Cognitive offloading: Let’s not miss the tipping point

Yesterday, I came across the following tweet:

Admittedly, I was slightly fuming at first, but then I realised that Victor Kumar makes a really neat point. Tying reading and cognitive offloading together in this way, he brings out (and debunks, at least implicitly) two misconceptions at once: (1) Cognitive offloading is often unduly restricted to the use of AI devices and then simply contrasted with analog skills like reading or writing. (2) At least in philosophy, reading is often unduly restricted to the passive intake of someone else’s thought and then simply contrasted with thinking for oneself. Schopenhauer famously put this as follows: “When we read, someone else is thinking for us: we merely repeat his mental process …” (More on this here.)

Neat as this point may be, there is a worry about deskilling I’d like to address in the following. People often debunk arguments about deskilling through AI use in similar ways by pointing out that we seem to have handled cognitive offloading through various means quite well in the past, suggesting that AI, and especially LLMs, might just turn out to be the next form of refined tool use, allowing us to offload torturous tasks to the LLM, while using the freed time and capacity for higher cognitive endeavours.

What this kind of argument seems to miss is a tipping point at which cognitive offloading, despite our best intentions, might well turn into deskilling. Compare cooking: Of course, there was a time during which we learned to prepare food in such a way that we prevented poisoning ourselves in the process. Gradually becoming shared knowledge, this skill became widespread and implemented thanks to a lot of offloading and division of labour. Certainly, this process can be seen as a great improvement. But now we’ve reached a level of offloading in food production where we increasingly allow for outright self-harm by stuffing ourselves with fast food and make do with industrial cruelty to non-human animals, resulting in harm and diseases on an evergrowing scale.

Returning to AI use, then, we shouldn’t miss the tipping point at which cognitive offloading might turn into all kinds of self-harm.

Why much academic writing isn’t thinking. A response to Lavinia Marin

Especially since the arrival of LLMs, there are quite a few pieces that claim “writing is thinking” or portray writing as thinking in a certain way (even Nature featured a piece on it). The idea is that you don’t just jot down what you thought out beforehand. Rather, the writing and rewriting process often produces thoughts that have not been anticipated by the writer. This is crucial in processes of learning, knowledge-production, artistic endeavours, or therapeutic ambitions. Although I don’t seem to have put it quite that way, I am myself a vocal advocate of that claim. In what follows, I don’t want to revoke my earlier claims. But still: I want to convince you that it’s even worthwhile to entertain the idea that much writing isn’t thinking in this sense, and that that might just be fine.

My idea goes back to recent exchanges with my colleagues Lavinia Marin and Timm Lampert. Lavinia pointed out to me that writing papers in the so-called hard and even some social sciences has no epistemic function. Papers get written to communicate work set-ups and results at conferences, to publish and to get funding. Today, Lavinia detailed this and a number of further points in an intriguing blog post (which I advise you to read as a whole). About writing in these sciences, she says the following: “Writing is just this process where you sit down and add up words. The hardest part is sitting down. … The way many academics treat writing today is that writing is not supposed to produce any new knowledge, insights or thinking. Writing is the wrapping of your results. This is at least for large parts of science, so alpha sciences, beta sciences, all that empirical stuff. “Apply ass to chair”, as Austin K Leon likes to say.” Timm took up this idea and suggested that much applied work based on logic, mathematics, and indeed programming with the aid of LLMs might fit this account.

This is of course somewhat anectdotal, but if this picture isn’t entirely off the mark, it does reveal some insights, not least in explaining why the academic responses to Large Language Models are such a mixed bag. The philosopher in me immediately wants to raise his voice and declare how much gets lost in this view on writing. Yet the historian in me cautions me to wait and listen. What does this mean? Here is a hunch: It doesn’t mean that people in the sciences don’t care about thinking. It just might mean that the real (epistemic) action is elsewhere. Not that long ago I stumbled across some intriguing work by Dana Jalobeanu on enacting experiments and recipes, inspiring me to rethink assumptions about early modern texts. As Dana points out in a paper on Della Porta and Bacon, experiments and recipes are records of what has been tried out in a laboratory or kitchen. The actual epistemic work is not in crafting the written text (which might sometimes just be a list of items and acts), but in all the work that precedes the writing and the work or reenactment inspired in the recipient who might try and replicate the promised results, with all the twisting and turning and trying and failing and trying again slightly differently. Once you see this, it becomes clear that the status and expectations from writing in certain sciences are vastly different from the status of writing in the humanities. In the former, much writing seems a much more social and epistemic action oriented endeavour where texts are just intermediearies and starting points for the actual work. In fact, once you see this, it becomes clear that even philosophical classics like the Descartes’ Meditations or Locke’s Essay heavily rely on the collaboration of the readers.

