David R Olson
Biographic Data
| ID | 282982 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David R Olson |
| GIVEN NAMES | David R |
| FAMILY NAME | Olson |
| SIGNATURE | OLSON D R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6763-3449 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 77 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 151 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 74 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Developing Theories of Intention: Social Understanding and Self-control
Ascribing understanding to ourselves and others
We commonly attribute an understanding of language to others including very young infants, and, more controversially, to other animals and computers. Although we adults attribute or "ascribe" understanding to very young children, only in the late preschool years do the children themselves begin to ascribe understanding to themselves and others a competence that comes with learning the meaning of the word "understand." It is argued that ascription…
Two cheers for literacy: Walter Ong, President Trump and the literate mind
Walter Ong emphasized two broad implications of literacy on mind, consciousness and interiority. I review some recent evidence for these conjectures by reference to my own research on children’s understanding of mind. I then go on to show how a theory of literate consciousness may help to explain the peculiar nature of Trump’s political rhetoric
Dois Vivas para a Alfabetização: Walter Ong, Presidente Trump e a mente literata
Este texto é a transcrição da palestra ministrada pelo autor como vencedor do Prêmio Walter J. Ong por carreira extraordinária no campo da Ecologia das Mídias, na 22a Convenção Anual da Media Ecology Association. PUC-Rio, 8-11 de Julho de 2021
Afterword
On the Use and Misuse of Literacy: Comments on “The Mind on Paper”
History of Writing, History of Rationality
Urolithiasis, Urinary Cancer, and Home Drinking Water Source in the United States Territory of Guam, 2006–2010
We reviewed patient records with a first-listed diagnosis of urolithiasis-also known as urinary tract or kidney stone disease, nephrolithiasis-upon discharge from Guam's sole civilian hospital during 2006 to 2010 and urinary cancer mortality records from the Guam Cancer Registry for 1970 to 2009 to determine the source of municipal water supplied to the patients' residence. The objective was to investigate a possible relationship between the sour…
Narrative, cognition, and rationality
Writing Systems, Psychology of
Schooling and Literacy in Mind and Society
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Knowledge and Responsibility
Literacy and the languages of rationality
Literacy, specifically the use of writing for rational purposes, adds a new dimension to the traditional problem of the relation between language, thought and rationality. Central to rational thought are the logical relations expressed by such terms as “is”, “or”, “and” and “not”. Whereas some see these concepts as fundamental and innate, it is here argued that such terms exhibit a diverse range of uses in speech and thought but through literacy …
Writing and the mind
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Preschool children conflate pragmatic agreement and semantic truth
Children’s ability to ascribe beliefs to themselves and others has been shown to develop in the late preschool and early school years. This ability to represent, that is to think about, beliefs known to be false is described as metarepresentational development. This article extends these findings to the domain of linguistic representations by exploring how children come to judge statements as true or false of a given reality. It presents two mode…
Cambridge Handbook of Literacy
Literacy, rationality, and logic: The historical and developmental origins of logical discourse
This paper examines the claim that writing turns the implicit properties of spoken language into visible objects suited to reflection and analysis. It examines this hypothesis through an analysis of relational terms including ‘and’, ‘or’, and ‘not’, their meanings and uses in ordinary conversational contexts, and the changes that occur when these terms are recruited for systematic logical thinking. Keywords: literate rationality; literacy hypothe…
Écritures: Sur les traces de Jack Goody
L'écriture constitue-t-elle le trait d'union entre technique et culture, et par là entre science et culture ? Cet ouvrage donne des éléments de réponse à cette double question, à l'acuité renouvelée par le numérique. il fait donc appel aux anthropologues et philosophes (Jack Goody, Jens Brockmeier, David Olson...), aux spécialistes des pratiques lettrées de l'antiquité (Christophe Batsch, Flavia Carraro), de l'internet (Paul Mathias, Henri Desboi…
Why Literacy Matters, Then and Now
