East/West

Westerners have a strong interest in categorization, which helps them to know what rules to apply to the objects in question, and formal logic plays a role in problem solving.

East Asians, in contrast, attend to objects in their broad context. The world seems more complex to Asians than to Westerners, and understanding events always requires consideration of a host of factors that operate in relation to one another in no simple, deterministic way. Formal logic plays little role in problem solving. In fact, the person who is too concerned with logic may be considered immature.

The collective or interdependent nature of Asian society is consistent with Asians' broad, contextual view of the world and their belief that events are highly complex and determined by many factors.

 The individualistic or independent nature of Western society seems consistent with the Western focus on particular objects in isolation from their context and with Westerners' belief that they can know the rules governing objects and therefore can control the objects' behavior.

East Asians group objects and events based on how they relate to one another, whereas Westerners are more likely to rely on categories

Reasoning- Westerners are more likely to apply formal logic when reasoning about everyday events, and why does their insistence on logic sometimes cause them to make errors? Easterners willing to entertain apparently contradictory propositions and sometimes this is helpful in getting at the truth?

Carrying out prescribed roles—in an organized, hierarchical system— was the essence of Chinese daily life. There was no counterpart to the Greek sense of personal liberty. Individual rights in China were one's "share" of the rights of the community as a whole, not a license to do as one pleased.

For the Greeks, things belonged in the same category if they were describ-able by the same attributes.

But the philosopher Donald Munro points out that, for the Chinese, shared attributes did not establish shared class membership. Instead, things were classed together because they were thought to influence one another through resonance. For example, in the Chinese system of the Five Processes, the categories spring, east, wood, wind, and green all influenced one another. Change in wind would affect all the others—in "a process like a multiple echo, without physical contact coming between any of them."

Categories are denoted by nouns. It seems obvious that nouns would be easier for a young child to learn than verbs. All you have to do to learn that the animal you just saw is a "bear" is to notice its distinctive features—huge size, large teeth and claws, long fur, ferocious appearance—and you can store that object away with its label. The label is then available for application to any other object having that set of properties.

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. "To throw" means to use your arm and hand to move an object through the air to a new location. Merely pointing at the action does not guarantee that someone will know what you're referring to.

Categories are denoted by nouns. It seems obvious that nouns would be easier for a young child to learn than verbs. All you have to do to learn that the animal you just saw is a "bear" is to notice its distinctive features—huge size, large teeth and claws, long fur, ferocious appearance—and you can store that object away with its label. The label is then available for application to any other object having that set of properties.

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. "To throw" means to use your arm and hand to move an object through the air to a new location. Merely pointing at the action does not guarantee that someone will know what you're referring to.East Asian children learn verbs at about the same rate as nouns and, by some definitions of what counts as a noun, at a significantly faster rate than nouns. There are several factors that might underlie this dramatic difference.
First, verbs are more salient in East Asian languages than in English and many other European languages. Verbs in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean tend to come either at the beginning or the end of sentences and both are relatively salient locations. In English, verbs are more commonly buried in the middle.
(...) They found big differences in the behavior of mothers even with their youngest children. American mothers used twice as many object labels as Japanese mothers ("piggie," "doggie") and Japanese mothers engaged in twice as many social routines of teaching politeness norms (empathy and greetings, for example). An American mother's patter might go like this: "That's a car. See the car? You like it? It's got nice wheels." A Japanese mother might say: "Here! It's a vroom vroom. I give it to you. Now give this to me. Yes! Thank you." American children are learning that the world is mostly a place with objects, Japanese children that the world is mostly about relationships.

Many of the categories used to understand the world refer to presumed qualities of the object: hardness, whiteness, kindness, timidity.

 Easterners of course use such categories as well, but they are less likely to abstract them away from particular objects: There is the whiteness of the horse or the whiteness of the snow in ancient Chinese philosophy, but not whiteness as an abstract, detachable concept that can be applied to almost anything. In the Western tradition, objects have essences composed of mix-and-match abstract qualities. These essences allow for confident predictions about behavior independent of context. In the Eastern tradition, objects have concrete properties that interact with environmental circumstances to produce behavior. There was never any interest in discussing abstract properties as if they had a reality other than being a characteristic of a particular object.

The obsession with categories of the either/or sort runs through Western intellectual history. Dichotomies abound in every century and form the basis for often fruitless debates: for example, "mind-body" controversies in which partisans take sides as to whether a given behavior is best understood as being produced by the mind independent of any biological embodiment, or as a purely physical reaction unmediated by mental processes.

The difference between the two groups would seem to be that Americans are simply more in the habit of applying logical rules to ordinary events than Koreans and are therefore more capable of ignoring the plausibility of the conclusions.

East Asians, then, are more likely to set logic aside in favor of typicality and plausibility of conclusions. They are also more likely to set logic aside in favor of the desirability of conclusions.

