Epigraph
The Epitome of the Civilization of Illiteracy
For the love of trade
“The best of the useful and the best of the ornamental”
The rear-view mirror syndrome
Book Two From Signs to Language Semeion Revisited The First Record Is a Whip Scale and Threshold Signs and Tools
From Orality to Writing
Individual and collective memory
Cultural memory
Frames of existence
The alienation of immediacy
Orality and Writing Today: What Do People Understand When They
Understand
Language?
A feedback called confirmation
Primitive orality and incipient writing
Assumptions
Taking literacy for granted
To understand understanding
Words about images
The Functioning of Language
Expression, communication, signification
The idea machine
Writing and the expression of ideas
Future and past
Knowing and understanding
Univocal, equivocal, ambiguous
Making thoughts visible
Alphabet cultures and a lesson from aphasia
Language and Logic
Logics behind the logic
A plurality of intellectual structures
The logics of actions
Sampling
Memetic optimism