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Ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'The Philosophy of Philosophy' and 'Goodbye Descartes'

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24. Political Theory / B. Nature of a State / 5. Culture
If languages are intertranslatable, and cognition is innate, then cultures are all similar [Williamson]
     Full Idea: Given empirical evidence for the approximate intertranslatability of all human languages, and a universal innate basis of human cognition, we may wonder how 'other' any human culture really is.
     From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 8.1)
     A reaction: This seems to be a fairly accurate account of the situation. In recent centuries people seem to have been over-impressed by superficial differences in cultural behaviour, but we increasingly see the underlying identity.