CULTURAL HARMONY VERSUS CULTURAL DISSONANCE:

PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACHES TO CONFLICT RESOLUTION

ABSTRACT

The Western concepts of debate and logical analysis began with the Greek philosophers. They excelled in syllogistic reasoning, logic, cause and effect relationships, and other forms of analytical thought. It is from this cultural tradition that debate emerged as a favored form of discourse on civic issues. Under Aristotelian Scholasticism, this philosophical approach became a cultural tradition. It is important to note that not all cultures followed that tradition. In Asia, for example, the focus is on harmony, social resonance, and following the Tao, ?. In this presentation, we will highlight two areas of concern: the treatment of disparate philosophical traditions by cultural psychologists and the misinterpretation of cognitive codes by academics. These traditions overlook the role of praxis across languages and cultures It us argued that these traditions differ in their uses of cognitive and performative knowledge. The implications of these differences are discussed.

Introduction

There are certain assumptions within cultural psychology that have been recently challenged. The assumptions are that everyone has the same basic cognitive processes and rely on the same tools for perception, memory, causal analysis, categorization and inference. From these assumptions they go on to argue that if people from different cultures differ from others, it cannot be because they have different cognitive processes. It has to be because they have been exposed to different aspects of the world or because they have been taught differently. Part of this assumption about cognition has to do with higher order processes of reasoning that are based on the formal rules of logic. Reasoning is separate from what is reasoned about.

DIFFERENCES IN PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE

Richard E. Nisbett (2003), a cultural psychologist, disagrees with these traditional claims. After working on research projects for many years with students and graduate faculty from Asia, he is convinced that there are distinct habits of thought that separate the cultures of the East from those in the West. These differences, he adds, have been maintained for thousands of years. Nisbett is not alone is his claims about language and cognition. Alfred Bloom (1981), a linguist and language psychologist, has argued that there are certain problems inherent in the linguistic nature of the Chinese language that impact on how Chinese people conceptualize. What he has in mind is the fact that counterfactuals and generics in Chinese grammar are not overt grammatical categories with highly marked morphological and syntactic properties. He failed to also mention that Chinese has no tense system. Robert Wardy (2000), a Sinologist, raises similar issues about language and cognition. He is concerned with the reading of the ??? (ming li t'iam, the investigation of the Theory of Names), a seventeenth-century translation of Aristotle's Categories. He cites a number of disparities between relate to translation problems he has encountered. He asks whether or no one can adequately translate the cultural differences behind these two disparate philosophical worlds. Needham (1956) experienced similar problems in his attempts to explicate the history of scientific thought in China.

A NEW APPROACH TO COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

These concepts are discussed in this essay, but from a different perspective. It is argued, for example, that many of the claims made about cognitive universals are culture bound and essentially reflect a unique socio-cultural perspective in cultural psychology. This explanation is predicated on the fact that there is a difference between lower and higher mental functions and that many higher mental functions are not biologically motivated, but socially and culturally motivated. People think differently, it is argued, because they follow different patterns of practical reasoning. This answer should not be taken to mean that the differences in thought are no more than differences in cognitive style. It is argued that they are differences in being that are based on differences in social practices and social philosophies (Jia and Sun, 2002; St. Clair, 2004). In order to better understand just what practical reasoning across cultures entail, it is best to begin with work of Vygotsky (1934; 1978) and his student, Leontiev (1978; Ratner, 1993, 1999; web source)who developed activity theory.