Example
Premise 1: All things that are made from plants are good for health.
Premise 2: Cigarettes are things that are made from plants.
Conclusion: Cigarettes are good for health.

Logical but implausible

Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Philosophical Investigations, brought the whole necessity-and-sufficiency enterprise crashing to earth in the West. Wittgenstein argued to the satisfaction (or rather, dismay) of even the most analytic of Western philosophers that establishing necessary and sufficient conditions for any complex or interesting category, such as a "game" or a "government" or an "illness," was never going to be possible. A thing can be a game even if it is not fun, even if played alone, even if its chief goal is to make money. A thing is not necessarily a game even if it is fun or is a nonproductive activity engaging several people in pleasurable interaction. Wittgenstein's sermon would never have been needed in the East. The pronouncement that complex categories cannot always be defined by necessary and sufficient conditions would scarcely have been met with surprise.

EAST DIALECTICISM AND LOVE OF CONTRADICTIONS

The reasons for these differences in preference for contradiction are deep. There is a style of reasoning in Eastern thought, traceable to the ancient Chinese, which has been called dialectical, meaning that it focuses on contradictions and how to resolve them or transcend them or find the truth in both. At the risk of doing violence to the spirit of dialecticism, which does not make use of hard and fast rules about reasoning, we can describe three principles that are important to it, which Kaiping Peng has articulated.

The Principle of Change The Eastern tradition of thought emphasizes the constantly changing nature of reality. The world is not static but dynamic and changeable. Being in a given state is just a sign that the state is about to change. Because reality is in constant flux, the concepts that reflect reality are fluid and subjective rather than being fixed and objective.

The Principle of Contradiction Because the world is constantly changing, oppositions, paradoxes, and anomalies are continuously being created. Old and new, good and bad, strong and weak exist in everything. In fact opposites complete each other and make each other up. Taoists see the two sides of any apparent contradiction existing in an active harmony, opposed but connected and mutually controlling. "Tao is conceived as both 'is' and 'is not.' " As the founder of the Taoist School, Lao-tzu, put it: "When the people of the world all know beauty as beauty, there arises the recognition of ugliness; when they all know the good as good, there arises the recognition of evil. And so, being and nonbeing produce each other . . ." Or as Mao Tse-tung, longtime Chinese dictator who regarded himself as a philosopher and poet as well as a politician and soldier, wrote:"... On the one hand [opposites] are opposed to each other, and on the other they are interconnected, interpenetrating, interpermeating and interdependent, and this character is described as identity."

The Principle of Relationship, or Holism As a result of change and opposition, nothing exists in an isolated and independent way, but is connected to a multitude of different things. To really know a thing, we have to know all its relations, like individual musical notes embedded in a melody.
The three principles of dialectical reasoning are related. Change produces contradiction and contradiction causes change; constant change and contradiction imply that it is meaningless to discuss the individual part without considering its relationships with other parts and prior states. The principles also imply another important tenet of Eastern thought, which is the insistence on finding the Middle Way between extreme propositions. There is a strong presumption that contradictions are merely apparent and to believe that "A is right and B is not wrong either." This stance is captured by the Zen Buddhis

(Though the Hegelian or Marxist dialectic, with its emphasis on thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, has been held to be more "aggressive" than the Eastern variety because the effort is always toward obliterating the contradiction rather than accepting it or transcending it or using it to understand some state of affairs better.)

Westerners tend not to be aware of the strength of their commitment to some logical principles that conflict directly with the spirit of Eastern dialecticism. These include the law of identity, which holds that a thing is itself and not some other thing, and the law of noncontradiction, which holds that a proposition can't be both true and false. The Western insistence on this pair of logical principles and the Eastern spirit of dialecticism are, on the surface at least, in direct opposition to each other.

There is some evidence that socialization of children in the East is moving toward the Western pattern. Harold Stevenson and his colleagues monitored the mothers of children in a particular elementary school in Beijing for more than a decade beginning in the mid-eighties, asking them what it was that they wanted for their children. When the study began, the mothers' concerns were for their children's relational skills—their ability to fit in harmoniously with others. Ten years later, the mothers were interested mostly in the same things that Western mothers are: Does my child have the skills and the independence to get ahead in the world?

*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. These include Singapore, Taiwan, and, to a lesser degree, Iran.

Thus we all function in some respects more like Easterners some of the time and more like Westerners some of the time. A shift in characteristic social practices could therefore be expected to produce a shift in typical patterns of perception and thought.

So I believe the twain shall meet by virtue of each moving in the direction of the other. East and West may contribute to a blended world where social and cognitive aspects of both regions are represented but transformed— like the individual ingredients in a stew that are recognizable but are altered as they alter the whole. It may not be too much to hope that this stew will contain the best of each culture.

The Geography of thought, How Asians and Westerners think differently, Richard Nisbett