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Nor is the next sense in which the term "interpretatio" was used immediately more promising. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, interpretatio played a significant role in Aristotelian logic. The third constituent treatise of Aristotle's Organon, called in Greek Peri hermenias, was known in the Latin tradition by the title De interpretatione. The sense of "interpretation" in this context is essentially linguistic; "interpretation" is equivalent to "enunciation." A succinct definition was offered by the Italian Protestant philosopher Giulio Pace (1550 Pace ( -1635 77 There is again no lemma for "interpret |
in 1597, twenty years after Bacon himself had left that university: "INTERPRETATION is an articulate utterance signifying by convention the thoughts of the soul. It is said to be 'articulate' insofar as it has a sequence of syllables, which are not found in whistling, or the barking of dogs, and other such utterances. It is said to be 'conventional'... because it does not arise from nature, but from the judgment of human beings." 79 Now it is worth reiterating here the obvious but important point that an author who entitles his |
Interpretation was a central part of the profession of theology or divinity, for the reason that (as was regretfully acknowledged) the sacred Scriptures were not so plain as they might be and therefore required explication. Moreover, it was worth interpreting Scripture precisely because it was sacred, and hence many points of doctrine and discipline, to say nothing of salvation, turned upon it. Thus theology was the faculty that perhaps generated the greatest quantity of explicit reflection on the goals and procedures of interpretation. It was also the field that generated the largest body of interpretative literature in practice, as anyone who has explored the enormous body of early modern biblical |
What were the goals of interpretation for the theologians? They were of course far too numerous to be comprehended succinctly here. But we can identify certain key preoccupations. The most ambitious defense of Protestant interpretative procedures in Bacon's England was William Whitaker's Disputation on Sacred Scripture (1588), aimed at Cardinal Bellarmine. In his fifth disputation Whitaker turns specifically to the question of biblical interpretation. Though we have not found naturalists speaking about interpretation, it is notable that the theologian Whitaker does use several of the philosophical terms we have already encountered to characterize the act of interpretation. In particular, |
We should not rule out altogether, however, the thought that interpreting the Bible might, in some way, have led Bacon's contemporaries, or at least one of them, to the idea of also "interpreting nature." I am aware of one-though only one-late Renaissance student of nature before Bacon who uses-though only once-the locution "interpretation of nature." This exception has been reserved for this discussion of the interpretation of Scripture because that was also his goal. The author is the Spanish royal physician Francisco Vallès (Franciscus Vallesius; 1524 -1592), and his book is On |
We do not know whether Bacon knew Vallès's popular book. But we can be sure that he was not sympathetic to his general endeavor. In the Novum organum Bacon attacks those "moderns" who, "in the height of folly," have "tried to build natural philosophy on the first chapter of Genesis, and on the book of Job, and other sacred Scriptures." 88 And in the course of his treatment of biblical interpretation at the close of the Advancement of Learning Bacon criticizes at length "the Schoole of Paracelsus, and some others, that haue pretended to finde the truth of all |
Answering this question leads us away from revealed theology (which rested, at least in principle, on the interpretation of Scripture) and into a different sphere: that of natural theology. Natural theology in the late Renaissance is a fluid and complex subject that has been much less well studied than its later anglophone heir. 92 But we can begin to address it by considering what was perhaps the most significant exposition of this theme for late Renaissance Europe, Raymond Sebond's (d. 1436) Book of the Creatures, generally known in the sixteenth century as the Theologia naturalis. Though this book was written in the mid |
This situation changes slightly once we enter the world of Second Reformation natural theology, here represented by Johann Heinrich Alsted's own Theologia naturalis (1615). Alsted is concerned in the first part of his book with the knowledge of God and in the latter part with "reading the book of nature." We have already seen from Alsted's Philosophical Lexicons that he did not appear to regard "interpretation" as part of the office of the philosopher per se, but he is clear here that his account of natural theology is distinct from philosophy-and especially metaphysics. 96 Is Alsted therefore willing to speak of |
There is, however, one curious occasion on which Alsted offers a slightly different thought. He is addressing the question of whether the reader of the book of nature ought also to read the writings of good philosophers. Developing a neat Aristotelian pun, he explains that the leaves of nature's codex should be opened not by the hands, but by traveling through its different regions on foot; and for this reason "a pupil in this School will be peripatetic." But Alsted does then go on to concede that philosophers themselves have also turned over the pages of this book: "because true philosophers are interpreters of nature, |
It is the case, however, that on one particular occasion Bacon did yoke together the conventional image of the book of nature with his new vision of "interpretation." In the third part of the Instauratio magna, the Historia naturalis et experimentalis (1622), he described the "Book of the Creatures" (Volumen Creaturarum) as being "that speech and language" (ille Sermo, & Lingua) that men should learn; they should "spare no effort in eliciting and unraveling its interpretation." 99 This imagery, of God's creatures and the heavens as "visible |
As we saw at the outset of this account, an important related aspect to the interpretatio naturae, at least in its earlier conceptions, involved what Bacon calls "legitimate inquisition" (inquisitio legitima). Now the idea of inquisitio, like that of interpretatio, could also be a legal one. In his Dictionary of Civil and Canon Law, the French jurist Pardoux Duprat (1520 -1569) explained that an "inquisition" is "an office purely of a judge, which ought to be exercised in the investigation of a crime, to preserve good morals." |
Renaissance lawyers do not seem, then, to have spoken precisely about the "legitimate inquisitions" that Bacon wrote about in a philosophical vein; but they did speak about the rather similar "legitimate indications" that give rise to inquisitions. Moreover, the appearance of indicia in this legal context should make us prick up our ears, for just as we met interpretatio in the title of Bacon's Novum organum, so too we also met there the idea of indicia-and specifically of indicia vera de interpretatione naturae. So in "indicium," too, we have another term to add to the |
