Week 1 Ways of Knowing
Chapter 1 Characterizing the Three Cultures – Jerome Kagan
“Although the primary concerns, sources of evidence, and concepts remain the most important
nodes of difference among natural scientists (physicists, chemists, and biologists), social scientists,
and humanists, the three communities vary on six additional dimensions less pertinent to their
epistemologies.” (2) Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. “The nine
dimensions follow:
1. The primary questions asked, including the degree to which prediction, explanation, or
description of a phenomenon is the major product of inquiry.
2. The sources of evidence on which inferences are based and the degree of control over the
conditions in which the evidence is gathered.
3. The vocabulary used to present observations, concepts, and conclusions, including the
balance between continuous properties and categories and the degree to which a functional
relation was presumed to generalize across settings or was restricted to the context of
observation.
4. The degree to which social conditions, produced by historical events, influence the questions
asked.
5. The degree to which ethical values penetrate the questions asked and the conclusions
inferred or deduced.
6. The degree of dependence on external financial support from government or industry.
7. The probability that the scholar works alone, with one or two others, or as a member of a
large team.
8. The contribution to the national economy.
9. The criteria members of each group use when they judge a body of work as elegant or
beautiful.” (2-3)
“Most intellectual efforts consist of three components: (1) a set of unquestioned premises that
create preferences for particular questions and equally particular answers, (2) a favored collection of
analytical tools for gathering evidence, and (3) a preferred set of concepts that are the core of
explanations.” (3)
Both social scientists and humanities share more similarities with each other than each does with
natural scientists. “Natural scientists emphasize material processes, minimize the influences of
historical and cultural contexts and their associated ethical values, and are primarily concerned with
the relations between a concept and a set of observations.” (3) “Social scientists and humanists resist
awarding biology too much influence, rely heavily on semantic networks and, therefore, are often as
concerned with the relations among a set of semantic terms as they are with the relation between a
concept and evidence, and frequently seek answers that affirm or disconfirm an implicit ethical
ideal.” (3-5)
Three Vocabularies
“The three cultures represent language communities that impose distinct meaning networks on their
important concepts and … compete with each other for dominance.” (6)
“The vocabularies of each culture contain a number of concepts with technical definitions that are of
primary interest to only one group … But the three cultures also use terms with exactly the same
sound and spelling that have different meanings for each culture, even though the scholars may not
recognize that fact. The terms fear, capacity, arousal, memory, and count are examples.” (6)
,“Even some terms in the vocabulary of natural scientists have different meanings. The meanings of
mass, space, and time in Newton’s equations are not synonymous with the meanings that Einstein
understood … Acceptance of relativity theory and quantum mechanics during the last century, which
altered the traditional meanings of time, space, and objects, allowed both philosophers and scientists
to appreciate that the meaning and validity of every proposition are restricted to the language
system to which it belongs, and might not be valid in another system.” (8)
The Cascade of Events
“The critical point is that the vocabulary biologists use to describe the brain’s properties does not, at
least at present, correspond closely in meaning to the vocabularies used by social scientists and
humanists.” (11) “The latter two disciplines describe the late phases of a cascade that begins in a
series of brief neuronal events and ends in a perception, thought, feeling, or behavior that lasts for a
longer time.” (12)
“Different metrics apply to the phases of a cascade that began with the response of a single neuron
[frequency of spike potentials] and proceeded to the activity of a cluster of neurons
[number/proportion firing at the same frequency], a circuit [coherence], a network of circuits
[probability of co-activation], and, finally, to a psychological outcome … The metrics for psychological
outcomes include the frequency, speed, or accuracy of a response; the duration of a perception,
emotion, or thought; the clarity of a representation; and the valence and intensity of a feeling.” (12)
“The important point is that the vocabulary that describes each of the phases in any cascade that
begins with a genetic or brain event and ends with a behavior has some degree of autonomy.” (13)
“The critical point in this discussion [adolescent’s suicide, interpretation of art, etc.] is that the
concepts in the social sciences and the humanities refer to emergent phenomena that cannot be
described with the vocabulary used by natural scientists … Put simply, the phenomena that
humanists and social scientists describe represent special combinations of events that require their
own vocabulary. Physicists confront a similar problem.” (14)
“Biological and social scientists focus on different phases, or half-way houses, in the complete
cascade that defines an observed phenomenon. Therefore, the three cultures think about the same
event in different ways.” (14)
Tropes
“There is one more reason for the ambiguity that surrounds the meanings of words. Humans have an
automatic tendency to relate two or more networks for different concepts and detecting, with
minimal effort, a single semantic node that is shared between or among them. When the shared
node awards a nonliteral meaning to the concept, as in the metaphor “humans are gorillas,” it is
called a trope. The features of concepts vary in their essentialness or defining property. For example,
the ability to fly is a defining property of birds, whereas the ability to catch fish is a secondary
property. Most tropes, or metaphors, are satisfying when a defining property of the second term is a
secondary property of the first term … Tropes can be categorized as satisfying or unsatisfying,
coherent or incoherent, but cannot be evaluated as true or false.” (15)
“Scientists often treat a novel scientific advance as a fruitful trope, or metaphor, for body, brain, or
mind … Although metaphors can be initially helpful crutches for creativity, scientists must remain
eternally vigilant to the dangers of their seductive appeal.” (16)
“The languages of the social sciences and humanities acknowledge the influence of tropes, but
natural scientists typically ignore non-literal meanings because they often include a perceptual
,representation and a feeling that resist accurate measurement and cannot be classified as true or
false.” (16)
A Brief Summary
“Every concept has multiple features and these features can change with time. Therefore, the validity
