Jack Goody (1977) has convincingly shown how shifts hitherto labeled as shifts from magic to science, or from the so-called 'prelogical' to the more and more 'rational' state of consciousness, or from Lévi-Strauss's 'savage' mind to domesticated thought, can be more economically and cogently explained as shifts from orality to various stages of literacy. (p29)
Although the cognitivist understands symbolic representations as abstract mental entities, observe that all of these properties are shared by texts written on pieces of paper.... Observe also that most of these properties are either deficient or absent for spoken utterances, which evaporate as quickly as they are issued and which can only be decomposed into discrete elements with a certain amount of wishful abstraction.