01 March 2022

Knowledge Representation: On Culture (Quotes)

"It is the destiny of our race to become united into one great body, thoroughly connected in all its parts, and possessed of similar culture. Nature, and even the passions and vices of Man, have from the beginning tended towards this end. A great part of the way towards it is already passed, and we may surely calculate that it will in time be reached." (Johann G Fichte, "The Vocation of Man", 1800)

"The imagination lurks as the most powerful foe. It has an irresistible affinity for the absurd. Even cultured individuals are subject to this impulse to a high degree. It is hostile to all civilized life and it confronts our decorous society with a reversion to the innate rudeness of the savage and his love of grimaces." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Annals", 1805)

"The more elevated a culture, the richer its language. The number of words and their combinations depends directly on a sum of conceptions and ideas; without the latter there can be no understandings, no definitions, and, as a result, no reason to enrich a language." (Anton Chekhov, [letter to A.S. Suvorin] 1892)

"I see the tasks of social sciences to discover what kinds of order actually do exist in the whole range of the behavior of human beings; what kind of functional relationships between different parts of culture exist in space and over time, and what functionally more useful kinds of order can be created." (Robert S Lynd, "Knowledge of What?", 1939)

"A culture is an historically created system of explicit and implicit designs for living, which tends to be shared by all or specially designated members of a group at a specified point in time." (Clyde Kluckhohn & W H Kelley, "The Concept of Culture", 1945)

"The behavior of an individual is therefore determined not by his racial affiliation, but by the character of his ancestry and his cultural environment." (Franz Boas, "Race and Democratic Society", 1945)

"A social system consists in a plurality of individual actors interacting with each other in a situation which has at least a physical or environmental aspect, actors who are motivated in terms of a tendency to the 'optimization of gratification' and whose relation to their situations, including each other, is defined and mediated in terms of a system of culturally structured and shared symbols." (Talcott Parsons, "The Social System", 1951)

"Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other as conditioning elements of further action." (Alfred L Kroeber & Clyde Kluckhohn, "Culture", 1952)

"'World view' differs from culture, ethos, mode of thought, and national character. It is the picture the members of a society have of the properties and characters upon their stage of action. While 'national character' refers to the way these people look to the outsider looking in on them, 'world view' refers to the way the world looks to that people looking out. Of all that is connoted by 'culture', 'world view' attends especially to the way a man, in a particular society, sees himself in relation to all else. It is the properties of existence as distinguished from and related to the self. It is, in short, a man's idea of the universe. It is that organization of ideas which answers to a man the questions: Where am I? Among what do I move? What are my relations to these things? (Robert Redfield, "The Primitive World View", 1952)

"Culture itself is neither education nor lawmaking: it is an atmosphere and a heritage." (Henry L Mencken, "Minority Report", 1956)

"The separation between the two cultures has been getting deeper under our eyes; there is now precious little communication between them. [...] The traditional culture [...] is, of course, mainly literary [...] the scientific culture is expansive, not restrictive." (Charles P Snow, New Statesman, 1956)

"A world view is not merely a philosophical by-product of each culture, like a shadow, but the very skeleton of concrete cognitive assumptions on which the flesh of customary behavior is hung. World view, accordingly, may be expressed, more or less systematically in cosmology, philosophy, ethics, religious ritual, scientific belief, and so on, but it is implicit in almost every act. In Parsonian terms, it constitutes the set of cognitive orientations of the members of a society." (Anthony F C Wallace, "Culture and Personality", 1961)

"Any culture is a series of related structures which comprise social forms, values, cosmology, the whole of knowledge and through which all experience is mediated." (Mary Douglas, "Purity and Danger", 1966)

"Culture, in the sense of the public, standardised values of a community, mediates the experience of individuals. It provides in advance some basic categories, a positive pattern in which ideas and values are tidily ordered. And above all, it has authority, since each is induced to assent because of the assent of others." (Mary Douglas, "Purity and Danger", 1966)

"Human action is ‘cultural’ in that meanings and intentions concerning acts are formed in terms of symbolic systems (including the codes through which they operate in patterns) that focus most generally about the universal of human societies, language." (Talcott Parsons, "Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives" 1966)

"Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media works as environments." (Marshall McLuhan, "The Medium is the Massage: An inventory of effects", 1967)