VYGOTSKY AND THE SOCIAL DIMENSIONS OF COGNITION

Vygotsky (1934; 1978) argued that the human mind is a product of cultural history. What he means by this is that over the centuries human beings have invented devices that have transformed their thinking. The most recent example of this can be found in the use of the computer. Vygotsky argues that these cultural tools are an indispensable part of human cognition. Each child does not invent these instrumental systems; they are passed down across generations. There are two kinds of tools that Vygotsky discusses. One of them is fairly obvious. Human beings use technical tools. The other is not so obvious: language is a human instrument. It is an epistemological tool. Vygotsky defined intelligence as the capacity to learn from tool instruction. The teacher, in this framework, plays a central role. She is there to help the student to go beyond his current level of competence. An index of this intelligence is not what a student can do now, but what a child can be capable of doing through interaction with adults. The move from the present level of development to the new potential level of development is called the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). This zone is too difficult for a child to manage alone and for this reason it is done with a mentor, a teacher, helping adult. The use of apprenticeship in education is called scaffolding. The teacher helps the student to move to the next rung on the ladder of ZPD. What Vygotsky is saying is that these new mental tools are developed through a teaching-learning process that involves social exchange in which shared meanings are developed through joint activity. These changes in higher mental functions are not universal. They are culture specific. What does this mean? It means that many of the cognitive categories and functions that cultural psychologists have argued are universal are not. It can be argued that many of the lower mental functions are, indeed, universal. These include biological and physiological abilities that involve neural processing (visual, auditory, tactile, etc.), perception (visual forms, color, hues, saturation, , auditory patterns, phonemic patterns, and tactile impressions), constancy phenomena (light constancy, color constancy, shape constancy), recognition of shapes and forms, the expression of emotions, speech (Goldstein, 2002; Fox, 2004). The higher mental functions that one acquires in life are different from these because they go beyond forms of local knowledge and local culture (Geertz, 1973, 1983) that most people experience within a given system of daily experience.

So what are these higher mental functions? They include many of the concepts that are developed through education and through secondary socialization. Literacy, for example, is a higher mental function. David Olson (1996) argued that it requires a different kind of cognitive skill to learn how to see the world on paper, to process information abstractly, to invent new psychological constructs, and to move away from the world of narration into the world of prose. Vygotsky himself argued that science is an activity that requires the use of higher mental functions such as thinking mathematically. What are the implications of Vygotsky's work for the issues raised by cultural psychologists such as Nisbett and linguists such as Bloom? They have assumed that higher mental functions are universal. They are not. Amongst academics, for example, they are shared internationally by people who have undergone similar influences of formal education, who learn foreign languages, who think abstractly, who invoke subjunctives and counterfactuals in their arguments, and who function among several cultural modes of cognition. The next step in this process is to further investigate how social practices play a role in human cognition in the form of activity theory.

ACTIVITY THEORY: LANGUAGE AS A SYMBOLIC INSTRUMENT

Activity Theory was mainly an effort in Russia to develop a new psychology based on Marxist philosophy. It was predicated on the assumption that the human mind comes to exist and develop and can only be understood within the context of meaningful interaction between human beings that is goal oriented and socially determined. This was called the principle of unity and inseparability on consciousness by Sergey Rubinstein (Bannon, 1997). This interest in human action as a unit of psychological analysis was elaborated upon by Alexey Leontiev (1978, 1979; web source). He elaborated on this framework and brought into play such basic principles as object-orientedness, the dual concepts of internalization and externalization, tool mediation, hierarchical structure of activity, and continuous development.

Since Leontiev was operating with a Marxist philosophy, he was concerned about the division of labor and how that concept played a role in the development of higher mental functions among human beings. It is through activities within that division of labor that human beings organize their lifes, define the kinds of things that people think about, perceive, imagine, remember, speak, and feel. Much of what Leontiev attempted to articulate has been investigated within a similar Marxian context by Pierre Bourdieu (1977 chapter 2; 1990a; 1990b: chapter 3) under the concept of habitus, a structure of understanding about the nature of things which structures psychological phenomena and which in itself is structured by social practices. Social script theory (St. Clair, Thomé-Williams, Su, 2004) is an attempt to articulate those social and psychological structures within the context of activity theory and the sociology of knowledge.

