Large Language Models and classism. The ethics of reading (3)

When reading texts with lots of general remarks and little attention to detail, I often wonder whether it’s produced by ChatGPT or some other LLM. I don’t like this kind of suspicion, especially in the context of teaching and evaluating. Not least because it primarily targets the author rather than the text: Has the author used an LLM and hence tried to cheat? So rather than assessing the text, I am incentivised to make a moral judgment. This readjusts my attitude as a reader in a crucial way. Rather than trying to enjoy the flow of the text or get into the argument, I wonder about the honesty and sincerity of the writer. While there is currently much discussion about cheating with LLMs, the unease that the suspicion causes me brings quite another worry to the fore: my own classism. Am I really worried to be cheated on or that the poor souls relying on AI are not learning to think for themselves? Or am I not rather mainly worried that these bullshitting texts produced by AI are soon indistinguishable from the products of my authentic intellectual labour? Let me explain.

Tacitly cultivating classism. – Being what is called a first-gen academic, one might say I’ve earned my cultural capital the hard way. I still remember how I mind-numbingly practiced philosophical terminology at the age of thirteen, enjoing the cluelessness of my parents when I put it to use. Looking back, I think of myself as impertinent and cruel. Intellectualism doesn’t come across as thuggish as brute anti-intellectualism. But I would say that, wouldn’t I? More to the point, my intellectualism paved a way that seems now to be threatened by the fact that text production can be outsourced just like other kinds of labour. Intellectual work of certain kinds is indistinguishable from work outsourced to LLMs. Being annoyed by people’s use of LLM’s I don’t feel consciously threatened. But I do wonder whether it’s this class aspect that creeps into my judgement of those users.

What kind of work do we actually grade as instructors? – My hunch is, then, that what is behind my suspicion against certain writers who might have used LLMs is owing to a certain classism or class anxiety. If people can outsource intellectual work at least to a certain degree, I might end up suspecting (tacitly) that these people don’t belong where they claim to be. Now you might respond that part of this suspicion is fair in that it targets fraud etc. Yet, I’m not sure it is fair. Of course, when dealing with straightforward cheating, our responses might be justified. But most cases are not that straightforward, or so I suppose at least. Just consider the teaching context: We might say we’re distinguishing students who “have done the work” from those who didn’t. But making such a distinction seems to rely on the fact that some students actually “do the work” in relation to one’s class. Yet, what if we’re merely rewarding those students who have learned intellectual skills to produce great texts long before they set foot in our classes? In other words, we might not reward intellectual skills developed as taught by us but intellectual skills as picked up long before. So what are you grading in such cases? The things that people learned in your class or the things that people bring along? If you’re perhaps not actually assessing people’s progress in your course, then the question arises what’s so salient about the distinction between someone well-educated long before and someone making up for an earlier disadvantage by using tools like LLMs to improve their work.

AI use between shaming and rewarding. – My point is not to appeal to such classism to silence justified criticism of naïve integration of AI into teaching contexts (here is a pertinent open letter I co-signed). But classism is a real thing; and “AI shaming” seems to be a new way of exercising the related kind of gatekeeping. Now that people start noticing that AI shaming is on the rise, it doesn’t mean it’s just part of an arsenal of arguments in favour of Tech Bros (as this thread insinuates). The stigma of using AI for one’s work is as real as the problem of cheating and related vices. But that doesn’t mean AI usage is exhausted by this. The world we live in will increasingly reward using AI. As an instructor I’m primarily faced with downsides when students use it to cheat, but as soon as we’re not acting as professionals ourselves we might become quite dependent on the benefits of AI. Just step outside your comfort zone and hand over the task of reformulating a text with a pertinent perspective! Having drafted a couple of legal documents, for instance, I have found that ChatGPT is a helpful tool. Of course, I still need to check on points, but the Legalese produced by this device is of real help. But relying on such help will be shamed by the next best expert in legal matters. And then it’s me who is at the receiving end of AI shaming.

From texts to their producers. – If we take the class perspective seriously, AI is not only presenting us with challenges but with contrary assessments ranging from worries about fraud, on the one hand, to worries about inappropriate gatekeeping, on the other. So how can we respond to this situation? My hunch is that we first need to acknowledge that this technology changes our reading culture. For a very long time, at least since the critical philological work of the 19^th century, we have learned to see texts as something objective in that they can be seen independently from their producers or authors (or the layers of production of texts). As Daniel Martin Feige noted, digitalization involves a striking return of the author (see part three of his Kritik der Digitalisierung). With the constant possibility of text production through LLMs, we will focus even more on the author and marks of authenticity again, whether we like it or not. But this doesn’t mean that we need to resign ourseves to constant suspicion.

Authentic versus bullshitting texts. – Turning to texts themselves, the crucial question for us will be whether such texts are authentic and genuine expressions by an author or bullshitting texts. In educational contexts, we have known long before the advent of LLMs that our grading systems incentivise bullshitting, with or without LLMs. So I’d repeat that we educators need to focus on actually reading rather than going for quick judgments. This would not merely mean assessing whether someone is cheating but to reflect on what we expect and on whether our expectations are mainly pertaining to class markers, as seems to be the case in many instances. The bottom line seems to be this: Our worry should not be about the use of AI or AI-prompted texts, but about bullshitting texts. This might still mean that our current reading culture (where we treat texts as something objective) might come to an end. But so be it.

