[xmca] Culture & Rationality

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.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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