Re: BHA: Epistemological relativism, human rights, culture

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Marshall Feldman wrote:
>
> Viren,
>
> Thanks for the reference. I'll have to look into it.
>
> My main point has been that people who take the linguistic turn put great
> stake in language, but these days they rarely justify this stake versus
> other characteristics (e.g., the socially organized transformation of
> material nature). The notion that language facilitates all this is novel in
> my experience, even though this is one of those insights that once said
> hardly seem remarkable.

For the last two decades or so it seems that hardly a month goes by but
what some new research in neuroscience or new perspectives in evolution
are not announced which add more emphasis to the human power of
abstraction and thought _prior to_ language. Just this week I have read
an account of research by a woman (a psychologist at Harvard) which
pretty definitely overturns the assumption, shared by William James,
Freud, & Piaget that for infants the world is (as James put it) a
"blooming buzzing confusion" -- i.e., for example, they would not
perceive distinct objects and separate them from the general buzz. But
it turns out infants as old as three or four weeks are capable of quite
powerful abstraction: they have expectations of how objects should
behave, and when they are fooled (when an object does not conform to the
theory they have formed), they are surprised and their interest is
aroused.

Abstract thought _had_ to precede language or how in the world would
language have originated?

Carrol


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