As I see it, this is quite a positive view of non-epistemic writing. And if writing works really like that in a number of domains, then there do seem to be good reasons to outsource such tedious exercises to LLMs. Recognising this rather strong difference between writing in the humanities and a number of sciences is really helpful to understand the different reactions to the advent of a lot of AI developments. Even if many colleagues in the humanities are not entirely skeptical about the merits of LLMs, they are worried about outsourcing too much and giving way to pernicious deskilling. Rightly so, because writing in the humanities really is different.

However, the process of introducing non-epistemic writing practices into the humanities has not begun with LLMs. It began much earlier. As most of us know all too well, there is the endless repetition of talk of the “crisis of humanties” – to which many administrators (it’s always the administrators!) responded, at least since the New Public Management developments in the 80s, by introducing success measures from the sciences into the humanities. Before we knew it, we began to write papers instead of books, grant applications, performance reviews, explained the value of potential applications of our work to various stakeholders and the average taxpayer. While there is nothing wrong with accountability per se, many complained – rightly I think – that the humanities’ competition with the hard and many social sciences is a game we can’t win. As I see it, this development lead to forms of formulaic writing in the humanities that tip the balance in favour of the (in some respects non-epistemic) paper model which I think is pernicious for many endeavours in our field (and should be countered by the reintroduction of the genre of commentary, as I argued earlier). So I think that many worries about recent technological developments are not inspired by LLMs per se, but by the way in which they accelerate an aleady problematic development in the humanities.

What’s more, the message that writing as such can be shortened and largely outsourced is not lost on students who are often already too busy. I am old enough to have grown up in a world where I learned writing by hand and the first thing I typed on a computer was my MA thesis, the authoritative book-like page on the screen making me feel at once proud and like an impostor whose scribblings were seemingly unduly dignified by the miraculous word-processor. But I keep wondering what it’s like for people who have never made this transition and are born into a world where pens and paper are part of a posh hobby like collecting vinyl records perhaps.

I’m not sure how big of a difference this makes. But what I’m reminded of is that we all (still) write, even if we happen to write non-epistemically and outsource like hell, in an environment in which those who are happy enough to have learned the art of reading and writing at school. This social environment with all its implicit forms of collective knowledge matters greatly. For the forms of writing we (used to?) learn – all the different genres of reports, discussions, commentaries, tables, proofs, translations, essays etc., all that jazz – is epistemic writing in that it trained us to think and imagine. Being trained this way, we can also enjoy the luxury of writing non-epistemically now and then, for instance when the action of thinking is happening elsewhere.

Most of all, we shouldn’t forget that meandering and serendipitous research processes inside and outside of the actual writing are a deeply human thing. Seen this way, there is no point in outsourcing, because writing and thinking – just like many other beautiful things that take time and practice to learn – are not there for the purpose of piling up huge quantities of ever more texts or lines in an academic CV. They have, as the saying goes, intrinsic value. As Lavinia highlights in her blog post, it doesn’t just happen in academic contexts but – now perhaps most of all – in our (popular) culture more widely understood:

“Much of the knowledge propagated in the popular culture is exactly from nerds and fans who have no profit mindset, but simply enjoy the sheer act of research. (I am inspired here by Celine Nguyen’s amazing essay). Research is a wonderful experience, just as painting, singing, staging a drama in your backyard, singing in a garage band, sculpting or knitting. It’s a particular form of leading a creative life, which I think we were all meant to lead. Any artistic practice is highly enjoyable in itself and helps us endure this life on earth. And we just need to recognise that reading and writing are such practices that make us more human and happier to be alive. And hence, the benefit, if you must use these economic terms, is simply experiential. Writing by hand, reading slowly are acts of sheer experiential enchantment. Ways of living our intellectual lives. If we insist on becoming more efficient about these practices, we will be refusing to future generations the access to these practices; we may be cutting them off from very human experiences that we shouldn’t hoard for ourselves.”

