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Take this thought a little further along its own trajectory...
And you realize that is precisely what a mythological structure is, a narrative or the story of the origin of people and how they came into the world, through the actions and wills of the gods, beings before them. The gods of wind, sky, water, fire, of the animals and so forth.
Embedded in these stories of origins are also the explanations of how things work in the world and how men can change these events and give themselves powers that once only belong to the god of fire for example or the god of rivers. Part of the method of gaining these powers or the promise of gaining these powers is through naming, naming your children for example, or of more powerful men in the clad naming themselves...the magical power of the word.
The mistake of the theory that mythological thinking is the precusor to scientific thinking is that mythological systems of thought are rational within their own assumptions about the world. And, there is a deep difference between a rational explanation derived from its axioms so to speak and a scientific explanation. For one thing a scientific explanation, may not be rational. In the latter case, we may have to invent another rational system or modify a current one in order to provide the scientific explanation some rational grounding.
I certainly wish that the more recent philosphers of science and interested others would read Cassirer, Levi-Strauss and others. Together they go a long, long way toward positioning the philosophy of science within its own critical domain, and position it within a larger cultural context. The point here is to understand not just science, but also our own culture and thought, and the extraordinary role that science, math and related technological thinking play.
I've been thinking about all this while reading the ``Theory's Empire'' thread from last week, but never got around to posting anything.
``That religion broadly defined is a human near-universal, like language, suggests it is not merely a contingent social construction...''
Think this one through too... and you will see the connection that language and mythological thought along with their activities and expressionns in other forms than language, say ritual, custom, and various arts are commingled into what we call a culture.
CG