What is an indicium? Like "interpretatio," the term does not appear in Goclenius's specifically philosophical lexicon. But it does appear in several legal lexicons of the late Renaissance, including those of Pardoux Duprat and Simon Schard, where it is defined as "a sign... of a crime, or of something else that is sought... an aid to proof." 112 Perhaps the foremost theorist of legal indicia in Bacon's time was Jacopo Menochio (1532-1607), who treated them at length in his massive Commentary on Presumptions, Con |
More generally, we have ruled out "interpretation" in its logical or philological senses of "enunciation" or "translation" as models for what Bacon is doing. We have identified theology and law as the intellectual realms in which interpretation was most widely practiced, albeit on words rather than on the things of nature. Perhaps the most surprising finding concerns the "book of nature" (liber naturae). Though authors certainly spoke of "reading" this "book" before Bacon, they do not seem have subjected it to "interpretation." By contrast, in the realm of law we have found a number of suggestive parallels between specifically |
The results of the research presented here therefore tend to support the long-standing suggestion that Bacon's knowledge of the law might have helped shape his philosophy of science. Among recent scholars the rather different work of Harvey Wheeler and Julian The broader implications of the case offered here extend beyond our understanding of Francis Bacon alone. As we have seen, a number of scholars have proposed that the "interpretation of nature" was a fundamental mode of natural knowledge in the Renaissance. Both Peter Harrison and James Bono assert, in somewhat different ways, that the prevalence, as they see it, of the image of the "book of nature" means that medieval and |
I now leave aside Bono, whose arguments are sometimes unclear and whose handling of evidence is not always wholly convincing. 121 But Harrison is a different matter, for he has developed an ambitious thesis across a number of publications about the role of "Protestant and humanist" biblical interpretation in what he calls "the rise of natural science." For Harrison, it was the application of specifically Protestant principles of biblical interpretation to the study of nature that brought about the "revolutionary changes that took place over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries." 122 Moreover, it is Bacon who, in an odd twist, plays an |
I suggest, in short, that the idea that nature might be "interpreted" was alien to the mental world of the late Renaissance-alien, that is, until Bacon proposed it. It was texts that were to be interpreted, not nature; and indeed, until Bacon yoked the idea to nature, "interpretation" was not even a goal of late Renaissance philosophy per se (for all that interpreting authoritative texts certainly was something done in the course of pursuing those goals). Indeed, we may go further. It seems likely that the idea that one might "interpret" nature would have been regarded by many of Bacon's contemporaries as |
Starting in the seventies and eighties two strands of research have been productive and challenging in particular: studies on print awareness, i.e. the concepts young children develop about print and writing, and studies on language awareness of structural features of spoken language (Adams, 1990; Gombert, 1992, Morais & Kolinsky, 2004, Teale & Sulzby, 1987 Tolchinsky, 2004). We consider print awareness as a construct separate from language awareness (Sénéchal et al., 2001). Print awareness refers to the pre-reading stage of |
Most studies in which 'illiterate' adults in Western countries were involved focused on adults who went to school in their childhood for quite some time but who were not successful in learning to read and write (cf. Barton, 1985; Greenberg, Ehri, & Perin, 2002; Hunter & Harman, 1979; Scholes, 1993; Scholes & Willis, 1991; Viise & Austin, 2005; Worthy & Viise, 1996). Their phonological and orthographic problems and abilities and their print awareness cannot be generalized to the 'true |
Our 'true' illiterate adults are non-readers, but theories about non-readers' conceptions of written language and about emergent literacy are built on studies with young children, a stage in life where language and cognitive development, and exposure to print go hand in hand. It is not clear, which conceptions should be attributed to the fact that the data come from young children in their course of development and which conceptions relate to the circumstance that the children are non-readers that did not experience formal reading instruction yet. Adult illiterates form an interesting testing case in this respect. Unlike young children they are experienced language users |
In addition, data on adult illiterates' print awareness can contribute to finding the answer in the dispute in adult literacy education about two different kinds of models on reading acquisition: stage models that stress the importance of explicit attention to the written code and maximal use of orthographic information in learning to read (Chall, 1999; Juel, 1991), and non-stage models like the whole language approach, which claim that learning to read is largely natural, spontaneous and effortless, given enough exposure to and practice with uses of written language (Goodman, 1986; Smith, 1992 ). An implication of |
The primary aim of our study was to acquire knowledge about the print awareness of non-schooled adult illiterates, living in print-rich environments such as the countries in Western Europe. We especially wanted to investigate whether the ideas they have constructed about print are comparable to what is known from prereading children and to what extent their knowledge fits into models used to explain the print awareness of pre-reading children. To estimate adequately the print awareness skills of non-schooled illiterates, it was necessary to compare their performance and achievements to reference groups with the same ethnic and social background. We used, besides the illiterate adults, two |
Print awareness ''Research demonstrates that in the process of becoming literate, children construct original and precocious ideas about the practices of reading and writing and about the formal features of writing systems and the resulting texts. These ideas are the building blocks for further learning'' (Tolchinsky, 2004, p.11). Print awareness refers to knowledge about environmental print, knowledge of written signs and graphemes, and knowledge about relationships between speech and writing, which becomes manifest, for example, in respectively identifying inscriptions and logos, in being able to differentiate between pictures and graphemes, and in expressing concepts about how writing represents language |
Confronted with environmental print such as inscriptions and logos, pre-reading children seem to memorize object and context as a whole. Once the visual contextual information is left out (such as the golden arches in the McDonald's logo), they lose their ability to name labels (Bialystok, 1991; Masonheimer, Drum, & Ehri, 1984), and the ability to recognize environmental print seems to be unrelated to knowledge of letters and sounds (Blair & Savage, 2006). Children develop already early some knowledge about differences in notational systems and seem to understand that written language |
