The Social Origins of Mind
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The Social Origins of Mind
| Author(s) | Nisbett, Richard E. |
|---|---|
| Abstract | The ecologies of ancient Greece and China were drastically different – in ways that led to different economic, political and social arrangements. For example, settled agriculture came to Greece almost 2,000 years later than to China, and it quickly became commercial, as opposed to merely subsistence, in many areas. The soil and climate of Greece were congenial to wine and olive oil production; by the 6th century BC, many farmers were more nearly businessmen than peasants. The Greeks were therefore able to act on their own to a greater extent than were the Chinese. Not feeling it necessary to maintain harmony with their fellows at any cost, the Greeks were in the habit of arguing with one another in the marketplace and debating one another in the political assembly. Their agriculture provided the luxury of attending to objects, including other people, and their own goals with respect to them, without being overly constrained by their relations with other people. A Greek could plan a harvest, arrange for a re-location of his herd of sheep, or investigate whether it would be profitable to sell some new commodity, consulting little or not at all with others. This might have made it natural for the Greeks to focus on the attributes of objects with a view toward categorizing them and finding the rules that would allow prediction and control of their behavior. Causality would be seen as due to properties of the object or as the result of one’s own actions in relation to the object. Such a view of causality could have encouraged the Greek assumptions of stability and permanence as well as an assumption that change in the object was under their control.n In contrast, the ecology of China, consisting as it does primarily of relatively fertile plains, low mountains and navigable rivers, favored agriculture and made centralized control of society relatively easy. Agricultural peoples need to get along with one another in a reasonably harmonious fashion. This is particularly true for rice farming, which requires people to cultivate the land in concert with one another, and wherever irrigation is required. In addition to getting along with one’s neighbors, irrigation systems require centralized control, and ancient China, like all other ancient agricultural societies, was ruled by despots. Peasants had to get along with their neighbors and were ruled by village elders and a regional magistrate who was the representative of the king or emperor. The ordinary Chinese therefore lived in a complicated world of social constraints.nSo the folk metaphysics of the two societies could have arisen directly from the targets of attention: the environment or field in the case of the Chinese and the object in the case of the Greeks. The scientific metaphysics of each society would have been just a reflection of the folk views. We would not expect that people whose social existence is based on harmony would develop a tradition of confrontation or debate. In contrast, people who are free to argue might be expected to develop rules for the conduct of debate, including the principle of non-contradiction and formal logic. It is an easy step from logic to science, as physicist and historian of science Alan Cromer has observed. |
| IssueNo | |
| Pages | 1-18 |
| Article | Access to Article |
| Source | The Geography of Thought |
| VolumeNo | |
| PubDate | 2004 |
| ISBN_ISSN | 0066-4366 |
Approaches to Social Psychology
- Cognitive Theory
- Critical Psychology
- Culture Psychology and Cross-Cultural Issues
- Deconstructionism and Post-Modernism
- Evolutionary Psychology
- Feminist Approaches
- Gender Issues
- Indigenous, Non-Western and Post-Colonialist Approaches
- Marxist Approaches
- Positive Psychology
- Social Neuroscience
- Social Psychology and Human Values
- Sociology Approaches
- Various Modern Theories
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