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Why Literacy is a Poor Metaphor for Expertise

1. Some metaphors enrich the sense of the word they use figuratively, but this one violates its basic meaning. To be literate in language X is to able to read and write texts in language X. Hence,
1. literacy is language- and culture-specific, whereas the thing that literacy is the extended sense is supposed to denote often is neither.
2. Every normal child naturally acquires one or more languages at home, whereas literacy is a learned skill.
1. Learning domain-specific knowledge is thus like literacy in the narrow sense;
2. literacy in the extended sense is more like language acquisition.
2. The fact that domain-specific communicative competence can sometimes be politically or economically enabling does not justify the metaphor.
1. The premise that literacy unconditionally opens the door of opportunity to the individual is false. It implies patronizingly that illiterate peoples and cultures are always in need of help, and that only fully literate societies can master the levers of technology and power.
1. The truth is that people who aren’t literate in the strict sense are fully capable of having domain-specific expert knowledge and competences of the kind glibly called literacies, as anthropologists and linguists established through empirical observation long ago.
2. Conversely, even societies that provide only restricted literacy through inequitable educational systems are quite capable of vying with societies that the patronizing assumption holds to be superior. Witness the ability of Japan to wage a modern war in Asia for a decade in the middle of the 20th century.
2. Literacy in either the narrow or extended sense is in fact not always politically or economically liberating.
1. Advances in public education improved the lot of millions but did not forestall the rise of totalitarian regimes in the 20th century. Likewise, greater political and economic equality for women and racial minorities are arguably one result of public education, but, by the same token, has lagged behind it.
2. Merely learning to talk the talk is not always salutary. At the same time that American secondary education in the 20th century dramatically transformed a mostly agricultural society into an industrial powerhouse and then a service economy rooted in finance, insurance, and real estate, it also trained and gave credibility to the voices of religious fundamentalism, creation science, neoconservative ideology, profit-driven journalism, and the prostitution of news as a form of vulgar entertainment.
3. Using the metaphor diminishes the value of genuine expertise by pretending it is nothing but domain-specific communicative competence.
1. This reductionism has been championed by what Joseph Weizenbaum called the Artificial Intelligentsia. Empirical results of AI research belie the theoretical models on the basis of which claims for reductionist epistemology are based.
2. Besides Weizenbaum, critical scholars such as Arthur Koestler (The Act of Creation), Theodore Roszak (The Cult of Information), Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus (What Computers Can’t Do and Mind over Machine), John Searle (Minds, Brains, and Science), and many others have highlighted the shortcomings of AI ideology. It is idle for humanists to pretend there is no choice between paradigms.
3. Meantime, a great deal of research has been conducted on expert behavior and knwoledge itself, yielding sharply different results from those claimed by reductionists.