THE GREEK PHILOSOPHICAL INFLUENCES ON CULTURE

It can be argued that what Nisbett (2003) addresses in his book on cultural psychology are really differences in cultural practices between East and West. The tradition that he learned as a child was based on the Greek cultural paradigm of rhetoric in which there was a great emphasis placed on the use of language as a form of public debate. Rhetoricians argued through logic. For them, the process of creating categories was important. They wee concerned with foregrounding details and objects in order to highlight them in their discussions. This tradition continues and has been reinstituted as a cultural practice. Nisbett (2003) assumed that the use of logic was a universal mental process. It is not.

CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN THE USE OF LOGIC

Johnson-Laird (1983) asked the basic question about logic. Is logic a natural cognitive process? In his research, he found out that very few people fully command the processes of formal logic. In order to understand how people use logic, he expanded used the mental model theory of thinking and reasoning proposed by Craik (1943). According to this framework, mental models are representations in the mind of real or imaginary situation; they are small scale models of reality that are used to anticipate events. These models are constructed from social interaction with others and with the real world. They are constructed from experiences, from images, from social scripts, and other forms of practical reasoning. Once the mind structures such a situation, the mental model of that situation is used to structure logical forms used in formal rule theories. What Johnson-Laird discovered is that people, contrary to belief, do not abide by the formal rules of logic. They bring content into their reasoning. In formal logic, as noted earlier, one is supposed to follow the rules of logic and its abstract forms and not appeal to the content of the premises involved in syllogistic reasoning. What people did, in essence, was to create mental models of a situation and reason on the basis of such models. Sometimes the mental models provided the desired optimal answer and sometimes they did not. What this amounts to is that most people use heuristics in problem solving and those rules are based on the kinds of experiences outlined by action theory. What this means is that formal logic is not an intrinsic cognitive function. It is a learned higher mental function. It is a kind of activity that one learns through scaffolding and through apprenticeship learning. Formal logic is not universal; it is an advanced cognitive skill. It is embedded within the culture of academia (Bourdieu, 1984). The academic culture is shared by intellectuals of all nations. It has its own social constructions of reality that transcend cultural barriers. Unfortunately, this tradition is still dominated by Western thinking and this has led many to confuse concepts that are universally distributed with universal categories.

CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN HUMAN AGENCY

Another contribution by Greeks to philosophical culture, it is important to mention the concept of agency. According to this concept, people are in charge of their lives and see themselves as unique individuals. It is this characteristic, Nisbett (2003:4-5) argues that have led the Greeks to speculate about the world. They did this by creating models of it and by categorizing objects and events in that mental model of reality. What were the Greeks trying to accomplish in their philosophy? Why did agency become such an important part of Western thought? There is a common theme in Greek philosophy: Chaos and order. The Pre-Socratic philosophers saw the world in a state of flux (Cornford, 1940; Havelock, 1967). Heraclitus (540-480 BC) argued that there was a structure to what others saw as chaos. He called this structure "logos". So what is this structure? It is the unity of opposites. Things cycle back and forth between these opposite and the whole structure has a unity (Axelos, 1958). Plato and Aristotle had different concepts of (Greek: nomos). Plato had a model that was based on a world of ideal forms that never changed and a world of decaying forms that were subject to change over time (Cornford, 1937; 1945). This idea can still be found in contemporary concepts of competence (an ideal state of knowledge) and performance (unstable actions, and variations of performance). The other idea of order came from Aristotle (1970) who held that there are four causes (Cornford, 1962). One could look at the four causes as events, but for Aristotle substances have causes.