How do LLMs improve philosophical writing? A test design

Here is a test (for philosophy students) of how philosophical writing can be improved through the use of Large Language Models:

The Test

1. Please write a brief introduction to a paper topic of your choice (ideally one that you had to write already).

2. Please feed the text into an LLM of your choice. Then, give a detailed account of how the artificially produced text improves or decreases the quality of your own writing. Pay special attention to:

– structure

– adequacy of terminology

– quality of the argument

– (critical) relation to the primary and secondary literature

– adequacy of the proposed methods

– style

– accuracy

– originality the proposed conclusion

Please note: You fail, if you can’t provide an adequate assessment of these points.

Please also note: If you your assessment speaks in favour of the LLM, please think about the promise of your philosophical writing.

On identity – between datafication and finding oneself

It was probably in 2015, when a friend took me along to a workshop of professionals involved in social entrepeneurship. Located in a hip place in Berlin Kreuzberg, it was a gathering of well-educated people, mostly in their early thirties, brimming with ideas of social change. Something of an outsider myself, I quickly noticed another outsider in the room: not a philosopher, but a grey-haired social worker, hailing from a village in Brandenburg and evidently pondering on the question that seemed strikingly concrete: how to stop people joining the far-right party AfD. At that time, the AfD still wasn’t generally perceived as a major threat but more as a refuge for Eurosceptics, national conservatives, and right-wing protest voters. During the introductions, the social worker explained that he knew many people in his village who were on the verge of joining the party. Yet the other participants seemed less interested in the problem he described than in what his concern revealed about him. Rather than hearing someone worried about political radicalisation, they appeared to classify him as someone who was, in one way or another, close to the people he was talking about. His proximity to the subject became a reason to suspect his own political identity. I may, of course, have misread the situation. But my impression was reinforced by what happened afterwards: once the introductions were over, no one spoke to him again for the rest of the workshop.

A great deal of contemporary political discourse constists not so much in advocating one’s beliefs as in convicting others of (moral) failure. The social worker mentioned above may well have come with best intentions. Yet the other participants weren’t interested in what he said explicitly, but in what the social cues could be taken to reveal about his identity. For the person under scrutiny, this may well result in conflicts between self-ascriptions and ascriptions by others. Faving someone’s tweet might have earned you all sorts of reputations (when favs were still traceable), even if you might just be wishing to lend support to a friend in need, whatever the cause. You may protest as much as you like, at least in online spaces the verdict about your (political) identity will be strengthened quickly by the data unfailingly betraying your true colours. Of course, the conflicts between self-ascriptions and social ascriptions have a long history. What seems distinctive about contemporary digital culture, however, is the epistemic authority increasingly granted to data. Digital traces appear to promise objective evidence of who someone really is. What interests me is the question of whether datafication, as practised in digital contexts, leads to a new understanding of (political) identity, namely as an identity that is not discovered by self-searching within conventional human interactions, but that can be objectively inferred by referring to digital traces or behavioural data.

A notion of identity that I personally cherish is the idea that identity is initially built by keeping something secret from others. The novelist Deniz Ohde makes this point as follows:

“Every child, at some point, begins to keep certain things secret from others – especially from their parents or other primary caregivers. … At first, it may hide experiences from kindergarten, the rules of games invented with other children, daydreams in which flying is possible … Then, these games slowly become something serious. Suddenly, the child begins to regard them as a private sphere that is none of the parents’ business. Then it keeps its first crush secret, keeps also dreams at night to itself, locks the bathroom door, … begins to maintain an inner dialogue … This is the foundation of the self. The secret is a crucial aspect of individuation.” (This is my rough translation from German.)

While this understanding of identity is also rooted in interactions with others, it is so qua silence or secrecy, qua withholding what would otherwise be traceable by others. What’s more, it’s fluid, experimental, entangled and tentative. On such an account, it’s open and perhaps subject to change what one thinks about things. It’s driven as much by curiosity as by love, shame, and suffering. When we enter (political) discourse with others, this kind of identity might be challenged, changed, or confirmed by others. What is crucial, though, is that in this understanding, our identity is developed in a dialectic of privacy and public exchange, of self-ascription and social ascription. Not something objectively discovered, but continuosly negotiated.

If this is an apt sketch of how identity might come about, then it’s very much at odds with the objectivity suggested by datafication. While we might increasingly integrate datafied aspects through the digital measures, we should not be tricked into seeing them as a welcome objective replacement for our fluid forms of becoming ourselves. The fact that we can track data about our health doesn’t necessarily improve our relation to our bodies. Likewise, the fact that we can collect ever more data about what someone reads, likes, follows, or endorses does not necessarily improve our understanding of that person or our capacity to engage with them. Data may reveal patterns of behaviour, but it cannot settle the question of who someone is. We should bear this tension in the disparate notions of identity in mind – especially when assessing public figures and their political identities, or indeed ourselves and our interlocutors, by such measures.

