> Philip Pilkington wrote:
>
> Cross-cultural definitions of happiness? Reductionist psychology at its
>> best
>> when meaning gets lost in numerical quantities and linguistic difficulties
>>
>
> Did you read the article? The authors seem to be aware of those objections,
> having spent their careers studying the subject.
>
> SA
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
Yeah it was pretty thorough, I wouldn't have used the term "happy" though, its far too culturally loaded. Its a strange term which originally meant something like "lucky" or "fortunate" but now seems, in Anglo-Saxon countries at least, but perhaps increasingly in Europe and elsewhere, as a sort of normalising term. It seems to usually signify something like what Freud called - in a proper, well-defined psychological vocabulary, may I add - the "ideal-ego". Basically I'd say that even if the authors recognise the "language gap", and they do, to a certain extent, they'll still have an extremely hard time overcoming it because their main point of terminological reference is grey enough even within our own culture, let alone in another.