"What a lost person needs is a map of the territory, with his own position marked on it so he can see where he is in relation to everything else. Literature is not only a mirror; it is also a map, a geography of the mind. Our literature is one such map, if we can learn to read it as our literature, as the product of who and where we have been. We need such a map desperately, we need to know about here, because here is where we live. For the members of a country or a culture, shared knowledge of their place, their here, is not a luxury but a necessity. Without that knowledge we will not survive." (Margaret Atwood, "Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature", 1972)

"The ‘culture’ of a group or class, is the peculiar and distinctive ‘way of life’ of the group or class, the meanings, values and ideas embodied in institutions, in social relations, in systems of beliefs, in mores and customs, in the uses of objects and material life. Culture is the distinctive shapes in which this material and social organization of life expresses itself. A culture includes the ‘maps of meaning’ which make things intelligible to its members. These ‘maps of meaning’ are not simply carried around in the head: they are objectivated in the patterns of social organization and relationship through which the individual becomes a ‘social individual’. Culture is the way the social relations of a group are structured and shaped: but it is also the way those shapes are experienced, understood and interpreted." (John Clark et al "Subcultures, Cultures and Class", 1975)

"It is hard for us today to assimilate all the new ideas that are being suggested in response to the new information we have. We must remember that our picture of the universe is based not only on our scientific knowledge but also on our culture and our philosophy. What new discoveries lie ahead no one can say. There may well be civilizations in other parts of our galaxy or in other galaxies that have already accomplished much of what lies ahead for mankind. Others may just be beginning. The universe clearly presents an unending challenge." (Necia H Apfel & J Allen Hynek, "Architecture of the Universe", 1979)

"Culture is the collective programming of the mind distinguishing the members of one group or category of people from others." (Geert Hofstede, "Culture's consequences: International differences in work-related values", 1980)

"The dominant culture of a complex society is never a homogeneous structure. It is layered, reflecting different interests within the dominant class (e.g. an aristocratic versus a bourgeois outlook), containing different traces from the past (e.g. religious ideas within a largely secular culture), as well as emergent elements in the present. Subordinate cultures will not always be in open conflict with it. They may, for long periods, coexist with it, negotiate the spaces and gaps in it, make inroads into it, ‘warrening it from within’. However, though the nature of this struggle over culture can never be reduced to a simple opposition, it is crucial to replace the notion of ‘culture’ with the more concrete, historical concept of ‘cultures’; a redefinition which brings out more clearly the fact that cultures always stand in relations of domination - and subordination - to one another, are always, in some sense, in struggle with one another." (Stuart Hall et al, "Encoding, Decoding’, 1980)

"Culture [is] a pattern of basic assumptions invented, discovered, or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems." (Edgar H Schein, "Organizational Culture and Leadership", 1985)

"[…] paradigms, the core of the culture of science, are transmitted and sustained just as is culture generally: scientists accept them and become committed to them as a result of training and socialization, and the commitment is maintained by a developed system of social control." (Barry Barnes, "Thomas Kuhn", 1985)

"A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least." (Jacques Barzun, "The Culture We Deserve", 1989)

"A world view is a system of co-ordinates or a frame of reference in which everything presented to us by our diverse experiences can be placed. It is a symbolic system of representation that allows us to integrate everything we know about the world and ourselves into a global picture, one that illuminates reality as it is presented to us within a certain culture. […] A world view is a coherent collection of concepts and theorems that must allow us to construct a global image of the world, and in this way to understand as many elements of our experience as possible." (Diederick Aerts et al, "World views: From Fragmentation to Integration", 1994)

"New knowledge is not science until it is made social. The scientific culture can be defined as new verifiable knowledge secured and distributed with fair credit meticulously given." (Edward O Wilson, "Naturalist", 1994)

"Culture in the broadest sense is a form of highly participatory activity, in which people create their societies and identities. Culture shapes individuals, drawing out and cultivating their potentialities and capacities for speech, action, and creativity." (Douglas Kellner, "Media Culture", 1995)

"Networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power, and culture. While the networking form of social organization has existed in other times and spaces, the new information technology paradigm provides the material basis for its pervasive expansion throughout the entire social structure." (Manuel Castells, "The Rise of the Network Society", 1996)