This chapter reviews recent work in classic literacy and the relationship between the objectification of written text and linguistic features of quotation. It shows how writing is neither equivalent to speaking nor a separate distinctive mode of communication and emphasizes the distance between expression and understanding that leads to a range of reading competencies. The chapter concludes with the use of language to reflect on language in “pure…
The Challenge of Academic Language
Increasingly in recent years, educators have related worries about students’ literacy accomplishments to their lack of “academic language skills” (August & Shanahan, 2006; Halliday & Martin, 1993; Pilgreen, 2006; Schleppegrell & Colombi, 2002). Indeed, it seems clear that control over academic language is a requirement for success with challenging literacy tasks, such as reading textbooks or writing research papers and literature reviews. As earl…
Contents, Vol. 36, 1993
Contents, Vol. 33, 1990
The Cognitive Revolution in Children’s Understanding of Mind
Bruner, in reassessing the cognitive revolution, argues for the centrality of ‘meaning-making’ in human activity, claiming that children learn to give meaning to what people do as they learn the language and social practices of their culture. The role played by the attribution of mental states to others has been studied intensely in the past decade in a new research area that has come to be known as children’s ‘theory of mind’. Researchers in thi…
Possible Minds: Reflections on Bruner’s Recent Writings on Mind and Self
This essay begins with an examination of the philosophical roots of Bruner’s constructivism and its recent application to the construction of self. The symbolic construction of mind as a part of self is drawn out for special consideration, and its roots in the history of philosophy and psychology are analyzed. The existence of internal mental states – a mind – is seen as a construction that arises at a particular time in history in a particular t…
Commentary
Language and thought: Aspects of a cognitive theory of semantics
Literacy, language, and learning: The Nature and Consequences of Reading and Writing
Talking about text
The Triumph of Hope Over Experience in the Search for “What Works”: A Response to Slavin
Slavin’s call for evidence-based research on the effectiveness of treatments is criticized for its unreflective concept of a “treatment.” It is argued that treatments cannot be defined objectively but only relative to the beliefs, goals, and intentions of those supposedly affected by the treatments. An alternative approach to the study of schooling in terms of the entitlements and obligations of those involved at all levels of the system is sugge…
The ABCs of deception: Do young children understand deception in the same way as adults
Most research suggests that it is not until age 4 that children understand deception as a means of creating a false belief. Yet children could have failed on these tasks because of either (a) conceptual problems (an inability to understand that deception is a means of creating a false belief), or (b) pragmatic problems (an inability to articulate an understanding of false belief) and task complexity (an inability to follow the narrative or make a…
How writing represents speech
Memory and inference in the comprehension of oral and written discourse∗
Three different inference types are considered in this paper: Propositional inferences which are necessary by virtue of the structure of the statements; Enabling inferences which are necessary by virtue of the structure of the discourse as a whole; and Pragmatic inferences which are invited by the content of the statements. In the first study, children from grades 4 and 6 were found to be able to differentiate between Pragmatic and Propositional …
Thinking About Thinking: Learning How to Take Statements and Hold Beliefs
Speech act theory (Searle, 1969) is used to analyze the concepts for thinking about talk and thought-metalinguistic and metacognitive concepts-and the relations between them. We examine the relations between speech acts and their corresponding mental states and between speech acts linked in a discourse. We argue that interpreting the illocutionary force of another's speech act is parallel to determining the propositional attitude to one's own men…
Children's ascriptions of knowledge to others
La these de l'egocentrisme dans l'evaluation par l'enfant des connaissances d'autrui est mise a l'epreuve aupres de 45 enfants âges de 3, 4 et 6 ans
Computers As Tools of the Intellect
The structure of language and meaning in speaking, writing, and computing is compared. The "bias" of both writing and computing is toward a radical explicitness that tends to minimize or eliminate altogether the role of interpretation–the construction of a personal, subjective meaning. The cognitive implications of teaching children to cope with this explicitness of writing and computing are considered
