Ossorio:Distinguish and relate culture, ways of life, and worlds. Draw a visual or a picture that includes all three.

Member of Audience: Guess whose question that was?

Ossorio: One way of doing it is to say that "Culture and a way of life are synonymous. A culture is a way of life." If you do it that way, though, then you need to take account of the kind of distinctions that are made by somebody who distinguishes cultures from ways of life. So one way or another you are going to have to account for certain distinctions. My preference personally is to say that they are the same. But that is a personal preference. You could do it the other way.

When it comes to culture you have not a definition but a parametric analysis. And the parametric analysis for culture starts with World, Members, Language, Social practices, and Statuses. Those are ways that one culture can be the same as another culture or different from it. That's a parametric analysis. Now notice that that connects culture and world directly. World is one of the parameters of culture. Every culture has some account, some understanding of the world in which that culture exists. It has some story about what's in it. It has some story about where they are in the world. It has some story about what's beyond the border. It has many stories about what goes on in the world. There is lots of detail involved in that parameter.

Member of Audience: It tells us what's possible and what's not possible.

Ossorio: Did you hear that? He said "what's possible and what's not possible." That too is part of the cultural picture of the world. Okay now, social practices come in structures. A culture is not just a jumbled collection of social practices. Those social practices are organized and by convention the next larger unit from a social practice is an institution. Institution is defined as an organized set of social practices. A culture provides the members with lots of possibilities of social practices and institutions to participate in. And everyone of those has lots of options of how you can participate in the same practice in the same institution in different ways. And as you might guess, some of those are not good. It's not good to step out in front of a moving car. It's not good to go around hitting people over the head. Those are options you have, but they are not good options from the cultural point of view.

Now what takes up the slack there is choice principles. And choice principles are a kind of protean notion because there are many ways to specify choice principles. The most common way is to talk about values, cultural values or personal values. The choice principle as you might guess is a principle for making choices. When you are faced with choices about which things to do and which options to take, you are not on your own. The culture also provides you with a variety of choice principles for how to live your life by making certain kinds of choices.

Choice principles, in turn, can be divided into central ones, intermediate, and peripheral. And Fernand is an expert on that because he did his dissertation on that. The dissertation said that when a person enters a new culture, the thing that changes first are his peripheral choice principles. Because those are most responsive to the milieu and if you move to a different milieu, very often your old ones are literally impossible. You can't come over here and still eat rice if there is no rice here. So those change quickly and are the first to change, and easiest. Then, the intermediate ones. And finally, if they change at all your central ones change. Why? Because the central ones are usually compatible with any milieu. After all, in your original culture there were plenty of different milieus and those choice principles applied across the board. So in a new culture they will also apply across the board. For example, if one of the primary choice principles is "Look out for your family above all else", you can do that as an immigrant to this country in the midst of all kinds of new social practices just as easily as you could do it in the old country with a familiar set of social practices. That's the nature of core principles. They are immune to ordinary things. You don't have to change them in the face of circumstances. But there are reasons why you might anyhow and if you don't, probably your children will.

Okay, now choice principles are where you locate the notion of a way of living. Which choices you make forms a kind of pattern. It gives a qualitative ... a distinct quality to your life. And it's a kind of thing that we by and large share. Now with the culturally approved choice principles are ones that lots of people will use. That's how you get social norms. There is also enough variety, at least in a culture like ours, so that different people can draw on the fund of choice principles and circumstances and live very different lives and still be living in accordance with the culture. Not being oddballs.

Now if you want to say that ways of living are the same as culture, then you have the problem of what do you call this. And I couldn't swear to it but I think that what I have done, in fact, is to distinguish between a way of life and a way of living. And a way of life is what goes with culture. A way of living is what goes with the person. Now as I said, those are not sacred. It's simply that you have this distinction that's real and you need to mark it with some different description. And either you use the contrast between culture and way of life, or you use the contrast between way of life and way of living or something else. It's the distinction that's important.

Member of Audience: You mentioned the parameters of culture. How are they different from the parameters of community?

Ossorio: Oh, a culture is a kind of community. Oh, by the way, choice principles is one of the parameters of culture.

Member of Audience: So you have the same list of parameters for cultures as you do for communities?

Ossorio: Pretty much, I think. Tony's differ from mine in very minor respects. I think he has social practices and locutions and I have a language, something like that.

