> The thing I'm trying to stress here is that the kind of
> rationality we engage in is an amazing social accomplishment:
> yes, humans for hundreds of thousands of years have had about the
> same sensory and intellectual capacities, but complex patterns
> of culture, building on prior knowledge and technology,
> encourage us to think the way we do. (If you need to be
> convinced that rationality and logic require rigorous
> training and practice, teach an elementary logic class
> or a scientific research methods course. I can assure
> you the way of thinking you celebrate requires a huge
> amount of hard work and indocrination; it doesn't come
> easily or naturally to many students!) --And
> surprisingly, our rational modes of thought are
> often considered strange or outright childish,
> according to the standards of people in some
> nonindustrial societies.
Thinking philosophically rather than social-science-ly, I would distinguish between rationality as a practice that may or may not be performed by a particular society, or individual, in particular situations and at particular times, and rationality as a standard for judging beliefs (and actions, considered as motivated by beliefs). It does take rigorous training and practice to form one's beliefs according to rational standards -- I have indeed had the experience of teaching elementary logic classes! Or at least, thinking rationally about rather complex subjects, in situations where one is apt to be easily confused, takes a fair amount of training and practice.
The standards of rationality, however, are not created by social development -- as your example of the Kpelle tribe. I'm not sure that the kind of classification task you mention is typical of all of what is usually called "rationality," but let's assume that they would have the same attitude to propositional logic, etc. The fact that they could do it when asked to act like "foolish children" shows that the standards of rationality were in fact in their minds, and they were perfectly familiar with them -- they just thought that they were only appropriate to children. It would be interesting to go on to determine what these adults used in their daily life tasks which replaced this classification practice; perhaps the psychologists who were studying them did investigate along these lines.
Similarly for mathematics -- some societies have been said to have no concepts of numbers, or only a few: "one," "two," "many," etc. Perhaps they haven't found any use for developing mathematical concepts further than that, but I would bet that they would have little trouble learning "Western-style" mathematics, at least as well as well as American students do (not very well, in most cases!), if they were motivated to do so for some reason and were given instruction. It's not that their society didn't "construct" mathematics, or their brains are incapable of understanding it, whereas Western society did; it's just that they were never motivated to get curious about numbers.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax