X : Have you found a good definition for culture?
Me : Language is a discipline of cultural behaviour and no model can be true and complete within itself.
X : What does that mean?
Me : You can’t build a model of culture using WORDS alone.
Me : Language is a discipline of cultural behaviour and no model can be true and complete within itself.
X : What does that mean?
Me : You can’t build a model of culture using WORDS alone.
X : I'm not sure I follow?
Me : You will never achieve a uniform agreement on a definition of culture using words. It's why despite a century of efforts to define culture adequately, there is no agreement among anthropologists regarding its nature. It can't be done with words.
Me : You will never achieve a uniform agreement on a definition of culture using words. It's why despite a century of efforts to define culture adequately, there is no agreement among anthropologists regarding its nature. It can't be done with words.
... in other words, there is always something outside the text. If you want to describe culture you need to embrace that, you need to go beyond the text and into context.
X : Example?
X : Example?
Me : Take an atlas, describe every path within it which should take a few hundred million years at which point I'll hand you a new atlas as the continents will have moved. See Pangea.
X : I don't get it.
Me : Culture is a landscape. You're trying to define a landscape in words.
X : I don't get it.
Me : Culture is a landscape. You're trying to define a landscape in words.
X : I can do that.
Me : No you can't. Try describing the entire landscape of the UK in words that everyone will agree upon. Come back when you've done that and then we'll talk about defining culture.
Me : No you can't. Try describing the entire landscape of the UK in words that everyone will agree upon. Come back when you've done that and then we'll talk about defining culture.
... hell, forget UK ... try doing it for a small town. You only need about 30 points of reference and the permutations alone will take about 6x10^28 average PhD thesis to describe in chunks of 25 words. You'll have to generalise and that's where disagreement starts.
X : Disagreement is necessary for getting to the truth.
Me : No "truth" but ok with an Altas. We disagree on where countries are, we make a better atlas. But without an atlas, in story form, it's personal politics over story telling ... invoke confirmation and authority bias.
Me : No "truth" but ok with an Altas. We disagree on where countries are, we make a better atlas. But without an atlas, in story form, it's personal politics over story telling ... invoke confirmation and authority bias.
X : Culture is about action.
Me : Action is a necessity for learning but that assumes we can perceive the environment we're acting upon. Acting by heading off in a random direction without a map or even the concept of a map doesn't make for a good learning experience.
Me : Action is a necessity for learning but that assumes we can perceive the environment we're acting upon. Acting by heading off in a random direction without a map or even the concept of a map doesn't make for a good learning experience.
