The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why

I've mentioned Richard E. Nisbett's book The Geography of Thought a couple of times.

I can't possibly get into a whole long Thoughtfest about whether Asians actually do or do not think differently in some overarching way than Westerners....at least, not until I figure out reciprocals. (news flash: I've made progress on that front, thanks to Dan K!)

So here's what looks like a decent summary of the book (which I haven't read myself) in Education Review, and here's what looks like an interesting critique of the book at a blog I keep meaning to spend some time reading, Gene Expression.


warning: I've glanced at these 2 sites, & that's it. Both look interesting. End of message.


Nisbett is a psychologist who teaches at the University of Michigan. He's a serious guy, the recipient of a Guggenheim and a blurb from Howard Gardner, no less.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF THOUGHT is interesting to me, because of what Nisbett has to say about Asian superiority in math.

Most Americans (I'm willing to bet) think Asians are genetically superior in math. I've had 4th graders tell me Asians are genetically in math.

Nisbett says that not only are Asians not genetically superior at math, the only reason they're functionally superior at math is that, in essence, they're outworking us. Asian culture, in his view, does not particularly support mathematical thought, by which he means logical thought, or the logic of noncontradiction.

Most advances in mathematics were made by Westerners, few by Asians, and older generations in Asia in fact aren't particularly talented in math. (This is certainly something I heard from the Chinese mom I met at tennis lessons. Her husband, a Ph.D. mathematician, is to this day in awe of American mathematicians. I was shocked when I heard this, because I had the same Asian-math-awe everyone else does.)

excerpts from THE GEOGRAPHY OF THOUGHT:

The Greek faith in categories had scientific payoffs, immediately as well as later, for their intellectual heirs. Only the Greeks made classifications of the natural world sufficiently rigorous to permit a move from the sorts of folk-biological schemes that other peoples constructed to a single classification system that ultimately could result in theories with real explanatory power.

A group of mathematicians associated with Pythagoras is said to have thrown a man overboard because it was discovered that he had revealed the scandal of irrational numbers, such as the square root of 2, which just goes on and on without a predictable pattern: 1.4142135 ..... [yup, that bugs me, too] Whether this story is apocryphal or not, it is certainly the case that most Greek mathematicians did not regard irrational numbers as real numbers at all. The Greeks lived in a world of discrete particles and the continuous and unending nature of irrational numbers was so implausible that mathematicians could not take them seriously.

On the other hand, the Greeks were probably pleased by how it was they came to know that the square root of 2 is irrational, namely via a proof from contradiction....

The Greeks were focused on, you might even say obsessed by, the concept of contradiction. If one proposition was seen to be in a contradictory relation with another, then one of the propositions had to be rejected. The principle of noncontradiction lies at the base of propositional logic. ....The basic rules of logic, including syllogisms, were worked out by Aristotle. He is said to have invented logic because he was annoyed at hearing bad arguments in the political assembly and in the agora! Notice that logical analysis is a kind of continuation of the Greek tendency to decontextualize. Logic is applied by stripping away the meaning of statements and leaving only their formal structure intact. This makes it easier to see whether an argument is valid or not. Of course as modern East ASians are fond of pointing out, that sort of decontextualization is not without its dangers. Like the ancient Chinese, they strive to be reasonable, not rational.

Chinese philosopher Mo-tzu made serious strides in the direction of logical thought in the fifth century B.C., but he never formalized his system and logic died an early death in China. Except for that brief interlude, the Chinese lacked not only logic, but even a principle of contradiction. India did have a strong logical tradition, but the Chiense translations of Indian texts were full of errors and misunderstandings. Although the Chinese made substantial advances in algebra and arithmetic, they made little progress in geometry because proofs rely on formal logic, especially the notion of contradiction. (Algebra did not become deductive until Descartes. Our educational system retains the memory trace of their separation by teaching algebra and geometry as separate subjects.)

The Greeks were deeply concerned with foundational arguments in mathematics. Other peoples had recipes; only the Greeks had derivations. On the other hand, Greek logic and foundational concern may have presented as many obstacles as opportunities. The Greeks never developed the concept of zero, which is required both for algebra and for an Arabic-style place number system. Zero was considered by the Greeks, but rejected on the grounds that it represented a contradiction. Zero equals nonbeing and nonbeing cannot be! An understanding of zero, as well as of infinity and infinitesimals, ultimately had to be imported from the East.

pages 24-27