Here is an excellent interview with Jesse Prinz (H/T Markus Schlosser) on the themes of his new book, Beyond Human Nature (which I still haven’t gotten around to reading). The main idea of the book is that experience and culture, as opposed to genetic and biology, play a much larger role in determining our behavior than is often thought. Some excerpts:
“If we are interested in differences in intelligence, the thing we should be interested in is learning and culture.”
“Brazilians are super-nice.”
I find myself agreeing with pretty much everything that Prinz says in the interview (including the bit about Brazilians…), which is not so surprising, given that, like him, I am very much of a ‘nurture-culture’ person on the nature-nurture dimension. (A bit of self-promotion: here is a recent paper of mine, "A dialogical account of deductive reasoning as a case study for how culture shapes cognition", forthcoming in the Journal of Cognition and Culture.) But more importantly, to my mind he manages to set up the debate in a very subtle and informative way, so I very much recommend the interview to anyone interested in this debate. (Btw, I’ve posted on my enthusiasm for his work before.)
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