>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.
I don't really have an answer for this. Call it whatever you like, someone who can count to 20 has greater cognitive ability, with regards to number counting, than someone who can count to 10. I'm not sure if this means that counting is a faculty or not. People can learn. Call it psyche, ego, cognition, whatever. Something is doing the learning, and the process of manipulation, calculation, abstraction, and self-correction what some people call reason. I don't really understand what is behind your objection here, which is why my response is to absolutely trite.
>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'm not sure if it would be appropriate to say endpoint. Self-reflection, at the highest levels, has to do with interactive processes. After the conventional level, we're not really talking about 'individual' psychology anymore, it has to do with sustained reflective interactive practice. We can take this attitude up philosophically or subjectively, but only hypothetically - it requires 'doing' rather than 'knowing.' I might not be expressing this point correctly. The process is one of increasing cognitive complexity, at the most base level with have stimulus and response, at the higher levels we have various kinds of social interactivity... and so on. The question of an 'endpoint' seems to inadvertently miss the point.
> 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.
Right, this was never about counting beans in ones head. It is a question of how behaviour is coordinated. Behaviour that uses baseball bats on a 'gut' level is fundamentally less sophisticated than self-legislating rule giving, reciprocal role taking, and argumentation.
> 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.
I would say that a failure to discriminate between the levels of complexity at stake stem from a lack of qualitative perception. A forest fire is more complex than the flame of a candle, as a social phenomenon. Understanding that you have to pay your taxes and paying them is qualitatively different than understanding the networks of social relations that go into a tax system and making a conscious decision to comply or not... You comment above was dealt with in my post, which explicitly said that this was not a matter of logic or context-dependency. It is a question of abstraction, via the logical of social evolution, and the capacity to abstract (in terms of competence). Would you agree that there are ways of assessing linguistic competence? If so, then, by extension, there is a way of assessing communicative competence (ie. a critical social theory).
>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_.
This seems to support my point. The language is a universal medium, and that communicative action is subject to a non-trivial analysis of competence.
ken