Matter and form are two of the four causes. Someone or something must change the matter and the form into a final cause and that person or thing is an agent. So, if one begins with a block of stone; that is the material cause. Within that material cause is a potential statue and that is the formal cause. The sculptor is the efficient cause who chisels the block (the material cause) to produce the final product or final cause (the finished statue). This is the concept of agency that Western culture has inherited from Aristotle. Why has this idea persisted in Western thought? The answer comes from the legitimation of his ideas during the dawn of the seventeenth century Aristotle's ideas were reintroduced into Europe by the Arabs. Medieval Europe was a theocracy at that time and this religious state lacked a philosophical system that could explain ideas. They adopted Aristotle's ideas of argumentation, such as the four causes, the disputatio (argumentation), developed a theoretical system of thought known as Aristotelian Scholasticism. One of the by products of this way of thinking is the Great Chain of Being (Lovejoy, 1936). It was argued that everyone has a place in the structure of society with some being close to God and other farther away. The Pope was closest to God and the workers (Latin: labores) were farther away and were lower on the chain of being. The often recited phrase of the Oracle of Delphi, "know thyself", captured this system of the role of the individual in the system. It meant "know thy place". Human agency at this in Europe had to do with a collective self. With the fall of this theocracy due to plagues, wars, and the building of nation states, the religious self that served a theocracy was replaced by a secular self that served a guild, social class or nation state (Foucault, 1966; 1969). During the second industrial revolution, the distinction between the classes weakened and this led to the rise of a new concept of self, the egocentric, self-serving, individual who was also narcissistic (Sennett, 1978). Currently, this model of human agency dominates Western thought (Lasch, 1978; 1984).

What Nisbett is discussing is the concept of a self that is based on individualism in which people are in control of their lives. People from Western cultures tend to assume that this is a psychological universal. Giddens (1984; 1991) has developed a sociological model based on this premise. It is called Structuration Theory. Only in a culture based on strong individualism is such a theory possible. In this theory, human agency and social structure are not two separate concepts or constructs and represent the two ways in which social action can be studied and understood. Human agents constitute a force within social change. Another sociological theory that is culture bound in sociology is conflict theory (Collins, 1975). One aspect of conflict theory can be found in the writings of Marx and his claim that the conflict between classes forms the basis for defining society. In Conflict Theory, it is argued that conflict is good and that it is normal. Such a theory is characteristic of western thinking.

What Nisbett is sharing in his research is the revelation that not all cultures share the Western model of agency. As Jia and Sun (2002) have noted, there are different worldviews with regard to human agency. One of the concepts characteristically associated with Chinese culture is known as Taoism. As Lenski (1995) and his colleagues have noted, agricultural societies develop epistemologies based on the cycles of life. They are aware of the changes between night and day, the movement of the sun in the sky, the movement of the stars at night, the change of seasons, the shifts in the wind, and their place in the cosmos. They seem themselves as functioning within a natural organism. They are aware of their place in this cosmos and the place of others in their society. They are dedicated to following the laws of nature, the Tao. They saw in nature the basis of a spiritual approach to living. Because China had undergone many changes in social order and religious beliefs, its scholars sought a more stable and unified life that would provide them with social order. The order and the harmony of nature provided an answer to their quest. Early Taoist taught the art of living and surviving by conforming to the natural way of things. They called this approach the wuwei (no action, not forcing the will). Taoism was the way of heaven and the way of the earth (Jia and Sun, 2002:56). It coexisted alongside the tradition of Confucius which was the way of man.It was concerned with the principles of good conduct, practical wisdom, and proper social relationships. Confucianism became the official of the state and it never existed as an established religion. Its writings can be found in the Five classics, (wu ching) and the four books (shih shu). These books represent a code of conduct founded by Kung-futze, Confucius (551-479 BC). It speeks of jen (social virtue). The rituals (li) that Confucius wrote about were not sacrifices performed for the blessings of the gods, but ceremonies performed by human agents (Yang, 1961). These ceremonies embodied the ethical core of Chinese society. From this tradition (Gao and Ting-Toomey, 1998: 8-9), one finds the concept of the other-oriented-self. Hamony (Chinese: he) comes from maintaining relationships and reinforcing one's role. Hence, as Gao and Ting-Toomey (2002: 11) note, the focus is on tolerance of others (Chinese: rong ren), solidarity with others (Chinese: tuan jie), and harmony with others (Chinese: sui he).