Summer School on Spinoza: An Underdog of Philosophy

The fifth Collegium Spinozanum attracted guests from all over the world to Hagen. Organizer Prof. Martin Lenz explains what makes the early modern thinker so fascinating.

The relatively low public awareness of Spinoza’s work stands in stark contrast to the enormous influence the Dutch philosopher (1632-1677) has had on the history of ideas within academia. To this day, scholars across a wide range of disciplines – from philosophy and psychology to mathematics – continue to engage with his writings. “Spinoza is an underdog,” says Prof. Dr. Martin Lenz of FernUniversität in Hagen. “But when I started reading him – relatively late, when I was already a postdoctoral researcher – I only then began to understand certain things. His influence is simply immense. Whether it’s Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, or Freud, so much of Spinoza’s thought runs through their work as an underlying current.”

Diversity That Brings People Together

“This diversity of influences is also what makes our Collegium Spinozanum so diverse,” says Professor Lenz about the summer school. The event was held for the fifth time at FernUniversität in Hagen. As in previous years, Martin Lenz organized the four-day gathering together with his colleague Andrea Sangiacomo (University of Groningen / Erasmus University Rotterdam). “We’re delighted to see that the Spinoza community continues to grow,” says Lenz, pleased with the strong turnout. “More than sixty participants came from Argentina, Canada, China, Israel, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the United States, and many different European countries.”

A Holistic Concept of God and Nature

Spinoza was not always so highly regarded. Among his contemporaries, he was a controversial figure, particularly because he did not believe in a transcendent God who, as creator, watches over humanity from afar. “We are all God; we are all part of nature. Everything is connected to everything else,” Lenz explains, summarizing Spinoza’s philosophy. “As human beings, we are not the crown of creation, but merely modes within the totality of nature.” This idea continues to resonate today, especially in discussions of environmental ethics. “When we take care of something, we are automatically taking care of ourselves – as part of the whole.” Spinoza’s holistic worldview would only gain widespread advocates in later centuries.

(Martin Lenz welcoming Julia Peters / Photo: FernUniversität)

Banished from His Community

The son of Portuguese immigrants initially made himself unpopular with his progressive ideas, especially within his own Jewish community. Because he openly questioned the central tenets of faith upheld by Amsterdam’s Jewish community, he was excommunicated in 1656. He later earned his living as a lens grinder, literally bringing clarity through his craft while simultaneously working on his penetrating philosophical writings. “A central idea in his work is that we are driven beings,” Lenz explains. “We believe that it is our goals that pull us forward. But in reality, we are being pushed from behind. This contains many ideas that were later taken up by others: in Nietzsche, for example, it becomes the will to power, and in Freud, the unconscious.” Unlike his ideas, however, Spinoza himself was not granted a long life. He died of tuberculosis in The Hague at the age of just forty-four.

A Small Team Takes on a Big Challenge

Martin Lenz expressed his gratitude to his team for their outstanding work. All participants gave highly positive feedback, marking a major success for what is, after all, a relatively small academic unit. “The team had everything under control,” the professor said enthusiastically. Not only was the conference program packed with engaging content, but the setting on the Hagen campus also impressed participants, offering a chill-out area, quiet retreat spaces, and numerous opportunities for networking. “I learned an enormous amount,” Martin Lenz emphasized. “The workshop generated tremendous inspiration.” In addition to the academic program, participants were offered career guidance, as well as roundtable discussions on research infrastructure and funding opportunities.

“We’ll see where we are in two years,” Martin Lenz says, already looking forward with anticipation to the next gathering.

**

Text and photos by Bendedikt Reuse

Translated from the German by Martin Lenz

Lesekompetenz als schwindende Situiertheit? (Video)

Hier findet sich das Video meines gleichnamigen Vortrags vom 25. Juni 2026 im Rahmen des Hagener forum philosophicum sowie als Keynote des Workshops Phänomenologie der Situation & Situierte Lektüren:

Abstract: Lesekompetenz als schwindende Situiertheit?

(Here is an English version of the talk.)

