What you demonstrate is that your theory is methodologically incapable of
> addressing the subject-matter of history, and the development of human
> civilisation.
Why do you say this? You have shifted the argument from discussing what we call "culture" to what we call "civilization". You have shifted the argument from a similarity of cognitive capacities between us and our ancestor and cousin species to whether those species ever developed state institutions, etc. You have done so without answering or even acknowledging my initial questions. I am not sure you actually want to discuss the issue or you would just prefer to maintain your beliefs or possibly win the argument. I have no wish to win this argument, because their certain core beliefs that are different between us that only time can change.
'more importantly there is no clear divide between modern homo sapiens and
> our ancestor species'.
>
> Really? No clear divide? The divide that is obvious to everyone is the
> very
> thing that - as a matter of principle - you refuse to recognise: human
> civilisation. (What you mean is there is no clear biological or genetic
> divide, which is of course true, we are the same biological species.)
Yes there is no clear divide between homo sapiens sapiens and our ancestor species. Development of culture and civilization was a gradual process. There was an explosion somewhere around the time of the agricultural revolution. And yet for most of the history of homo sapiens we did not develop what you call civilization until very recently. For most of the history of homo sapiens we lived as hunter gatherers. "Civilization" is a relatively recent phenomena. It is too soon to know whether what we call civilization will be a success for our species or not. But that is just my pessimistic conclusion, which is neither here nor there in this debate. I don't know if the human species will last a very long time.
Just imagine how intolerable it would be to an historian to read the late
> and mid-Victorian eras confused, and you will get some hint of just how
> ignorant it is to assert that there is no difference between the 21st
> century and 30 000 B.C..
The question of periodization of human history is a separate question from that of "culture". I am not questioning that society has become more and more complex since the agricultural revolution. Why should I? What does the question of the periodization of human history have to do with the idea that most of our cognitive capacities have developed in the course of evolution and that most of them developed before the speciezation of homo sapiens. I am maintaining that the cognitive capacities of modern humans have many similarities with our cousin species the bonobo and the chimpanzees.
Do hunter gatherers exhibit culture? Of course they do. Do they exhibit what we call civilization? No. And yet hunter-gatherers including the ones that survive today have all the cognitive capacities of modern humans.
Does the evidence show that homo erectus exhibited culture? Of course it does. Does the evidence show that homo erectus exhibit what we call civilization? No. Yet homo erectus most likely had many, if not most, of the cognitive capacities that modern humans exhibit. (Perhaps they even had a complex communication system, we don't know for sure.) Does the evidence show that our cousin species the chimpanzees exhibit what we would call the phenomena of culture? Yes. And we say so because when we find similar phenomena and evidence for early homo sapiens, current hunter gatherers, or homo erectus we call it evidence of culture. Nothing you have said changes these facts.
"Is there any evidence at all that will convince you?"
>
> I think I said already. When Chimpanzees take part in human culture and
> politics (or we in theirs) then we can assume that they are the same.
What you said specifically is (quote) "When I see a Bonobo trading on the US Stock Exchange, sending a donation to Greenpeace, or organising an election campaign, then I'll change my mind."
I am not sure if I should take this seriously. We assume for example that homo sapiens in prehistory, who spent their life as hunter gatherers have the same capacities as the human beings that trade on the U.S. stock exchange. But the evidence that we have for those human beings having culture is similar to some of the evidence that we now have for chimpanzees displaying culture.... i.e. tool use past down through generations, and evidence of different kinds of tool cultures. And yet those early humans never developed stock exchanges or a complex civilization.
The same can be said for homo erectus, with the added caveat that there is no evidence that homo erectus could have developed business institutions and impersonal social networks. Yet the scientific consensus is that homo erectus had complex cognitive capacities and a well developed culture.
The evidence is that chimpanzees and bonobos have well developed and complex cognitive capacities that in many aspects are very similar to ours and that they develop cultures that are not very complex.
The question isn't whether a chimpanzee can participate in human institutions but whether they have developed their own culture. The questions is also whether our own cognitive capacities show a continuity with earlier species. That is how this thread began.
