David B Kronenfeld
Biographic Data
| ID | 78879 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David B Kronenfeld |
| GIVEN NAMES | David B |
| FAMILY NAME | Kronenfeld |
| SIGNATURE | KRONENFELD D B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Riverside |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 274 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 52 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
A Prototype Analysis of the Cultural and Evolutionary Construction of Romantic Love as a Synthesis of Love and Sex
Our goal is to use prototype analysis to distinguish the folk or culturally held understandings of love, romantic love, and sex and to specify, from the obtained data, the semantic relationship among these three associated concepts. By considering the semantic distinctions between these three concepts, we come to an unintended insight: if romantic love is a socio-cultural universal it does not appear to have the same evolutionary history as love …
Cultural Models
Cultural models refer to a kind of collectively held, distributed cognitive structure that serves as a repository of cultural knowledge for a cultural community. “Knowledge” here refers not just to intellectual and verbal knowledge but also to pragmatic knowledge of how to do things, of how to behave, and of the physical and social consequences of action. “Collectively held” knowledge contrasts with individual knowledge. “Distributed” means that …
Kinship Terminologies
Romantic Love in the United States
We seek to advance cultural models theory by contributing to issues related to theory, methods, and testing the external validity of a cultural model. We propose that cultural models are learned as if they were truly properties of collectivities but have no primary existence except in individual representations of them. The shared aspect of cultural models also implies collective awareness of the if-then entailments of cultural models. We use ind…
Anthropology and the Cognitive Challenge
What kinship is not- Schneider, Sahlins, and Shapiro
A Companion to Cognitive Anthropology
Cultural models
Kecskes: In your latest works and a recent book proposal you say that you do not consider culture and cultural models intrinsic parts of an individual's psyche and do not see them as filled-in specifications for actual behavior. You claim that they form, instead, scenarios of varying degrees of abstraction that can be applied by an individual to some particular situation. Could you elaborate on this idea, please? How do the individual and collect…
What Diagrams as a Formal Model Can and Cannot Represent; Examples from Language Family Trees
Models of theoretically generated relations among analytic entities have formal properties which enable them to accurately represent some desired relationships, but not necessarily all imaginable relationships. One important part of the modeling task is matching the properties of the model type with the relevant formal properties that one ascribes to the relationships being modeled. Some kinds of mismatches render the model type inappropriate for…
Formalization as a Tool for Empirical Research
Author(s): Kronenfeld, David B | Abstract: Introduction to the Special Issue on Formalization as a tool for empirical research: what it buys us and what it doesn't
Formal rules, cognitive representations and learning in language and other cultural systems
Definitions of Cross Versus Parallel
Following a brief introduction to typologies and the background of classifications of kinship terminologies, the author addresses this problem of needed revisions in our typology of kin terminological systems. First, he lays out an example involving the definition of cross versus parallel features in Dravidian- and Iroquois-type terminologies in which a lack of attention to explicit formal characterizations of systems has led to needless confusio…
On Language and Culture
The inevitability of folk etymology
The Ecology of Language Evolution
The Ecology of Language Evolution. Salikoko S. Mufwene. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 255 pp
Collective representations and social praxis
We consider an attempt - within an economy under pressure to stay competitive in an increasingly integrated global economic system - to reconcile the contradictory pressures of democratic values versus managerial efficiency, and of the desire for an effective social welfare safety net versus the need for budgetary responsibility. We focus on a local welfare committee's experimental attempt to improve morale and productivity through a combination …
The Uses of Formal Analysis re Cognitive and Social Issues
Using Sydney H. Gould's formalization of kin terminologies
Parts of the formalism recently developed by Sydney H. Gould (Gould, 2000) are used to explore three interrelated problems relating to kinship terminologies. (1) What insights into the role of kinship in a modern society may be gained from a comparison of terminological variants in use within that society. (2) How we are to understand the relationship between skewed and unskewed variants of a terminology such as Fanti. (3) What may be some of the…
Cultural encounters1
Karttunen, Frances. Between Worlds: Interpreters, Guides, and Survivors. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994. xiv + 364 pp. including notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95 cloth. Van den Berghe, Pierre L. The Quest for the Other: Ethnic Tourism in San Cristobal, Mexico. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994, xi + 169 pp. including bibliography and index. $24.95 cloth
