On Tue, 29 Mar 2005, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
> Doug:
>> It's hard to say anything's "natural" in human behavior, but
>> nonhierarchical arrangements have yet to present themselves in
>> durable quantity.
>
> "Natural" is an understatement or perhaps wrong category. Our all cognitive
> processes necessarily involve hierarchies - without hierarchies we could not
> differentiate, categorize, arrange, analyze, organize - in a word, think in
> rational terms. Things have no meaning if they are not placed in a context
> that by very definition involves some form of hierarchical arrangement.
This conflates the psychological and sociological uses of the word "hierarchical". When psychologists refer to "hierarchical" cognitive processing, they mean that people tend to organize and retrieve information effectively if it arranged in a conceptual hierarchy that fans out from general, abstract concepts to more and more specific subconcepts (e.g., furniture as general concept; chair, table, stool as specific subcategories). Note that this has nothing to do with the social hierarchies Doug and I were discussing!
Moreover, many cognitive processes do not involve hierarchical reasoning, even as I have described it above. --E.g., cognitive psychologists agree that one way we organize long-term memory is via semantic networks. Semantic networks are a related web of concepts with no hierarchical relations. I could provide many other examples here: the hierarchical thinking that Woj assumes is crucial is only one of many strategies we use to cognitively make sense of the world.
Miles