	Tao (the way)
	Wu ching (five classics)
	shih shu (four books)
	he (harmony)
	rong ren (tolerance)
	tuan jie (solidarity

The tradition of Aristotle in the West and the teachings of Confucius and Lao Tze in the East have provided two very different concepts of human agency. One is oriented towards the self and the other is oriented towards the group.

DIFFERENT SOCIAL AND CULTURAL TRADITIONS

The social and cultural influences that dominated Chinese history were very different from those of the West. This meant that both cultures would differ in their practices of practical knowledge. They would follow different patterns of social interaction, social role behavior, and interactional styles.

DIFFERENCES IN OBJECT-ORIENTATION

In each culture, actions are directed towards goals. They must be fulfilled by an object in order to meet that goal. The problem for cultural psychologists is that they forget to note how different these goals are from one culture to another. One is directed towards debate and argumentation (philosophical tradition of Aristotelian Greek culture) and the other is concerned with establishing harmony and avoiding conflicts among various groups within society (philosophical tradition of Confucian China). Since human activity is guided by anticipation, what is anticipated differs from one culture to the next. They have different goals and consequently, they have different motives. Each has invested in different social practices.

HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURE OF ACTIVITY

The interaction between human being and the world is organized into functionally subordinated levels within a hierarchy. The problem overlooked in this case is that there is a division of labor in society and cultures differ in how they deal with those hierarchies. For example, there is a relationship in Asian cultures between the older brother and the young brother. The older brother acts as a surrogate parent. This kind of relationship does not exist in Western cultures. Hence, it does not play a significant role. It does not become a routine in that culture. It does not follow a pattern of expectation. In European cultures, however, there is no hierarchy between children in a family. Hence, children find themselves competing with each other (sibling rivalry) for the attention of their parents.

INTERNALIZATION AND EXTERNALIZATION

Activity has an internal side and an external side and they are directly related to one another. What kind of activity that occurs outside in the social world of China is not the same kind of activity that occurs in the West. The internalization of social practices differs from one culture to the other. Immanuel Kant (1966) made the distinction between noumena (the things of the real world) and phenomena (the appearances of the real world). He argued that one could never know the real world and hence he created a model of cognition that included a priori knowledge (knowledge that is not based on experience with the real world). The approach to the real world discussed in this essay differs in many ways from that of Kant. The real world does exist. It has form and structure. This is the basis for all of the natural sciences. Just what that world is forms the basis for the theoretical sciences. They are attempts to know and understand the things of the real world (noumena). It is by means of social interaction with the real world that human beings come to know it. Interpretations of that world differ from one culture to the next. Because each of these cultures are based on different interactions with the world, they have developed different traditions that reflect their cultural success in coping with that world. They externalize and internalize their experiences in different ways. Their cultures are theoretical constructs of reality, both social and physical (Rodríguez, St. Clair and Joshua, 2004).

MEDIATION

Human activity is mediated by a number of tools. Most theories of language and culture do not acknowledge the use of tools as an important part of human interaction. Anthropologists use the concept of artifacts, but this concept seems to be focused more on the product of tools than in their uses. Vygotsky (1962, 1978) and Leontiev (1962) consider language to be an epistemological tool. One might add that nonverbal communication is another kind of tool, one that has significant cognitive and social dimensions. One of the most important nonverbal tools in Asia is the bow. One shows respect to others by means of the bow (De Mente, 1993). Another kind of tool can be found in the overt grammatical categories in language. There are special languages of gender, politeness, power, and privilege. Once established, these artifacts (technical tools, signs, language, machines, and script activities) persist as structures of mediation.