Ausgangspunkt ist die These, dass Lesekompetenz nicht lediglich eine Kulturtechnik, sondern eine historisch kontingente Form der Situiertheit ist, die bestimmte Praktiken des Denkens, Verstehens und Imaginierens überhaupt erst ermöglicht. Ausgehend von einem sozial-pragmatischen Verständnis des Lesens wird argumentiert, dass die Bedeutung von Texten nicht im Text selbst oder im lesenden Individuum liegt, sondern in den sozialen Interaktionen zwischen Leser*innen. Lesekompetenz erscheint dabei als historisch erworbene Voraussetzung für den distanzierten Umgang mit Schrift.

Anhand der Entwicklung von der mittelalterlichen Buchkultur zur scholastischen Universität wird gezeigt, wie sich Texte zu epistemischen Instrumenten abstrahieren konnten. Erst die zunehmende Beherrschung schriftsprachlicher Strukturen ermöglichte eine Loslösung des Textes von seinem materiellen Träger sowie neue Formen systematischen und reflexiven Denkens.

In einem zweiten Schritt werden Auswirkungen digitaler Medien auf diese Form der Lesekompetenz untersucht. Während die Buchkultur durch Distanz, Abstraktion und eine relative Entkopplung von unmittelbaren Handlungskontexten gekennzeichnet ist, binden soziale Medien schriftliche Kommunikation erneut eng an affektive Relevanzmarker, soziale Bewertungen und unmittelbare Anschlusshandlungen. Online-Kommunikation folgt damit zunehmend der Pragmatik gesprochener Sprache („fingered speech“).

Der Vortrag schließt mit der Überlegung, dass die für Buch- und Wissenskultur zentrale Fähigkeit epistemischer Distanznahme keine selbstverständliche anthropologische Konstante, sondern eine historisch fragile Errungenschaft ist. Sollte sich die soziale Funktion schriftlicher Texte grundlegend verändern, könnte auch die daran gebundene Form der Lesekompetenz und damit eine wesentliche Bedingung wissenschaftlicher und imaginativer Praxis allmählich verloren gehen.

„Das ist aus dem Zusammenhang gerissen!“ – Eine verfehlte Verteidigung?

In Deutschland wird derzeit über den Kabarettisten Dieter Nuhr debattiert, dem vorgeworfen wird, kürzlich einen ausgesprochen schlechten Witz über Femizide gemacht zu haben. Nachdem die öffentliche Empörung nicht abebbte, erklärte er in den sozialen Medien, er habe nie einen Witz über Femizide gemacht; sein eigentliches Anliegen sei vielmehr die Kritik am Missbrauch des Begriffs „strukturell“ im Zusammenhang mit Behauptungen über strukturelle Gewalt von Männern gegen Frauen gewesen. Nuhrs Verteidigung besteht also darin, dass der Witz falsch kontextualisiert sei, wenn man ihn auf Femizide und nicht etwa auf strukturelle Gewalt von Männern beziehe. Allerdings ist fraglich, ob dies eine gelungene Verteidigung darstellt, denn die Rede von Femiziden setzt ja in der Tat eine strukturelle Form von Gewalt gegen Frauen voraus. So gesehen beruft sich seine Verteidigung lediglich auf eine anders nuancierte Paraphrase des Vorwurfs. (Welche Nuancierung? Nun, einmal betont man strukturelle Gewalt gegen Frauen; das andere Mal strukturelle Gewalt von Männern.) Mir geht es aber gar nicht so sehr um die mislungene Verteidigung Nuhrs an sich, sondern um den allseits verbreiteten Topos, etwas sei „aus dem Kontext gerissen“ bzw. falsch rekontextualisiert worden. Der Topos ist bei genauerem Hinsehen nämlich etwas eigenartig. Warum? Nun, Textverstehen ist oft nichts anderes als Rekontextualisierung.

Rekontextualisierung als Verstehen. – Wenn man davon ausgeht, dass jemand, der einen Text zu verstehen sucht, diesem zwangsläufig mit eigenen Voraussetzungen begegnet, dann ist Verstehen immer Rekontextualisierung. Es sei denn, man versteht unter Verstehen so etwas wie ‚ein Foto von einem Text machen‘. Ich ordne einen Satz oder eine Szene immer in meinem Horizont ein. Natürlich kann ich von meinem persönlichen Horizont Abstand nehmen, kann mich weiter informieren und weitere Aspekte betrachten, aber auch das ist eine Veränderung des Kontextes. Rekontextualisierung von Äußerungen ist also die normale Form des Verstehens. Übrigens auch des Verstehens von eigenen Äußerungen. Eine Grundform dieses Tuns ist das Zitieren. Denn beim Zitieren geht es oft um das Übertragen einer Äußerung in den Kontext einer Erklärung. Wenn dies zutrifft, dann scheint der Vorwurf, etwas sei aus dem Kontext gerissen, merkwürdig.

