ABSTRACT
Psychologists and philosophers have long assumed that basic processes of cognition and perception are universal—that inductive and deductive inference, attention, memory, categorization, and causal analysis are the same for everyone in every culture. Historians and philosophers of science, however, have raised the possibility that, at least for ancient Chinese and Greek scientists and philosophers, conceptions of the world and the cognitive processes used to understand it were very different (e.g., Cromer, 1993; Lloyd, 1990; Nakamura, 1964/1985). For example, although the Greeks formalized logic and made use of it for many cognitive operations, including geometry, the Chinese never formalized logic, and indeed, except for two brief periods around the third century B.C., never had much concern with logic at all (Becker, 1986). Presumably as a consequence, the ancient Chinese made little progress in geometry despite that they made great strides in arithmetic and algebra (Cromer, 1993).