DEVELOPMENT

Different patterns of development occur because they are based in different kinds of practical reason. They are based on different forms of activity. In interacting with others in society, human beings develop social scripts. These are social routines that are learned as performative knowledge . What is being argued here is that one of the major problems encountered by cultural psychologists is their failure to distinguish between biological and social constructs. Biological constructs occur among all human beings. This is the ability to see between 400-700 angstrom units, hear between 20 to 20,000 cycles per second, etc. Many social constructs such as the concept of self differs from one culture to the other. As a matter of fact, the concept of self is a recent social development. It came to represented the concept of the soul after the secularization of Europe (Taylor, 1989). Another problem that has been overlooked by cultural psychologists has to do with the differences between lower and higher mental functions. The development from lower to higher functions is not the product of natural development. The changes have to be scaffolded (Vygotsky, 1962). As noted earlier, literacy is one of these higher mental functions. It differs from merely doing phonics, learning alphabet constancy, and other lower mental functions. It has to do with the ability to use counterfactual modes of reasoning, visualize the world on paper, etc (Olson, 1996). There is one other issue that needs to be discussed within the contexts of cultural psychology.

One example of how pattern of development occurs can be found in the use of social scripts as the sources of practical or instrumental knowledge (St. Clair, Thomé-Williams, and Su, 2004). When one enters a restaurant, for example, there is a social script. Everyone knows the procedure of where to enter a restaurant, how to enter it, where to find help in being seated, how to know one's waiter, etc. As a matter of fact, everyone in the restaurant knows this script. The customer, however, may not know the scripts followed by others who are performing their own rules in the context of this situation. Those roles are performed publicly, but they are not known to the customer. The reason for this is simply that the context determines the role. The customer is not allowed into the business office, the kitchen, the galley, and so on. His role is limited to a certain public space. They others in the restaurant know his role because it is their job to serve him. They know things about the restaurant and its structure that he does not know. An example of a social script can be found below:

CULTURE-BOUND MODELS OF WESTERN CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY

The major point of this discussion is that many theories about cognition are culture-bound. They represent Western worldviews. There is nothing wrong with trying to understand the world from one's own perspective. The problem comes in when such perspectives are asserted to be universals. Nisbett (2003) is aware of this problem and this is the focus of his book. He realizes that psychological theory needs to be restructured to include non-western ways of thinking. In this essay, a different perspective is provided. It is argued that cultures differ in what higher mental functions they cultivate. In Asia, the focus is on relationships between things; in Europe it is on foregrounding objects. What this means is that one culture is prepared to only see objects and the other is trained to see objects always in relationship to other objects. This is more than a difference in cognitive style. It is a difference in how one practices one's culture on a daily basis. The school systems across cultures reflect their different practices, their different patterns of practical knowledge. In the west, one is trained to see objects. When these objects are in a relationship, it has to be a logical one. In the east, one sees objects and relationships, but the relationships are connected to other systems of belief, behavior, and tradition. One has to find one's social self in these relationships. One cannot stand alone without relationships. Psychologists test for spatial relationship, but are almost oblivious to other forms of relational thought. All of these differences represent ways of being human. The point that is being made here is that there are other ways of seeing and knowing the world besides those proposed by western psychologists.

DIFFERENCES AMONG OVERT AND COVERT LINGUISTIC STRUCTURES

When one looks at the morphological and syntactic differences between English and Chinese, certain differences emerge that merit comment.

These differences have to do with what Edward Sapir (1922) called overt and covert grammatical categories. Languages differ in the overt tools that they have available to them to express grammatical concepts. Some languages do not have markers for singular and plural nouns. They lack this covert category. What does this mean? It means that the category is covert. It exists, but not openly. Furthermore, it can be expressed or implied by other means. In the case of tense, those languages that lack tense use time words (e.g., today, tomorrow, now, etc.) to work around this covert category. As noted earlier, the translation of the writings of Aristotle into Chinese had to do with explaining the overt categories of western languages into a language in which those very categories were covert. Language teachers face this translation problem all of the time.