CfP: Reading as a Social Practice. An Interdisciplinary Workshop

CfP: Reading as a Social Practice. An Interdisciplinary Workshop

Berlin, 27-28 March 2026

Organised by Irmtraud Hnilica (Mannheim/Hagen) and Martin Lenz (Hagen)

According to a widespread consensus, we are currently living through a reading crisis. This workshop seeks to take a step back from the rhetoric of decline and instead raise the question of how reading itself can be conceptualised and approached from different disciplinary perspectives, particularly in philosophy and literary studies. To a first approximation, we propose that reading is determined not only by texts themselves or by individual readers, but mainly by the interactions between readers. We especially invite submissions engaging with this claim—whether through historical investigations of reading cultures, theoretical reflections on the social dynamics of interpretation, or analyses of contemporary practices in both analogue and digital spheres. We explicitly welcome submissions from scholars at all career stages. The aim of this international workshop is to spark new collaborations that will eventually result in a joint interdisciplinary network devoted to the study of reading as a social practice.

To submit, please email an abstract around 500 words to Martin Lenz (martin.lenz@fernuni-hagen.de) no later than 31 October 2025. Please use ‘Reading 2026’ as the header of your email. The email should contain a short bio of the author‘s details (including position and affiliation). We hope to notify you about the outcome by the end of November 2025.

The languages of the workshop are English and German. For each talk, there will be time for a 30-minute presentation, with about another 15 minutes for discussion. Upon acceptance, we grant reimbursement of accommodation and travel expenses.

***

CfP: Lesen als soziale Praxis. Interdisziplinärer Workshop

Berlin, 27./28. März 2026

Organisiert von Irmtraud Hnilica (Mannheim/Hagen) und Martin Lenz (Hagen)

Einem weitverbreiteten Konsens zufolge erleben wir derzeit eine Lesekrise. Dieser Workshop möchte einen Schritt zurücktreten von der Rhetorik des Niedergangs und stattdessen die Frage stellen, wie Lesen selbst konzeptualisiert und aus verschiedenen disziplinären Perspektiven – insbesondere in der Philosophie und Literaturwissenschaft – betrachtet werden kann. In einer ersten Annäherung schlagen wir vor, dass Lesen nicht nur durch die Texte selbst oder durch individuelle Leser*innen bestimmt wird, sondern maßgeblich durch die Interaktionen zwischen Leser*innen. Wir freuen uns auf Beiträge, die sich mit dieser These auseinandersetzen – sei es durch historische Explorationen von Lesekulturen, theoretische Reflexionen über die sozialen Dynamiken der Interpretation oder durch Analysen zeitgenössischer Praktiken in analogen wie digitalen Räumen. Explizit erwünscht sind Einreichungen von Wissenschaftler*innen aller Karrierestufen. Ziel dieses internationalen Workshops ist es, neue Kooperationen anzustoßen, die in ein gemeinsames interdisziplinäres Netzwerk zum Lesen als sozialer Praxis münden sollen.

Bitte senden Sie ein Abstract von ca. 500 Wörtern bis spätestens 31. Oktober 2025 per E-Mail an Martin Lenz (martin.lenz@fernuni-hagen.de). Verwenden Sie als Betreff Ihrer E-Mail bitte: Reading 2026. Bitte ergänzen Sie Ihr Abstract durch eine akademische Kurzbio mit Angaben zu Position und Institution. Wir hoffen, bis spätestens Ende November 2025 Rückmeldung geben zu können.

Workshopsprachen sind deutsch und englisch. Vorgesehen sind 30 Minuten Vortrag und je 15 Minuten Diskussion. Fahrt- und Übernachtungskosten werden übernommen.

What does it say? The supposed objectivity of written texts

“… interpretation is the source of texts, facts, authors, and intentions.”

Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?

Do you remember when you first committed some of your own thoughts to paper? Perhaps you kept a diary, perhaps you wrote poems or lyrics or crafted a letter to a friend. Perhaps you had worked on the aesthetics of your handwriting. Anyway, there it was. Something that you had written could now be read and, of course, misread in a distant place during your absence. This striking distance became even more evident to me when I had seen my words, not in my clumsy handwriting, but in the typeface of a word-processor. Imagining that someone would read my words not as my personal scribblings but as a text in an authoritative typeface, made me at once proud but also seemed to diminish my personal impact on the text. In any case, the absence or possible absence of the author from something written, I suppose, is what turns texts into something objective. As I see it, texts become objective when they can be read independently of the writer, of what the writer says and thinks. If this is correct, it seems that written texts are fundamentally different from spoken texts or thoughts. In turn, this makes me wonder whether it’s written texts alone that afford the interpretive openness allowing for different readings or interpretations as we know them in the humanities of our time. In what follows, I would like pursue some perhaps naïve musings on this issue.

