |
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| Positive consequences for individuals | |
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| Negative consequences for individuals | |
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| Positive consequences for society | |
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| Negative consequences for society | |
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| A game of consequences | |
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| Looking to the future: the literate construction of what it means to be human | |
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| Conclusions | |
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| References | |
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| Index | |