Let's take the case of: 1. Professional tasters and sniffers - they are paid small fortunes for their ability to compute sensory perceptions and transform these into value systems to grade tea, coffee, wine, essences and scents. Theoretically, they would be able to accomplish this without much in terms of language skills. That could be left to the PR people and consumers who can wax on about wine's "undertones of red earth, with a slight upper palate of crushed wheat on a platform of smoky oak shavings".
By the way, I enjoy my red wines, so I am not bashing the 'elitist' 'knowledge' of the wine drinking ritual, provided it doesn't exceed the necessary to convey your appreciation of the product. 2. Trackers - the 'powerful' apartheid war machinery that faced the Cuban forces in Angola relied significantly on the knowledge of the San people (often referred to as 'Bushmen', as depicted in the film "The Gods Must be Crazy") to track the movement of enemy. The San can 'read' impressions on the ground and with accuracy tell you the weight of the person (or animal) the speed of the movement, how long ago the print was made (even accounting for wind) etc. Also, once shown how to operate a mortar launcher and getting used to the hyperbolic curve of its trajectory, they were able to fire these into the enemy with a precision greater than veteran special forces aided by calculating devices. 3. One-person fighting machines - without attributing much in the way of value to the aberrations created my the entertainment industry, one could theorise about the cognitive skills of characters such as MacGyver, the A-Team, Rambo and others, who single-handedly ..... (you've all probably seen them) ________________________________________________ Rui Correia Advocacy, Human Rights, Media and Language Consultant 2 Cutten St, Horison, Roodepoort, Johannesburg, South Africa Tel/ Fax (+27-11) 766-4336 Cell (+27) (0) 83-368-1214 "Quando a verdade é substituída pelo silêncio, o silêncio é uma mentira" - Yevgeny Yevtushenko "When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie" - Yevgeny Yevtushenko -----Original Message----- From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Doyle Saylor Sent: 29 December 2006 08:02 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Cognitive elite Greetings Economists, On Dec 28, 2006, at 7:23 PM, David B. Shemano wrote: > I have no idea why we should want to such a world. Does anybody say > we should? Doyle; What really is the issue with high IQ is the bias in thinking about cognition is about language skills. We don't really have a sense of what is a broader more universal need for cognition. If I may, many animals cognate. Are extraordinarily powerful mobile computing entities. But we have no such broad scale means of unifying that cognition to our own. We say they can't speak and therefore they are 'sub-human' in cognition. That surely means there is no general principle of the distribution of cognition and connection in the world. Rather we see primarily how language makes human social connection and that is 'enough' for us to understand cognition. That is why I think there is a clear answer to David, yes most people do think cognition is language. Where IQ is primarily a game of puffing up the importance of language cognition over a broader definition of cognition appropriate to a global system. thanks, Doyle