Thinking versus speaking versus thought?

If you observe what you say in contrast to how you write, you’ll probably notice a stark difference between spoken versus written language. While academics sometimes seem to try and imitate the grammatical standards of their written language in their speech, we quickly notice that the grammatical rules, word choices and other aspects are vastly different. Pondering on this issue quickly brought me back to the ancient and medieval doctrine of “three kinds of language”, according to which thought is expressed through spoken language and spoken language is signified by written language. But once you notice how different already speaking and writing really are, it’s difficult to give much credit to said doctrine. The very idea that writing is a set of signs of what is spoken strikes me as a very impoverished understanding of the difference. This makes me wonder when written language was first considered as a set of signs independently from spoken language. Following Stephan Meier-Oeser’s work, my hunch is that William of Ockham and Pierre D’Ailly in their logical treatises are among the first to deem written signs as independent from spoken language. (Sadly, it’s not entirely clear why they hold this in contrast to many of their fellow thinkers.) Now, once you think of written language as independent from speech it seems that you acknowledge something that could be the objectivity of the written text. Of course, long before the written text is acknowledged as an independent signifier, there have been sacred texts like the Bible that were considered objective in some sense. But experiencing our very own writings as independent from our speaking must do something to the way we think about texts and their interpretability more generally, or so I think.

The written text as an objective ‘thing’

The way we encounter written texts or books (be it on paper or screens) seems to present them as distal objects, independent from how we interact about or with them. Like the table in front of you, the book on your desk or in your pdf isn’t altered when you look away. This experience is certainly at least in part responsible for the common assumption that texts and their meanings are stable items independently of us. Likewise, our experience of reading is commonly thought of as grasping something external to us or our interactions. But why? While I myself have begun to think that reading is in many ways a matter primarily dependent on interactions between readers, I equally wonder how written texts, non-sacred texts in particular, have earned the status of independent carriers of meaning that can be hit or missed. Our current reading practices inside and outside of academia seem to corroborate this assumption. – (What does it say? This is a question that silences classes but equally fosters the pretence that texts are stable unchanging sources of meaning that provide all the necessary constraints for possible interpretations. Yet, not knowing whether we’re reading a recipe or a a poem, we are probably unable to tell the genres apart without context. “Context” – this harmless little term obscuring all the greatly important factors allowing for recognition, and constantly underestimated as a “side issue” when it comes to competing readings!) But what does it take for a written text to be actually seen as independent in such ways?

The advent of ChatGPT

Investigating the question of the objectivity of texts will take some time. But currently it seems that this objectivity becomes undone in quite unexpected manners: the advent of chatGPT does not only call into question the production of texts through proper authorship. Rather, it also calls into question the independence of written language as a system of signs, thriving on a supposed text-world relation having been taken for granted for a very long time. Reading a piece of text, we can no longer presume that it was produced by a person having a relation to the world, to themselves and to other people making it a rational item, interpretable by rational beings, or simply readers.

How did we get here?

Stop grading student essays and start reading them instead. The ethics of reading (2)

A question for scholars. – How can we spend a lifetime on a chapter in Aristotle and think we’re done with a student essay in two hours? Both can be equally enigmatic.

Writing this little joke back in 2018, ChatGPT was still unheard of in my part of the world. My point was that our teaching practice results in our unlearning to read and encourages mindless writing and reading. Back then, people responded by emphasising that, contrary to texts of “proper” philosophers, student work is being produced and read to be judged with regard to specific skills, so it doesn’t merit further attention. With the advent of ChatGPT, the judging part of this kind of exercise went down the drain. But even back then, the thought that sparked the worry behind my joke was that we have students produce texts that no one wants to read and, basically, that we train forms of writing that no one wants to read. After all, we now know that it’s not only student papers that often get no more than a quick glace, but equally work of peers. As I see it, then, ChatGPT did not alter this situation but just made our practice of mindless reading and writing more visible. At least, we talk about it now.

If this contains at least a grain of truth, then we knew very well before the advent of ChatGPT that our exercises weren’t very promising. Why? Of course, writing is a great thing and should be practised, but grading writing is another matter altogether. Either our responses would have to be very formulaic or they would have to be so time consuming that no one could serve larger classes. So the problem is not that students now have better ways of cheating. The problem is that we don’t and didn’t act well as readers of our student work. No matter whether we act like cops to catch cheaters or just keep rushing through masses of work: we’re acting as a bad role model for good reading and writing. If we rush through student papers, we demonstrate that we only care about grading. Students learn that they should mainly care about grades, too. It’s no surprise, then, that what gets perfected is not the writing but the techniques of cheating.

But this doesn’t mean that students don’t want to write or learn writing. Rather, they probably don’t want to write for readers who spend two to five seconds on a paragraph that took two days to compose. Perhaps what we (should) really feel, now that ChatGPT makes it almost impossible to distinguish real from hallucinated work, is relief – relief that student essays can’t be graded as they used to be. It should encourage us, not to abolish this kind of exercise, but take it more seriously and stop grading it in the way we used to. While we can focus our common grading practices on other kinds of exercises, we could encourage student essays designed as longer projects for those who really want to go through the effort.