Most theories on the development of print awareness of children suppose these skills to be dependent on exposure to print at home or in pre-school (Burgess, Hecht, & Lonigan, 2002; Bus, Van Ijzendoorn, & Pellegrini, 1995; Lonigan & Whitehurst, 1998), whereas knowledge about the nature of the relationship between writing and speech is expected to be influenced by formal instruction (Gombert, 1992, Olson, 1994 Kurvers & Uri, 2006; Kurvers, 2007; Morais & Kolinsky |
The participants were predominantly unschooled illiterate adults, pre-school children before entering first grade and literate adults who had a mean of four and a half year of primary schooling. Since almost all native Dutch adults who cannot read or write have a history of formal education, illiterate adult migrants without former schooling, who had just entered adult literacy classes, were selected. As illiterates those adults were selected that had (a) no schooling at all or at most two years of primary education, and (b) could not read simple monosyllabic words they had not been practicing with (see below). Adults who could not read |
Of the 14 illiterate Moroccan adults, eleven spoke Tarifit, one of the Berber languages, as their mother tongue, and three spoke Moroccan-Arabic. Of the literate Moroccans, six were Tarifit speakers and five were Moroccan-Arabic speakers. Seven Moroccan children had Tarifit as their home language. All Somalis had Somali as their home language, and all Turks Turkish. The other participants were mainly children and adults from the former Dutch colonies of Surinam and Curaçao, and spoke both Sranan Tongo (Surinam) or Papiamentu (Curaç |
The mean age of the children was 6.4 years, with a range from 5 to 7. To be sure that the differences between the two groups of adults would not be caused by differences in their backgrounds, additional background data were gathered and checked. In both groups of adults, the majority of the participants were women (19 in both groups); the difference was not statistically significant (chi-square (1, N = 48) = 0.32, ns). In both groups, about half of the participants came from villages and the other half from smaller or larger towns (chi-square (1, N = |
As can be seen in Table 2, the mean age of the illiterates was 39, ranging from 15 to 57, and the mean age of the literates was 34, ranging from 17 to 55. There was no difference between the groups in mean length of residence of the participants or their partners. Across both groups, the period of residence ranged from less than a year to more than 20 years. Of the 25 illiterate adults, 19 had never been to school as children, whereas six had attended some school for a short period of one or two years: Koran school ( |
Almost all illiterate and literate adults used their mother tongue more often at home than their L2 Dutch. As Table 2 shows, the majority of both groups preferred to speak the mother tongue and all literate and 20 illiterate adults reported (some) knowledge of another language, mostly Arabic or Dutch. Of those who did report any knowledge of a second language, 13 illiterates judged their knowledge of the second language as 'little', (e.g., ''I can understand Dutch, but I cannot talk back''), the other 7 as reasonably well, For the literates who reported, these figures were |
As an additional source of evidence to distinguish between readers and illiterates, next to their educational history, we administered a reading test that was used in adult education as an intake test for second language classes. The test consisted of a short text of about 150 words in short sentences in one out of 25 languages (e.g., Somali, Turkish, Arabic, and Dutch). The participants read the text aloud and told the experimenter what the text was about. Participants were judged literate if they could read the text aloud without sounding out most of the words and could indicate what the text was about. Adults with a history of |
In addition to printed material that typically enters the post box in their households (bills, advertisements, information of local authorities), 22 of the illiterate adults mentioned the presence of some reading materials at home, mainly related to school (e.g., their own or children's homework) and to religion (e.g., the Koran). However, in general they reported much less printed material than is known from middle-class families (Adams, 1990; Heath, 1983; Neuman & Celano, 2001). Thus, except for the difference in years of primary schooling and the ability to read, |
To gather background data (all participants) and information about experiences with writing (adult illiterates) an interview guideline was developed. The questions were about early experiences with written language in their home country (Did you get any personal correspondence? Who did the reading and writing? Etc.), actual uses of written language and literacy-related activities (Can you write your name? Can you read prices of articles? Can you use the calendar?), help in using written language (Do you ask for help with reading and writing? Who do you ask? For what?), personal needs and aspirations (What do you want to learn?) and knowledge about functions and |
Recognition of environmental print (street signs, shop names, billboards) is often used to assess the emergent print awareness of young children (Masonheimer, Drum, & Ehri, 1984; Sulzby & Teale, 1991). Illiterate adults are sometimes judged to be able to recognize environmental print, even when they are not able to decode (Antwergen et al., 1987; Sabatini, 1999; Smith, 1992). Thus, we used this assessment to determine whether illiterates would recognize written words, which are observable frequently in public areas |
Like inscriptions, logos belong to environmental print. Logos make use of graphic cues (font, typeface), but also of visual, non-graphic cues, such as the'swoosh' of Nikes or the yellow arches of McDonald's. In recognizing logos, young children seem to use the visual instead of the graphic cues (Masonheimer, Drum, & Ehri, 1984). To investigate the influence of visual besides graphic cues in the recognition of environmental print, nine frequently used logos associated with places, services, brands, and so forth such as for postkantoor (post office) |
Grapheme knowledge is known to be one of the most important predictors of decoding ability (Adams, 1990; Bus & Van IJzendoorn, 1999; Byrne, 1998 ). Verhoeven's (1992) standardized grapheme test was used to assess participants' knowledge of graphemes. The task consists of the 34 graphemes used in Dutch, eight of which are composed of two characters (e.g. oe, ie, ng). In this assessment participants were asked to identify orally the graphemes they knew. Both the sound of the letter (buh) and the letter name ( |
Even before they can read, children seem to have knowledge about specific features of print and to be able to distinguish between writing signs and other visual signs or symbols, such as geometrical shapes or drawings (Bialystok, 1995; Brenneman et al., 1996; Tolchinsky, 2004). To investigate the illiterates' knowledge of features of print, 14 cards with different visual signs or symbols (both referred to as signs from now on) were presented (based on Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982; Bialystok, 1995), |
One of the major cognitive burdens for beginning readers is to understand how writing relates to speech (Olson, 1994 (Olson,, 1997 and to understand that the relationship between a written word and its meaning (e.g. the word flower) is different from the emblematic relationship between a drawing and its meaning (a drawing of a flower). Every answer in which the participant pointed to the word that was asked, or mentioned the word that was pointed to, were scored as correct. This task was not meant for the literates, since they could read what was written down. To check the latter assumption, this |
