White Bears in the Far North
Question:
In the Far North, where there is snow, all bears are white.
Novaya Zembla is in the Far North and there is always snow there.
What color are the bears?
Typical Response:
“I don’t know. I’ve seen a black bear. I’ve never seen any others…Each locality has its own animals”
Oral people lacked the categories that become second nature even to illiterate individuals in literate cultures. They could not, or would not, accept logical syllogisms.
Shown drawings of circles and squares, they named them as “plate, sieve, bucket, watch, or moon” and “mirror, door, house, apricot drying board.”
—James Gleick in The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood writing about Russian psychologist Aleksandr Romanovich Luria’s work among illiterate peasants in remote Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan in the 1930s.
