Artefacts of Encounter

Abstract

Geoffrey Lloyd s paper, like his book Cognitive Variations (2007), brings together a range of discussions still playing out within and across various academic disciplines, relating to questions about the unity and diversity of the human mind; in particular, the degree to which people perceive, reason, and conceive of things differently. In his analysis of these largely disjointed projects, Lloyd draws out the broader implications of certain trajectories of research, examining underlying assumptions that are not always acknowledged within a given programme of study but which clearly influence the kinds of results achieved as well as their interpretation. In this sense, his work here as elsewhere (Lloyd 2009) concerns the ability of increasingly specialized disciplines to speak to one another, as much as it examines the issue of cognitive variation among individuals and groups of people. The query at the heart of his inquiry seems to turn on whether the variety of the ways in which we (qua disciplines or people) conceive of things is so great that we can t even discuss cognition meaningfully amongst ourselves (for example, within the Anglophone scholarly community) let alone with those who might be debating similar issues in other languages and intellectual traditions.