Are “illiterate” adults irrational? Lifeworld, rationality, and an epistemically just theory of literacy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the context of the current measurement regime, literacy is interpreted as a set of skills required for the job market. Large-scale adult literacy surveys like the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) are used to measure progresses made by different countries and place them in the scale of economic competitiveness. However, the measurement regime has fundamentally ignored the epistemologies of a large part of adult population especially those who live in the marginalised communities of the global South. Drawing on key concepts provided by Jürgen Habermas such as the lifeworld and communicative rationality, this paper first critiques financial literacy and develops an epistemically just theory of literacy to have an alternative understanding of literacy that goes beyond the measurement regime. It theorises that so-called ‘illiterate’ adults are not irrational because they continuously and actively contribute to the construction and reconstruction of contextually useful knowledge for their lifeworlds.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".