I agree with you that very few behavioral norms are invented from scratch, and that the more complex ones pretty much never are, and that they must therefore be propagated culturally.
That said, your analogy is actually a good one, in that I have the same objection to the analogy that I had to the original.
Unlike you, I suspect that there’s quite a lot of in between: some people use integrated-circuit computers, some people (often the same people) use pen and paper, some people use a method of successive approximation, some people count on their fingers. It depends on the people and it depends on the kind of calculation they are doing and it depends on the context in which they’re doing it; I might open an excel spreadsheet to calculate 15% of a number if I’m sitting in front of my computer, I might calculate it as “a tenth plus half of a rounded-up tenth” if I’m working out a tip at a restaurant, I might solve it with pencil and paper if it’s the tenth in a series of arithmetic problems I’m solving on a neuropsych examination.
When you say “most people use some integrated-circuit computing machine, or nothing” you end up excluding a wide range of actual human behavior in the real world.
Analogously, I think that when you talk about the vast excluded middle between “morality” and “pecking order” you exclude a similarly wide range of actual human behavior in the real world.
When that range is “approximated as just having two choices” something important is lost. If you have some specific analytical goal in mind, perhaps the approximation is good enough for that goal… I’m afraid I’ve lost track of what your goal might be, here. But in general, I don’t accept it as a good-enough approximation; the excluded middle seems worthy of consideration.
I agree with you that very few behavioral norms are invented from scratch, and that the more complex ones pretty much never are, and that they must therefore be propagated culturally.
That said, your analogy is actually a good one, in that I have the same objection to the analogy that I had to the original.
Unlike you, I suspect that there’s quite a lot of in between: some people use integrated-circuit computers, some people (often the same people) use pen and paper, some people use a method of successive approximation, some people count on their fingers. It depends on the people and it depends on the kind of calculation they are doing and it depends on the context in which they’re doing it; I might open an excel spreadsheet to calculate 15% of a number if I’m sitting in front of my computer, I might calculate it as “a tenth plus half of a rounded-up tenth” if I’m working out a tip at a restaurant, I might solve it with pencil and paper if it’s the tenth in a series of arithmetic problems I’m solving on a neuropsych examination.
When you say “most people use some integrated-circuit computing machine, or nothing” you end up excluding a wide range of actual human behavior in the real world.
Analogously, I think that when you talk about the vast excluded middle between “morality” and “pecking order” you exclude a similarly wide range of actual human behavior in the real world.
When that range is “approximated as just having two choices” something important is lost. If you have some specific analytical goal in mind, perhaps the approximation is good enough for that goal… I’m afraid I’ve lost track of what your goal might be, here. But in general, I don’t accept it as a good-enough approximation; the excluded middle seems worthy of consideration.