This train of thought on the uses that morés have for human tribes brings us to a deeper implication embedded in the argument.

Close analysis of individual human behaviours reveals that they cannot be completely explained by their collective advantages to the tribe. We can’t reason our way to a moral code for all humans without first understanding that humans are capable of forming very large patterns of thinking—patterns we usually call concepts or beliefs.

Behaviourism’s model of human thinking is left behind at this point since this model does not adequately explain conceptual thinking. It connects stimulus to response in a one-to-one, mechanical way. It then explains some individual behaviours for which stimulus and response can be clearly described in limited, detailed, objective terms. The behaviorist reports that “The organism sees and recognizes these colours, shapes, and sounds, pushes the bar, and gets the food-pellet reward.” For example, I go to work at the big, grey factory, punch my time card at the clock beside the brown door, put bolts on widgets for nine hours, punch out, collect my pay, and go home.

                                      

                                                              bull Moose (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

                                       

But a human can confront situations that are not, by sensory evidence, like anything the human has encountered before, and still the human can react effectively. The English hunter who had never seen a moose, kangaroo, or rhinoceros in muskeg, outback, or veldt still knew where to shoot in order to kill one. Polynesian sailors navigated well by the stars of a new hemisphere when they first came to Hawaii as did European sailors when they first began to explore the lands and seas south of the equator. In each of those situations was a set of concepts—ideas underlying those terms, ideas based on patterns found in large numbers of experiences. For example, the animal’s heart lies at the bottom of the ribcage, slightly to the left of center, and a heart shot is fatal for every animal on this planet.

Further, a man may react in one way to a new stimulus in his first attempt at something and quite differently in his next attempt, after he has contemplated the stimulus situation for a bit longer. He sees, hears, or feels a deeper, more general pattern that he recognizes, and then, based on concepts stored in his memory, he plans and executes a more effective response to it. The lists of concepts and their uses could go on for pages.

Nearly every human past the age of twelve is capable of forming generalizations based on what he has learned from his individual experiences and, to an even greater degree, what he has been taught by the adults of his society. Conceptual thinking is as human as having forty-six chromosomes. It comes to a child at the age when, for example, he realizes that the short, wide cup holds more soda than the tall, slim one. Volume is a concept. (I take Piaget as my guide here.⁶)

The programmers of society—parents, teachers, shamans, and others—make use of this faculty in their young subjects, greatly increasing these children’s chances of surviving by programming them with more than simple, one-to-one responses to recognizably repetitive sense data patterns in the tribe’s territory. The young subject is to be programmed with categories and then, at higher levels of generality, with principles, beliefs, and values.

   

                                                      reindeer with herdsmen (credit: Wikipedia) 

              

Every tribe has labels (words) for large groups (categories) of similar things or events in the tribe’s environment. These category terms are taught to the young because they are useful in the quest for survival. The Sami (Laplanders) have many words for describing a reindeer because they sometimes need to differentiate between them. A single word to describe a dark brown, pregnant doe is useful if she is in labour, in distress, and in need of immediate care. And for Cro-Magnon tribes, it probably was useful to have many terms for rock or stone or boulder or pebble or flint because only certain types of flint could be used to make effective weapons and tools. By contrast, most visitors to Lapland speak only of reindeer does, bucks, and fawns, and some may have no words for reindeer at all. Most of us today - when compared to our Cro-Magon ancestors -  know very little about types of flint.