The term writing not only refers to a specific code, but also to a specific language register, that differs from spoken language (Blanche-Benveniste, 1994). According to Ferreiro (1985) and Blanche-Benveniste (1994), many non-readers do not understand the written register in the way readers do. For example, they would reject false statements or improper grammar as 'writable'. Thus, in this assessment, we tried to determine the participants' conceptions of what can be written. Fourteen sentences were presented, of which 12 were grammatically correct, and two were |
Before the assessments started, some visits were made to the classes and the interviews with the adults were carried out. The researcher and one of the bilingual research assistants who were fluent in Dutch and either Tarifit, Turkish or Somali conducted the interviews. Depending on the preferred language of the participant either the mother tongue or Dutch was used. The Tarifit and Turkish assistant were postgraduate students in social sciences and linguistics respectively; the Somali assistant had been a teacher of Somali language. In all but two cases the background interviews were conducted in a separate room in the same building were the participants attended the lessons; with two participants the interviews were conducted at |
All but six interviews and assessments were audio taped. Important results were obtained in the interviews with the illiterate adults, where they explain their personal histories, explain how they deal with their illiteracy, and how other persons help them to get information from written sources. For all assessments the responses of the participants were all transcribed in detail. The tapes and the transcriptions were used to categorize the responses of the participants, the primary categories being correct/incorrect or yes/no, depending on the assessment task, and a total score for each of the tasks was calculated. As mentioned, all assessments were carried out in either the first or |
Can the explanations the informants gave about their answers provide us with a better insight in their print awareness? And can subgroups of items in the assessments tasks tell us more about the print knowledge of illiterates and prereading children? All explanations the participants gave for their answers during the assessments were notified and categorized, i.e. if they use visual instead of graphic information in recognizing logo's or inscriptions. Since the participants did not explain all answers (and for practical reasons were not asked to do so for every single item) these explanations were not quantified and analyzed statistically, but their comments, arguments and reflections were used as additional |
Sixteen of the adult illiterates could not remember any concrete example of use of written language they were involved with as children, three others remembered looking at what their siblings (mostly brothers) were reading, while the six who had experienced a short period of schooling remembered, for example, some words or letters they had learned. Nineteen participants remembered somebody who was able to read personal correspondence to them, in almost all cases a relative or neighbour, while two remembered the postman reading letters to their families. Except for one widowed woman, all illiterate adults at that moment had at least one reader/writer in their immediate family |
All but three illiterate adults were determined to learn to read and write. For example, they made comments such as, ''Otherwise I will stay like a blind person, who can look at the newspaper, and still do not know what it says'' or ''You are not a human being if you cannot read.'' Most illiterate adults expressed a low level of aspiration for their own future. For example, when asked what they wanted to learn in the second language literacy class, they gave answers such as ''Just reading and writing'' or ''One level up, some more Dutch to answer the phone'', while a few wanted more, such |
As could be expected (one of the groups consisted of readers), the main effects of group were statistically significant for all assessments, although the Eta value was not high for the signs-task. In some of the assessments, the mean scores of the pre-reading children were higher than those of the adult illiterates (logos, sorting signs, written register), whereas in other assessments the mean scores of the illiterates were higher than those of the pre-reading children (inscriptions, graphemes, correspondence writing-speech), although in the average score for writing-speech correspondence, the scores for those who refused the task are |
The post hoc analyses, the outcomes of which are shown in Table 5, revealed that both groups of non-readers differed significantly from the literate adults in all tasks except signs (p \ 0.05 for written register, p \ 0.01 for all other tasks). This is hardly surprising, since one of the groups consisted of readers. More interesting therefore are the differences between the two groups of non-readers. Post hoc analyses revealed statistically significant differences between children and illiterate adults for graphemes and for writing-speech correspondence (p \ 0.01). This might partly be explained by the fact that six |
Figure 1 makes clear that there are two general patterns. Four of the six tasks follow the same pattern, which mainly differentiates between readers and nonreaders, while in two tasks the illiterate adults were somewhere between children and literate adults. Figure 1 illustrates that, in four of the six tasks, the children did not differ from the illiterate adults (although the mean z scores of the children were somewhat higher), while in two of the tasks (grapheme knowledge and writingspeech correspondence), they did, although in the correspondence task the outcomes of the illiterates will be somewhat flattered since four of them (who |
Did the explanations the informants give about their answers provide us with a better insight in their print awareness? And are there relevant subgroups of items? As can be seen from Table 4, neither children nor illiterate adults were good in reading environmental print, i.e., inscriptions and logos such as Exit and McDonald's. Like young children, illiterate adults living in print rich environments did not recognize environmental print taken out of its original context. They recognized hardly any inscription and only a few logos. Further analysis revealed that logos with additional visual features, such as the yellow arches of McDonald's, or the colours and curls of |
The illiterate adults also performed better at the correspondence writing-speech assessments than the pre-reading children. The illiterates answered on average five of the seven questions correctly (SD 2.14), the children about three (SD 1.90). As expected, the five literates who conducted this task answered all questions correctly. The results of the illiterates, however, may be overestimated, because four of them refused to undertake this task: ''How can I answer your questions? I cannot read yet.'' The probably low scores of these four might have eliminated the difference with the pre-reading children. Ten of |
