Re: [xmca] Culture & Rationality

[Peter Feigenbaum <pfeigenbaum@fordham.edu>]

Martin--

If you grant that interpersonal speech
communication is essentially a cultural invention, and that private and
inner speech--as derivatives of interpersonal speech communication--are
also cultural inventions, then Vygotsky's assertions about inner speech
as a tool that adults use voluntarily to conduct and direct such crucial
psychological activities as analyzing, reflecting, conceptualizing, regulating,
monitoring, simulating, rehearsing (actually, some of these activities
were not specifically asserted by Vygotsky, but instead have been discovered
in experiments with private speech) would imply that these "higher
mental processes" are themselves cultural products. Even if the *contents*
of inner speech thinking happen to bear no discernible cultural imprint,
the process of production nonetheless does. 

Of course, you may not agree that interpersonal
speech communication is a cultural invention. But if you do go along with
the idea that every speech community follows (albeit implicitly) their
own particular conventions or customs for: assigning specific speech sounds
to specific meanings (i.e., inventing words); organizing words into sequences
(i.e., inventing grammar--Chomsky's claims not withstanding); and sequencing
utterances in conversation according to rules of appropriateness (i.e.,
inventing rules that regulate "what kinds of things to say, in what
message forms, to what kinds of people, in what kinds of situations",
according to the cross-cultural work of E. O. Frake), then reasoning based
on the use of speech must be cultural as well. 

My guess is that you are looking for
evidence that cultures reason differently. While there may be evidence
for such a claim, I only want to point out that the tools for reasoning
are themselves manufactured by human culture.

Peter

Peter Feigenbaum, Ph.D.
Associate Director of Institutional Research
Fordham University
Thebaud Hall-202
Bronx, NY 10458

Phone: (718) 817-2243
Fax: (718) 817-3203
e-mail: pfeigenbaum@fordham.edu



From:      
 Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>
To:      
 "eXtended Mind,
Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date:      
 06/26/2012 05:06 PM
Subject:    
   [xmca] Culture
& Rationality
Sent by:    
   xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu

---

Thank you for the suggestions that people have made
about evidence that supports the claim that culture is constitutive of
psychological functions. Keep sending them in, please! Now I want to introduce
a new, but related, thread. A few days ago I gave Peter a hard time because
he wrote that "higher mental processes are those specific to a culture,
and thus those that embody cultural concepts so that they guide activity."

I responded that I don't think that LSV ever wrote this - his view seems
to me to have been that it is scientific concepts that make possible the
higher psychological functions (through at time he seems to suggest the
opposite). 

My questions now are these:

1. Am I wrong? Did LSV suggest that higher mental processes are specific
to a culture and based on cultural concepts?

2. If LSV didn't suggest this, who has? Not counting Peter!  :)

3. Do we have empirical evidence to support such a suggestion? It seems
to me to boil down, or add up, to the claim that human rationality, human
reasoning, varies culturally. (Except who knows what rationality is? -
it turns out that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy does not have
an entry for Rationality; apparently they are still making up their minds.)

that's all, folks

Martin

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