her cognitive complexity, and the development of the cultural “code” she has “installed” through her participation in society. Both of these constitute a kind of “exterior” reality, meaning that they can both be intersubjectively recognized and in some sense “objectively” studied. There really is an empirically observable side to these two: You can put people or animals through cognitive tests and they will consistently behave according to a certain cognitive stage, and you can study the pattern of their symbolic understanding of the world, in which case they will consistently gravitate
...more