Sources of Authority in the Language of the School: A Response to “Beyond Criticism”
Luke, de Castell, and Luke (1983) do a considerable service in their attempt to show that the authority of written texts, school textbooks in particular, derive not only from the particular linguistic properties of the texts themselves-their explicitness and impersonality for example-but also from the social or institutional contexts in which those texts are owned, taught, and studied. Texts, they say, are above criticism primarily because the so…
Two cheers for literacy: Walter Ong, President Trump and the literate mind
Walter Ong emphasized two broad implications of literacy on mind, consciousness and interiority. I review some recent evidence for these conjectures by reference to my own research on children’s understanding of mind. I then go on to show how a theory of literate consciousness may help to explain the peculiar nature of Trump’s political rhetoric
Knowledge and Responsibility
Écritures: Sur les traces de Jack Goody
L'écriture constitue-t-elle le trait d'union entre technique et culture, et par là entre science et culture ? Cet ouvrage donne des éléments de réponse à cette double question, à l'acuité renouvelée par le numérique. il fait donc appel aux anthropologues et philosophes (Jack Goody, Jens Brockmeier, David Olson...), aux spécialistes des pratiques lettrées de l'antiquité (Christophe Batsch, Flavia Carraro), de l'internet (Paul Mathias, Henri Desboi…
The Computational Mind and the Digitized Society: A Question of Rules
Information technology has allowed us to organize and coordinate actions to a degree unimaginable even a few decades ago—think of the man on the moon program— and to understand the rational workings of the human mind—think of Chomsky’s account of language as the product of rules and representations. I examine both of these ventures in terms of the increasing rationality of thought and action and the increasing rationality of social organization—t…
Language, literacy, and mental states
There is a parallelism between children's mastery of the language of mind and their thinking about the world. Children work out distinctions appropriate to language at the same time that they are working out concepts for thinking. These assumptions were tested by measuring children's mastery of verbs of saying and meaning. In one study, 72 children from grades 1 through 4 were subjects. Although knowledge of cognitive verbs did not relate directl…
Reading, Writing, and Revisonism
The Role of Communications in the Middle East Conflict: Ideological and Religious Aspects
Language and thought: Aspects of a cognitive theory of semantics
Variety of exemplars versus linguistic contexts in concept attainment in young children
Cognitive Development: The Child's Acquisition of Diagonality
Contents: Foreword. Preface. Introduction. Conceptualizing Conceptualizing: The Diagonal as an Interesting Problem. The Nature of the Difficulty. The Effects of Instruction. The Change in the Mind of the Child. Instruction Revisited: Perceptual, Motor, and Linguistic Factors in Cognitive Development. Personal and Cultural Experiences in Conceptual Development: The Acquisition of the Diagonal in East Africa. Looking, Seeing, and Knowing -- Eye Mov…
Oral and Written Language and the Cognitive Processes of Children
Journal Article Oral and Written Language and the Cognitive Processes of Children Get access David R. Olson David R. Olson 1David Richard Olson is Professor of Applied Psychology at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Communication, Volume 27, Issue 3, September 1977, Pages 10–26, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1977.tb02119.x Published: 07 February…
The Role of Communications in the Middle East Conflict: Ideological and Religious Aspects
From Utterance to Text: The Bias of Language in Speech and Writing
In this far-ranging essay David Olson attempts to reframe current controversies over several aspects of language, including meaning, comprehension, acquisition,reading, and reasoning. Olson argues that in all these cases the conflicts are rooted in differing assumptions about the relation of meaning to language: whether meaning is extrinsic to language-a relation Olson designates as "utterance"-or intrinsic-a relation he calls "text." On both the…
Memory and inference in the comprehension of oral and written discourse∗
Three different inference types are considered in this paper: Propositional inferences which are necessary by virtue of the structure of the statements; Enabling inferences which are necessary by virtue of the structure of the discourse as a whole; and Pragmatic inferences which are invited by the content of the statements. In the first study, children from grades 4 and 6 were found to be able to differentiate between Pragmatic and Propositional …
Inventory of Marriage and Family Literature, Volume IV: 1975 & 1976
