I’ve been looking for this type of description for some time:
Pride of place in the Philogelos goes to the “egg-heads”, who are the subject of almost half the jokes for their literal-minded scholasticism (“An egg-head doctor was seeing a patient. ‘Doctor’, he said, ‘when I get up in the morning I feel dizzy for 20 minutes.’ ‘Get up 20 minutes later, then’”).
After the “egg-heads”, various ethnic jokes come a close second. In a series of gags reminiscent of modern Irish or Polish jokes, the residents of three Greek towns – Abdera, Kyme and Sidon – are ridiculed for their “how many Abderites does it take to change a light bulb?” style of stupidity. Why these three places in particular, we have no idea. But their inhabitants are portrayed as being as literal-minded as the egg-heads, and even more obtuse.
“An Abderite saw a eunuch talking to a woman and asked if she was his wife. When he replied that eunuchs can’t have wives, the Abderite asked, ‘So is she your daughter then?’”
We might try to laugh this off as ancient silliness until we realize that it applies today.
Literal-minded = confuses the ostensible, or how reality is sampled by human categories, with the real.
The real is organic, or made of billions of small factors working together to create a whole.
The literal is like assuming that a name controls something: if we call a squirrel a pit bull, it still will not attack.
We see plenty of literal-mindedness in society today, and to me it seems like the byproduct of people having no idea how reality works, because to them living means buying things in stores.
[...] — idiots — think that great civilizations are linear rationalists who approximate literal mindedness, holding up an eggplant and saying “well the box said this is a spark plug, so put it in the [...]
I think we could all learn a great deal from ‘egghead’ personalities.
By taking things literally, we break our allegiance to false symbolism as social intelligence (that is no 90% propoganda) and learn to look at the details of something rather than assume a false synergy from the labeled whole.
To use the article example, sampled reality is based upon the skew given by the supposition implied in the preamble: ‘Eggheads Are So Literal They Can’t See The True Subject For The Conditional Modifier.’
But if the doctor is looking at 70 year old man with angina as part of a known family history of CAD, where ‘feeling faint’ is correlated to feeling a compression in his heart muscle, itself a sign that the heart muscle is not sufficiently blood-oxygenated.
Then telling junior to take it easy for his first 20 minutes of consciousness is the equivalent of letting him know that as his active conscience reinforces his autonomic controls, it will be easier and safer for him to begin active perambulation a little later.
Who’s the egghead now? The doctor who knows perfectly well the meaning of his context-rich humor but isn’t aware of the notion that someone less intelligent than he ‘may not get it’.
Or the poor Joe Ordinary who literally doesn’t recognize that shared humor doesn’t necessarily obviate the imbedded wisdom but simply makes his own cognitive failure easier to swallow?
Listen at at least two levels to your eggheads. Lest you be laughed at and not even know it. Or laugh with them and not get what they are seriously trying to tell you.
YOU are the one responsible for context filtering in any dialogue. Not the other guy.
KPl.