When one learns another language, the problem of covert categories takes on a new dimension. One uses the overt categories of their own language as a pseudo symbol, a workable tool that will enable them to process that language. Hence, speakers of Chinese will prefer to use their own descriptive form of counterfactuals as a linguistic tool when processing counterfactuals in other languages. English speakers who have to learn Spanish will encounter similar problems in mastering the covert categories in their own language that happen to be overt categories in Spanish. They will have to learn the difference between the perfect and the imperfect and the proper uses of subjunctives and conditional verbs. It is not that the categories do not exist in one's native language. What happens with covert linguistic categories is that they are pushed into the background while the more overt categories dominate the grammatical landscape.

THE CULTURE OF ACADEMIA

There are many cultures within a society. Academic culture is one of them. When scholars from different cultures interact with one another, they are doing so in a special culture. It is one that demands a certain level of literacy, logic, historical knowledge, and belief systems. This is a cross-cultural activity. It involves a whole series of covert categories that constitute the tools of cross-cultural communication.

What one learns in higher education is to be a citizen of the world. What this means is that one comes to learn about other cultures, peoples, and their traditions. This very act of learning the world of academia means that an individual is learning another culture, one that is not native to his country. Academic studies come from all cultures. Their ideas may form clusters of knowledge and higher forms of mental activities, but they are not limited or owned by any one country. This learning of a new culture means that a scholar in one country may have more in common with scholars in other cultures than he does with the masses in his own country. What does this mean? It means that he is not culture-bound. He has experiences that transcend his own country. His audience is also not localized. Academics are not limited in their quest for knowledge and understanding by local cultures. Even when they study their own cultural traditions, they transcend the boundaries of their own time and place. They investigate the past, understand the present, and project into the future. They are also ambassadors of their own culture. Academics are the ones who explain and impart their own culture to others. They are the ones who have a wider range of gifts to offer others in their own culture and to the world. Some cultures invest in scholarship and the academic class. They create international universities where instruction is not limited to one's native language. They provide for academic exchanges between cultures and they foster international harmony through their actions.

SWITCHING CULTURES: THE HONG KONG SITUATION

In those cultures in which compound bilinguals dominate such as Hong Kong, the average citizen has to switch from one culture to another on a daily basis. This is a fascinating phenomenon that merits further investigation. In the first place, such individual approach life with a greater range of symbolic tools. They are accomplished in several languages. Since these languages differ in how they present their own world views, these inhabitants also come to know and use a wider range of epistemological tools than others where culture-switching is unknown. Such individuals live in enriched cultural worlds. They have access to a greater range of practical knowledge and similarly, they have access to a greater amount of cognitive knowledge.

CONCLUSION

It has been argued that Western cultures favor debate and Asian cultures have a predilection for resolving conflict through harmony. There have been many explanations for these differences. The one most frequently offered is that they are due to differences in cognitive styles. Another is that the languages themselves are lacking categories and this leads to differences in cognition. It has been argued that none of these explanations are adequate in accounting for these phenomenon. What has been missing from the literature is the study of practical reasoning which has been introduced under the guise of activity theory and Vygotskyian psychology. The differences between East and West have to do with the technical and the symbolic tools used in social and cultural interaction. Tools are used to fulfill a goal. They are connected to social practices. In Hong Kong, one finds an interesting situation in which there are many composite bilinguals, people who are fluent in two or more languages since early childhood. The tools available to the citizens of Hong Kong are greater than those available to those from either China or England alone. They are able to actively participate in both systems.

Upon closing this essay, it should be noted that the concept of culture being used in this investigation has to do with culture as a social system. It is argued that there are many cultures within a nation state. One of them is the academic culture (Bourdieu, 1984). It turns out that scholars all over the world share this culture and they have more in common with each other than with most of the other subcultures within their countries. Being an academic requires a strong command of literacy, the use of formal logic, scientific knowledge, etc. When one refers to a language that represents a country, what they are referring to is the official dialect of that country. For example, the official dialect of Spain is Castellano. This is the dialect that others called Spanish, the language of Spain. When it comes to cultures, the same situation occurs. There is an official culture that is used to mark that a country.

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This paper was presented as a keynote address at the International Conference on Intercultural Communication Studies at the University of Guadalajara, Mexico, July 2004.