How Culture Molds Habits of Thought nytimes.com
Well, on the off chance you might want to cool off a little, it's Science Tuesday, and this interesting article showed up in the Times. A snippet, on a topic that's been belabored a bit here, I think.
Dr. Nisbett and Dr. Ara Norenzayan of the University of Illinois have
also found indications that when logic and experiential knowledge are in
conflict, Americans are more likely than Asians to adhere to the rules of
formal logic, in keeping with a tradition that in Western societies began
with the Ancient Greeks.
For example, presented with a logical sequence like, "All animals with fur
hibernate. Rabbits have fur. Therefore rabbits hibernate," the Americans,
the researchers found, were more likely to accept the validity of the
argument, separating its formal structure, that of a syllogism, from its
content, which might or might not be plausible. Asians, in contrast, more
frequently judged such syllogisms as invalid based on their implausibility
-- not all animals with fur do in fact hibernate.
While the cultural disparities traced in the researchers' work are
substantial, their origins are much less clear. Historical evidence suggests
that a divide between Eastern and Occidental thinking has existed at least
since ancient times, a tradition of adversarial debate, formal logical
argument and analytic deduction flowering in Greece, while in China an
appreciation for context and complexity, dialectical argument and a
tolerance for the "yin and yang" of life flourished.
How much of this East-West difference is a result of differing social and
religious practices, different languages or even different geography is
anyone's guess. But both styles, Dr. Nisbett said, have advantages, and
both have limitations. And neither approach is written into the genes:
Asian-Americans, born in the United States, are indistinguishable in their
modes of thought from European-Americans.
Cheers, Dan. |
