ABSTRACT
Much cultural change consists of young people learning something different in their socialization from what their elders believe. The main point of this chapter is that one changes culture by formalizing it. Some formalizing processes are doomed to failure, as when juries continue to make inferences that lawyers and judges do not like, and the National Science Foundation fails to make scientists do research by the numbers. This chapter is a generalization to cultural structures of what Noam Chomsky called the generativity of grammar. It breaks particular areas of culture into rapidly changing "frontier" parts, such as research physics, and more stable parts, such as the physics in the elementary textbook. The chapter is about culture change by formalization of culture. Culture as well as social organization is formalized –devoted to specialized purposes, turned into algorithms, written into computer programs, arranged into dictionaries, codified by bar association committees, or drawn into blueprints.
