In reply to Peter Isackson.

Excellent point about re-writing stories, Peter. In "The Educated Mind", Kieran Egan identifies 5 levels of understanding, with Ironic Thinking at the top.

1. Somatic - (before language acquisition) the physical abilities of one's own body are discovered, as are our emotions; somatic understanding includes the communicating activity that precedes the development of language; as the child grows and learns language, this kind of understanding survives in the way children "model their overall social structure in play".

2. Mythic - binary opposites (e.g. Tall/Short or Good/Evil), images, metaphor, and story-structure are prominent tools in pre-literate sense-making.

3. Romantic - the limits of reality are discovered and rational thinking begins, connected with the development of literacy. Egan connects this stage with the desire to explore the limits of reality, an interest in the transcendent qualities of things, and "engagement with knowledge represented as a product of human emotions and intentions"

4. Philosophic - the discovery of principles which underlie patterns and limits found in data; ordering knowledge into coherent general schemes.

5. Ironic - it involves the "mental flexibility to recognize how inadequately flexible are our minds, and the languages we use, to the world we try to represent in them"; it therefore includes the ability to consider alternative philosophic explanations, and is characterized by a Socratic stance in the world.