In the signs-task both writing signs and other visual signs such as drawings and geometrical shapes were used. Further analyses with different item-types revealed that the groups did not differ in identifying writing signs as ''for reading'' (81% correct by the children, 84% by the illiterates and 89% by the literates); the difference between the groups was not significant (Fisher Exact 0.42, p = 1.00). The difference between the groups in answering ''not for reading'' to the nonwriting signs, was more substantial (scores ranging from 61% by the illiterates to |
In the written register task, further analyses at item level revealed that the groups did not differ in admitting that both true and grammatically correct sentences could be written (percentages correct 84%, 88% and 100% respectively for children, adult illiterates and adult readers). Most of the participants at first stated that untrue utterances (''A baby is very old'') could not be written, but 20 of the illiterate adults stuck to this opinion at further questioning (''You are right, this is not true. But even then, do you think someone could write this down?''), while the readers did not |
The primary aim of this study was to acquire knowledge about the print awareness of non-schooled adult illiterates, living in print-rich environments such as the countries in Western Europe. We investigated them in a comparative study with a control group of pre-school children just before entering the first grade of elementary education and a control group of low-educated literate adults with an average of four and a half year of primary schooling. All groups had the same ethnic and social background. To assess the print awareness of the participants, their responses to six assessment tasks were collected. Additionally, interviews were conducted with the adult illiterates about their backgrounds and |
The results of the environmental print tasks suggest that the adult illiterates cannot recognize simple environmental print when the original context is lacking. They only recognize some logos with apparent visual (such as yellow arches) instead of graphic features (such as letters). In these tasks their outcomes were similar to those of the pre-reading children. Adult illiterates living in a highly literate environment for quite some time do not seem to learn to read and write without any systematic instruction, as sometimes has been suggested (Goodman, 1986; Sabatini, 1999; Smith, 1992). Studies among young children |
The illiterate adults in our study knew more graphemes than the pre-reading children, although both groups differed significantly and negatively from the literate adults According to the letters they did know, this difference seemed to be an effect of attending adult literacy classes. The outcomes on the signs-tasks revealed that the illiterate adults knew quite well what written language looks like. Like young children, they are able to distinguish conventional written signs from other visual symbols such as pictures or geometrical shapes, and both groups of non-readers did not differ significantly from adult readers. In both groups of non-readers only a few participants seemed to confuse writing |
The adult illiterates know better than young children about how writing relates to speech (although their ability might have been overestimated), but significantly less than low-educated readers and there is a notable variation in their level of knowledge about writing. Although this study was not meant to be developmental, different types of reactions within the group of illiterates could be traced that seem to reveal similar patterns in reactions as in the developmental stages that Ferreiro (1985) and Homer and Olson (1999) found in young children: ranging from a conception in which each word in a written sentence represents the objects that are mentioned to a conception in |
The outcomes together lead to the general conclusion that what writing looks like from the outside and what it is used for did not seem to pose problems for most of the illiterate adults, as the interviews about their experiences and the outcomes of the signs-task revealed. They know better than young children where writing is used for and in this respect they are more similar to low-educated literates. This outcome seems to confirm that being literate or not is not a matter of dichotomy (Koch, 1997; Wagner, 1993). The illiterate adults we investigated resemble what Koch (1997) called 'quasi-liter |
When it comes to the inside of written language, as for example the building blocks of the writing system and the relationship between writing and speech, the majority of the adult illiterates was more like the pre-reading children: they did not know exactly how writing represents speech, what is written at which place in a sentence, nor that every single part of a spoken utterance can be reduced to writing. The differences in this specific domain of print awareness (i.e. how writing relates to speech) that were found between the illiterate adults and the pre-reading children can be attributed to previous schooling: unlike the pre-reading children |
Our findings on the print awareness of the illiterate adults, in comparison to prereading children and literate adults appear to reveal a pattern that was found in research on the emergent literacy of children (Bialystok, 1991 (Bialystok,, 1995 Ferreiro, 1997; Gombert, 1992; Tolchinsky, 2004). There seems to be a gradual pattern going from thinking about writing as representing meaning on a more global and ideographic level (in which signs are conventional, but represent concepts or ideas), to the conception of writing as a graph |
A secondary aim of the present study was to inform educational practice. We see two practical implications of our research results for adult literacy teachers. It turned out that these adult illiterates were not good at recognizing the environmental print that surrounded them. As for the two models of reading acquisition, we found no supportive evidence for what might be implied by non-stage models. Although Goodman (1986) suggested that breaking whole language into abstract pieces such as syllables or phonemes makes learning to read more difficult, and Smith (1992, p. 432) stresses that learning is ''spontaneous and effortless'' given sufficient exposure, the |
The second implication is that teachers need to be precautious in the way they approach non-schooled illiterate adults. Our study reveals that educated adult readers (like we all are) look distinctly at writing and language (see also Kurvers, Van Hout, & Vallen, 2006) than illiterates do. Teachers should be aware that many adult illiterates do not know exactly how writing maps onto speech, that they may think that only content words like 'tree' or true statements can be written, that they sometimes recognize a written word on the basis of visual features only, and that they do not |
The most important outcome of this study probably is that adult illiterates do not have a kind of naive behaviour towards the functions and uses of print (they know quite well about this), nor towards differences between notational systems. Teachers do not need to start from scratch in discussing the various functions of written language, or in carefully distinguishing writing from other visual symbols. These adult illiterates already knew about the 'outside' of the written code. But the adult illiterates in this study did not have access to the 'inside' of the written code and they need to learn in detail how the written code is mapped onto spoken language |
