Status Updates From The Geography of Thought: H...

As Huntington has observed, Westerners tend to confuse modernization—defined as industrialization, a more complex occupational structure, increased wealth and social mobility, greater literacy, and urbanization—with Westernization. But societies other than Japan have become modern without becoming very Western

Relationships, on the other hand, involve, tacitly or explicitly, a verb. Learning the meaning of a transitive verb normally involves noticing two objects and some kind of action that connects them in some way

Because of their relative ambiguity, it’s harder to remember verbs; verbs are more likely to be altered in meaning than nouns when a speaker communicates to another person or when one person paraphrases

How is it possible that Easterners today have relatively little interest in categories, find it hard to learn new categories by applying rules about properties, and make little spontaneous use of them for purposes of induction? Why are they so much more inclined to consider relationships in their organization of objects than Westerners are?

The lack of interest in classes of objects sharing the same properties is consistent with the basic scheme that the ancient Chinese had for the world. For them, the world consisted of continuous substances. So it was a part-whole dichotomy that made sense to them. Finding the features shared by objects and placing objects in a class on that basis would not have seemed a very useful activity