Plastic Glasses and Church Fathers
Kronenfeld aims to present a comprehensive understanding of the process by which we use words in speech to refer to things in the world, and to develop a theory of the semantics of natural language which can account adequately for native speakers' intuitions regarding word meanings and their word usage
Regions Based on Social Structure
Boas argued that anthropologists should make historical comparisons within well-defined regional contexts. A century later, we have many improvements in the statistical methodologies for comparative research, yet most of our regional constructs remain without a valid empirical basis. We present a new method for developing and testing regions. The method takes into account older anthropological concerns with relationships between culture history a…
Language,Nineteen eighty-four, and 1989
The article examines the fact that the push for democracy and the end of Communist rule in Central Europe was phrased in terms of traditional European notions of freedom and democracy, in spite of longlived Communist attempts to redefine these and related terms in order to make them a Communist reality. Communist language usage was forcefully brought home to the West by George Orwell inNineteen Eighty-Four, especially in his notion of "doublethin…
Origins of the Modern Mind
The Four Fields
Symmetry and Entropy
Regions Based on Social Structure
Boas argued that anthropologists should make historical comparisons within well-defined regional contexts. A century later, we have many improvements in the statistical methodologies for comparative research, yet most of our regional constructs remain without a valid empirical basis. We present a new method for developing and testing regions. The method takes into account older anthropological concerns with relationships between culture history a…
An Algebraic Account of the American Kinship Terminology [and Comments and Reply]
Although componential and transformational analyses are the generally recognized domains for the study of kinship terminology structure, neither procedure completely elucidates the structure formed by kin terms as a system of terms. Both procedures ignore that kin terms, via a kin terms product, form a structure separate from the structure imposed on a genealogical space through definition of kin terms as sets of kin types. Separation of these le…
Mindscapes and Science Theories [and Comments and Reply]
Four causal metatypes in science theories correspond to four cognitive/cogitative/perceptual types which vary from individual to individual. In any given culture, all individual types exist, but their percentage distribution varies from culture to culture. The four metatypes are (1) nonreciprocal causality (either probabilistic or deterministic), (2) independent events as most basic, (3) reciprocal causal loops, change-counteracting (either proba…
Symmetry and Entropy
Particularistic or Universalistic Analyses of Fanti Kin-Terminology
A formal relative product analysis of the Fanti terminology, novel in its reliance on Fanti categories in the framing of genealogical strings and equivalence rules, is compared with an earlier Lounsburian analysis. The newer one provides the more cognitively 'real' definition of Fanti kin-term categories and of the logical relationship of the kin-term categories to one another, but is less suited to cross-system comparison and generalisation
Fanti Kinship
This article compares the results of a formal analysis of the three variant patterns of the Fanti kinship terminology and the marking hierarchy they form with the results of a multi-dimensional scaling and linear regression analysis of the bases of Fanti ascription of behavior to kinsmen. Terminological categories are shown to be a product of, but not a simple reflection of, patterns of behavior in the culture
Sibling Typology
Nerlove and Romney (1967), using assumptions about conjunctivity and markedness, identified a set of necessary conditions which any existent terminological arrangement of true siblings must fulfill. The present paper generalizes and extends their assumptions, explores the psychological bases of these assumptions, and investigates the degree to which these revised assumptions represent a set of conditions such that (given enough cases) any termino…
Asdiwal crumbles
Lévi-Strauss' use of ethnographic sources, of definitional terms, and his analytic categorization of incidents in the Asdiwal story is arbitrary, inconsistent, and even distorts the story text on occasion. His argument, in addition to being circular in places, is internally inconsistent, especially as regards the claim that when myths make negative evaluations, they always involve the opposite of real life, a claim which is, in fact, both support…
Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding
For both people and machines, each in their own way, there is a serious problem in common of making sense out of what they hear, see, or are told about the world. The conceptual apparatus necessary to perform even a partial feat of understanding is formidable and fascinating. Our analysis of this apparatus is what this book is about. Roger C. Schank and Robert P. Abelson from the Introduction (http://www.psypress.com/scripts-plans-goals-and-under…
Why Tikopia Has Four Clans
Structuralism
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological ...Read More
Romantic Love in the United States
