'For example, we presented three subjects (1-3) with drawings of an ax, a saw, and a hammer and asked, "Would you say these things are tools?"
All three subjects answered yes.
"What about the log?"
1: "It also belongs with these. We make all sorts out things out of logs -- handles, doors, and the handles of tools."
2: We say a log is a tool because it works with tools to make things. The pieces of logs go into making tools."
"But" we remarked, "one man said a log isn't a tool since it can't saw or chop."
3: "Some crazy fellow must have told you that! After all, you need a log for tools, together with iron it can cut."
"But I can't call wood a tool?"
3" "Yes, you can -- you can make handles out of it."
"But can you really say wood is a tool?"
{this reply would strain MY credulity here -- that the interviewer has protested with "But..." three times in a row , if I were the subject. But as I am the product of academic institutions, I tend to notice these things, perhaps quite unpragmatically. ;-) }
2: "It is! Poles are made out of it, handles. We call all the things we have need of 'tools.'"
"Name all the tools you can."
3: "An ax, a mosque [light carriage on springs], and also the tree we tether a horse to if there's not a pole around. Look, if we didn't have this board here, we wouldn't be able to keep the water in this irrigation ditch. So that's also a tool, and so is the the wood that goes to make a blackboard."
"Name all the tools used to produce things."
1: "We have a saying: take a look in the fields and you'll see tools."
3: "Hatchet, ax, saw, yoke, harness, and the thong used in a saddle."
"Can you really call wood a tool?"
2: "Yes, of course! If we have no wood to use with an ax, we can't plow and build a cariage."
The answers of these subjects were typical of the group of illiterates with whom we worked, and they indicate that in attempting to define the abstract, categorical meaning of a word, subjects began by including things that in fact belong to the designated category. But they soon exceeded the limits of the category and added objects that were simply encountered together with items that were members of the designated class, or objects that were considered useful in an imagined situation in which such items were used. Words for these people had an entirely different function from the function they have for educated people. They were not used to codify objects into conceptual schemes but to establish the practical interrelations among things.' (1)
So in parallel, I propose, may be a difference between words used by some poets and those used by some theoreticians... and I express wonder whether therein is an explanation why 'systems' and 'ecological' thinking (insofar as these emphasize practical interrelationships) continue to encounter barriers to their appropriation in some societies...
Just a thought. Or two.
Nothing to report on the bunny front, except relief that local mosquitos have not tested positive yet for the west nile virus. No fur ruffled.
(1) The making of mind. A. R. Luria
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