The opening of Naming the Mind is a REMARKABLE anecdote:
Danzinger walks into an Indonesian university, realises that there is a 'Western psychology' class and an 'Eastern psychology' class, and proposes to do a combined seminar ...
And then fails to find any common ground.
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For context, I'm reading this because Lisa Feldman Barrett assigns it to everyone in her lab:
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“If you’re interested in psychology of the mind, there’s a book called Naming The Mind by Kurt Danzinger …”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s about where we got the idea that the human mind is populated by thoughts and feelings and perceptions. Because that’s not universal.”
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"Chinese thinking often gives no attention to distinctions which for Western minds are so traditional and so firmly established in thought and language, that we neither question them nor even become aware of them as distinctions."
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I find this hilarious, because it implies that — for 'emotional intelligence', at least — the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is real.
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Replying to @tom_morganKCP
The idea that different traditions have different theories of minds, and therefore they can build up totally coherent bodies of useful tools — I find this awesome and also hilarious, because a practitioner of one tradition will find another tradition totally incomprehensible!
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LOL "Psychologists did not invent the concept of 'emotion', for example, to account for certain empirical findings, they obtained certain empirical findings because of their desire to investigate a set of events which their culture had taught them to distinguish as 'emotional'."
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Ok this is an excellent opening to a book. It's like Danzinger decided to take the entire body of knowledge that is psychology, and then gleefully set all of its foundations on fire.
Here he is arguing that what we call intelligence (the g factor) might not be intelligence:
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