Learning Outcomes:
At the end of this course students will have an informed view of the impact of cultural variables on core mental activities. In addition, they will acquire the skills of writing academic papers suitable for presentation at graduate conferences.
Indicative Module Content:
General Description
This course will look at recent research on the interdependence between culture and mind. Two aspects of culture that the course will particularly focus on are language and moral norms. One of the broad themes that we will explore is relativity. So called ‘linguistic relativity’ is the view that (a) languages affect our thinking as well as our experiences of the world and (b) vastly different languages will give rise to very different, possibly incommensurable, ways of thinking about the world. We will look at recent empirical evidence for this view, and its philosophical implications. We will also look at empirical evidence for and philosophical discussion of variance in moral norms across different cultures. An opposing thought is that language or moral norms are to some extent universal. We’ll examine empirical evidence that bears on and philosophical discussion of this hypothesis. There are other phenomena (emotions are an example) whose status as universal or relative to culture has been debated and in the final three weeks we could briefly engage with one or more of these debates.
Seminar 1
- Pullum, Geofrey. 1989. The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 7: 275–281.
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. Science and linguistics. Indianapolis, IN, USA:: Bobbs-Merrill, 1940.
Seminar 2
- Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct. London: Penguin. Chapter 3.
- Fodor, J. A. (1989). Why There Still Has to be a Language of Thought. In P. Slezak & W. R. Albury (Eds.), Computers, Brains and Minds: Essays in Cognitive Science (pp. 23-46). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.
Seminar 3
- Bloom, Paul., & Keil, F. C. (2001). Thinking through language. Mind & Language, 16(4), 351-367.
- Malik-Moraleda, Saima, et al. "Concepts Are Restructured During Language Contact: The Birth of Blue and Other Color Concepts in Tsimane’-Spanish Bilinguals." Psychological Science 34.12 (2023): 1350-1362.
Seminar 4
- Margolis, Eric. & Laurence, Stephen. 2011. Learning Matters: The Role of Learning in Concept Acquisition, Mind & Language.
- de Villiers, Jill & Peter de Villiers. 2003. Language for thought: coming to understand false beliefs. In Language in mind: advances in the study of language and thought, D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow (eds), 335–384. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Seminar 5
- Reines, Maria Francisca, and Jesse Prinz. 2009. Reviving Whorf: The Return of Linguistic Relativity. Philosophy Compass 4: 1022–1032.
- Li, Peggy, Linda Abarbanell, Lila Gleitman, and Anna Papafragou. 2011. Spatial reasoning in Tenejapan Mayans. Cognition 120: 33–53.
Seminar 6
- Quine, W.v.O. (1960) Word and Object, Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. Chapter 2.
- Imai, Mutsumi. and Mazuko, Reiko. (2003). Re-evaluation of linguistic relativity: Language-specific categories and the role of universal ontological knowledge in the construal of individuals. in: Language in Mind: Advances in the issues of language and thought., Publisher: MIT Press, pp.430-464
Seminar 7
- Rachels, J. (2003). The Elements of Moral Philosophy, 4th Edition. New York: McGraw Hill: Chapter 2.
- Prinz, J. (2011). Morality is a culturally conditioned response. Philosophy Now, 82, 6-9.
Seminar 8
-Haidt, Jonathan, and Craig Joseph. "The moral mind: How five sets of innate intuitions guide the development of many culture-specific virtues, and perhaps even modules." The innate mind 3 (2007): 367-391.
- Flanagan, O., Williams R.A. (2010), - What Does the Modularity of Morals Have to Do With Ethics? Four Moral Sprouts Plus or Minus a Few. Topics in Cognitive Science.
Seminar 9
- Wong, D.B. 2011,“Relativist Explanation of Interpersonal and Group Disagreement,” in S.D. Hales (ed.), A Companion to Relativism, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 411–29.
Seminar 10
- Griffiths, P. E. "The Affect-program Theory." Emotion 2 (2005): 222.
- Ekman, Paul. "BIOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL CONTRIBUTIONS TO BODY AND FACIAL MOVEMENT¹." The body: critical concepts in Sociology 1 (2003): 10.
Seminar 11
- Averill, James R. "A constructivist view of emotion." Theories of emotion. Academic Press, 1980. 305-339.
- Samuels, Richard. "Delusion as a natural kind." Psychiatry as cognitive neuroscience: Philosophical perspectives 49 (2009): 79.
Seminar 12
- Murphy, Dominic. "Delusions, modernist epistemology and irrational belief." Mind & Language 28.1 (2013): 113-124.
- Radden, Jennifer. "Delusions and Cultural Meaning" in /On delusion/. Routledge, 2010.