On the Language and Authority of Textbooks
Journal Article On the Language and Authority of Textbooks Get access David R. Olson David R. Olson 1David R. Olson is Professor of Applied Psychology at The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Communication, Volume 30, Issue 1, March 1980, Pages 186–196, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1980.tb01786.x Published: 07 February 2006
Role of Model's Affect in Test Anxiety
Thirty high test-anxious and 30 low test-anxious undergraduate females were exposed to either an anxious model, a non-anxious model or no model before performing on a spatial visualization task. The STAI A-State scale was also given before and after performance to determine the effects of model conditions and task performance on state anxiety levels. Subjects were then asked to evaluate their performance. Highly test-anxious subjects performed mo…
McLuhan: Preface to Literacy
Journal Article McLuhan: Preface to Literacy Get access David R. Olson David R. Olson 1David R. Olson is Professor of Applied Psychology at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Communication, Volume 31, Issue 3, September 1981, Pages 136–143, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1981.tb00437.x Published: 07 February 2006
Children's story-retelling
Children listen to stories from an early age, and are thus exposed to a rich source of well-formed and well-structured texts. This paper examines the relationship between children's progress in learning to read and their use of specialized linguistic features in retelling stories. The effectiveness of story-retelling is analysed from three per spectives: the use of story structure features, type of recall and the presence of oral and written lang…
Sources of Authority in the Language of the School: "A Response to "Beyond Criticism
Sources of Authority in the Language of the School: A Response to “Beyond Criticism”
Luke, de Castell, and Luke (1983) do a considerable service in their attempt to show that the authority of written texts, school textbooks in particular, derive not only from the particular linguistic properties of the texts themselves-their explicitness and impersonality for example-but also from the social or institutional contexts in which those texts are owned, taught, and studied. Texts, they say, are above criticism primarily because the so…
Literacy, language, and learning: The Nature and Consequences of Reading and Writing
Computers As Tools of the Intellect
The structure of language and meaning in speaking, writing, and computing is compared. The "bias" of both writing and computing is toward a radical explicitness that tends to minimize or eliminate altogether the role of interpretation–the construction of a personal, subjective meaning. The cognitive implications of teaching children to cope with this explicitness of writing and computing are considered
"Comment on "Computers as Tools of the Intellect
Information Technology and Education
Literacy, Language and Learning. The Nature and Consequences of Reading and Writing
Language, literacy, and mental states
There is a parallelism between children's mastery of the language of mind and their thinking about the world. Children work out distinctions appropriate to language at the same time that they are working out concepts for thinking. These assumptions were tested by measuring children's mastery of verbs of saying and meaning. In one study, 72 children from grades 1 through 4 were subjects. Although knowledge of cognitive verbs did not relate directl…
Reading, Writing, and Revisonism
Literacy, Language and Learning. The Nature and Consequences of Reading and Writing
Mind and Media: The Epistemic Functions of Literacy
Journal Article Mind and Media: The Epistemic Functions of Literacy Get access David R. Olson David R. Olson 1David R. Olson is Professor of Applied Cognitive Science at The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and Co-Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, University of Toronto Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Communication, Volume 38, Issue 3, September 1988, Pages 27–3…
Or What's a Metaphor For
This article discusses four questions fundamental to understanding metaphor. First, what is the relation between speakers' intentions, their goals, their beliefs, and their utterances? -or, what's a metaphor? Second, do metaphors have to be recognized as metaphors to be metaphors? - or, when's a metaphor? Third, what is the role of literal meaning in the comprehension of a metaphor?-or, what's not a metaphor? And fourth, what is the intellectual …
The State of Research on Literacy
Psychology (60 works) · Sociology (35 works) · Philosophy (34 works) · Computer Science (28 works) · Linguistics (28 works) · Epistemology (24 works) · Pedagogy (24 works) · Literacy (22 works) · Media, Communication, and Education (17 works) · Mathematics education (14 works)