Reading as a Social Practice. Sketching a long-term project (from March 2025 onwards)

Currently, Irmtraud Hnilica and I are sketching guiding ideas for a project that has been in the making for some time. Below is a small blurb. Please feel free to get in touch, if you’re interested in collaborating:

According to an ever-growing consensus, there is a reading crisis today. It ranges from illiteracy and a lack of text comprehension to a reduced willingness of pupils and students to engage with complex texts. This development has been recognised as an area of action. The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), for instance, has initiated measures to promote reading with significant funding for empirical educational research. By contrast, our project Reading as a Social Practice is meant as a reflexive evaluation of the reading crisis.

For starters, it is questionable what exactly this crisis consists of. Many academic disciplines are working on this question and related issues, but the expertise remains largely fragmented. Setting out from the disciplinary perspectives of philosophy and literary studies, our project aims at bringing together the fragmented expertise across disciplines and examining what reading actually is. The reading crisis, as well as the observation that a countervailing reading hype can be observed at the same time (associated, for example, with the social media phenomenon #booktok), is placed in a historical and systematic context. Considering, for instance, forms of reading aloud and quietly, various biblical interpretations, the novella tradition (where reading is presented as a social phenomenon), the salon culture and book clubs, reading is mostly a social practice. A communal bond weaves readers and books into larger contexts. Our project explores this by looking at three main areas:

1. Reading Theories and Text Types. – The project builds on theories of hermeneutics and tries to advance these further. Reading, we submit, is essentially determined by interactions between readers, which can decentre different text types, on which it nevertheless remains dependent.

2. Reading Cultures and Canon Formation. – The history of reading is examined as a history of social practices. In doing so, mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion come into focus. The social practice of reading, through its associated potential for distinction, usually swings in both directions.

3. Reading Scenes and Interventions. – Using specific reading scenes, we will examine, for instance, autosociobiographical texts from authors with a background of social climbing to explore the conditions for success and failure of reading practices as well as possible interventions. What role, for instance, does the opportunity for identifying reading play in reading socialization?

***

You’ll find a number of texts under the category Reading as a Social Practice on this blog.

Thou shalt not read sloppily on your phone! The ethics of reading (1)

“What the philosopher establishes in their labors are not truths or theses, but rather scores, scores for thinking with.”

Alva Noë, The Entanglement, 115

If it’s true that so many people and especially ‘students these days’ fail at reading, there must be an ethics of reading. And of course, there is more than one. While many ideas in this field are revolving around the relation between reader and text (just think of the principle of charity), I’m currently more interested in the relation between readers. After all, it’s not so much between reader and text but between readers within a certain group that we try to enforce certain values.* Spinoza or his œvre will not show much offence, if you read sloppily. But your instructor, your fellow student or your colleague are already waiting for their gotcha moment. Indeed, many philosophy classes are thinly veiled occasions for blaming others of sloppy reading or, if they’re aiming higher, of missing the argument. What many philosophers or indeed other academic readers tend to overlook is that such (ethical) standards are relative to the profession or shared philosophical endeavour. If you’re reading for pleasure or reciting some passage to a friend, quite different standards might apply.** But even within philosophy, there are different sets of standards. In what follows, I want to look at these standards more closely, hoping to suggest that many common complaints about students these days etc. might be off the mark.

The ‘fake it till you make it’ reader. – I guess we all know this particular student who comes to class, is rather quiet when we ask for a summary of the text, but greatly enlivens the discussion when we turn to a particular argument. As instructors, we can sense that this student “didn’t do the reading”, but we let them get away with it – just this once – because it’s the discussion we care about most for the moment. If you haven’t been this student yourself, here is how it works: You just wait till the discussion reaches a very particular point (and it will), then you make up your mind about the point, deriving most insights from the summaries before and the heat of the moment. If you actually did bring the text, you might quickly search for the pertinent passage and even shine with terminological digressions. It’s a great skill, but it doesn’t require the kind of devoted reading that is encouraged by old dons. The skill is not based on “wrestling with the text” but on distilling crucial information and turns from what is being said. By and large, this kind of skill is greatly honoured in philosophy classes and in essay writing. We use words like “smart” to describe such behaviour, even if we might chide the student for not going all the way and reading the damn book properly. (By the way, I don’t think Jerry Fodor lied when he said that he thought he could write a book about Hume “without actually knowing anything about Hume.”)*** Hence, we might say that the ethical core value in place is not so much being a serious reader but rather being a serious discussant of pertinent ideas.

Now change just some parameters. – Instead of listening to your fellow students, you ask ChatGPT for a summary and for what’s in certain paragraphs. The same honoured skill is applied, but instead of honouring the skill we now focus on the decline of mankind as we knew it. But has anything relevant changed in what the student does? Remember, the student didn’t read the originally set text but gathers information from a likely somewhat flawed summary. Granted, the student might be better off listening to fellow students rather than feeding off tech products, but for the particular ethics applying to what happens in class or on the page, the student may still be doing what matters most, i.e. engaging in a serious discussion of a thesis or argument. In fact, many philosophers I know trust their rational reconstructions much more than poring over the ancient texts. We even have debates about whether we should really have students read an actual text by Kant, let alone the original German, rather than, say, the smart secondary texts in our ubiquitous “just the arguments” summaries. So if we don’t care all that much about teaching “the text”, let alone “the original”, why do we worry so much about students when they take this endeavour to the next level?

