Greetings Economists, On Dec 28, 2006, at 9:18 AM, Leigh Meyers wrote:
couldn't spell past a. 6th or 7th grade level. They knew the rough, and generally accepted meanings of large words (used 3 times in a sentence for practice), and how to use a spellchecker, often with confusing or hilarious results.
Doyle; Leigh brings up language cognition I think because most people associate that with cognition. Jim Devine quoted Gardner about multiple intelligences, but we are so used to writing and reading which is a recording of language we have a hard time guesstimating how limiting that is to the concept. The malfunction of the managers at the trucking company is really specific to the ability to read which is still not so widely spread in the global system as might be hoped for. In other words a great deal of the worlds business is conducted outside of literacy. We can roughly indicate how language is just a part of cognition. That only two well known areas and perhaps a third are involved in generating speech. Really small parts of one half of the human brain, but what does that mean? At it's heart language depends upon the means of expression and we don't know how well matched the brain is to language in terms of expression of sheer cognitive power. It is no special importance here to go about various anecdotes about when language is not present how the brain re-organizes. The central question Michael query raises is 'cognition' language like in it's most powerful sense. That the language reflects some degree of what can be done in cognition. This question seems to answered quite differently if we try to hew to a democratic and equal perspective upon the cognitive processes. For we can see quite clearly that languages provide barriers which are quite hard to surmount in terms of a united global community. Speculation about a more universal process has been around for a long time. The failures are many that come from that speculation. Esperanto! Cognition is not just language. That means roughly we are free to make something that surmounts the limitations of language. Without saying much about what could arise, it is easy to simply point out that the volume of information carried by language is limited, but the brain is substantially more powerful than is language in generating information. Or the speed of processing language is quite slow. We could deliver information much more speedily. All of which suggests we might cognate quite differently with the right kinds of tools. To summarize, in my view language is not the central issue of cognition for human beings. What this leads to in a vast social sense is developing around us now, but hard yet to say what we are experiencing is that much different from the historical social connections of language. I think the steady weakening of face to face conversation as the chief means of social connection is a consequence of the unfolding a changing social structure reflecting the need to better define cognition in terms of human culture as perhaps a socialist might want it. thanks, Doyle
