Intelligence and Intelligibility

This study investigates the tension between two conflicting intuitions, our twin recognitions: (1) that all humans share the same basic cognitive capacities; and yet (2) their actual manifestations in different individuals and groups differ appreciably. How can we reconcile our sense of what links us all as humans with our recognition of these deep differences? All humans use language and live in social groups, where we have to probe what is distinctive in the experience of humans as opposed to that of other animals and how the former may have evolved from the latter. Moreover, the languages we speak and the societies we form differ profoundly, though the conclusion that we are the prisoners of our own particular experience should and can be resisted. The study calls into question the cross-cultural viability both of many of the analytic tools we commonly use (such as the contrast between the literal and the metaphorical, between myth and rational account, and between nature and culture) and of our usual categories for organizing human experience and classifying intellectual disciplines, mathematics, religion, law, and aesthetics. The result is a robust defence of the possibilities of mutual intelligibility while recognizing both the diversity in the manifestations of human intelligence and the need to revise our assumptions in order to achieve that understanding.