Abstract
Interest in and evidence for specialised habits of thinking that enable humans to adapt to ecological constraints on behaviour is not new. The psychological reality of habitual information processing modes is evident in caricatures of behaviour required to adapt to the stress of certain occupations. For example, impersonators project the verbal strategies of athletes, schoolteachers, political leaders, psychiatrists and others; and imitation presupposes a psychological certainty in actor and audience. Although valid categories and generalisations of behavioural adaptations have been prerequisites to caricature by entertainers, a scientific framework that allows their systematic definition and measurement has eluded psychologists. Much serious empiricism has accrued from mental measurement, but little of it seems aware of its own limitations as part of a science of mental life. This essay proposes a method for strengthening our structures of intellect by employing a taxonomy for regulating inferences from data. Then, a case study of the use of the taxonomy in evaluating data collected from the Shona of Zimbabwe over the past 25 years is presented.
This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Michael Hannan, S.J., a Canadian whose scholarship and humanity taught me another approach to the study of mental life.
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Irvine, S.H. (1988). Constructing the Intellect of the Shona: A Taxonomic Approach. In: Berry, J.W., Irvine, S.H., Hunt, E.B. (eds) Indigenous Cognition: Functioning in Cultural Context. NATO ASI Series, vol 41. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2778-0_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2778-0_9
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