I’m not saying textual scholarship doesn’t matter; and you wouldn’t have much fun in my history of philosophy classes when ignoring the texts. What I’m saying is that different ethics of reading apply to different sub-disciplines in philosophy. I often tell students that, while philosophers care most about problems, historians of philosophy also care about texts. So the stakes are different. And it’s this difference that we signal to our students when we focus on, say, the structure of the argument as opposed to the frilly bits and bobs in the text.

______

* I’m greatly inspired by Adam Neely’s The Ethics of Fake Guitar, who makes a similar point about adherents of different genres of music favouring different core values.

** Already in relation to an earlier post, Marija Weste convinced me that there is less of a difference between different types of texts (say, philosophical texts versus novels), but much more of a difference between professional academic reading as opposed to non-professional kinds of reading.

*** Here is the passage I have in mind from Fodor’s Hume Variations:

However, ChatGPT tells me: “Jerry Fodor’s claim that he could write a book on Hume without knowing him is not meant to be taken literally. It highlights his approach to philosophy, which is to focus on the enduring theoretical insights of philosophers like Hume, rather than necessarily adhering to historical interpretations. Fodor uses Hume’s ideas as a source of inspiration for his own work in cognitive science, particularly his theories about the mind and language.”

Books, powerpoints, tabloids, and tote bags. What do we care about in reading?

Do we really let ourselves be encouraged to present our ideas with flashy powerpoint slides and then wonder why students don’t bother reading books anymore?

Last weekend, I had an inspiring seminar on Hume’s Treatise and so I was just about to write another blogpost about reading philosophy. This time I wanted to try a slightly different angle and focus on what we care about when reading. What is it that matters to us – beyond the issue of what might matter to our instructors in the context of a Hume course? Why do we pick up a book like Hume’s Treatise? What steps might we have gone through in advance of picking up such a brick? What makes us pick up big philosophy books and carry them around? Here are a couple of half-baked thoughts, not on reading philosophy but on some perhaps substantial changes in what figures in our reading practices between different generations.

Signalling readership to others. – The smooth passage from my associations about reading philosophy to ones about why we carry books around eventually transported me to a passage in Deniz Ohde’s autosociobiography Sky Glow (Streulicht) that I recently read: Here, the narrator focuses, among other things, on hopes and fears in her attempts at social climbing. One scene has her getting ready for going to evening school and decidedly picking up a canvas tote bag with the logo of a German weekly newspaper (Die Zeit), hoping she is going to make the impression of belonging to the group of … well, of what precisely? Perhaps the group of serious readers and thinkers. The scene is an acute portrait of how we signal readership to others. Of how we want to be seen as readers. We signal that we read and, even in reading, we signal to others that we read. Reading is a status symbol and indicative of a supposed lifestyle. The creators of adverts on tote bags and elsewhere have known this for a long time. What I find so heart-wrenching about this particular scene is that this person’s signalling happens in a world that doesn’t really care any longer about the status of being a reader. As readers of the novel, we might assume that the narrator, presenting flashbacks of her younger self, has learned this the hard way at some point. But the protagonist clearly doesn’t know this at the time at which the scene is set. She cares about reading and cares about being seen as a reader. But reading is no longer seen as a status symbol, at least not in the same way as it used to be.

Changing signals. – Books used to be indicators of intellectual status, wealth and time, lots of time. Being a reader could be signalled by carrying and hoarding books. I am not sure what exactly has initiated crucial changes in such indicators. (That said, I hope to find out more about changing reading cultures in due course.) But by now even the book-loving scholar in the humanities is more of a distant cliché than a reality. Today’s academics mostly pride themselves on being “busy” or even “stressed”, and many might in fact often be too busy to read or at least to read as much as they list in their bibliographies. – Now, I don’t want to complain about decreasing literacy or interest in reading. My point is rather that the indicators of readership may have changed. If this is correct, we’re faced with the the following question: Would we recognize new indicators for what they are? Instead of carrying a dusty book to class your students might prepare a flashy powerpoint presentation. What these students signal to their instructors is still competence (or so I think), but it is not signalling competence in the way I have learned to signal competence in my youth. But even when I grew up in the 1970s and 80s, reading had already become a mass phenomenon. Not only in the sense of many people having the necessary literacy, but also in the sense of the world being a place packed with words. Adverts and signs were populating the streets. Newspapers were everywhere. Children read their comics on the loo. Workers read newspapers for breakfast, pacing through headlines and pictures. (Of course, for most of us this is common, but if you study medieval and early modern philosophy, you’ll find that our common reading culture is markedly different.) Now if reading is happening everywhere, mere (signalling of) reading is no longer a socially distinctive marker.

