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Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

The long-standing presumption in Western thought has been that vision and audition are more objective than the other senses, serving as the basis of knowledge and understanding, whereas touch, taste, and smell are crude and of little value.

Uhh... citation needed?

Off the top of my head, certainly Proust would disagree.

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The paper makes citations for these claims. For example:

"Modern reworkings of the Aristotelian hierarchy give primacy to sight followed by hearing, touch, and then taste and smell (20, 21). Regardless of the precise characterization, the distal senses of vision and audition are privileged at the expense of the lowly proximal senses of touch, taste, and smell (22)."

The relevant citations are:

[20] Viberg Å (1984) The verbs of perception: A typological study. Explanations for Language Universals, eds Butterworth B, Comrie B, Dahl Ö (Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin), pp 123–162. http://www.pnas.org/lookup/google-scholar?link_type=googlesc...

[21] San Roque L, et al. (2015) Vision verbs dominate in conversation across cultures, but the ranking of non-visual verbs varies. Cogn Linguist 26:31–60. http://www.pnas.org/lookup/google-scholar?link_type=googlesc...

[22] Howes D (2005) Empire of the Senses (Berg, Oxford). http://www.pnas.org/lookup/google-scholar?link_type=googlesc....

We got him

Even the concept of Western thought is dubious itself, there's not much in common culturally between "western" countries. There's no common language, values or vision of society.

Maybe I don't know what the definition of "Western" countries is but if there's one thing that seems common to me across them it's Christianity. Every western country I've been to is full of churches.

There's clearly a lot of thought influenced by those churches. It wasn't until I moved to the other side of the world did I have the experience of cultures not nearly as influenced by Christian thought.

I don't have concrete examples of the top of my head but I've read academic papers trying to put forth ideas about universal human behavior that clearly have never lived outside a Christian influenced culture. Even if the author was atheist they didn't seem to notice how those influences shaped their conclusions.

Try looking at how missionary shape south America and Africa... I bet they are not "western" countries, also in Europe "church" power vary from country to country, for instance in France it have both little presence and power, in Spain or Italy have far more presence and power.

Christianity itself steal many aspect of ancient religions from Egyptian one to Celtic and Romans one. Just as an example in ex-Celtic area of Europe christmas symbol's are mostly ex-celtic like "decorated fir tree", santa claus (a male dressed with heavy winter clothes red because of the blood of animals he have killed being a hunter), a big wooden log to be burning in the night etc. In ex Viking part of EU santa claus is a female with more "Viking" dress, in the southern christmas nativity scene are far more common while still remain winter/snowy scene certainly not possible in ancient Lebanon etc.

Substantially all Christianity events Christmas, all saints, Easter etc are Celtic or Roman or Greek events. Think only about our time measure: ancient Roman count days starting with "ora prima" (first hour) in the morning, Celts use midnight as we use today (an ancient Roman phrase "the Celts are a strange population that count days starting from the nights").

Religions are political means to subjugate populations so their history mostly follow political/military history of the world.

Christianity spread far far more than just "Western" countries, just have a look at Africa or South America, you even have a lot of Christians in Asia. There's probably more christians outside the West than in it.

Certainly one way of categorizing western society is white supremacy and dominance of white culture.

That's not really a common point to have the same skin colour. And what "white culture" does even mean?

"European-originated culture" is perhaps a better term. And it makes sense, in that a lot of cultural idioms and thinking is shaped from similar Greco-Roman origins in these cultures.

It's always possible to say "X is too diverse to be called a single culture" because these things are fractal (there's more diversity to discover at every level), but on a global scale, it makes sense to use "white culture" or "European-originated culture" as a reasonably precise term.

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