Concepts, Generalizations, Abstractions and Ideas
A dog's acquisition of a behavior satisfies one of the requirements of culture, but it also fulfills another. If you were to take a dog that has learned not to eliminate indoors to a different house, it would still know not to eliminate there. This is because the dog has made a generalization. It knows not to urinate or defecate in any house, not just the one in which it was taught. However, this behavior only makes two of the four requirements.
Read more about this topic: Cultural Behavior
Famous quotes containing the words abstractions and/or ideas:
“But the nature of our civilized minds is so detached from the senses, even in the vulgar, by abstractions corresponding to all the abstract terms our languages abound in, and so refined by the art of writing, and as it were spiritualized by the use of numbers, because even the vulgar know how to count and reckon, that it is naturally beyond our power to form the vast image of this mistress called “Sympathetic Nature.””
—Giambattista Vico (1688–1744)
“A religion, that is, a true religion, must consist of ideas and facts both; not of ideas alone without facts, for then it would be mere Philosophy;Mnor of facts alone without ideas, of which those facts are symbols, or out of which they arise, or upon which they are grounded: for then it would be mere History.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)