It was obviously my hope that the chemiosmotic rationale of vectorial metabolism and biological energy transfer might one day come to be generally accepted, and I have done my best to argue in favour of that state of affairs for more than twenty years. But, it would have been much too presumptuous to have expected it to happen. Of course, I might have been wrong, and in any case, was it not the great Max Planck (1928 Planck (, 1933 who remarked that a new scientific idea does not triumph by convincing its opponents, but rather because its opponents eventually die? The fact that what |
I shall presently explain the difference between the physiological and the biochemical levels at which the chemiosmotic theory has helped to promote useful experimental research. But let me first say that my immediate and deepest impulse is to celebrate the fruition of the creative work and benevolent influence of the late David Keilin, one of the greatest of biochemists and -to me, at least -the kindest of men, whose marvellously simple studies of the cytochrome system, in animals, plants and microorganisms (Keilin, 1925), led to the original fundamental idea of aerobic energy metabolism: the concept of the respiratory |
During the two decades between 1940 and 1960, the mechanism of oxidative phosphorylation (by which some 95% of the energy of aerobic organisms is obtained), and the basically similar mechanism of photosynthetic phosphorylation (by which much of the energy available from plant products is initially harvested from the sun) was recognised as one of the great unsolved problems of biochemistry. At the beginning of this period, the work of David Keilin (1925 Keilin (, 1929 ) on the cytochrome system, and work by Warburg, Wieland and others on the respiratory hydrogen carriers, had |
As indicated in Fig. 1, according to Keilin's chemically simple concept of the respiratory chain, the respiratory-chain carriers (or their complexes of molecular dimensions) were involved chemically only in redox reactions. However, when, following the pioneer work of Kalckar (1937), Belitser & Tsybakova (1939), Ochoa (1940), Lipmann (1941 Lipmann (, 1946, Friedkin & Lehninger (1948), and Arnon, Whatley & Allen (1954), attention was directed to the mechanism by which the |
By the end of the two and a half decades between 1940 and 1965, the field of oxidative phosphorylation was littered with the smouldering conceptual remains of numerous exploded energy-rich chemical intermediates; the remarkable uncoupling action of 2,4-dinitrophenate and of other chemically unrelated reagents, and of physical membrane-lytic treatments, remained obscure; and the process of hypothesis-building, needed to keep faith with the chemical-coupling notion, reached such fantastic proportions as to be hardly intelligible to those outside the field (see Mitchell, 1961 Mitchell, c, |
Soon after 1950, it began to be recognised that the water-insoluble property of preparations of respiratory chain and photoredox chain complexes was related to the circumstance that, in their native state, these complexes were part of the lipid membrane system of bacteria, mitochondria and chloroplasts. But, such was the lack of liaison between the students of transport and the students of metabolism, that the significance of this fact for the field of oxidative and photosynthetic phosphorylation was not appreciated, despite suggestive clues provided, for example, by Lundegardh (1945), Robertson & Wilkins (1948) |
The level represented by Fig. 4 is essentially physiological. It aims to answer the question: what does it do? At this conceptual level one makes use of the general principle of coupling by proticity, the protonic analogue of electricity. Separate protonmotive redox (or photoredox) and reversible protonmotive ATPase complexes are conceived as being plugged through a topologically closed insulating membrane between two proton-conducting aqueous media at different protonic potential. Thus, coupling may occur, not by direct chemical or physical contact between the redox and reversible ATPase systems, but by the flow of proticity |
To promote experimental research programmes designed to test, and if possible to falsify, the physiological-level chemiosmotic coupling concept, it was explicitly and unambiguously formulated (Mitchell, 1961 (Mitchell, c, 1966 in terms of the following four fundamental postulates, corresponding to the four structural and functional systems represented in Fig. 4 : 1. The ATP synthase is a chemiosmotic membrane-located reversible ATPase, having characteristic +H+/P stoichiometry. 2. Respiratory and photoredox chains are chemiosmotic membrane-located systems, |
4. Systems 1 to 3 are plugged through a topologically closed insulating membrane, called the coupling membrane, that has a nonaqueous osmotic barrier phase of low permeability to solutes in general and to hydrogen ions and hydroxyl ions in particular. This is the cristae membrane of mitochondria, the thylakoid membrane of chloroplasts, and the plasma membrane of bacteria. These postulates were almost entirely hypothetical and experimentally unexplored when they were given as the basis of the chemiosmotic hypothesis in 1961. My original guesses for the +H+/P and tH |
The four postulates, representing the four systems with characteristic properties, are now widely regarded as experimentally established facts. Thus, we appear to have answered the question: What does it do? The plug-through respiratory chain and photoredox chain complexes generate proticity across the coupling membrane, energising the aqueous conductors on either side, so that power can be drawn off by other plug-through complexes, such as the reversible protonmotive ATPase. However, this acceptance of the chemiosmotic coupling concept at the physiological level is without prejudice to the possible biochemical mechanisms of the protonmotive ATPase and redox complexes |
In my opinion, the biochemical content and value of the chemiosmotic rationale depended from the outset on the feasibility of protonmotive chemiosmotic reaction mechanisms of the direct group-translocation type, exemplified by the redox loop and the hydrodehydration loop (Mitchell, 1966 (Mitchell,, 1967a, which are relatively orthodox biochemically, and require little more than the addition of a spatial dimension to Lipmann's concept of chemical group potential (Lipmann, 1941 (Lipmann,, 1946 (Lipmann,, 1960. Had |
The photograph in Fig. 6 was taken in a tiny research room in the basement of the Department of Biochemistry in Cambridge, England, in 1942 or 1943, when I first began to do biophysical and biochemical research. It shows Jim Danielli, Joan Keilin (David Keilin's daughter), Mrs. Danielli (who was acting as Jim Danielli's technician) and me. Jim Danielli, who is seen there operating a surface balance on a Langmuir trough, was my research supervisor. He exposed me to the techniques and concepts of the membranologists and students of transport, while the |
About seven years elapsed before I had accidentally become a microbi- ologist and was involved: first, in studies of a functional aspect of the plasma membrane of bacteria, which I called the osmotic barrier (Mitchell, 1949) ; and soon after, in studies of the specific uptake and exchange of inorganic phosphate and arsenate through a catalytic system present in the osmotic barrier of staphylococci (Mitchell, 1954 ; and see Mitchell & Moyle, 1956). This enabled me to give my full attention to the functional and conceptual relationships between chemical and osmotic reactions |
