THERE A GEOGRAPHY OF THOUGHT ? Pascal

his associates have produced a number of psychological experiments which display large patterns of differences between " Westerner " and " Eastern Asian " subjects on a number of cognitive tasks, which purport to reveal strong differences in cognitive processes, styles of thinking and reasoning and ultimately in overall world-views between the two groups. Nisbett and his colleagues claim, on the basis of these experimental studies, that they show that social differences between cultures affect not only the subjects' cognitive processes, but also their beliefs about the world and their overall epistemologies. The order of determination, according to them, is the following: (1) social organisation directs attention to some aspect of the field at the expense of others (2) what is attended to influences metaphysics, i.e beliefs about the world and causality, (3) metaphysics in turn guides tacit epistemology, that is beliefs about what it is important to know, and how knowledge can be obtained, (4) epistemology dictates the development and application of some cognitive processes at the expense of others, (5) social organisation and social practices can influence directly the development and use of cognitive processes such as dialectical vs logical ones (Nisbett, Peng, Choi and Norenzayan 2001: 291-92). It is easy to draw from these studies the conclusion that the differences of thought and cognitive processes between Westerners and Easterners are relative to their cultures and to the social systems to which they belong, hence that Nisbett and his colleagues are relativists. They accept that members of different cultures are not locked in their styles of thinking and that each group can benefit from the styles of thinking of the other groups; they do not hold the view that nothing in cognition is innate or universal. Their view, they tell us, is quite compatible with much of recent work in cognitive science which purports to show that cognitive processes are not under cultural influence. I am unconvinced. In the first place, I am not sure that the experimental results really show that the differences in thought and cognitive processes between the two kinds of cultures are to be located exactly were Nisbett and his colleagues say they are located. In the second place, a number of claims such a (1)-(5) above do seem to me, in spite of Nisbett's denial, to have strong relativistic implications. It is not my purpose here