The Geography of Thought By Richard E. Nisbett
Chapter 6 Is the World Made up of Nouns or Verbs?
(January 27, 2012)
1. (p. 139) For the ancient Chinese, the world consisted of continuous substances. So it was a part-whole dichotomy that made sense to them. ... Since the Greek world was composed of objects, an individual-class relation was natural to them. .... Learning that one object belonging to a category has a particular property means that one can assume that other objects belonging to the category also have the property. If one mammal has liver, it's a good bet that all mammals do. A focus on the one-many, individual-class orgarnization of knowledge encourages induction from the single case; a part-whole representation does not. What do you think about this view? Do you agree on this way of understanding the world?
2. (p. 140) Give a thought to the three objects: chicken, cow, grass. If you were to place two objects together, which would they be? Why do those seem to be the ones that belong together? If you're a Westerner, odds are you think the chicken and the cow belong together. ... American children preferred to group objects because they belonged to the "taxonomic" category. Chinese children preferred to group objects on the basis of relationships. They would be more likely to say the cow and the grass go together because "the cow eats the grass." When you read this message for the first time, which objects did you place together among the three objects?
3. (p. 148) Categories are denoted by nouns. It seems obvious that nouns would be easier for a young child to learn than verbs. All you have to do to learn that the animal you saw is a "bear" is to notice its distinctive features, and you can store that object away with its label. The label is then available for application to any other object having that set of properties. Relationships, on the other hand, involve tacitly or explicitly a verb. Learning the meaning of a transitive verb normally involves noticing two objects and some kind of action that connects them in some way. "To throw" means to use your arm and hand to move an object through the air to a new location. ... Because of their relative ambiguity, it's harder to remember verbs; .... and it's harder to correctly identify verbs than nouns when they're translated from one language to another. ... Verbs are highly reactive; nouns tend to be inert. ... There are several factors that might underlie this dramatic difference. ①verbs are more salient in East Asian languages than in English and many other European languages ②Western parents are noun-obsessed, pointing objects out to their children, naming them, and telling them about their attributes ③naming objects that share a common set of properties results in infants' learning a category formed of objects sharing those features ④generic nouns in English and other European languages are ofter marked by syntax ⑤Eastern children learn how to categorize objects at a later point than Western children
4. (p. 154) The distinction between "human" and "animal" insisted upon by Westerners made it particularly hard to accept the concept of evolution. In most Eastern systems, the soul can take the form of any animal or even God. Evolution was never controversial in the East because there was never an assumption that humans sat atop a chain of being and somehow had lost their animality.
5. (p. 162) East Asian children have their attention directed toward relationships and Western children toward objects and the categories to which they belong. Language probably plays a role, at least in helping to focus attention, but probably also in stabilizing the different orientations throughout life. There appears to be nothing about the structure of language, though, that actually forces description in terms of category versus relationships.