'Now the term "culture" and the term "politics" are not scientific terms, no
> matter how hard we try to make them so.'
>
> Clearly, you do not understand culture, or politics, which are real
> subjects
> of enquiry with disciplines dedicated to their study.
We repeat ourselves and there is no use of going on unless we can find some way to get beyond "beliefs" and deal with what is actually happening.
Whether they are disciplines of inquiry or not does not mean that they are scientific concepts. These are separate questions. Questions I am not getting into. I am simply pointing out that we "call" certain phenomena as "C" (i.e. cultural) when it comes to humans and when we find the same phenomena in other species we should recognize it as the same phenomena.
Still you do not deal with my questions. Please do.
They are not defined
> in natural science, because they are not part of nature, but society. All
> of
> which makes your suggestion that 'primatologists are warranted in calling
> this phenomena "cultural"' specious.
Here is a quote from Chomsky that I repeatedly use:
"Relative clarity matters. It is pointless to seek a truly precise definition of "terror," or of any other concept outside of the hard sciences and mathematics, often even there. But we should seek enough clarity at least to distinguish terror from two notions that lie uneasily at its borders: aggression and legitimate resistance."
The reason I bring this up here is that it has something to do with how we use concepts: Scientific notions _tend toward_ precise definitions. We strive to make our scientific concepts as precise as definitions in Fregean artificial languages. We rarely, if ever, reach this goal. But words and concepts in natural languages do not have the same kinds of precise definitions. Thus I quoted a famous article by social scientists listing
It is pointless to seek a truly precise definition of such a term as "culture". In my last email I refered to the "famous article written in 1952 by Kroeber and Kluckholmm which identified 162 different definitions of culture proposed by anthropologists and social scientists." The situation has not changed greatly since. And yet the term "culture" is a useful notion in discussions of this sort, as long as one allows that it lacks scientific preciseness. As I said there is no scientific-theoretical concept of culture, just a word we use with more-or-less preciseness in order to get a loose hold of what the learned aspects of human capacities are, and how they develop. We can distinguish culture from the notion of "instinct" on one side and the notion of "civilization" on the other side.
Given these distinctions all the evidence points to the fact that homo erectus "possessed" culture but not civilization. The current evidence is that chimpanzees display the cognitive capacities for culture and in fact do have cultural differences between themselves -- in this case, learned behavior producing physical artifacts that we call tools that differ between chimpanzee groups.
Since you refuse objectivity to the concepts culture and politics, you
> really ought to lay off them, and leave them to those who study these
> things, instead of subsuming the rich complexity of their work to your
> dumb
> formulae.
I don't refuse "objectivity" to the concept of culture. I just don't think there is any good scientific-theoretical definition for the term. The same with "politics." I do think that they refer to "something" "objective."
The difference is something like the difference between a scientific definition of "heat" or "energy" and an everyday definition. Before modern science, there was no scientific-theoretical concept of "heat" or "energy". That does not mean that our concepts in natural language didn't refer to something "objective".... It just meant that we had no precise theory of what we referring. The term "culture" in the social sciences stands can be used in many different ways but it is very loose imprecise concept. But this very loose, imprecise concept refers to something "objective."
[Just a note: The subject/object, subjective/objective division is not something I accept. I think it is a confusing philosophical holdover. On one hand I would rather talk about the experiential and the non-experiential, while assuming that both of these are "physical" phenomena. On the other hand I would like to talk about levels of certainty and knowledge. It seems to me that the words "subjective" and "objective" have both meanings, one referring to the "experiential" and the other referring to lack of certainty. I prefer to keep these meanings separate. ]
I do wish that you would deal with some of my specific questions....
There is some inkling of understanding in the following:
>
> "It is my belief that we call culture is a subset of biological processes
> though not _necessarily_ reducible or understandable by analysis of
> biological
> processes. It is also my belief that the biological is a subset of
> "physical" processes but that the biological is not necessarily reducible
> to
> physical processes."
>
>
>
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>