"Any global tradition needs to begin with a shared worldview - a culture-independent, globally accepted consensus as to how things are." (Ursula Goodenough, "The Sacred Depths of Nature", 1998)

"Despite being partly familiar to all, because of these contradictory aspects, mathematics remains an enigma and a mystery at the heart of human culture. It is both the language of the everyday world of commercial life and that of an unseen and perfect virtual reality. It includes both free-ranging ethereal speculation and rock-hard certainty. How can this mystery be explained? How can it be unraveled? The philosophy of mathematics is meant to cast some light on this mystery: to explain the nature and character of mathematics. However this philosophy can be purely technical, a product of the academic love of technique expressed in the foundations of mathematics or in philosophical virtuosity. Too often the outcome of philosophical inquiry is to provide detailed answers to the how questions of mathematical certainty and existence, taking for granted the received ideology of mathematics, but with too little attention to the deeper why questions. (Paul Ernest, "Social Constructivism as a Philosophy of Mathematics", 1998)

"Even revolutionaries conserve; all cultures are conservative. This is so because it is a systemic phenomenon: all systems exist only as long as there is conservation of that which defines them." (Humberto M Romesin & Pille Bunnell, "Biosphere, Homosphere, and Robosphere: What has that to do with Business? Society for Organizational Learning", 1998)

"A collective mental map functions first of all as a shared memory. Various discoveries by members of the collective are registered and stored in this memory, so that the information will remain available for as long as necessary. The storage capacity of this memory is in general much larger than the capacities of the memories of the individual participants. This is because the shared memory can potentially be inscribed over the whole of the physical surroundings, instead of being limited to a single, spatially localized nervous system. Thus, a collective mental map differs from cultural knowledge, such as the knowledge of a language or a religion, which is shared among different individuals in a cultural group but is limited by the amount of knowledge a single individual can bear in mind." (Francis Heylighen, "Collective Intelligence and its Implementation on the Web", 1999)

"Cultural archetypes are the unconscious models that help us make sense of the world: they are the myths, narratives, images, symbols, and files into which we organize the data of our life experience" (Clotaire Rapaille, "Cultural Imprints", Executive Excellence Vol. 16 (10), 1999)

"Every culture has a shared pattern of thinking. It is the cement that holds a culture together, gives it unity. A culture's characteristic way of thinking is imbedded in its concept of the nature of reality, its world view. […] A change of world view not only brings about profound cultural changes, but also is responsible for what historians call a ‘change of age’. An age is a period of time in which the prevailing world view has remained relatively unchanged." (Russell L Ackoff,"Re-Creating the Corporation", 1999)

"The stunning variety of life forms that surround us, as well as the beliefs, practices, techniques, and behavioral forms that constitute human culture, are the product of evolutionary dynamics." (Herbert Gintis, "Game Theory Evolving", 2000)

"All human knowledge - including statistics - is created through people's actions; everything we know is shaped by our language, culture, and society. Sociologists call this the social construction of knowledge. Saying that knowledge is socially constructed does not mean that all we know is somehow fanciful, arbitrary, flawed, or wrong. For example, scientific knowledge can be remarkably accurate, so accurate that we may forget the people and social processes that produced it." (Joel Best, "Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists", 2001)

"The danger arises when a culture takes its own story as the absolute truth, and seeks to impose this truth on others as the yardstick of all knowledge and belief." (F David Peat, "From Certainty to Uncertainty", 2002)

"Mathematics is often thought to be difficult and dull. Many people avoid it as much as they can and as a result much of the population is mathematically illiterate. This is in part due to the relative lack of importance given to numeracy in our culture, and to the way that the subject has been presented to students." (Julian Havil ,"Gamma: Exploring Euler's Constant", 2003)

"Art is constructivist in nature, aimed at the deliberate refinement and elaboration of mental models and worldviews. These are the natural products of cognition itself, the outcome of the brain’s tendency to strive for the integration of perceptual and conceptual material over time. […] human culture is essentially a distributed cognitive system within which worldviews and mental models are constructed and shared by the members of a society. Artists are traditionally at the forefront of that process, and have a large influence on our worldviews and mental models." (Mark Turner, "The Artful Mind : cognitive science and the riddle of human creativity", 2006)

