Experiencing Meanings-Designate

My claim has been that text reading involves moments of active meaning constitution of units that are mostly not tied to each other in a conscious manner. This assumes that single moments of consciousness can only have a single thematic content, at least in hindsight. The chapter opens with a probing and qualified endorsement of this assumption, widely shared among investigators of consciousness. It examines certain aspects of how meanings-designate become explored in hindsight, and explores the important topic of re-reading, which later chapters will also deal with. There follows an examination of discussions among readers, and the special features of meetings and conversations which are based on the participants’ prior reading of the same text. Gadamer’s and Bakhtin’s views on the role of dialogical thinking in text reading are considered. An illustrative protocol of reading experiences addresses an excerpt from Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The aim of the protocol is to identify both conscious and previously unconscious dimensions of my experience of reading this text for the first time.