Cognitive Style of Culture and the Problem of Cultural-Historical Cognitive Development

Abstract

This study addresses the problem of cultural-historical cognitive development. The concept of cognitive style of culture, or more exactly, the opposition “field-dependent – field-independent cognitive style” is the main methodological instrument for the analysis. The author argues that cognitive development from sympractical cultures to theoretical ones, and further within theoretical cultures, can be described as the emergence of novel cognitive modules which become less and less field-dependent. This statement is illustrated by parsing the Ancient Greek mathematics and historiography with the example of Euclid’s Elements and the historical treatises by Herodotus and Thucydides.

Keywords: cognitive development, sociocultural approach, Euclid's Elements, Herodotus, Thusydides.