This is an important question, but there is a surprising lack of research in analytic philosophy on this topic. To be fair, considerations about reading are central toLudwig Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-followingin his later work, especially in thePhilosophical Investigations. This discussion is rightly famous, but not because it is about reading in particular. What it is to follow a rule is a deep and important issue in philosophy. But its attention toreadingas such has gotten lost by the wayside.

How hard can it be to say what reading is? We all do it, every day, in at least brief spurts. I’m not just talking about reading in the sense of reading Difficult But Important Books—I’m talking about all kinds of reading that you are able to do when you are literate. In this very broad sense, texting involves reading. Following street signs in your car involves reading. Pushing the right elevator button involves reading. Following the instructions on the back of the mac and cheese box involves reading.

But it is one thing to be able to do something, and another thing to be able to say what you are doing when you do that. Think of how hard it is to explain to someone else in words how to do some physical skill you’ve developed, like whistling or knitting. The same point applies here. It’s one thing to know how to read, and another to be able to describe clearly and carefully what you’re doing when you read.

阅读(我在这里试图捕捉的是非常广泛的意义)不需要包含文字:你可以为了演奏一个曲调而阅读书面音乐。它甚至不需要按照规定的顺序在一个图案中移动;你可以通过看地图找到回家的路。你读到的甚至可能是一个动态变化的测量仪器;想想看指南针、温度计或里程表。有时阅读包括以特定的方式看照片;想想看x光片或乳房x光片。人们甚至谈论看茶叶、看手相、看星星。

Even if we just think about reading in the most familiar sense—that is, reading written texts—there are still different ways of reading. There’s reading out loud, and there’s reading ‘in your head.’ Sometimes you can read out loud without having any ideawhatyou are saying; imagine knowing how to pronounce all the written words of a foreign language without understanding what they mean. Perhaps you can also read ‘in your head’ without having any idea of how the relevant words are meant to be pronounced.

(By the way, if you’re interested, itseems to bea myththat the ancients never read silently but only out loud. Reading silently has a long history.)

There are similar distinctions inways of readingfor any kind of thing you can read—you might only be able to read music without ‘hearing’ it in your head, but some people can look at a musical score and vividly imagine what it would sound like if played out loud. You might be able to say what a map signifies—the bus stop is west of the library等等，而不是真正能够使用它来导航它所绘制的区域。

Does anything unite these otherwise quite disparate kinds and ways of reading? You might think there isn’t any deep feature shared by, say, palm-reading and map-reading. Things get even trickier when we consider forms of reading that may seem morefigurativelythan literally ways of reading: think of reading a room, reading someone’s mind, or reading the defense in football. These kinds of ‘reading’ might only be called “reading” in an honorary, analogical, or metaphorical way.

Some philosophers might say that calling all of these ways of “reading” is just to lasso together a bunch of otherwise unrelated activities with the same linguistic label. But I think that’s a position of last resort. It seems intuitive that there should be some reason why we tend to call all of these activities “reading.” Only if we work hard and yet still fail to find that reason should we give up our search.

I suspect that the answer to our question about what all these activities have in common is mental action. There is always something you do, actively,在你读书的时候，在你的思想中。在每种情况下，这可能是一种不同类型的心理活动。看手相和看音乐在这方面有所不同，但看小说和看新闻也是如此。当你阅读小说时，你会想象故事中描述的场景。When you are reading the news—or at least the news that you trust—you come to accept or evenbelievethat various events took place.

阅读本质上涉及到各种形式的阅读中的各种形式的心理活动，这种想法目前还只是一种假设。但我还要说三件事来支持我的观点，即心理活动在阅读中起着至关重要的作用。

The first point is that there is no analog of the distinction betweenhearingandlisteningwhen it comes to reading. The distinction between hearing and listening seems to be a distinction between something passive and something active. If all reading involves mental action of some form or another, that would explain why there is no analog of merehearingin the case of reading: there’s no such thing as purely passive reading.

The second point—which is more of a precautionary defense—is that even those cases of immediate or unavoidable reading can be explained if all reading involves mental action. Think of a case where you cannot avoid reading a word, like the word “STOP” on a red hexagonal sign at an intersection. These cases of sudden reading might seem passive, in part because you don’t have to make any effort or even pay special attention to read such simple words in these cases. But they can equally well be cases of automatic action—just like braking at the sight of a stop sign is.

My third and final point is this: the role of mental action in reading dovetails nicely with Wittgenstein’s own connection between reading and following a rule. When you do something intentionally—in bodily or mental action—you (usually) have an aim in mind. Having an aim in mind can be understood as setting up a success condition for yourself, or trying to follow some standard or norm. Arulethat you are trying to follow can give you some such standard or norm. This connection needs to be made clearer, but there is something promising in the vicinity.

For these reasons and more, I hope that we can make sense of reading in terms of mental action—andintentional心理活动，尤指心理活动

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