The Loss We Cannot See

The loss we cannot see is Wolf's name for the epistemologically distinctive feature of deep reading circuit erosion: the cognitive processes that would allow a person to perceive the loss are the same processes being lost. A person who has never developed strong inferential reasoning does not experience the world as lacking inferences — she experiences it as fully legible, because the inferences she cannot draw are invisible to her. The layer of meaning that inference would reveal simply does not exist in her cognitive experience. She does not see a gap where the inference would be. She sees a complete picture — the complete picture her cognitive architecture can construct, which is a less complete picture than a more developed architecture would produce.