Concepts

Four terms I use often enough that they are worth defining once, properly, in a place I control.

• Tertiary orality

  Language produced without a composing subject.

• Structural receptivity

  The condition of an audience that makes a falsehood liveable.

• Aletheic breakdown

  The failure of the shared procedures by which a society settles what is true.

• The Gutenberg Parenthesis

  The five centuries of print-shaped knowledge now closing behind us. Sauerberg's and Pettitt's term, not mine.