of any claim that two concepts are similar, or closely related, depends on the specific features that
are presumed to be similar. An investigator should not treat one concept as equivalent to another if
only a small number of all the possible features are the same.” (17)
The Influence of History
“The balance between inquiries guided by a search for generalizations that transcend the current
historical moment and those seriously influenced by the temporary conditions historical events
created differentiates the three cultures.” (19)
“The oldest narrative began several billion years ago with the first living things … biologists recognize
that the genomes of humans who lived 100,000 years ago were both different from and less variable
than those of contemporary humans, most of the problems natural scientists pursue are affected less
seriously by the vicissitudes of time than those posed by social scientists and humanists.” (19)
“The later sequence began about 10,000 years ago when human populations began to increase in
size and to leave some record of their social organization, experiences, and skills … Although many
social scientists seek to understand the universal human phenomena of perception, memory,
language, emotion, learning, group formation, and affiliation with principles that are not restricted to
the current historical moment, an equally large group probes phenomena more seriously influenced
by current societal conditions.” (19)
“The most important changes in Europe and America during the hundred years from 1760 to 1860
were the emergence of industrialization, capitalist economies, and a serious rise in the sizes of cities
and the number of urban poor.” (19-20) “. The popular explanation of the latter fact emphasized
social conditions.” Political and economic structures. (20)
“American social science emerged in universities toward the end of the nineteenth-century under
the umbrella of Darwinian ideas and only a few decades after scientists had discovered relations
between the site of an experimental lesion of an animal’s brain and the nature of the subsequent
compromise in its behavior.” Brain activity. (20)
“However, the next generation of Americans had more pragmatic interests and were able to honor
the stance of objectivity demanded by the natural scientists by studying the learning of new habits
through acquiring associations between stimuli and responses.” (21)
“A significant change in world view occurred during the interval from 1890 to 1920 when scientists
and the educated public began to accept the idea that uncertainty and probabilistic outcomes were
nature’s plan and the traditional belief in determinism a naïve idealistic vision. The changing
probabilities of rare events provide a persuasive example of the effects of historical change … The
planes, the Internet, and cell phones generated new social phenomena [and affected the
probabilities].” (22)
“The effects of history on the research themes of social scientists are seen in the changing popularity
of topics in academic journals.” (22) “Many sociology papers published at the end of the nineteenth
century discussed the undesirable consequences of industrialization; whereas, papers of the 1930s
dealt more often with miscegenation between members of the Black and White races.” (23)
, “The early themes, like clothes that are out of fashion, have been replaced with investigations of
subjective well-being, the implications of a secure or insecure infant attachment to a caretaker,
mental illness, and the effectiveness of interventions designed to alleviate the distress of psychiatric
symptoms. The recent increase in the number of papers on a homosexual life style reflects the
influence of historical change on a psychological function as fundamental as sexuality.” (23)
“A survey of papers in the British journal Mind … revealed that ethics, aesthetics, truth, and
phenomenal consciousness dominated the early issues. However, soon after physicists announced
their discoveries in quantum mechanics and relativity, papers on reductionism, time, and space
became more popular. Twenty-five years later, when psychological ideas were ascendant, articles on
Freud, memory, and the relation between brain activity and psychological events appeared.” (24)
“The problems probed and solutions offered by social scientists and humanists are more constrained
by their historical moment than those of the natural sciences. If late nineteenth-century Europeans
had held a more permissive attitude toward sexuality, Freud might not have written that repression
of sexual urges was the primary cause of all neuroses … Each of these original ideas required history
to arrange a special constellation of conditions. Although a new apparatus often leads to significant
observations and new concepts in the natural sciences, social conditions that alter the existing
arrangements of people and their motives, beliefs, emotions, and actions are more important
sources of fresh ideas in both the social sciences and the humanities.” (25)
Patterns or Features
“Scientists, like everyone else, are biologically prepared to categorize experience in terms of the
features or functions of “things” and to describe these objects with nouns modified by adjectives,
adverbs, or predicates; for example, large molecules, predatory animals, or anxious adults.” (25)
“However, a molecule can also be described as a pattern of features that include its mass, melting
point, and ease of combining with other substances.” (25-26)
“Scientists who study the relation between brain activity and psychological events have a choice
between emphasizing the average activity in single neurons, or in a localized cluster of neurons, on
the one hand, or the patterns of synchronized activity involving many millions of interconnected
neurons in different locations. The latter strategy is likely to prove more fruitful in studies of the
relation between brain and mental states because all psychological properties are the product of
patterns of reciprocal activations and inhibitions of neuronal clusters in varied sites.” (26)
“Most neuroscientists recording the wave forms in the electroencephalogram usually compare the
response to different events or the reactions of different people by computing the average
magnitude of a single waveform rather than the pattern of magnitudes for the four or five
waveforms generated during the first second.” (26) “The human brain is prepared to react to both
features and patterns.” (26-27)
“Economists like to compare nations on the single feature of gross domestic product rather than on a
pattern that includes form of government, freedom of expression, life span, and ethnic diversity.
Psychologists, too, usually compare genders, ethnic groups, or psychiatric diagnoses on single
features, such as a particular gene, hormone level, heart rate, or brain state, instead of patterns of
genes and hormone levels.” (27)
“When objects or events have different histories, it is usually more profitable to compare their
patterns; when they share the same origin it is often more useful to attend to their features.” (27)
“Social scientists and humanists study many phenomena that are best described as patterns.” (28)