Reading is not replaced, but happening differently. – This ubiquitousness of reading has simply exploded. Given the recent changes in technology and design allowing for digital reading and bullet-point presentations or summaries of one’s reading, it is plausible to assume that reading is turning into a different thing altogether. Firstly, reading does no longer signal a socially elevated status. Showing off by being a bookish person does make you look old-fashioned at best, but it doesn’t mean you’re wealthy or smart. Secondly, the practice of reading is no longer visible in books or paper alone, but basically baked into every device we see or touch. I can read my phone or in my phone. People send me texts all the time. Every pling sound is a demand to read more. If this is correct, reading doesn’t need to be signalled, simply because it’s everywhere. As my colleague Irmtraud Hnilica pointed out, we “can’t expect [our students] to be just like us.” The difference might just run much deeper than I used to think.

Where do I belong? – If reading neither needs to be signalled nor signals that I’m special, where does that leave me? Me as a member of the group of serious readers? And where does it leave you? We have to accept that reading is nothing special and we have to accept that reading is a practice somewhat different from the olden days. So what? I grew up in a different, somewhat old-fashioned world and now ended up learning to summarize books with bullet-points. Once you’ve learned that and have very little time on your hands, you might want to save time by reducing reading to reading bullet-points even more. And our students don’t do what we tell them. Rather, they imitate what they actually see us doing.

Let me close with two suggestions: Firstly, we need to learn to recognize different practices of reading. The fact that the hallmark of being an avid reader is no longer that you carry a dusty book around doesn’t change that much. Phones do not replace reading, but they affect the way we read, our reading culture. Overall, we read much more than we used to, say, in modern times. Secondly, we need to be cautious in thinking that technological designs of reading are in any way innocent. As Daniel Martin Feige has argued convincingly, especially the digitalized forms and designs of reading and talking about reading are not guided by their aptitude but by the possibilities of monetization: While it might not make a difference to the texts if I read Hegel on a kindle, the increasing transformation of our verbal or written exchanges about such texts into specific formats provided in commercial media (Apple, Microsoft, Google etc.) subscribes to their economic models (see Feige, esp. p. 43 and 55). Put plainly, the fact that our exchanges about books are often happening in the form of showing each other powerpoint presentations (at conferences or in class) might not so much be owing to the advantages of that format, but because some people earn lots of money if that format is demanded everywhere and if further (educational) expectations are driven in line with such a format. I wouldn’t put it past people that they encourage the use of powerpoint and, by extension, other digitally convenient forms of streamlining content for monetary rather than educational reasons. Having our book summaries and discussions done by ChatGPT tightens this transformation. In this sense, the new ways of reading and the new ways of indicating social status aligned with the virtues of reading are still following the money, as much as booksellers might have already done in the past. But the current changes and transformations in our practices might leave us with something of a generational gap. If all of this is correct, we might wonder whether we really have a decline of literacy – or perhaps rather a change in practices.

Are we talking literacy or buffalo wings? Notes on “The average college student today”. Guest post by Irmtraud Hnilica

When my dear colleague Martin Lenz sent me a link to Hilarius Bookbinder’s blog post “The average college student today”, I immediately knew this would be a lamentation about how students nowadays couldn’t care less, wouldn’t make the effort, and simply didn’t read. Not that I have psychic abilities about blog posts. But Martin and I have an ongoing discussion about the topic of literacy and the so-called reading crisis. When I clicked the link to read the post, I was slightly concerned. Martin had only commented that “things sounded quite bad”. Well, what sounded very bad to me was – for starters – the title of this blog post. Why would a professor even write about the average college student? The average college student is merely a statistical construct, not to be found in any classroom. In my fifteen years of teaching experience at six German universities spanning institutions such as the FernUniversität in Hagen, LMU München and HU Berlin, I have yet to encounter a single homogenous study group. And labelling those with whom one seeks to engage in meaningful academic work as average seems condescending to me. I find it odd to point out something so obvious, but one simply cannot expect cooperation or trust from people one does not respect. And students must trust their academic teachers that the challenging material they ask them to read really is worthwhile. I, personally, am not sure whether I would take reading suggestions from someone who comes across as condescending and uninterested in what matters to me. Would our average professor (as Martin called Bookbinder in his reply)? I absolutely don’t think so.

Hilarius Bookbinder claims to write as a concerned, even alarmed professor. And if it’s true that students read way less than a decade ago – and it very well might be – then that is a serious matter. But Bookbinder adopts a rather resentful tone and weaves students’ identities into his somewhat unclear reasoning. Suddenly, it’s not about reading skills anymore, but about students’ culinary preferences. They seem to love buffalo wings, while the professor clearly despises them. Just a fun fact? Not at all. Bookbinder repeatedly returns to it. Actually, he completely lost me at his feverish choice of a picture to illustrate his article. It features a young woman reading a menu, seemingly contemplating that the buffalo wings look good. The woman depicted has brown eyes and curly brown hair. I might not have considered her ethnicity, if Bookbinder hadn’t previously published another article, questioning why white men no longer want to go to college. And I think that’s exactly what this is all about. Add a touch of some classism – buffalo wings are often seen as working-class food – and it becomes evident that this is not truly about learners’ reading skills, but rather about the individuals themselves, who might be female, first-generation academics and come from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

I consider it part of our duty as academic teachers to stay open and curious about our learners. We can’t expect them to be just like us. Of course they have their own unique cultural references. They even listen to, god forbid, Taylor Swift! There’s by the way a chance that they actually do read a lot. And there is statistical evidence that women read more than men. Let’s stay curious about today’s students and start a new conversation about literacy, rather than becoming bitter about a generation that might not share our preferences. If we create a non-judgmental space for students’ diverse cultural references and interests, they could eventually come around for some shared reading practice and open up for the books we want to introduce them to.

