Ian Hacking reviews Cognitive Variations by G.E.R. Lloyd LRB 1... http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n21/ian-hacking/how-shall-we-repaint-t...

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Ian Hacking

Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind by
G.E.R. Lloyd
Oxford, 201 pp, 27.50, April 2007, ISBN 978 0 19 921461 7

We are creatures: therefore biological, but also social. How much of each of us is biological,
how much social? Usually, the question is asked about individuals: how much of what you do
is the working out of innate, inherited capacities, how much acquired from people around
you? There is also a more communal question: how much of our social behaviour as a group
how we talk, how we love, how we argue, how we get angry is peculiar to our local ways of
living, and how much is determined by our shared animal nature? Geoffrey Lloyds book is
the best recent overall summary of the state of play in the discussion of our social behaviour.
The game? Nature v. nurture. That is a convenient jingle of words, as Francis Galton wrote
in 1874, when he coined the dyad.

Nature is all that a man brings with himself into the world; nurture is every
influence that affects him after his birth. The distinction is clear: the one
produces the infant such as it actually is, including its latent faculties of growth
and mind: the other affords the environment amid which the growth takes place,
by which natural tendencies may be strengthened or thwarted or wholly new ones
implanted.

Experts dont like to use this language much any more, but Galtons handy words allow us to
stand back and get some perspective on debates that have been going on for a very long time,
and thus to give some background to Lloyds scorecard. Nature and nurture are not
exhaustive; indeed, the action is mostly at the interplay between the two. They should be
regarded only as signposts. Moreover, you should not assume that nature gives what is
universal in the human condition, while nurture produces all the variety. There is of course
tremendous regional variety in peoples around the globe, and lots of cognitive variability
within a single family; conversely, there may be many facts about the very possibility of
human societies that make for the cultural universals urged by anthropologists as different as
Claude Lvi-Strauss and Mary Douglas.

Cultures a word that has long been overused, and which I try to avoid are entities that

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exist because children are nurtured into systems of practices and reactions that define the
collective lives of individuals. Nurture, as Galton meant it, involves not only mothers breast
and knee: it is also on the street, it is TV. Galton, reviled as the founder of eugenics, had too
much respect for nurture to hope to affect it much; better to try to reform nature by breeding.
He knew, as Victorian gentlemen did, that breeding worked far better for dogs, say, than any
amount of mere training of an arbitrary mongrel. (No, I am not a eugenicist, the very
opposite; I am saying only that Galton had a good head.)

There has been something of a tug-of-war between anthropology, favouring nurture, and
cognitive science, favouring nature. Galton, as an explorer in Africa and as a pioneer of
heritability, practised both. Early in the last century, the anthropologists were on top. In the
1920s, Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead, reporting from the South Pacific,
convinced the general English-reading public that human societies are very, very different;
little of what we do, above the bare necessities of survival, is fixed by nature. We procreate
using more or less the same biology everywhere, but the rituals with which we do it are
exotically variable. The relativist doctrines of Mead were welcomed as part of the sexual
liberation of the 1920s, but how many readers of the LRB feel liberated by learning the details
of female circumcision?

In the same decade, Edward Sapir, analysing many North American languages, advanced the
doctrine that a language reflects the way that its speakers understand the world a way that
may be incomprehensible without the language. Kants a prioris, structures of the human
mind, were replaced by structures of local languages that most other humans would not be
able to take in without sharing a life with the locals. Sapir, who came to America when young,
still had the classic Germans before him; Alexander von Humboldt came more readily to his
mind than John Locke did. The issues between us, Leibniz said of Locke, are matters of some
importance; he referred to Plato the good guy and Aristotle, not so good. Many of the
nature/nurture arguments seem also to recapitulate the scholastic Christian and Muslim
problem of determinism/freedom. Cognition v. culture is where we have got to after debates
in the West spanning millennia.

Benjamin Lee Whorf gave Sapirs ideas their most radical twist. He was employed all his life
by an insurance company as a chemical engineer; his business acumen was directed at the
causes of fires. In his free time he studied under Sapir. Reporting later from the American
south-west and into Mexico, he found that peoples with whom he talked in the deserts did not
even share our organisation of time and space. He died in 1941, but when his individual
papers were put together in paperback in 1956 he became a cult figure, his ideas soon
partially assimilated to Thomas Kuhns doctrine of incommensurability.

Sapir and Mead had become common wisdom by 1950, and sophomores revelled in Whorf
from 1956. Tides turned. Noam Chomsky was the most powerful agent in the turning that
took place in the 1960s. Citing Descartes all the way, he argued that the ability of children to
begin speaking any language spoken around them shows they have an innate capacity to do
so, and hence there must be a basic structure that underlies all languages, for which every

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normal infant is prepared. What really counts about language, then, is determined by nature,
not nurture. There are specific inherited capacities, of which speaking grammatically is only
one. The search for universal grammar continues apace, although not in quite the
uncontested way of the early years of enthusiasm.

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[*] Ian Hacking wrote about The Veil of Isis in the LRB of 10 May 2007.

[] Eduardo Viveiros de Castros pamphlet, The Turn of the Native, is published by Prickly
Paradigm Press. Geoffrey Lloyd wrote about Philippe Descolas Par-del nature et culture in
the TLS (17 March 2006).

Vol. 29 No. 21 1 November 2007 Ian Hacking How Shall We Repaint the Kitchen? (print
version)
pages 17-19 | 4104 words

ISSN 0260-9592 Copyright LRB Ltd., 1997-2012 ^ Top

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