When I was eleven I had reader’s block—as my mom called it, when she tried to explain why I was acting even weirder than normal.

Theseveralthingsthatpeople call “reader’s block” are all forms of resistance to reading. “Reader’s block” might refer to reluctance to read at all; anxiety about reading some specific intimidating book; or that special frustrating phenomenon where you drag your eyes over the lines of a page without taking anything in.

What I had was most like this last thing, but more acute and puzzling. I think now that it was the result of a specific philosophical mistake about reading. I’ll explain why.

I was trying to readHomecoming, by Cynthia Voigt, for school. It’s a story of four abandoned siblings who journey to Bridgeport, Connecticut to find a relative who can care for them. It’s simply written and relatable. But I absolutely despised it.

When I tried to readHomecoming, I would concentrate intensely, and cast my eyes over a sentence. Then I would pause, unable to locate in my mind the impact of each individual word. I’d start the sentence again, this time focusing on the forgotten words. But then the other words would fade into the background. Then I’d try to hold the sentence as a whole in mind. I’d mentally chant full sentences until they lost all appearance of meaningfulness. Each page took me at least half an hour at this pace.

This went on for weeks. I freaked out.

我的问题不是一般性的阅读问题;我是一个酷爱快速阅读的人。这也不是语法分析的问题。I just lovedgrammar, and the sentences ofHomecomingweren’t exactly complicated:

戴西天一亮就醒了。A chilly dew beaded the windshield. (p.20)

Windshield?? I’d think.Was that really a windshield in my mental image? Wait, hang on, was there an image at all?所以我要重新说一遍。

What’s the point of this story, and what is it doing on a philosophy blog?

In mylast post, I said that reading involves mental action. This point is crucial to understanding reading. But it contradicts a fairly natural—and seriously mistaken—idea about reading. It’s this idea that caused my struggle throughHomecoming.

错误的想法是:在阅读时，文字会冲击你的被动思维，在那里产生一个构成你对这些文字的理解的东西。这个想法意味着你只需要通过纸上的文字让某种理解进入你的脑海。

Once I had read a sentence ofHomecoming有一次，我以为会有一些东西——一幅图像，或者一点理解，无论什么东西都留给我去检查。我想，这个理解单元应该有与原句中的每个词相对应的方面。如果没有，联检组就有缺陷，是误解或不完全理解所述内容的结果。

The mistake I am attributing to myself is similar to a mistake about understanding discussed by Ludwig Wittgenstein in thePhilosophical Investigations, Section 138ff. “What really comes before our mind when weunderstanda word? – Isn’t it something like a picture?” the interlocutor suggests. There, Wittgenstein shows why this model of understanding cannot succeed on pain of regress. Doesn’t a picture itself need interpretation and understanding?

我自己实际上犯了两个明显但相关的错误。我的第一个错误是认为正确地阅读一个句子会在头脑中植入某种可以通过自省来检查的理解单位。My second mistake was to think that whatever Unit of Understanding reading did植入到脑中必须有对应于原句子中的每个单词的内省位。

Thinking about reading as intentional action helps to counteract these mistakes.

当你在有意地做某事时，你会对自己在做什么有一定的意识——这是安斯康比、汉普郡和无数其他行动哲学家所提出的观点。这种意识对你完成你开始做的事情的方法和策略很敏感。当事情出错时，它帮助你调整，并及时了解什么是对的。它合并了生成总体操作所需的子操作的意识。

But this sort of awareness is also temporary. It animates your action with a rich awarenesswhile你在表演，但它不需要在最后植入一个完成的项目。

Reading is more like that. If reading each sentence is an individual action, the reading of each word is a sub-action. In reading the sentence, you might have a rich but temporary awareness of what you’re doing in trying to parse each word. This gives way to another rich and temporary awareness of what you’re doing in parsing the next word, and so on. This temporally structured awareness of what you’re doing, I’m suggesting, can partly constitute your understanding of thesentence为已读。如果这是对的，你对这个句子的理解可以及时展开。在你真正读完句子之后，没有什么能像图像或者其他哲学上神秘的理解单位那样证明你的成功。

Surely not all reader’s block is caused by the model of reading I had in mind when I suffered mine. But we should pay more attention to reader’s block—in my weirdo version, but also in all its more familiar forms—to better understand what reading is.