Understanding East Asian holistic cognitive style and its cultural evolution: a multi-disciplinary case study of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Abstract

This paper improves understanding of the cognitive anthropology of East Asian holistic cognition by providing readers a detailed, multi-disciplinary case study of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). In §1 contemporary results in cross-cultural psychology studies are used to review four components of holistic cognitive style: non-linear associationism, causal pluralism, contextualism, and inconsistency. §2 discusses cognitive commitments in five major TCM doctrines: five agents (wu xing), organs, qi and blood, the theory of meridians (jing luo), and yin-yang. §3 presents a close reading of East Asia’s most influential historical medical text, the Huangdi Neijing, in terms of its representation of components of holistic style (in §1) through major TCM commitments (in §2). §4 presents machine-learning research findings using an historical Chinese corpus to show the wide dispersal of holistic cognition in Early Chinese literature and its medical texts. §5 explains some of the major means by which TCM and the holistic cognition on which it is based was culturally transmitted into the present. §6 reviews experiments asserting that TCM training is not merely correlated with but causes holistic cognition. In §7 and §8 we scrutinize holistic cognition as present in discussions of diagnosis and treatment in contemporary TCM textbooks.