"The principle of informed responsibility: no culture is justified in creating a cultural separation of its own area; it is the responsibility of each culture to inform other cultures about their own developments and be informed about developments of other cultures." (Andrzej P. Wierzbicki et al, "Creative Space: Models of Creative Processes for the Knowledge Civilization Age", Studies in Computational Intelligence Vol. 10, 2006)

"The principle of systemic integration: whenever needed, knowledge from and about diverse cultures and disciplines might be synthesized by systemic methods, be they soft or hard, without a prior prejudice against any of them, following the principles of open and informed systemic integration." (Andrzej P. Wierzbicki et al, "Creative Space: Models of Creative Processes for the Knowledge Civilization Age", Studies in Computational Intelligence Vol. 10, 2006)

"Our generational perspective contributes to the mental models we hold about ourselves, the world, and the way things ‘should’ be. These beliefs create blind spots that can become our undoing as we pursue our values and seek to accomplish our goals. Likewise, they can have a powerful effect on our culture.” (Deborah Gilburg, “Empowering Multigenerational Collaboration in the Workplace”, The Systems Thinker Vol. 18 No. 4, 2007)

"Mental models are formed over time through a deep enculturation process, so it follows that any attempt to align mental models must focus heavily on collective sense making. Alignment only happens through a process of socialisation; people working together, solving problems together, making sense of the world together." (Robina Chatham & Brian Sutton, "Changing the IT Leader’s Mindset", 2010)

"Cultures are never merely intellectual constructs. They take form through the collective intelligence and memory, through a commonly held psychology and emotions, through spiritual and artistic communion." (Tariq Ramadan, "Islam and the Arab Awakening", 2012)

"Image theory is an attempt to describe decision making as it actually occurs. […] The concept of images is central to the theory. They represent visions held by individuals and organisations that constitute how they believe the world should exist. When considering individuals, the theory refers to these images as the value image, trajectory image and strategic image. The value image is based on an individual’s ethics, morals and beliefs. The trajectory images encompass the decision maker’s goals and aspirations. Finally, for each trajectory image, a decision maker may have one or more strategic images that contain their plans, tactics and forecasts for their goal. […] In an organisational decision-making setting, these images are referred to as culture, vision and strategy." (Christopher B Stephenson, "What causes top management teams to make poor strategic decisions?", 2012) 

"Culture is fuzzy, easy to caricature, amenable to oversimplifications, and often used as a catchall when all other explanations fail." (Zachary Karabell, "The Leading Indicators: A short history of the numbers that rule our world", 2014)

"Symbols transcend the medium of communication. They are ubiquitous in our language, and play a sizable role (though perhaps not a central one) in mathematical imagery linking the conscious and subconscious, the familiar and unknown, to give us cultural/emotional predispositions to meaning, all to enhance the creative process."(Joseph Mazur, "Enlightening Symbols: A Short History of Mathematical Notation and Its Hidden Powers", 2014)

"All cultures organize themselves around a story, which tells them how the world came into being - a creation myth." (William Byers, "Deep Thinking: What Mathematics Can Teach Us About the Mind", 2015)

"A worldview consists of observations of the individual and other people with respect to the self, time and space, the natural and the supernatural and the sacred and profane. […] Beliefs about the world do not reside in the human mind in chaotic disorder; rather they form a latent system. A worldview cannot, however, be viewed as a well-organised network of cognitive models or a static collection of values; instead it should be regarded as the product of a process shaped by historical, cultural and social perspectives and contexts." (Helena Helve, "A longitudinal perspective on worldviews, values and identities", 2016)

"Communication requires the ability to expand or contract a message based on norms within a given culture or language. Expansion provides more detail, sometimes adding in information that is culturally relevant or needed for the person to understand. Contraction preserves the same intent but discards information that isn't needed by that person. Some concepts in certain situations require greater detail than others." (Vidya Setlur & Bridget Cogley, "Functional Aesthetics for data visualization", 2022)

"We can expect the revolution in communications to extend the power of our brains. Its ultimate effect will be the transformation and unification of all techniques for the exchange of ideas and information, of culture and learning. It will not only generate new knowledge, but will supply the means for its world-wide dissemination and absorption." (David Sarnoff)

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