Reflecting on Connections Across Time

Passive synthesis has been shown to be the reader’s non-deliberate adjustment of experienced text meanings to each other’s co-presence. This unconscious dimension of reading cannot be reified as consisting of merely shadowy acts of inference. The reader’s exploration of their earlier experiences as motivating their current understanding of the text produces encounters with hitherto latent meanings, not with acts. This encounter is open to the future, and underlies explicit interpretations, including those of a text’s in/coherence.