>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.
in the first place, i think there's more to rationality here than ken has made out. i was never much interested in this part of H's theory, so ken may be able to elaborate better than i. in the second place, as for what you say below, habermas would likely agree wrt conceiving of this as a process and the fact that this process is clearly social.
when my son was about 3 or 4, he loved shoes. he put on everyone's shoes. he especially loved the laugh he got out of me and everyone else for this behavior. we reinforced it. when visiting my grandmother's new husbands home after she remarried, he discovered a domicile with a wealth of dustcatchers and trinkets all over the various shelves readily accessible to a child. he decided he liked the display of bronze dutch shoes. they were solid; the artisan hadn't attempted to even make them with an opening as a real shoe would have. they were about half the size of his feet, unlike most of the shoes he tried to wear. nonetheless, my son thought it more fun than you can shake a toothbrush at to try to put that shoe on to make everyone laugh, as he was used to. of course, he got whisked off the floor away from the bookcase because there were breakable things in addition to the bronze shoe collection.
here is a child that understands that shoes are things that you put on your feet. in his particular instance, one puts on any and all shoes because this makes people you love laugh. he did not have the rational capacity to know that this particular "shoe" 1. was a representation of a shoe. 2. it wasn't big enough for him to wear and 3. it didn't have an opening that would enable him to wear it if he'd tried.
he was still at a stage of development where he couldn't understand abstraction. this ability came later and is still in the process of developing. it will take many years. but part of developing the capacity for understanding abstract concepts is the acquisition of language (which is a process) and the ability to take on the role of the other--to imagine what their life is like, what they might be thinking, etc. there is no _point_ at which this occurs, but a range of typical ages, because it is, indeed, a process. further, the ability to engage in abstraction is involved in the process of taking on the role of observer, not just taking on the role of the other(s) with whom one is interacting. this is evident as to where my son is at now: he's learning how to think about his relations with others. so, he likes to talk a lot to me about what takes place with him and his friends. he relates his view, what he thinks the views of others are, etc.
two years ago, when he skipped school one day after they missed the bus, he blamed it on his friends who had the idea to skip rather than call parents for rides to school. i couldn't get it through his head that he had made a choice that was wrong and he shouldn't have made that choice. he kept reverting to the fact that everyone else did it and he went along.
when he recently shoplifted i asked, "how did you get the idea that this was a good idea? you had plenty of money?" he said, "well, alex told me he wanted to take this money clip for his dad's present. he asked if i would too. but mommy, i was wrong to have done it. i didn't have to when alex asked."
ok. this is a point of view he couldn't have taken two years ago. he also probably couldn'thave been as upset about the racism of the cops against his friend the other day either.
this point of view is conjointly social, cognitive and moral according to Habermas.
kelley
>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