Member of Audience: Does that make culture synonymous with a community?

Ossorio: No, one is a special case of the other. See, a culture is what you might call a stand alone community. It's one that can survive on its own without needing some other community. Now a community of psychologists does not have that feature. If you've just got a bunch of psychologists and nothing else, they are not going to survive unless they have a culture in the real sense. So, a culture is a stand alone community that is self sufficient enough to survive without any other culture in the picture. And that makes it a very special kind of community because any other community depends on this kind.

Member of Audience: Sometimes it seems to me there ought to be another parameter for cultures or communities analogous to personal characteristics, but called culture characteristics.

Ossorio: The choice principles are the main things to distinguish one culture from another.

Member of Audience: Not to withstand, but there are groups of choice principles. There are a lot of times that people want to talk about kinds of choice principles.

Member of Audience: Yeah, that...

Ossorio: Yeah, you mean like Germany is an authoritarian culture and England is a...

Member of Audience: Something to put it down to one culture.

Ossorio: Yeah. That's not one choice principle; it's a whole set of choice principles.

Member of Audience: That's what I say.

Member of Audience: Don't you do that through the standard old principles?

Ossorio: Yeah, but that's not part of the parametric analysis.

Member of Audience: Seems to me you could do that by taking central choice principles...

Ossorio: Well as I say that's how we mainly distinguish one culture from another. But you could do it the way you did it. It's hard and you have no guarantee that you will have interesting PC's. There are a few that we know about and can mention like authoritative Germany, but there's no guarantee that every culture has some interesting characteristic like that.

Member of Audience: When we talk about a way of living, I take it that creates a personal way of life. Here you could distinguish personal characteristics not just in terms of choice principles but in terms of dispositions as well, powers and dispositions. An example would be in your personal way of life may be heavily influenced by your affinity for mathematics or your affinity for art, color, etc. And I don't know that to just put that into terms of choice principles does it justice.

Ossorio: No, what I said is that you have a set of choice principles from which you draw. And, indeed, your characteristics are one of the main basis on which you draw these rather than those. Your circumstances are another. But, once you mention those two, guess what? It's simply a model for understanding behavior in general -- person characteristics and circumstances.

Member of Audience: I have a quick question there. I think I know what choice principles are, but to me a parametric analysis is something big...

Ossorio: What do you mean "big?"

Member of Audience: Wouldn't parametric analysis include choice principles?

Ossorio: No, parametric analysis is a purely formal notion. It even has a definition. Let me give you the definition. To give a parametric analysis of a domain, a logical domain, is to specify the ways that one element in the domain can be the same as another element or different from it as such. So if you are talking about persons, a parametric analysis would be the ways that one person can be the same as another person or different from the other person as a person. Not as an organism, not as a physical object, but as a person. Because you are dealing with the domain of persons. And the same for behaviors. This is the parametric analysis for behavior [points to the behavior formula]. These are the ways in which one behavior can be the same as another or different from it as a behavior. Some parametric analyses are very simple; like, brightness, hue, and saturation is a parametric analysis of visible colors. Others are more complicated, like this one of behavior. There is no implication about simplicity or complexity. And the definition covers any degree.

Member of Audience: No, I was saying that to me the parametric analysis of persons would have to include more than just choice principles. I thought that was what I was hearing.

Ossorio: No, there is a parametric analysis of person and there are 11 parameters. In fact, no, it is even worse than that. There are 11 categories of parameters, each of which has an indefinitely large number of actual parameters. Let me just rattle off the list. (Change tape) ...Every one of them is a person characteristic. Every one of them is a way that one person can be the same as another or different from another. So that's an extraordinarily large number of parameters for persons. But guess what? You can derive them all in a more or less tortuous fashion, or at least some of them, from the definition of a person as an individual whose history is paradigmatically a history of deliberate action. Because if you schematize a life history and introduce a series of deliberate actions and you say "How can one of these things differ from another one of these things or be the same?" The answer is, "Well there are only two ways." One is "Which behaviors occur?" and the other is "In what pattern?" Now because the number of patterns is essentially unlimited, instead we do crude groupings and that's how you get things like traits, attitudes, interests, etc. So there is a parametric analysis of persons and, indeed, it has a large number of parameters.

Member of Audience: Yeah, I was planning on bringing it up but I appreciate that description. But the notion of choice principles is starting to get...

