The nature and Identity of Cultural Entities

Abstract

To characterize persons as cultural entities is to subsume at least a portion of psychological theory under the theory of culture. This breeds complications both because the nature of other sentient creatures and a large part of the sentient nature of man, an animal with a distinctive biological endowment, are not to be explained in cultural terms and because much that counts as cultural phenomena befalls entities that are not themselves endowed with minds. The intersection of the psychological and the cultural serves as well to focus our attention on the possible continuities and discontinuities between the natural sciences and what are variously called the behavioral or social or human sciences. That is, it challenges the assumption of the unity of science (Neurath et al. [1955] ). It challenges it in two ways at one stroke: admitting the distinction of persons and other cultural entities, admitting the irreducibility of the intentional (Sellars [1963a] ), entails that the methodology appropriate to physics and its allied sciences are inadequate for the explanation of the phenomena in question; fortiori, it entails the untenability of physicalism.