Mechanistically, the group translocation or conduction concept was a development of the idea, put forward by Pauling in 1950, that enzymic catalysis depends on tight binding of the transition-state complex rather than of reactants and resultants. As we pointed out (Mitchell & Moyle, 1958b ), Pauling's idea required only a small adjustment to adapt it to the notion that the active centre regions of certain enzymes (and of certain catalytic carriers, such as cytochromes) may be conceived, not simply as specific group-binding centres, which would tend to lock in the transition state |
It was, of course, realised that the chemicomotive effect of group translocation -or group conduction, as I now prefer to call it -would not be manifested unless the enzyme or catalytic carrier molecules were inhomogeneously organised in space according to either of two main topological principles. According to one topological principle, the organisation could be at the macroscopic level in a membrane, thus giving rise to macroscopic chemiosmotic processes of which we gave some permutations and combinations for a phosphokinase system by way of example, as shown in Table 1. The two aqueous phases are represented |
The second case in Table 1 is shown in diagram A of Fig. 9. It represents the macroscopic chemiosmotic group-conduction principle applied to the phosphorylative translocation of the substrate GH, which could be a sugar, as in the phosphoenol pyruvate phosphotransferase system discovered in bacteria by Kundig, Ghosh & Roseman in 1964. Now, it was only a small, but nevertheless important, step from Table 1 to write heterolytic protonmotive ATPase reactions as shown in B and C of Fig. 9. My original proposal ( |
Let us return to the theme of David Keilin's respiratory chain in the light of the essentially biochemical concept of direct group-translocating or group-conducting chemiosmotic mechanisms. As indicated in Fig. 14, the chemiosmotic hypothesis, at the biochemical level, permitted a return to David Keilin's notion of a chemically simple respiratory chain; but the protonmotive property would have to depend on a topological complexity in place of the chemical complexity favoured by the proponents of the chemical coupling type of hypothesis. This seemed to me to be an attractive notion because it was in accord with the evidence of the |
At equilibrium, the total protonmotive potential across the membrane would be equal to the total redox potential across each loop -that is, around 250 mV (Mitchell, 1966). Thus, we can relate quantitatively the Fig. 15. Suggested looped configuration of respiratory chain systems (after Mitchell, 1966). scalar group-potential differences of chemical reactions (i.e. of hydrogen and electron transfer reactions) to the real vectorial forces of transport (i.e. of oppositely directed H and etransport, adding up to net H + translocation). Fig |
A great deal of ingenious experimental work in many laboratories over the last decade has shown that these schemes require some modification of detail, but their direct group-conducting redox-loop principle has been amply confirmed, as indicated in the diagrams of Fig. 17, which, as I shall discuss in a little more detail later, summarise recent knowledge about the mitochondrial respiratory chain (A), the chloroplast non-cyclic photoredox chain (B), and the reversible ATPases (F 0 F 1 and CF 0 CF 1 ), driven by these systems. It is noteworthy that these schemes show remarkable similarities. |
The photoredox chain system, shown in Fig. 17 B and Fig. 5 B, obviously has a real Z configuration that corresponds to the abstract Z scheme introduced by Hill & Bendall in 1960. It may well be remarked that the protonmotive stoichiometries of these schemes, which correspond to one proton per univalent reducing equivalent traversing each effective redox loop, represent a crucial datum. In my laboratory, and in most other laboratories where such stoichiometric measurements have been made (see Mitchell, 1979), the +H+/e-ratio has been found to be near |
The first protonmotive device conceived by man was the electromotive hydrogen-burning fuel cell, invented by the remarkable William Grove in 1839. It is, perhaps, not self evident that such a fuel cell for generating electricity is also, potentially, a generator of proticity. This is illustrated by the diagrams of the hydrogen-burning fuel cell shown in Fig. 18. It simply depends where one opens the circuit to conduct away the power for external use. In A, the circuit is opened in the electron conductor to give electricity. In B, the circuit is opened in the proton conductor to give proticity (Mitchell |
The fuel cell is a beautiful example of the truth of the principle, enunciated by Pierre Curie at the end of the last century (Curie, 1894), that effects cannot be less symmetric than their causes. The phenomena of transport in the fuel cell arise from the intrinsically vectorial disposition of the chemical reactions at the anisotropic metal/aqueous catalytic electrode interfaces (Liebhafsky & Cairns, 1968). Thus, the scalar group-potential differences of the chemical reactions are projected in space as vectorial chemical fields of force corresponding to the chemical group-potential |
The idea of electrochemical cells and circuits was generalised by Guggenheim in 1933 to include the chemically motivated transport of any two species of chemical particle around a suitably conducting circuit. Guggenheim's rather abstract thermodynamic treatment effectively showed that chemical transport can be coupled reversibly to chemical transformation by splitting the chemical reaction spatially into two half reactions, connected internally by a specific conductor of one chemical species, and connected externally by a specific conductor of another chemical species needed to complete the overall reaction (see Mitchell, 1968). When we include the leading in and out of the reactants and resultants, |
As indicated in equation (2), the internal (trans osmotic barrier) ligand conductors in the redox-loop complex are conceived as being specific for hydrogen atoms that diffuse down their potential gradient one way, and for electrons that diffuse down their (electrochemical) potential gradient the opposite way -exactly as in the fuel cell of Fig. 18 B, and as illustrated further in Fig. 19. The outer circuit consists of the aqueous proton conductors on either side of the insulating lipid membrane (Mitchell, 1966). Fig. 19. Fuel cell-like terminal redox loop of respiratory |
The protonmotive redox loop and hydrodehydration loop, and other possible chemicomotive loops, as generally defined here, depend on a very simple specific ligand-conduction mechanism. I have called it the direct chemiosmotic mechanism in the biological systems, where it represents a spatial extension of the conventional biochemical concept of group transfer, but it is identical in general principle to the mechanism of man-made fuel cells. I find it remarkably paradoxical, therefore, that many physiologists and biochemists have tended to reject, or have found it difficult to accept intuitively, the feasibility of this direct and most bio |
