Thinking About Culture
The Epistemology of Memory
To begin our study of human culture, its role in human thought and behavior, its relation to social and political forces, etc., it's important at the outset to acknowledge how little we actually know not only about culture but about the most fundamental human skills and capacities necessary for contributing to and sharing a culture.
Take, for example, memory and simple intellectual tasks such as remembering what you had for dinner last night. How do we do this -- how do we go about recalling this bit of information? That might strike you as somewhat of a strange question, so let me make it more specific. What I'm looking for is an account of what takes place in the mind when you consciously recall such information. Specifically, what mental process makes it possible to remember what you had for dinner last night?
I would claim that no amount of introspection, i.e. thinking about what's going on in your mind, will reveal the mechanism responsible for making this happen. This claim may also strike you as puzzling. Let me explain. If you do recall what it was you ate last night, some kind of mental activity must occur -- a retrieval or recall of information in the form of images or words -- that leads to your remembering what it was you ate. But the problem for one who seeks to explain this act of remembering is that whatever is happening, we're unable to observe it. We simply don't have a clue through introspection as to what's taking place or how we remember this simple fact from last night. We don't know how we do it, yet we do it all the time.[1] The implications for culture are obvious since without memory, there would be no stories, no collective histories and traditions to link people together culturally. We're absolutely dependent on memory for human experience, but we don't really understand how it works.
Or consider where thoughts come from when you're having a simple conversation with a friend. How do you know what you're going to say from one moment to the next? In most cases, you don't. We operate in conversations without a script. Yet we spontaneously "produce speech" which is (in most cases) intelligible and relevant. Try to split your attention and observe this puzzling phenomenon next time you're talking. Notice how your words just seem to be there. There's often no noticeable gap between your thought and your speech. Now sometimes you do give a bit of thought to what you want to say. No doubt you've been told since you were a child (as I was) to "think before you speak". But even this doesn't change the problem I'm proposing, because even in those instances when you do think something through before saying it, your thinking takes place in words -- you "talk to yourself" -- a kind of internal speech. So the question still remains. Where is this sequence of words or thoughts coming from? What makes this happen? What is the mechanism?
The same puzzle applies to writing a story or drawing a picture -- specific forms of cultural production. You invent -- create -- a new text or image. How? What mental structures, rules, procedures, etc. allow such behavior to occur? We don't know. There seems to be a free, creative process going on, perhaps governed by an internal or mental set of rules (grammatical, logical, etc.) governing what makes sense and what doesn't. But what are the rules? Do they apply to all languages? How can we even begin to understand and explain such basic and everyday phenomena?
One thing is for sure, we're not going to get very far if we limit ourselves to introspection because even if we could manage to gain some insight by simply thinking about these things, we would still need to verify our insights and determine as best we can whether or not they're accurate. But this is precisely where we run into problems: Introspections are not public property -- they can't be compared objectively. So even if they do provide reliable information (and I wouldn't rule out the possibility that they often do), there's no way to compare them directly with the introspections of others to see if they agree. That's because introspections are, by definition, private experiences. To provide a scientific explanation of such phenomena, we need publicly observable data and a method for describing and predicting even the most common and elementary experiences. A system is needed which produces results that can be observed and success that can be measured and shared with others. This sets a standard which must be met by any scientific explanation.
The Analysis of Culture
Now our purpose in this course is not to study the intimate workings of the mind. Our concern is directed to the structure and effects of culture. Rather than searching for a model to explain the mind, our ultimate goal is to answer the following kinds of questions:
Given the limitations on our knowledge of the most basic phenomena outlined above, how can we possibly hope to answer these and other important questions? Is there some way to gain reliable information and knowledge about these things? Are there models we can use to guide our investigations?
There are a number of different approaches to the study of
culture, many of which are covered in some detail in Jere Paul
Surber's Culture and Critique. We'll spend most of the
semester examining and assessing these approaches. As we do, we'll
focus on an essential feature of the systematic study of culture:
conceptual analysis. Needless to say, our investigation
will be exploratory and tentative. In some cases we'll be making
progress if we can get clear on the questions that need to be
raised.
1. This example is derived from similar remarks
made by cognitive psychologist Stevan Harnad. [return]
© T. R. Quigley, 1998