Functional Illiteracy as Consequence of “Intellection’s Subject Change”

Abstract

The most important reason for the formation of functional illiteracy is the impact of the digital information environment, in which the reduplication of knowledge as an activity is purposefully distributed. This method, becoming one of the main ones due to low energy consumption, reduces the degree of personal responsibility of the individual for the nature and meaningfulness of the activity. Reduplication and imitation as mental operations are supported by changes in memory, which is increasingly becoming transactive. The authors analyze one of the manifestations of functional illiteracy – the lack of neurophysiological operations in a significant part of the examined students, which are necessary for the full cycle of meaning generation. The authors found the most typical errors in student translations, which reflect cognitive alteration in mental activity of students thus pointing to the cognitive subject shift. The results of the analysis of the students' translation activity showed that it forms a stable tendency towards "simplification of meanings", that arises from the use of only nominative meanings, enables the use of an out-of-context and non-associative meaning of the word, promotes operating with approximate meanings, reflects the desire to identify the units with the same root, but different in lexeme value. It is proved that this is largely a consequence of the active use of various types of visual signs and a partial change in the quality of a verbal sign in the digital information space.