Continents in Cognition

Abstract

Is it racist to think that black people think differently from Asian people or that Asian people think differently from white people? In one sense, we want to avoid assuming that someone’s appearance or skin color has any relevance to the intellectually or morally relevant aspects of their being—the ‘content of their character’ which Martin Luther King jr. hoped everyone would eventually learn to engage when interacting with one another. Still in another way, we seem to care about giving people credit for cultural contributions in a way that suggests that ethnic heritage ‘belongs’ to groups of persons in ways that are not entirely arbitrary. That is, we seem to intuitively associate black music with black people, mariachi with Mexican people and Indian music with Indian people. Of course, this is not random. Music and language are important to brain development. So it seems tenable that there are mental attributes of cultural identity that vary in ways that we (non-arbitrarily) associate with varied physical appearances. John Locke discovered that persons are distinct from bodies. He recognized that the minds of agents are central to moral questions about blame and responsibility. This distinction has endured for centuries and American society is founded on Locke’s premise that persons are essentially psychological beings—from our legal system to our regard for mental health. For example, conceiving persons psychologically was central to Locke’s conception of human nature and political theory of natural rights. An important aspect of personal identity that Locke did not consider when he first analyzed persons in mental terms was race, but persons inherit cognitive patterns that determine how they perceive themselves and their environments from their cultures. In fact, much of what makes us ourselves comes by way of mental inheritance which mirrors biological inheritance. But we are still unaccustomed to considering how mental patterns across populations shape agency in ways that are similar to how human races are studied in biology. This dissertation attempts to get to the iron core of the problem by asking ‘What does it mean to be a person of a specific ethnicity or culture?’. Methodologically, the approach taken here will be naturalistic, drawing from the best evidence across the sciences, arts and humanities.