Before considering alternative ways to define thinking and the relation between rationality and human reason, let us look at the characteristics of thinking in current praxis, science and philosophy included. The amount of language we need to function in the workplace and in social life has diminished in comparison to previous circumstances of human experience. If thinking took place only in language, that would mean that thinking itself has diminished. Very few people would be inclined to accept this conclusion. The small subset of language used in social life and in professional interaction is representative of the segmented nature of this life and of the interactions it supports. This small subset of language, the command of which does not require literacy skills, is composed of social stereotypes, but is not sufficient to constitute a medium for thinking. Parallel to the diminished subset of natural language, the languages of science and technology expanded as expectations of scientific and technological efficiency increased. Expressions in the small subset of natural language that people use in order to function are generated regardless of the requirement of variety and change in our reciprocal relations. As canned expressions of limited function, they are taken over from previous circumstances, and used independently of what once determined their need. Chances are that an illiterate neighbor will never be noticed since everything pertaining to the social status of such a neighbor is literacy independent: driving, washing clothes, cooking, banking, telephoning, watching television, connecting to the Internet. The trained illiterate can perform these tasks and those pertinent to work perfectly without ever displaying a literacy handicap. No doubt that the new machines, new materials, new foods, and new medicines that are more at the frontiers of science than in the mainstream of living and working will further affect the need and possibility of a civilization dominated by more than one of its means of expression and communication.
People can function as illiterates in societies of extreme specialization without being noticed as illiterates and without affecting the efficiency of the system to which they belong because their own involvement in the functioning of the world in which they live is changing. Illiterate rationality is no less goal oriented than any other rationality. It is just expressed through other means. And it is no less concerned with predicting the behavior of systems driven by languages of extreme functionality, working regardless of the literacy of the operators. Scientific literacy is either stored in skills, through training, or in the systems operated by people who know less about their functioning than the machines themselves.
Symptoms such as misuse of words, sloppy language and grammar, use of stereotypes, the inability and even unwillingness to sustain dialogue might be telling something about thinking, too-for instance, that forms of thinking based on sign systems other than language are more effective, or more appropriate to what people do in our days; or even that appropriateness in one particular sign system does not translate into appropriateness and effectiveness in another practical experience. No wonder that science, in addition to reasons implicit in the nature of scientific inquiry, shies away from language, from its imprecision, ambiguity, and tendency to coalesce in stereotypes, or become stereotypes under circumstances of patterned use. Philosophy, by and large, follows the same tendency, although its alternatives are not comparable to those of science. The experience of science, and to a more limited degree that of philosophy, is simultaneously an experience in generating language capable of handling continuity, vagueness, and fuzzy relations. Spatial reasoning and replication of phenomena, usually associated with the living as aspects of common-sense knowledge, are also constitutive of the new science.
Extremely specialized human practical experiences are no longer predominantly experiences based on knowledge, but on constituting the person as information integrator. The continuous diminution of the need to think corresponds to the extreme segmentation of work and to the successful technological integration of various partial contributions resulting from this highly efficient segmented and mediated work. In one's individual life, in activities pertinent to self-maintenance (nourishment, rest, hygiene, enjoyment), the process is the same. Thinking is focused on selection: cooking one from many pre-processed meals at home, dressing in one from among many ready- made clothing items, living in pre-fabricated homes, washing objects in programmed machines. But the objects embody someone else's thinking. The reified thinking projected into gene manipulation, materials, and machines leads to a reduction of live thinking. People integrate themselves in the information network, and for a greater part of their existence they act as information processors: heat something until it pops; snap or zip to close; press a button that will adjust water temperature and wash cycle according to the type of clothes. More generally, people rely on the living machine that adapts to the user, re-assembles itself as requirements change, and/or fixes itself. Rationality is more and more integrated in the technology; thus it is rationalized away from the process of individual self-constitution. As tremendous as the consequences can be, they will be infinitely more dangerous if we do not start thinking about them.
Technology at this level uncouples the past from the present. Consequently, life and actual existence are alienated. Individuals do not have to think, they have to integrate themselves into the program embodying high efficiency rationality and reason. Today, knowledge of what goes into food, how preparation affects its qualities, what makes for a good shirt or sweater, what makes for a good house, what it means to wash, and how a material is affected by certain chemicals and water temperatures are rendered irrelevant. What matters is the result, not the process. What counts is efficiency, not individual know-how. Thinking is detached from thinking in the sense that all thinking, and thus rationality, is embodied outside the self-constituted human being. The appearance is that this outside thinking and this outside rationality have a life of their own. Memetic mechanisms are a testimony to the process.
In the civilization of illiteracy, we experience not only the benefits of high efficiency, but also the self-perpetuating drive of new pragmatic means. At times it appears that humans do not compete for achieving higher levels of creativity and productivity. Affluence appears as a given that takes over the need to match efficiency expectations characteristic of the global scale of humankind. To keep pace with technological progress and with scientific renewal becomes a rationale in itself, somehow disconnected from human reason. The confusing rationality of ever- increasing choices is matched by the frustrating realization that value options literally disappear, leaving no room for sensible reasoning. As a result, social and political aspects of human existence are short circuited, in particular those affecting the status of science and the condition of philosophy. Frequently, research is questioned as to whether its goals make sense at all. Only 15 years ago, half of the population in the USA suspected that science and the technology it fosters were the cause rather than the cure of many problems faced in the country, social problems included. The balance changed, but not the attitude of those captive to literacy's goals and values, who oppose science and the humanities instead of seeing them in their necessary, although contradictory, unity.
Quo vadis science?
Discovery and explanation
From among the many levels at which the issue of language in relation to science is relevant, two are critical: discovery and explanation. In all fairness, it should be said that literacy never claimed to be a way towards scientific discovery, or that language is the instrument making discovery possible. The main claim is that access to science, and thus the possibility to continue scientific work, is primarily through language. This assertion was correct in the past as long as scientific practice took place in a homogeneous cognitive context of shared representations of time and space. Once this context changed, the built-in language metrics of experience, what is called the ratio, the shared measure, started to get in the way of new discoveries and efficient explanations of previous discoveries. Among the many new codes scientists use today, symbolic reasoning (used in mathematics, logic, genetics, information science, etc.) is the most pervasive. All in all, a transition has been made from a centralized scientific practice to new experiences, which are quite often independent of each other and better adapted to the scale of the particular phenomenon of interest. This independence, as well as sensitivity to scale, results from different objects of specialized disciplines, from different perspectives, and from different sign systems structured as research tools or as medium for constituting efficient explanatory theories.
Plato would have barred entrance to the Academy to those who did not master mathematics: "Let no one enter who is not a mathematician." In today's world, the guardians of science would require logic, and others the mastery of artificial languages, such as programming languages, themselves subject to improved focus (as in object programming) and increased computational efficiency. In the time of Socrates, "the orator," language was ascertained to be constitutive of cities, laws, and the arts. In the time of the Roman poet Lucretius, physics was written in verse (7,000 lines of heroic hexameter were used to present Epicurus' atomic theory). Galileo preferred the dialogue, written in colloquial Italian, to share discoveries in physics and astronomy with his contemporaries. With Newton, equations started to replace words, and they became, almost to our time, the vocabulary of physics. Very similar developments took place in the evolution of science in China, India, the Middle East. The emergence of new visual or multimedia languages (of diagrams, systems of notation, visual representations, mixed data types) corresponds to the different nature of visual and multimedia experience. They are steps in the direction of deeper labor division, increased mediation, and new forms of human interaction-in particular, of a practice that is more intensional than extensional.