We seek to advance cultural models theory by contributing to issues related to theory, methods, and testing the external validity of a cultural model. We propose that cultural models are learned as if they were truly properties of collectivities but have no primary existence except in individual representations of them. The shared aspect of cultural models also implies collective awareness of the if-then entailments of cultural models. We use ind…
Computer Analysis of Skewed Kinship Terminologies
Significant insights into the organization of kinship terminologies, and into methods for their analysis, have resulted from the construction of a computer program that reduces the ranges of kin-terms to kernel kin-types, identifies the operable equivalence rules, and uses the identified rules and kernels to re-expand the full range of the kin-terms. The program is based on the work of Romney and of Lounsbury, and has been run successfully on a n…
Definitions of Cross Versus Parallel
Following a brief introduction to typologies and the background of classifications of kinship terminologies, the author addresses this problem of needed revisions in our typology of kin terminological systems. First, he lays out an example involving the definition of cross versus parallel features in Dravidian- and Iroquois-type terminologies in which a lack of attention to explicit formal characterizations of systems has led to needless confusio…
Using Sydney H. Gould's formalization of kin terminologies
Parts of the formalism recently developed by Sydney H. Gould (Gould, 2000) are used to explore three interrelated problems relating to kinship terminologies. (1) What insights into the role of kinship in a modern society may be gained from a comparison of terminological variants in use within that society. (2) How we are to understand the relationship between skewed and unskewed variants of a terminology such as Fanti. (3) What may be some of the…
Language,Nineteen eighty-four, and 1989
The article examines the fact that the push for democracy and the end of Communist rule in Central Europe was phrased in terms of traditional European notions of freedom and democracy, in spite of longlived Communist attempts to redefine these and related terms in order to make them a Communist reality. Communist language usage was forcefully brought home to the West by George Orwell inNineteen Eighty-Four, especially in his notion of "doublethin…
Mathematics in Structural Theory [and Comments and Reply]
Levi-Strauss, amongst other anthropological theorists, has argued for the incorporation of mathematical formalization into anthropological theorizing. The integration of mathematical formalization with anthropological theory is examined in this article through the structural analysis of fandango (wedding) ritual as it is practiced among the Zapotec in a small village near Oaxaca, Mexico. The correspondence that is found between the details of the…
Cultural models
Kecskes: In your latest works and a recent book proposal you say that you do not consider culture and cultural models intrinsic parts of an individual's psyche and do not see them as filled-in specifications for actual behavior. You claim that they form, instead, scenarios of varying degrees of abstraction that can be applied by an individual to some particular situation. Could you elaborate on this idea, please? How do the individual and collect…
The inevitability of folk etymology
Revised Lexicostatistical Classification of Salishan Languages
Innate language
Kroeber v. Radcliffe-Brown on Kinship Behaviour
Reflexion sur la controverse entre Kroeber et Radcliffe-Brown, a savoir si notre comportement envers des parents se segmente de la meme facon que nos termes de parente. Des donnees sont rassemblees sur la terminologie de parente et le comportement, provenant des Fanti du Ghana, qui donnent raison a la these de Kroeber
Guttman Scaling
The Ecology of Language Evolution
The Ecology of Language Evolution. Salikoko S. Mufwene. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 255 pp
Collective representations and social praxis
We consider an attempt - within an economy under pressure to stay competitive in an increasingly integrated global economic system - to reconcile the contradictory pressures of democratic values versus managerial efficiency, and of the desire for an effective social welfare safety net versus the need for budgetary responsibility. We focus on a local welfare committee's experimental attempt to improve morale and productivity through a combination …
General and Ethnology
Let's Look at the Figures
Guttman Scaling
Fanti Kinship
This article compares the results of a formal analysis of the three variant patterns of the Fanti kinship terminology and the marking hierarchy they form with the results of a multi-dimensional scaling and linear regression analysis of the bases of Fanti ascription of behavior to kinsmen. Terminological categories are shown to be a product of, but not a simple reflection of, patterns of behavior in the culture
Sibling Typology
Nerlove and Romney (1967), using assumptions about conjunctivity and markedness, identified a set of necessary conditions which any existent terminological arrangement of true siblings must fulfill. The present paper generalizes and extends their assumptions, explores the psychological bases of these assumptions, and investigates the degree to which these revised assumptions represent a set of conditions such that (given enough cases) any termino…
Kroeber v. Radcliffe-Brown on Kinship Behaviour
