If you exclude reading, writing, speaking, and listening (ie use of language, including math or code) as mere table stakes, how would you define “intellectual” in terms of essential non-language behaviors that non-intellectuals typically don’t exhibit?
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Agreed, but isn’t that example you give precisely an instance of “placing yourself within a tradition”? A useful test might be to ask whether it’s possible to see preliterate cultures as having intellectuals. Obviously they have thinkers, storytellers, etc. But “intellectuals”?
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Not necessarily. Long memory as an integral part of life orientation can be true of Robinson Crusoe on an island. "If an intellectual intellectualizes on an island, does he make an intellectual sound?" :D
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