Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind Review

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Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind ReviewThis very valuable book looks at the ongoing debate between those who think humans all think the same, or more or less the same, and those who think that culture can make enormous differences. Lloyd comes down roughly in the middle, making the point that cultures, and individuals within cultures, differ a great deal among themselves, but humans are fairly similar worldwide after all.
Lloyd is an expert on ancient Greek thought about the world, and is able to disprove almost any facile generalization by showing that the ancient Greeks argued about it. Those Greek philosophers were really a very small number of culturally very similar people, but they revelled in arguing about anything and everything, up to and including the existence of reality. No simple generalizations about human, or western, or Greek thought can survive.
Particularly valuable to me are the later chapters, dealing with self and causation, "nature," and "reason."
I am a bit more toward the universalist side than Lloyd, however. In his earlier chapters he touches on areas where I have more knowledge than I do of cause and reasoning, and I find some problems. On traditional and folk color naming and biological classification, he seems to exaggerate the value of the anti-universalist position. For example, in treating color naming, he notes that some color terms have secondary meanings of "fresh" or "succulent" or the like. This does not affect their value as showing the universality of color perception. (Some of his criticisms are fair, however, including the inter-person variability of seeing colors.) In regard to biological kinds, he misses recent scholarship by Brent Berlin, Eugene Hunn, Cecil Brown, and others who have established very widespread similarities in naming. He looks at modern problems in classifying microorganisms; of course this has nothing to do with traditional folk systems. He points out, correctly, that folk systems differ a lot in higher-level classifications; he misses the fact that they are astonishingly similar, and similar to modern biological systems, at lower levels. On the other hand, they do differ a lot--so put Lloyd down for 50% universalist and me about 70%.
The same goes for emotions. Lloyd privileges a few accounts that claim culturally unique and distinctive emotions, or huge cultural differences in emotional experience. There is no space to go into this here, but suffice it to say that these accounts exaggerated differences far beyond anything the data showed, and their more extreme claims are now not taken very seriously in most anthropological quarters. On the whole, human emotionality is astonishingly similar worldwide, as anyone can tell by reading Chinese or Russian novels or by watching a modern college campus with an international student body. Students have strikingly little trouble adjusting to each other and "reading" each other's facial and body language. Cultures differ, but are the antithesis of the closed, hermetically sealed, steel-walled little worlds that the more extreme culturalists claim. If Lloyd is at 50, put me down for about 80 or 90 here.
I agree with Lloyd much more on the later chapters--I hope it's not just because I don't know the topics. One I do know is cross-cultural views of "nature." Here the facts are clear, and the culturists win. Most cultures worldwide do not have the modern western concept of "nature," and some don't have anything remotely like it. The Yucatec Maya can't even imagine separating people from the rest of the biota that way. They see people as one of a great number of species who interact to produce the world; humans influence it all, birds influence it all, jaguars influence much of it, and so on. Yet, of course they can tell people from trees and gardens from forests. They know there is a difference between stuff people make and stuff people don't make. They just don't regard it as particularly basic.
This book is very thoughtful and thought-provoking, a good read, and invaluable to anyone wanting ancient Greek input on these subjects. It certainly shows that extreme uniformitarianism and extreme cultural constructionism are both far from being confirmed by the data.Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind Overview

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