Irmtraud Hnilica

The average professorial laments – and remarks on reading. A reply to Steven Hales

Currently, there is a piece on “the average college student” (in the U.S.) making the rounds. It’s sparking both frustrated nodding about the problems in student performance and some eye-rolling about professorial arrogance.* Although I have met a number of students from the U.S., I have taught mostly in the Netherlands and in Germany, so my more positive experience might be owing to regional differences. But I’m not entirely sure. What’s perhaps most striking about the piece is that its merciless judgements are based on, well, not much exactly. In what follows, I’ll focus on Steven Hales’ remarks on reading, point out some problems, and then make some suggestions.

Hales’ section on reading starts by pointing out that “most of our students are functionally illiterate.” This is a drastic remark. Did he do tests? We are not told, but we get something like a definition detailing that this status amounts to being “unable to read and comprehend adult novels”. How the heck does Hales know? If he has any ways of learning about his students’ reading habits, he keeps them to himself. I’m left wondering how I would figure out what my students read. Well, of course I could ask them and sometimes indeed do. Could I judge from such conversations whether they “comprehend” the texts in question. That depends: partly on my own comprehension skills and partly on what students like to disclose. I remember my first shock when coming as a postdoc to Cambridge and being told by students as well as some colleagues that they had given up reading novels because there was only so much time – and that had to be spent on professional reading. What I’m saying is that there might be reasons for changing one’s reading habits, especially in academia, and it might be quite hard to figure out what a student actually thinks about their reading for pleasure, especially in a conversation with a professor. It’s not that I don’t believe Hales that at least some students don’t do the reading; it’s that Hales’ doesn’t tell us how he knows.

I’m not saying there are no ways of knowing or at least making educated guesses at what people read and comprehend. We do that all the time. So I’m not saying you need rigorous testing or anything like it to get an idea of whether someone read something and whether their reading aligns with yours. But given the drastic type of judgment, I’d expect a modicum of information about such ways. What this lack of information leaves me with is the assumption that the conversations informing Hales’ inferences about adult novels might have been quite superficial. Talking to my 8-year-old daughter about how she feels, I often get the reply “good”. If I don’t inquire further and about particular details, I’ll be left with that. More to the point, I know from my own student life that when a professor asked me something about my private endeavours or my thoughts on a text, I could become so shy that I would respond with utter nonsense. What now? Well, perhaps Hales did have thorough attempts at conversations about Richard Powers’ novels and he just doesn’t tell us. Perhaps some of these conversations didn’t go very well. The question to ask is: why! I’m not saying that Hales’ judgment is necessarily flawed, but I would expect it to be based on something – and the mere assertion that the average student is functionally illiterate suggests that something else is lacking here.

Since I like to inquire about reading habits among students and colleagues, I know that people can be become somewhat monosyllabic when you ask them about how they read. “I just, well, read,” is the reply I get most of the time. It takes time to tease out actual expectations from a genre or assumptions about the texts at hand. So what do you do when you think your students are bad at reading?

First of all, ask them about it. Better still, start a conversation. To steer such conversations, it’s helpful to bear in mind that acts of reading are first and foremost defined through the interaction between readers. Reading is as much about belonging (to a certain group) and relating to styles and attitudes as it is about texts. So when it comes to conversations, the ‘text itself’ is a long way off. It’s the interaction between readers that settles important prior questions: Whether you belong to the same group, share expectations or desires or frustrations etc. Above all, it takes trust to converse about literature.
A second point to bear in mind is that there is often a stark difference between reading, talking about reading, and performing relatedly in class. I might read all night through but never establish a comfortable way of talking about that in a semi-professional environment. Talking in front of peers or judgmental professors is quite different from enjoying reading. So, encourage such conversations very gently.
Finally, what we Gen X people recognise as a reading culture does not immediately translate into the contemporary environment rich with gamification of interaction. Hales is ready to identify phones as the culprit, but that strikes me as too quick. Even if it feels very alien, we have to make an effort to find the reading culture outside of the places in which we expect it. Even social media foster reading, e.g. in the form of “BookTok”.

So on the whole, many of the problems described might be owing to expectations being at odds. Of course, some people really don’t like to read. But if you call them “illiterate” it strikes me as setting a problematic example if all you offer is your very own word for it.

______

* See also the blogs Daily Nous and Leiter Reports for extensive discussion.

