Heidegger and Smith; Some Notes

I have some observations about Smith’s book that I didn’t want to bog down the class with tonight but I thought could go on here. Some parallel studies I am conducting on Being and Time have striking relevance to a few of Smith’s major tenets.

First off, Smith’s “prediction” in reading is identical to Heidegger’s “futurity”. Smith’s insistence on prediction as a habit of mind is no less important to consciousness for Heidegger. Futurity, (orientation of human consciousness toward defining itself in terms of the future) is a component of what makes human consciousness unique: according to Heidegger, our consciousness is such that it must take a stand on itself. Only for humans is existence an issue; which is a condition founded on futurity, on the constant “towardness” of consciousness; and therefore also of reading.

Another point I thought relevant was the relationship of Smith’s “task schema” to such futurity in reading; and this goes hand-in-hand with some of the concepts we studied in “Literacy” last semester, particularly in the definitions of literacy as not simply the ability to encode and decode texts; but also to include an awareness of the function of language. These are important concepts, I think, because they refer again to fundamental aspects of consciousness that are distilled in reading. We have “computer-like” functions, program like scripts that we enact when we read. Certain encodings like “Once upon a time. . .”; or grammatical patterns like the “Either x or y; neither z, nor q,” automatically prepare us to receive certain types of information; other scripts, like what we say to a waiter at a restaurant, or how to read salutations in a letter, these are all task schema. As Megan pointed out, Chomsky-school linguists and cognitive scientists since the birth of the computer age have attempted to describe the whole of human behavior in terms of such task schema, and simultaneously program computers to be able to function as people. According to phenomenologists; the failure of the cognitive paradigm results from the computers’ lack of “awareness”: their inability to perceive things in relation to what Heidegger would call a totality of significance. In terms of Smith’s model of reading this would be analogous to the global level of prediction or expectation or Rosenblatt’s stances. Task schema are how we cope with the world, and they are how we begin to inquire in a more conscious way; but such coping always occurs in relation to a totality; and inquiry always occurs in relation to an awareness of totality. It is this totality of significance which amounts to something like an awareness of the world at large, that is not programmable.