Riassunto esame Lingua Inglese, prof. Russo, libro consigliato Language, Culture and Identity, Riley

The social knowledge system

Notes on the concept of culture

The term culture refers to the specific characteristics of diverse social groups: sport and gastronomy, the media, politics and the arts, age and economic. The term 'culture' possesses two connotations: first, it is a metaphorical opposition to 'nature': it is a product of human activity and effort, the sum of knowledge which humanity has produced, accumulated, stored and transmitted throughout history. In Oxford English Dictionary, culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom and any other capabilities acquired by man as a member of society; while 'civilization' was used to describe the gradual refinement of manners and was seen as the process which saves humanity from ignorance and irrationality.

Structures and functions of the social knowledge system

Knowledge is 'what makes society possible', because in every society, people need to have something in common; and this common knowledge is shared and acquired in and through language. Any society can be described as a set of structures and functions for the management of knowledge, which, taken together, form the social knowledge system. The most important of these are:

• Creation and production: Society is continuously producing knowledge which has to be 'epistemologized' into new domains and bodies. Access to any knowledge depends on and determines the individual's social identity.
• Organization: Existing knowledge is organized into disciplines and domains with their own principles of relevance and objects. Bodies of knowledge include scientific knowledge, but also practical knowledge, common sense, religious or revealed knowledge and magic.
• Storage: Knowledge is stored in social institutions, such as language, codes of law, oral history, literature and mythology, and is stocked in repositories such as libraries, archives, data banks, etc.
• Distribution: Knowledge is distributed differentially, creating epistemic communities. Professions and occupations are the most obvious kinds of epistemic community, but teams and clubs, associations and gangs usually share some kind of local knowledge which unites and identifies them. They also have communicative networks and practices, including sermons, gossip, scandal, debate, publications, etc. Reading and social interaction are the main modalities of knowledge propagation.
• Legitimation: Dominant discourses are established through discussion, power, interest and ideology. They are justified by authority, rationality, consensus, revelation, magic or pragmatic procedures. Non-dominant discourses may attempt to challenge or subvert such claims and their own terms, by accepting their forms of argument but rejecting their conclusions, or by denying the validity, relevance or legitimacy of the forms of argument employed.
• Use: Knowledge is demonstrated, applied and transferred: it is implemented through technologies, skills and competencies.

The social learning process

All knowledge is conditioned by the social knowledge system and by the communicative practices through which it is negotiated and distributed. These forms of transmission include - 'How you explain', 'How you teach', 'How you bring up children', and so on. The primary mechanism of the social knowledge system and, therefore, of the social learning process is language. The distribution and acquisition of knowledge takes place during dyadic or group interactions in which participants establish intersubjectivity, a state of shared meaning.

The ability to establish intersubjectivity, to enter into social contact with another, is a necessary condition for the formation of identity. It may be provoked by an innate capacity to recognize others as human beings, and to attribute mental processes, attitudes and intentions to them, that is, to recognize them as persons. This approach is known as 'Innate Intersubjectivity Theory', which argues that infants have the capacity to link the subjective evaluation of experience with those other persons. Here it’s clear that culture is acquired on the basis of biological programming: the capacity to enter into intersubjective relationship we are born with is the foundation of our ability to form and acquire cultures.

Access to knowledge depends on the nature and quality of the individual's participation in social life, on their social identity and on their state of knowledge at a given time. This is why any theory of 'culture' is necessarily a theory of communication, of the ways in which a group preserves its identity, by transmitting its knowledge to new members. Culture is the knowledge members of a society need if they are to participate competently in the various situations and activities life puts in.