TOK REFERENCING: culture has played a dominant role in influencing the cognitive processes of a knower, and if consciously paid attention to , helps one educate their selves on the cognitive biases that may be due to their cultural backgrounds. This aspect is important to know as a knower and help us as knowers’, question the credibility and reliability of the knowledge we possess. These aspects are journeyed through, in this blog page.
Over the summer, I became more aware of things that I knew that I didn’t know about. Like for example I don’t know how cow meat tastes like because the cultural background I’m from, restricts me from tasting cow meat because we pray cows. Although the vast interest in spirituality my culture shows has enabled me to have in depth knowledge on the spiritual realms and knowledge that would concern a possible spiritual world. This led me to my knowledge question: Does our culture determine what we know?
Culture defined according to the online dictionary is “the customs, ideas, beliefs, etc. of a particular society, country, etc.” Our culture is what often tailors our view of the world without us consciously aware of it happening.
To decide whether it indeed determines what we know or not, we must consider two possible standpoints before reaching an evaluated conclusion.
On one hand it is relevant to say that culture determines what we know because culture influences how we think. This ultimately means that it has control over what we know. This control over our thought process can be understood by looking at individualistic and collective cultures. Individualistic cultures are cultures that don’t necessarily have strict regulations and are more oriented towards an individualistic mindset where one can have independent beliefs, thoughts, and ideologies that not necessarily are homogenous across a group.
A collective culture however focuses on group oriented beliefs, thoughts, and ideologies and do not encourage individualistic mindsets. Thus, people from a collective culture aren’t very open to open minded thoughts. This may reduce their exposure to different perspectives which in turn can limit what they know. Thus, in this case, the particular culture draws a boundary on what and how much a person can know. A person from an individualistic culture may face the opposite of a person from a collective culture.
According to research it has also been proved that culture can affect the amount of specifics one can manage to recall. This in other terms can be said as the specifics we choose to ‘know’ over the rest. Qi Wang from Cornell University conducted research on this particular matter. He came to find out that American children could recall more on personal events that took place in their lives and talk about their personalities better than the Asian children who were better at recalling group events and social relationships. This further emphasizes on the fact that cultural aspects and background have influence on our cognition and our memory.
On the other hand however, the fact that culture doesn’t determine what we know can be justified. Some cultures do not acknowledge the existence of the LGBTQ+ community, but that doesn’t prevent most of us from knowing it. The increase in social media platforms and a paradigm shift from what was the ‘time of religion’ to what is now called the ‘time of science’ has detached us or has loosely bounded us to our culture. We have become increasingly open minded due to knowledge gained from many sources online, and the many evidences gained from science and logical thinking, which has prevented us from using our culture to fill in the grey areas of doubt or unknowns. Thus, it can also be said that, culture doesn’t solely determine what we know.
By evaluating both sides of the argument, I come to the conclusion that culture does influence what we know to a certain extent but doesn’t fully dictate or determine what we entirely know as we are influenced by external factors (media, knowledge on other cultures etc) on a daily basis.
Sources:
2. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/08/170804103911.htm
3. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/how-culture-affects-the-way-we-think
4. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11785-can-culture-dictate-the-way-we-see/
5. Online dictionary
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individualistic_culture
cover image source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fL5WzpuvXfY, time - 0:51
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