THE CREDIBILITY OF THE PLAUSIBLE

I have repeatedly noted that the causal explanations offered by our scenarios usually took the form of huge generalisations, to which a universal validity was ascribed. ‘Tool-making necessitates language’, ‘life in the savannah implies hunting’, ‘hunting involves great risks’. Does hunting involve great risks? Where? Everywhere. When? Always. Under what circumstances? Under all circumstances. What hunting? All hunting. The left-hand side of the relations (‘if x’) is thus reduced to the most simple and general formula possible. The right-hand side (‘then y’) appears equally rudimentary and its content can move across in the following ‘causal sequence’ to the left-hand side, to become the cause of a subsequent element in the causal chain. The paucity of the content decontextualises these statements and in the end they express nothing but relations that are valid a priori everywhere and at all times, applied to notions that are virtually abstract because they are too general (society in general, tools in general, hunting in general, etc.).