Reflexion sur la controverse entre Kroeber et Radcliffe-Brown, a savoir si notre comportement envers des parents se segmente de la meme facon que nos termes de parente. Des donnees sont rassemblees sur la terminologie de parente et le comportement, provenant des Fanti du Ghana, qui donnent raison a la these de Kroeber
General, Applied, and Theoretical
Computer Analysis of Skewed Kinship Terminologies
Significant insights into the organization of kinship terminologies, and into methods for their analysis, have resulted from the construction of a computer program that reduces the ranges of kin-terms to kernel kin-types, identifies the operable equivalence rules, and uses the identified rules and kernels to re-expand the full range of the kin-terms. The program is based on the work of Romney and of Lounsbury, and has been run successfully on a n…
Asdiwal crumbles
Lévi-Strauss' use of ethnographic sources, of definitional terms, and his analytic categorization of incidents in the Asdiwal story is arbitrary, inconsistent, and even distorts the story text on occasion. His argument, in addition to being circular in places, is internally inconsistent, especially as regards the claim that when myths make negative evaluations, they always involve the opposite of real life, a claim which is, in fact, both support…
Life Sentences
Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding
For both people and machines, each in their own way, there is a serious problem in common of making sense out of what they hear, see, or are told about the world. The conceptual apparatus necessary to perform even a partial feat of understanding is formidable and fascinating. Our analysis of this apparatus is what this book is about. Roger C. Schank and Robert P. Abelson from the Introduction (http://www.psypress.com/scripts-plans-goals-and-under…
Mathematics in Structural Theory [and Comments and Reply]
Levi-Strauss, amongst other anthropological theorists, has argued for the incorporation of mathematical formalization into anthropological theorizing. The integration of mathematical formalization with anthropological theory is examined in this article through the structural analysis of fandango (wedding) ritual as it is practiced among the Zapotec in a small village near Oaxaca, Mexico. The correspondence that is found between the details of the…
Ethnology
Innate language
Structuralism
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological ...Read More
Mindscapes and Science Theories [and Comments and Reply]
Four causal metatypes in science theories correspond to four cognitive/cogitative/perceptual types which vary from individual to individual. In any given culture, all individual types exist, but their percentage distribution varies from culture to culture. The four metatypes are (1) nonreciprocal causality (either probabilistic or deterministic), (2) independent events as most basic, (3) reciprocal causal loops, change-counteracting (either proba…
Particularistic or Universalistic Analyses of Fanti Kin-Terminology
A formal relative product analysis of the Fanti terminology, novel in its reliance on Fanti categories in the framing of genealogical strings and equivalence rules, is compared with an earlier Lounsburian analysis. The newer one provides the more cognitively 'real' definition of Fanti kin-term categories and of the logical relationship of the kin-term categories to one another, but is less suited to cross-system comparison and generalisation
Toward a Convergence of Cognitive and Symbolic Anthropology
This review describes the conditions that have established the subfields of cognitive anthropology and symbolic anthropology as major clusterings of anthropologists. It discusses the influences in anthropology as well as in related areas of cognitive science, linguistics, and literary criticism that can bring the two subfields closer together. It also looks at future directions of study and suggests some of the characteristics that might be inclu…
Mathematical Social‐Cultural Anthropology
Why Tikopia Has Four Clans
Linguistics
Revised Lexicostatistical Classification of Salishan Languages
An Algebraic Account of the American Kinship Terminology [and Comments and Reply]
Although componential and transformational analyses are the generally recognized domains for the study of kinship terminology structure, neither procedure completely elucidates the structure formed by kin terms as a system of terms. Both procedures ignore that kin terms, via a kin terms product, form a structure separate from the structure imposed on a genealogical space through definition of kin terms as sets of kin types. Separation of these le…
Numerical Taxonomy
Numerical taxonomists in biology and scholars in other fields interested in similar classification tasks have used varieties of two techniques: hierarchical clustering and multidimensional scaling. They have tended to treat both kinds of techniques as all-purpose tools suited to all kinds of classification problems. Choices among techniques have been made in terms of which best accounted for inputted data matrices rather than with any attention t…
Graph theory's uses in formalizing anthropological theories
Hage, Per, and Frank Harary. Structural Models in Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. xiv + 201 pp. including appendix, references, and index. $12.95 paper
Sociology (37 works) · Computer Science (31 works) · Philosophy (24 works) · Epistemology (21 works) · Anthropology (19 works) · History (18 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · History (16 works) · Linguistics (16 works) · Psychology (16 works)