Modal Logics II: Toward a Formal Analysis of Cultural Objects

Abstract

In this essay we hope to make some progress toward an explication or rational reconstruction of the concept culture, which has been of interest to philosophers at least since the time of Hegel ⁸, and also to social scientists since the 1870’s, when Tylor ²⁵ explicitly introduced the concept as an analytic category. Our aim is not only to clarify the concept, but also to indicate some unfortunate effects of philosophical naïveté on the part of some social scientists, who have in fact been embroiled in problems calling for careful philosophical analysis, without recognizing the importance of philosophical techniques. We hope also to show the relevance of our analysis to some traditional philosophical problems, such as the realist-nominalist ontological debate, and the continuing critique of Aristotelian essentialism. And we remark finally that the problem is by no means artificial: we feel that the issues we hope to clarify have been genuinely perplexing both to philosophers and to social scientists.

This research was supported in part by the Office of Naval Research, Group Psychology Branch, Contract # SAR/Nonr-609 (16). We are forced again as in our last article ¹⁷ to apologize to our friends Jon Barwise, Nuel D. Belnap, Jr., and Neil Gallagher, for boring them to tears in the course of reading and re-reading earlier drafts of this article. They are not to be held accountable for our errors, but they have surely saved us from many.