Roberts Carl W. (Editor). The Fifth Modality: On Languages that Shape our Motivations and Cultures

Brill, 2008. — xxiv, 191 pp. — (International Comparative Social Studies). — ISBN: 978-90-04-16235-8.This is a book about cultures, and about the motivations of those who participate in them. More precisely, the approach here is to differentiate among cultures solely in terms of how their members typically understand each other’s motivations. Such understanding is not problematic in tribal settings (within which everyone has opportunities to know everyone else) or between long-time acquaintances. However, when there are enough people in a society for most interactions to be between strangers, a “cultural default” is needed for them to understand why people act as they do. For example, when approached by a stranger you might assume that she wants you either to do something for her or to stop what I am doing, that she wishes either to guide you or to have you guide her, etc. With no cultural default for understanding strangers, you will not know how to react to them (with friendliness, fear, embarrassment, hubris...).Each culture’s default understanding of personhood is maintained as people consistently use a language-of-motivation — or a modality—when referring to each other. The vast majority of people in any given society generally assume one of these cultural modalities to be universal. In the book the grammars of these languages is made explicit. There are only four cultural modalities — a position that can only be taken from a more general language that incorporates them all. This fifth, nonuniversalistic modality will be compelling enough for you to try reading others in accordance with its grammar.On Persuasion
Reading Personhood
Gedankenexperiment
Individualism
Mutualism
Essentialism
Doctrinism
Another Modality
A Formalization.