Does reading involve texts? Reading as a reciprocal process between readers

It goes without saying that the title question is a bit of a provocation. Nevertheless, the point I want to make is that reading is first and foremost an interaction between readers and the ‘text itself’ comes second. It’s not just one of those weird hear-me-out appeals. Rather, I think that this insight should have repercussions on our practice of teaching and, perhaps, of reading.

Early Beginnings

Come to think of it, before you even learned to read, you probably have been read to! Be it by your parents or by mischievous siblings. At least I remember that, before I ever set eyes on a text myself, my mother used to read fairy tales to me, hoping I’d fall asleep. So my first encounters of reading were actually interactions, not so much with the text, but with the special reading voice of my mother. A reciprocal interaction: My mother would read; I would listen. My mother would stop; I would plead. Tell me, gentle reader, is my listening already a form of reading? I’m not sure. – Anyway. Likewise, learning to read at school involved first and foremost interactions with the teacher and the class. Here, however, the reciprocity would become slightly asymmetrical: I would not just try to make sense of the letters on the blackboard; I would be judged on my performance. I don’t remember much of it, but I still feel the excitement of internally gliding along with my inner voice trying to remember the alphabet correctly: A, B, C, D, E, F, G … H? I don’t actually remember whether we also had to learn to write the letters when learning to read them, but it feels like it must have been a related process. In any case, reading is taught through an interaction between teachers and pupils (and asymmetrically so), when actual texts are still a long way away.

Tacit Agreements in Reading

Let’s slowly move on to my claim then. My thesis is that at least a crucial part of reading consists in partly tacit and partly explicit interactions between readers. Why would this be so, though? Doesn’t reading mainly consist in grabbing a text and reading it? Well, before you actually pick up a text, you’ll be fed with assumptions about the genre. So you’ll know what to expect before you set eyes on the actual page or screen. If you enter a restaurant, for instance, the items on the menu won’t come across as strange poetry. Conversely, if you picked up a book from a poetry section, you wouldn’t take the text to offer a menu, even if there was talk of pizza and pasta on the page. And if you enter a philosophy class, you’ll of course expect to be offered philosophical texts. In any case, the habitually familiar settings already stir tacit expectations about the texts in question. I consider such settings tacit agreements between the reader and the provider of texts. If you enter a restaurant, you’ll expect a menu. If you enter a literature course, you’ll expect a literary text (or at least one dealing with literature). Questions (mostly on genre) will be raised if these expectations are frustrated. At this point, the crucial stages of interaction are about seeing whether expectations of genre are met or frustrated.

The Topic of Texts

Philosophical and certain literarary texts often thrive on a certain openness or even ambiguities. Unlike manuals or menus their understanding is not exhausted by being able to act on their content; that is, to build the shelves or order the soup successfully. This means that it’s often an open question what’s going on or what the text is actually about. Deciding on the precise topic of a passage or paper or book is thus often a matter of debate. This can even be true of your very own texts. (Agnes Callard once gave a nice example of her book as an Ugly Duckling by reporting on how she started out thinking it was on the weakness of will when it later turned out that she was really talking about aspiration.) So even if we’re clear about the genre of a text, we might remain unsure about its topic. In such situations, we might recommend all sorts of scholarly remedies: such as looking into the text in question, comparing it with other texts or some such straightforward means. However, what I think is really doing a great part of the work is the interaction with other readers. This doesn’t mean that the text plays no part in it. But the attempts at settling the topic will crucially involve an attempt to reach agreement with other readers, be they alive or part of a tradition of reading texts in a certain way.

The Triangulation Thesis

This idea has its roots in Donald Davidson’s so-called triangulation argument: Understanding linguistic utterances or the beliefs of my interlocutor involves not just understanding what object these utterances are about. Rather I need to interact with my interlocutor to fix the object in question in the first place. Jeff Malpas puts this point as follows:

“Identifying the content of attitudes is a matter of identifying the objects of those attitudes, and, in the most basic cases, the objects of attitudes are identical with the causes of those same attitudes (as the cause of my belief that there is a bird outside my window is the bird outside my window). Identifying beliefs involves a process analogous to that of ‘triangulation’ (as employed in topographical surveying and in the fixing of location) whereby the position of an object (or some location or topographical feature) is determined by taking a line from each of two already known locations to the object in question – the intersection of the lines fixes the position of the object … Similarly, the objects of propositional attitudes are fixed by looking to find objects that are the common causes, and so the common objects, of the attitudes of two or more speakers who can observe and respond to one another’s behaviour.” (Italics mine)

So while the object or Ding an sich is elusive, it’s being fixed in the interaction with the other. Similarly, I think that the topic of a text is elusive. Determining it requires triangulation with other readers. Once we admit that, we’ll see that becoming clear about our interlocutor’s assumptions and authorities as well as their relation to our own take on the text is a crucial element in reading.

***

Part of this idea has been presented at an interdisciplinary workshop on “Reziprozität” at the FernUniversität in Hagen. I’d like to thank Dorett Funcke for inviting me to present my musings at this occasion. Special thanks to Christian Grabau, Irina Gradinari, Irmtraud Hnilica, Tanja Moll, and Marija Weste for further discussions of this idea.