I think the question "what is the phenomenology of reading?" is a narrower question than "what is reading?" If I ask the latter, one part of the answer could be to appeal to all kinds of nonconscious processing mechanisms of word recognition, classification of letters, etc. I dislike jargon, so I prefer to say "conscious experience" - but since that phrase isn't always clear, it also helps sometimes to put the point in the jargon, too. I'm committed to the idea that philosophy can and should be clear and accessible. Thanks for clarifying, Badda! I sure hope I'm not just throwing up an obstacle with the word "phenomenology". And if we a re reading a moral psychology paper that prime in us about what is like to be in "disgust" perhaps we are prone to read (to see) an hyperbolic semantic emphasis about "five glasses of saliva" instead of one. We are more accustomed to see a fork in a "kitchen enviroment" that in a "forest enviroment", and here enters our cognitive machinery that abstracts the semantic gist (semantics about the wholeness not the details) of scenes, in this cae a text. What if our mind/brains are constantly "guessing" about what is out there and we do not have a faithfull representation of the visual world, but rather an aproximate derivative? This would be a mayor blow to "realism" Perhaps the fact that we sometimes experience something instead of other ("that" as "than") is due to the probabilistc encounter with things. Word-letter advantage phenomena (people are more ready to detect words than isoleted letters)and other interesting phenomena of the pattern recognition mechanism of our visual systems are full of mysteries to investigate human phenomenology. It's hard to believe, though, that something as mundane and nearby as this would be beyond our ken. Could more careful introspection get us the right answer? That's tricky, too - not noticing something is necessarily an elusive sort of experience. Maybe in some future neuroscience, if we can narrow down more precisely the correlations between brain states and conscious experience, we could scan the visual system for a "t"-ish or "n"-ish representation in the right part of the visual system - but that's a long way off, if ever we'll get there. But this is only a hunch, and I'm not a great believer in introspective hunches. At least it's hard to imagine that I would utter the "that" aloud without noticing the typo. Now my own hunch is that I see the "t" (or maybe something more indefinite) but utter the "n". Do I utter to myself "than", "that", or some more indefinite thing? Suppose I'm also saying the sentence to myself in inner speech as I read it. Maybe I've been reading Nichols on disgust, and I write "Drinking five glasses of saliva is worse that drinking one." What is it like for me to see that sentence as I read it? Do I see it at all ( Hurlburt thinks maybe not)? Supposing I do visually experience the sentence, do I see the "that" as a "than", so that my visual experience, in the appropriate place, is actually "n"-ish rather than "t"-ish? Or is my visual experience really "t"-ish in that spot, though I fail to notice the error? Or is my visual experience somehow indefinite between "n" and "t" (and maybe some other shapes), even though I may be foveating (looking directly) on the "t"? Suppose I've written a sentence with "that" where "than" should be. What, I wonder, is the phenomenology of that? Most of us (certainly I!) can a dozen times read something we've written without noticing a typo.
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