Page 126 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

103 The Development of Normative Structures

views is directed not only against cognitive dissonance but also against
social disintegration. The concordant structuration of the stock of
knowledge stored and harmonized in interpretive systems is related,
therefore, not only to the unity of the epistemic ego, but also to that
of the practical ego. Legal and moral representations are to be distin-
guished in turn from the concepts and structures that directly serve
to stabilize ego and group identities—for example, concepts of origin-
ary powers, gods, representations of the soul, concepts of fate, and the
like. This complex construction prohibits a global comparison between
ego development and the development of world views. We have to
sharpen particular, abstract, reference points of comparison. Thus there
might be a process of decentration of world views that corresponds to
ego development; and for cognitive development in the narrower
sense, we can lock for isomorphisms in the fundamental concepts and
logical connections of collective interpretive systems.

All provisos notwithstanding, certain homologies can be found.
This is true in the first place for cognitive development. In onto-
genesis we can observe sequences of basic concepts and logical
structures similar to those observable in the evolution of world
views!2—for example, the differentiation of temporal horizons
and the separation of physically measured and biographically
experienced time; the articulation of a concept of causality—
grasped only globally at first—that becomes specified for the
causal connection of things and events, on the one side, and for
the motivational connection of actions, on the other, and is later
employed as a basis for the hypothetical concepts of a law of
nature and a norm of action; or the differentiation of the con-
cept of substance—encompassing at first the animate and the
inanimate—into objects that can be manipulated and social ob-
jects that can be encountered as opposite numbers in interaction.
(Thus, for example, Dédbert has attempted to reconstruct the
development of religion from primitive mythology to so-called
modern religion—which has shrunk to a profane ethics of com-
munication—from the point of view of a step-by-step explication
of basic action-theoretic concepts. )** Similar observations can be
made regarding logical structures. Mythology permits narrative
explanations with the help of exemplary stories; cosmological
world views, philosophies, and higher religions already permit