Let me interject here that the protonic chemiosmotic theory has a much broader range of applicability than is encompassed by the central field of energy transduction in the classical oxidative and photosynthetic phosphorylation systems, treated in this lecture (see Mitchell, 1976a). For example: there is the protonmotive bacteriorhodopsin system of Halobacterium halobium (Stoeckenius, 1977; Schreckenbach & Oesterhelt, 1978; Drachev et al., 1978; Schulten & Tavan, 1978 |
The respiratory chain system summarised in Fig. 17A differs from my earlier suggestion of three linearly arranged redox loops (Figs. 14 and 15) in that loops 2 and 3 are coalesced into a cyclic Loop 2 + 3 configuration, described as the Q cycle, catalysed by the cytochrome b-c 1 complex. In this way, many of the otherwise anomalous thermodynamic poising and kinetic characteristics of cytochromes b 566 and b 562 (represented by bb in the diagram) may be explained; and the presence of ubiquinone ( |
The representation of the respiratory and photoredox chains as a set of physically compact complexes (that may be partially resolved and reconstituted) stems from work by Keilin & King (1958), by Takemori & King (1962), by the Madison group, led by Green and Hatefi (see Hatefi, 1966), and by Efraim Racker's group (see Racker, 1976). They originally defined four complexes: NADH-Q reductase, succinate-Q reductase, QH 2 -cytochrome c reductase |
There are about equal numbers of cytochrome b-c 1 and cytochrome oxidase complexes in mitochondrial respiratory chains. Counting all the different Q-linked dehydrogenases (NADH dehydrogenase, succinate dehydrogenase, electron transfer flavoprotein dehydrogenase, choline dehydrogenase, glycerol-l-phosphate dehydrogenase, etc.), there are about as many dehydrogenase complexes as there are cytochrome b-c 1 complexes. Thus, there is no special significance of the number four in the redox complexes of Green's group. There is |
There are generally at least ten Q molecules per cytochrome b-c 1 complex, so providing for the redox pool function of Q, identified by Kröger & Klingenberg (1973). However, recent work by Ragan and colleagues Heron et al., 1978) on functional interaction between NADH-Q reductase and cytochrome b-c 1 complexes in liposomal membranes confirms the thesis of King (1966 King (, 1978 that the most active redox-functional units are binary dehydrogenase-cytochrome b-c 1 complexes containing bound Q. Thus, |
The possible conduction of H atoms by flavin mononucleotide (FMN) in NADH dehydrogenase is based only on the known H-binding property of the flavin group (Mitchell, 1972a; Garland et al., 1972; Gutman et al., 1975). The very wide gap between the redox midpoint potentials of FeS1 and FeS2, and the effects of np in poising these centres, are difficult to reconcile with the arrangement shown in Fig. 17A (Ohnishi, 1979). As indicated in Fig. |
The notion of the net conduction of O 2groups by (ADP -+ P -)/ATP antiport in F 1 and CF 1 (Mitchell, 1972b (Mitchell,, 1977a is based on the precedent of the mitochondrial ADP/ATP antiporter, which is known to conduct ADP and ATP only in specific protonation states (Klingenberg, 1977). The protonmotive NAD(P) transhydrogenase, not shown in Fig. 17, may likewise translocate protons by the effective antiport of the phosphate groups |
In summary, the bioenergetically efficient mechanisms, represented in outline by Fig. 17, depend on two main principles: 1, the semi-fluid bimolecular lipid membrane and the plug-through complexes form a condensed, continuous non-aqueous (protonically insulating) sheet that acts as the osmotic barrier and separates the aqueous proton conductors on either side; 2, components of the complexes plugged through the membrane catalyse the highly specific vectorially organised conduction of electrons, H atoms, H + ions and O 2-groups. As examples of specific ligand binding, we have the electron |
There is still much to be understood about the biochemical details of the specific ligand-conduction processes, even for electron conduction (King, 1978; Dockter et al., 1978). But, I think it is fair to say that the protonmotive property of the mitochondrial cytochrome system and the photosystems of chloroplasts can probably be correctly explained, in general principle, by the direct ligand-conduction type of chemiosmotic mechanism. The same may be said of the protonmotive property of the photosystems of bacterial chromatophores (Crofts & Bowyer, 1978 |
The present position, in which, with comparatively few dissenters, we have successfully reached a consensus in favour of the chemiosmotic theory, augurs well for the future congeniality and effectiveness of experimental research in the field of membrane biochemistry and bioenergetics. At the time of the most intensive testing of the chemiosmotic hypothesis, in the nineteensixties and early nineteenseventies, it was not in the power of any of us to predict the outcome. The aspect of the present position of consensus that I find most remarkable and admirable, is the altruism and generosity with which former opponents of |
Buck and Axel changed all that. As a postdoc at Axel's Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) laboratory at Columbia University, Buck became fixated with the problem of the mysterious olfactory receptors. Picking up on recent hints in the scientific literature that smell receptors could be related to the small family of vision receptors, she adapted a freshly developed tool, the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), to serve her ends. PCR amplifies specific genes to detectable levels, and Buck used it in an effort to flush out her receptors in rats. This approach was novel at the time, but has since become routine. After initially |
With all due respect to those studying corpulent gastropods or the hook-faced worms called chaetognaths, it is often said that scientists come to resemble the creatures they study. With Berwald and Staaf, the resemblance is in writing style. Spineless feels planktonic, drifting through the depth and breadth of research into jellyfish swarms, or blooms. Squid Empire feels more 'nektonic', or free-swimming: a fast-paced and confident approach to cephalopods. Together, they offer a splendid backstory for the blobs dotting beaches and the multi-armed cephalopods in |
We learn what dozens of jellyfish experts think, and how Berwald's feelings evolve, flipping back and forth between technical and emotive. ("Perhaps jellyfish strike an unconscious nerve, far below what we are still certain we know, of a past before violence, before consumption, before aggression. ") The result is delightful; but the book has some shortcomings, including technical errors (incorrect species names and syntax referring to life stages) and inconsistent language that may confuse non-scientific readers. Importantly, it never mentions Claudia Mills, whose 1995 paper on jellyfish blooms launched the field (C. E. Mills ICES |
Anyone beguiled by dinosaurs will probably find Squid Empire irresistible. Staaf compares how both the "terrible lizards" and the "head-footed" cephalopods evolved, diversified and ate their way through their ancestors, then mostly perished in the hostile conditions at the end of the Cretaceous period, 66 million years ago. Through her words, we learn how evolution of a buoyant shell gave ammonites, nautiluses and their early kin the ability to rise off the sea floor and become fearsome predators, only to find themselves prey to jawed fish. And so began an arms race between |
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