Friday, August 05, 2005

People classify differently....   posted by Razib @ 8/05/2005 05:44:00 PM
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Cognition has a new paper titled Folkbiology of freshwater fish, that might interest some. The skinny is that Native Americans and non-Native Americans tend to have contrasting taxonomies, which isn't surprising because fresh water fish are not as easy to separate using essentialist intuition as "fish, fowl and beasts of the earth." But newer readers might find my old post The Geography of Thought as apropos, but more relevant to broader context because it compares the "Asian mind" with the "Western mind."1

1 - The book makes it clear that in fact there is an "Anglospheric" mind, a traditionl non-European mind, and a European mind in the middle, when it comes to metrics like individualism. East Asians are used as exemplars of the non-European mind because there is a more psychological data on them than many others. Asian Americans tend to fall between Asians and non-Asian Americans.