Kenneth MacKendrick wrote:
>
> At 01:42 PM 7/28/01 -0500, you wrote:
>
> > but the statement that one person is more rational than another is,
> > actually, unintelligible to
> >me. I don't know what it means.
>
> [clip] But there is a greater capacity for reason in someone who has
> achieved a higher stage of cognitive development. Through abstraction, we
> can articulate the stages (or tasks) that a two year old must come to
> master if they are going to move on to a more reflective (yes, higher)
> position. Is this a hierarchy of rationality? You bet.
My first 'problem' with this is probably something you can answer easily (at least to your own satisfaction) but I'll toss it out. This strikes me as founded in the ancient "faculty" psychology, with "reason" or "rationality" being one of the faculties, and one is in some way measurable. That is simply unacceptable, and I would not try to refute it (nor listen to a defense of it). But you can probably somehow deny the description.
But leaving "faculties" aside, you are describing a neurological & social process -- or rather you are _not_ describing the process but only asserting its endpoint. I assume it is primarily a social process rather than biological, since the brain does not "develop" or "grow" in the way in which the skeleton does but through a process (continually mediated by the "body") of social interaction. (Incidentally, memories are not "stored" but must be continually recreated by neuronal action, and of course _always_ change: hence it is incoherent to speak of remembering something from the age of two - you can only remember reconstructions of reconstructions of reconstructions . . .of that memory.) So "rationality" or "reason" (applied to persons) can only be labels for processes, not labels for entities that may be ranked. It is thus an illusion to think of a bond analyst handling abstraction "better" than a two year old: they both are equally adept of handling the abstractions their social relations set for them.
This may be roughly analogous to the fact that all languages are equally powerful, equally capable of conciseness, equally poetic, etc. Susanne Langer handled that question very well some 60 years ago in _Philosophy in a New Key_.
Carrol
Carrol