Book review: Thinking about thinking. MODES OF THOUGHT: EXPLORATIONS IN CULTURE AND COGNITION. David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance (Eds). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997. No. of pages 305. ISBN 0-521-49610-1. Price: £40
✍ Scribed by Leona Schauble
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 65 KB
- Volume
- 12
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0888-4080
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
No. of pages 305. ISBN 0-521-49610-1. Price: £40
The modern study of thinking has proceeded largely from the assumption that the proper role for psychology is to identify and describe the universals of cognition. This agenda was explicit in the behaviorist tradition, where it was assumed that general laws of learning apply universally, without respect to age, culture, and even species, and that the operation of these laws cumulates in ways that produce all behavior, from simple stimulus-response pairings to highly complex forms of reasoning. Although his work was in other respects a challenge to the behaviorist agenda, Piaget shared this interest in universals. In his view, the development of intelligence depends upon the construction of progressively more adaptive structures, universal and invariant in sequence. Even much of contemporary human information processing theory is concerned with delineating the architecture of cognition, an enterprise that foregrounds what is universal and backgrounds dierence.
As one might expect from the title, this volume stands in challenge to this tradition. Yet as a collection, the chapters by no means adhere to a single view; together they present a nice balance between emphasizing what is common and unitary in human thought and what is diverse and multiple. On the one hand, there is an emphasis on the varieties of specialization and diversity in thinking. Hence, one thread that runs through the volume is the role of cultural and institutional mediation on thought. Examples are Olson's discussions of literate practices and their role in enabling the development of logic; Bruner's emphasis on the centrality of context and interpretation in narrative modes of thinking; and Lloyd's contrast of the ways in which the development of science and mathematics were aected by dierent prevailing values in ancient Greece and ancient China.
Yet, a few authors stand primarily on the side of universality. Atran claims that a common taxonomy of biological kinds emerges across cultures and histories, comprising a universal folk biology. Similarly, in contrast to other chapter authors, Kuhn argues that scienti®c thinking is not distinct from everyday thinking Ð it is just good thinking. And several chapters set out to explicitly reconcile the speci®cs of thinking with the general. For example, Feldman and Bruner suggest that in narrative forms, which emphasize interpretation and contextualized forms of thinking, genres are the generalized cognitive models that serve as the means for `transcending particularity'. Carey proposes the notion of theoretical frameworks, or basic foundational theories, which provide an overarching layer of generalization and constraint on our knowledge about particular domains. For a variety of reasons, researchers tend to take strong rhetorical stances on this issue of universals versus particulars, and the balance in perspectives in this volume seems both somewhat unusual and intellectually honest.
Another unusual aspect in the volume is its strong historical ¯avor. For example, Lloyd suggests that ancient Greek and ancient Chinese thinkers valued dierent qualities of thought, leading on the one hand to an emphasis on deductive, demonstrative models, and on the other to a regard for descriptions of empirical regularity. Stack traces shifts in ways of discussing the self through the writings of Augustine, Petrarch, and Descartes, and argues that these shifts re¯ect fundamental historical changes in epistemology. Similarly, Ezrahi recounts historical changes through the origins of modern scienti®c thinking, when the scientist was widely seen as an arrogant genius challenging the proper province of the divine, through times when the scientist was regarded as one individual among others engaged in democratic, cooperative search for commonly accessible truth, through post-modernist times, when normative standards for epistemology are regarded as necessarily indeterminate.