Reviewing ideas.

The second birthday book I read was a mini-tome called 'Ideas - A history', by Peter Watson. The aim of this book is to provide a condensed overview of the history of ideas and their development, and it does this in a remarkably thorough and wide-ranging way. I was enthralled with the scope of the development and continually surprised by two particular aspects of this history.

The first thing that struck me was how recent many of the ideas were. In particular, ideas that I hadn't recognised as such because I take them for granted are in some cases just a few thousand years old, or even less. For example, the key idea that we can distinguish between subjective and objective kinds of knowledge (on which I'll say more when I discuss one of the later books) seems to have sprung up in the last millenium, and the distinction between personal and physical explanations of events is almost as recent.

The second big surprise was the number of ideas involved in the development of things which I normally think of as individual ideas. A good example is writing, which is a skill I have known for so long that I did not realise how many ideas (apart from the obvious development of language itself) must be developed before it is possible. I can think of at least 12 steps:

1. The use of tools external to the body.
2. The preparation of tools in advance of when they are needed.
3. Using the state of the tools as a memory aid.
4. Creating tools to be used purely as memory aids.
5. Drawing pictures as a reminder of the things they resemble.
6. Associating the pictures with particular words.
   
7. Representing abstract ideas by the pictures of words with similar sounds.
8. Representing ordered strings of words (as from speech) through strings of pictures of the individual words of which they consist, to achieve a kind of frozen speech.
9. Representing particular sounds consistently by abstract symbols.
10. Developing conventions for which collections of symbols correspond to which words.
    
11. Representing other aspects of speech via punctuation marks.
12. The development of forms of language appropriate to written, rather than spoken, communication.
    

Each of these steps happened surprisingly recently. Further, although each seems trivial given (or even indistinguishable from) the last, the gaps between the developments of these ideas were remarkably long, being at least a generation in even the shortest case. The fact that this process was so painstaking makes it clear that we are currently missing some developments which, with hindsight, will seem equally obvious.

There were a couple of problems with the book, though. The first is related to the fact that the book is one of history, and often had to deal with periods about which we have very little evidence. In these cases, Watson would give the latest scholarly opinion, but without treating it as opinion. He reported it (in many cases) as if it were established fact. This meant that he was often reporting current, rather than past, ideas.

The second problem was the provincial focus of the later parts of the book. The only serious ideas mentioned for the last 800 years were from Europe and North America. Though other countries were mentioned, it was only in terms of what effect consideration of their cultures had on the West. It gave the impression that everyone else had been sitting on their hands for the last millenium.