Abstract

Is it racist to think that black people think differently from Asian people or that

Asian people think differently from white people? In one sense, we want to avoid

assuming that someone’s appearance or skin color has any relevance to the intellectually

or morally relevant aspects of their being—the ‘content of their character’ which Martin

Luther King jr. hoped everyone would eventually learn to engage when interacting with

one another. Still in another way, we seem to care about giving people credit for cultural

contributions in a way that suggests that ethnic heritage ‘belongs’ to groups of persons in

ways that are not entirely arbitrary. That is, we seem to intuitively associate black music

with black people, mariachi with Mexican people and Indian music with Indian people.

Of course, this is not random. Music and language are important to brain development.

So it seems tenable that there are mental attributes of cultural identity that vary in ways

that we (non-arbitrarily) associate with varied physical appearances.

John Locke discovered that persons are distinct from bodies. He recognized that

the minds of agents are central to moral questions about blame and responsibility. This

distinction has endured for centuries and American society is founded on Locke’s premise

that persons are essentially psychological beings—from our legal system to our regard for

mental health. For example, conceiving persons psychologically was central to Locke’s

conception of human nature and political theory of natural rights. An important aspect of

personal identity that Locke did not consider when he first analyzed persons in mental

terms was race, but persons inherit cognitive patterns that determine how they perceive

themselves and their environments from their cultures. In fact, much of what makes us

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ourselves comes by way of mental inheritance which resembles biological inheritance.

But we are still unaccustomed to considering how mental patterns across populations

shape agency in ways that are similar to how human races are studied in biology. This

dissertation attempts to get to the core of the problem by asking ‘What does it mean to be

a person of a specific ethnicity or culture?’. Methodologically, the approach taken here

will be naturalistic, drawing from the best evidence across the sciences, arts and

humanities.

I employ meme theory for its simple depiction of cultural identity as inheritance.

But the theoretical stances of this dissertation do not depend on meme theory’s

correctness or reflect a strong commitment to the theory. I agree with critics of this theory

that it exaggerates the resemblance between biology and culture. As it stands, I believe

that the theory is very probably false. Still, in this circumstance, it helps to use a very

simple model as a place-holder for other theories of cultural transmission. I do not think

my account relies on the details in any way that matters.

Since I will be discussing several types of identity in the coming chapters, allow

me to provide a few definitions. I use ‘psychological identity’ and ‘cognitive identity’

interchangeably and I use both as broader than ‘narrative identity’. So when I ask what it

might mean to be cognitively or psychologically black I mean to ask the same question

by both terms. It would be different to ask what it means to be narratively black. When I

discuss ‘narrative identity’ I mean a person’s story. I agree that a person’s story is relevant

to their psychological identity, but deny that narrative conceptions of identity include

everything that is important to identity. Although having a life-story that involves being

black is relevant, there is more to being mentally black than having the right story. This

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makes my account of identity distinct in two ways. Firstly, having the right narrative is

not obviously sufficient for having a black psychological identity. Secondly, it allows that

certain non-narrative traits are sufficient for a black psychological identity. To preview, I

will be arguing that belonging to ethnic groups involves sharing perceptual and

attentional dispositions in common with the group and that many non-propositional

mental states are of importance to psychological identity. Many of the most important

details of my account do not emerge until the later chapters, so if the reader finds the

discussion of race and mind to be too slow or unclear in the earlier chapters, feel free to

skip ahead. I think the current order motivates the discussion in a logical fashion, but this

might appear to be at the expense holding back on stating my own, more nuanced views

for the end

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5021732&forum_id=2#43888756)