Can we read letters? Reflections on fundamental issues in reading and dyslexia research
Original version
Tønnessen, F.E; Uppstad, P.H (2015) Can we read letters? Reflections on fundamental issues in reading and dyslexia research. Rotterdam: Sense PublishersAbstract
Internationally there has been a major increase in activity within reading and
dyslexia research over the past three or four decades. This is a reasonable
development given that the importance of having good reading skills has grown
ever greater in our modern society, where information and education take pride of
place. However, that increase in research activity has not resulted in more attention
being devoted to the fundamental questions within the field. Most branches of
science, once they attain a certain level in their development, tend to ask more and
more questions pertaining to the philosophy of science. This is crucial for assessing
the quality of research and for deciding the way forward. Empirical researchers
may well find such theoretical issues rather alien to their work, but there is in fact a
great deal of practical benefit to be drawn from careful consideration of them. It is
hard to imagine a Nobel laureate who has never reflected upon issues relating to
the philosophy of science.
When I first embarked upon research into reading and dyslexia twenty-five
years ago, I was uncertain where to concentrate my efforts within a field which was
becoming more and more multifaceted. The deciding factor turned out to be my
background – and interest – in medicine, psychology, logic and the philosophy of
science. My PhD thesis focused on the hypotheses and findings published shortly
before by Norman Geschwind and Albert Galaburda about the relationship
between brain lateralisation (left-handedness), immunological diseases and
dyslexia. I remain fascinated to this day by the creativity and boldness of those
hypotheses, but that did not prevent me from presenting questions and critical
objections in my thesis. In my opinion, one characteristic of good research is
precisely that it inspires new hypotheses and new studies.
However, describing and explaining reading and dyslexia on the basis of
neurology alone did not seem enough to me, and nor did I think the answers
provided by behaviourism were sufficient. This is why I enthusiastically launched
into studies based on cognitive psychology. As time went on, though, that school
of thought also came to feel too one-sided and too limited. I found connectionism
to be a good way of unifying these different approaches, but after a while I instead
started to search for the solution in the concept of ‘skill’, which I considered
capable of bringing all of these different schools of thought together. In my
opinion, it is fairly obvious that reading is above all a ‘skill’ or ‘procedural
knowledge’. It represents primarily implicit – not explicit – knowledge. For my
definition of ‘skill’, I borrowed the concept of ‘automaticity’ from behaviourism
and that of ‘awareness’ from cognitive psychology, but it was clear to me that they
could not be unified through simple addition or combination, so I turned to
philosophy for a solution. [...]