Ossorio: No, the point that Walter was making is that a personal way of life or a way of living involves a person selecting from the choice principles that the culture offers. What he was saying is that that choice reflects your personal characteristics and I said indeed it does.

Member of Audience: Is the description of central, intermediate, and peripheral choice principles tautological?

Ossorio: More or less.

Member of Audience: And of which ones change?

Ossorio: I prefer to treat them as empirical but only by about that much [indicates a small space]. Reflection might view the result that they are really tautological. Not that the choice principles are tautological, but the fact that the central ones change less readily than the peripheral ones. One of the reasons for not just going straight down that path is that Fernand and I ginned up an interesting empirical hypothesis. Namely, that with refugees, in general it would be the case that the peripheral ones would go quickest and the intermediate ones would go more slowly. But we also ginned up the hypothesis that a few of the peripheral ones would outlast just about anything else. And the reasoning was that the peripheral ones are your last concrete hold on your old culture. And so they acquire additional value. They don't become central but they acquire additional value which means that they don't change that readily. Now that's not tautological. And what we found? We didn't find that result. It might still be true but we didn't find it.

Member of Audience: ...central vs. peripheral...

Ossorio: Well, there's two angles. One is exactly the kind of data he got that shows they change readily. The other is, again, native speaker intuition. You ask people from the culture what's most important. The other is that you can usually arrange them in a hierarchy so that the less central ones are ways of implementing the central ones. When you've got all of that, there is a very little question about it.

Member of Audience: ... the choice principles vs. values?

Ossorio: Choice principal is the general and rigorous term. Values is one way of identifying choice principles. There are other ways. For example, policies are direct ways of identifying choice principles. A policy is a choice principle. But you also have strange things like mottos and slogans. For example, "Duty, honor, country." If somebody is living by that motto, it is easy to tell. It's easy to recognize it as a choice principle because it guides his choices. And it's very hard to paraphrase that one in terms of values or in terms of anything else. That's why we have these various ways of specifying choice principles. What I said was the most common way I think is values and the next most common is policies. And then it's up for grabs any other way.

Member of Audience: Where would something like traditions fall? I am thinking of the idea of people holding onto some peripheral things that may not even be beliefs or choice principles, but traditions.

Ossorio: What are traditions?

Member of Audience: What are traditions?

Ossorio: Yeah.

Member of Audience: Ceremonies, maybe.

Ossorio: Ceremonies are social practices or institutions. And, indeed, one of the things immigrants do is to try to preserve some of their social practices and institutions.

Member of Audience: But those aren't choice principles as far as...

Ossorio: No, but there are choice principles applicable to both. What they've done is they have saved part of their culture within the new culture and that usually over time will disappear. Because it doesn't have the same backing as it did back there. So you can sort of brute force maintain it because it is important to you, but over time you don't have the support and it dies out. Now as I said, if it doesn't die out for you it will probably die out for your children because they don't have the same background; it's not as important to them as it is to you.

Member of Audience: But then what about the third generation, you know, that goes back after it?

Ossorio: Well, that's predictable. We have another dissertation around that. About the time you start losing your core principles, or you have difficulty with your parents because you have lost them and they haven't, about that time you start searching for your roots. You say "What does it really mean to be a Japanese?" And so that kind of problem is predictable somewhere in that sequence.

Member of Audience: How come some people go through searching for their roots and some don't? I have a great grandparent who came over here from Lithuania in the 1880's and I never gave a thought to my roots. It is an interesting notion, I suppose.

Ossorio: Well, there are two kinds of answers that come to mind quick. One is if you assimilated it. You don't feel the need of roots because you have them. You know, it is just a new set of roots. The other is if nobody keeps reminding you that you came from Lithuania. These days you get reminded all of the time that you came from Lithuania, and that's one reason why you are driven to "Well, I am a Lithuanian." Remember that principle that people become the way they are treated. Then you have the problem of "What is it to be a Lithuanian?" You don't have it in here. Or if you do, you don't know it.

Member of Audience: Well, it could be that's the way Lithuanians are.

Ossorio: Yeah, but you probably don't know that either. Okay. Um, let's see.

Member of Audience: What about the one you were saying about being reminded of it.

Ossorio: What?

Member of Audience: You said you don't have to search for it if you weren't reminded of it.

Ossorio: If they had assimilated because they would have roots.