Essays in the Hermeneutics of Science by Dimitri Ginev

Author:Dimitri Ginev [Ginev, Dimitri]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9780429856006
Google: MoyADwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 40981189
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

Part Two

4 Universals of human existence as a theme of philosophy of science

This essay takes it for granted that the universals of human existence (or the human universals) form a heterogeneous set. Any attempt at classifying them must begin with a distinction between non-cultural human universals and cultural universals. While sociobiologists and human ecologists have concentrated on the universal characteristics of 'human nature', interpreted on the firm quantitative foundation of population genetics, the representatives of interpretive anthropology and other semiotic approaches to culture seek to establish the universal constitutive moments of 'learned behavior', seeing the latter as irreducible to the biological substance of 'human nature'. Obviously, those universal features of human behavior which were selected for specifically in the biological evolution of homo sapiens must be regarded as non-cultural human universals. They can have significant cultural value (i.e. they can contribute in a significant way to the peculiarity of the cultural dimension of human existence), but their 'origin' is a biological one. They are not 'learned' culturally. A typical example of such a non-cultural universal is laughter. As an expression of universal emotion it is to be observed under somewhat different circumstances in different cultures, but this does not contradict its universal presence and therefore its evolved (and thus biological) basis.1 By contrast, there are many human universals that are without any biological basis. Thus the implicational universal that for all languages the existence of initial consonant clusters implies the presence of medial clusters, but not vice versa, represents a 'pure' cultural universal.2

However, the intuitive classification of human universals into non-cultural and cultural ones is often theoretically obscure because in many cases there is no clearcut evidence whether a given human universal has a biological basis. The discussion of the universality of the Freudian Oedipus complex provides an interesting illustration of this.3 Probably, there are cultures in which the classical triangular structure of the Oedipus complex is not valid. Nobody, however, would deny that the (culturally specified) family system exercises in all cultures a strong influence on the development of the individual human mind. The universality of this influence of the family system is not disputed. Yet it is not clear whether there are reasons to support the biological determination of this influence.

Furthermore, there is another essential difficulty in distinguishing cultural from non-cultural human universals. Let us assume that some of the attempts to relate historical linguistics to typology are successful. These yield a set of universal types of linguistic change. They concern such processes as palatalization, the grammaticization of phonologically developed alternations, etc. No doubt, these universal types should be regarded as cultural human universals. At the moment there is a lack of any biological interpretation of such diachronic language universals. But there is no guarantee that the present universal types of linguistic change could not be incorporated in a future more integrated naturalist framework that is as yet unavailable. Thus, a future neurolinguistic theory might provide a naturalist account of the diachronic near-universal that the definite articles arise from demonstratives.

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