Relational thinking and the cultural conditionality of human understanding

Rošker, Jana S. (author)

For Western researchers, the confrontation and understanding of so-called “non-Western” cultural traditions are intricately bound up with linguistic, cultural, historical, and socializational disparity issues. Indeed, the interpretation of various cultures is a process where not only the subject of the interpretation, i.e., the culture, is important, but also interpreter-related factors, e.g., in terms of geography, politics, and economy, play a role. A basic assumption of the present chapter is that Western epistemology embodies only one of the numerous diverse models of human thought and our perception of reality. This chapter presents a specific epistemology, which differs in its characteristics from the norms derived from Euro-American epistemological discourses. The basic paradigms of this model, which I call “relational epistemology,” have been developed in Sinic, especially Chinese, intellectual traditions; it is predicated on the idea of seeing the world as a complex network of interconnections. Such models for interpreting questions of knowledge were thus based on the compatibility of the structures of external reality on the one hand and the structure of the human mind on the other.

• Language: English
• Keywords: intercultural methodology, interpretation, mind, perception, reality, relational network, structural compatibility, transcultural epistemology, Confucianism, relationism, cultural conditionality of deciding, theory of perception
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.16 - Independent Scientific Component Part or a Chapter in a Monograph
• Organization: FF - Faculty of Arts
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Author Accepted Manuscript
• Year: 2023
• Number of pages: Str. 19-36
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-143765
• UDC: 1
• COBISS.SI-ID: 136746243
• Publication date in RUL: 11.01.2023

Record is a part of a monograph

• Title: Brain, decision making and mental health
• Editors: Nima Rezaei
• Place of publishing: Cham
• Publisher: Springer
• ISBN: 978-3-031-15958-9
• COBISS.SI-ID: 136739843
• Collection title: Integrated science
• Collection numbering: 12
• Collection ISSN: 2662-9461

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: konfucijanstvo, odnosnost, kulturna pogojenost odločanja, teorija percpecije

Projects

• Funder: ARRS - Slovenian Research Agency
• Project number: N6-0161
• Name: Humanizem v medkulturni perspektivi: Evropa in Kitajska

• Funder: ARRS - Slovenian Research Agency
• Funding programme: P6-0243
• Project number: P6-0243
• Name: Azijski jeziki in kulture