Absichtsvolles Missverstehen? – Jetzt kann man natürlich einwenden, dass es – zumal in politischen Debatten – häufig vorkommt, dass eine Äußerung willentlich missverstanden wird. Hier wird dann behauptet, man versuche eigentlich nicht, eine Äußerung zu verstehen, sondern man versuche, eine wohlverstandene Äußerung unangemessen auszulegen. Arnd Pollmann zufolge geht es dabei „um strategische Landgewinne. Man will der Blase beweisen, auf der richtigen Seite zu stehen. Das eigene Weltbild wird stabilisiert, indem das irritierende Contra ignoriert, verfälscht oder karikiert wird.“ Das scheint mir in der Tat eine treffende Beobachtung. Allerdings setzt die Idee der Verfälschung voraus, dass es eine unverfälschte Form der Deutung gibt. Natürlich kann man hier mit Recht auf das Principle of Charity verweisen, dem gemäß Äußerungen so rational wie möglich zu interpretieren sind. Allerdings lässt der bloße Verweis unerwähnt, dass dieses Prinzip auf geteilte Überzeugungen angewiesen ist. In diesem Sinne setzt die Idee der unverfälschten oder zumindest charitablen Deutung ein geteiltes Weltbild voraus. Gerade dies scheint beim absichtsvollen Missverständnis aber nicht gegeben zu sein. Was hier „absichtsvoll“ genannt wird, ist meines Erachtens lediglich die unterstellte Möglichkeit, jemanden auch anders verstehen zu können, als er oder sie es gerade tut. (Aber – um beim Beispiel zu bleiben – das hängt davon ab, ob ich die Äußerung des besagten Kabarettisten als frauenfeindlich einordne oder nicht. Und gerade das steht bei den unterschiedlichen Deutungen ja zur Debatte, kann also nicht als gegeben vorausgesetzt werden.) „Anders verstehen“ heißt in so einem Fall, jemandem ein Weltbild zuzuschreiben, das ich ihm aufgrund der getätigten Äußerung gerade absprechen will. Das Problem ist also, dass die charitable Interpretation davon abhängt, welche Einstellungen ich meinem Gegenüber sonst noch zuschreibe. Bei tiefgreifenden Dissensen über politische Fragen können ganz unterschiedliche Dinge rational erscheinen.

Zitate als Belege. – Ein Grundproblem bei all diesen Moves, also beim Vorwurf des falschen Rekontextualisierens und dem des absichtsvollen Missverstehens, scheint mir in der in akademischen Kreisen verbreiteten Tradition zu liegen, Zitate oder Verweise auf Texte bzw. Filmsequenzen als Belege zu behandeln. Natürlich gibt es manchmal unmissverständlich klare Aussagen, die für sich zu sprechen scheinen, aber in den allermeisten Fällen sind Äußerungen erst dann als Belege verwendbar, wenn sie im Kontext einer bestimmten Interpretation akzeptiert werden. „Das steht da doch gar nicht“ oder „das hab ich nicht gesagt“ hilft nicht weiter, wenn Äußerungen doch erst durch Kontextualisierung interpretierbar werden. Zitate sind daher gerade in Streitfragen nichts, das für sich als Beleg für eine Einstellung herangezogen werden könnte (es sei denn, es geht um die Frage, was jemand wörtlich gesagt hat).

Unangemessene Rekontextualisierung. – Aber auch wenn die meisten Verstehensakte auf Rekontextualisierungen angewiesen sind, gibt es angemessene und unangemessene Rekontextualisierungen. In diesem Sinne ist es völlig berechtigt, wenn sich eine Autorin oder ein Autor an der Interpretation der eigenen Äußerung beteiligt. (Nuhr allerdings scheint mit seiner Kontextualisierung gerade die für ihn missliebige Deutung unmerklich zu bestätigen.) Das ist aber, wie man so schön sagt, ein dialektisches Geschehen, bei dem man sich nicht schlicht darauf berufen kann, etwas anderes gesagt oder gemeint zu haben. Gleiches gilt natürlich auch für die Interpretierenden. Deshalb bleibt letztlich allen Beteiligten nur, sich weiter offen auszutauschen oder stur zu beharren.