the study of culture and ramifications for philosophy

in a previous blog entry, i described how culture is "the summation and totality of epistemological issues manifested through metaphysical means and their interactions with pure metaphysics." i then proceeded to explain why culture cannot be investigated scientifically -- due to "social science's major fundamental flaw". so, if the root of culture is ultimately epistemological, then what does the study of culture amount to? the study of culture is ultimately philosophical, as much as social scientists might want to claim it as their own; social scientists merely describe in detail the manifestations of culture, they do not investigate the nature of culture at its root source. so, if culture is in philosophy's domain, then why hasn't any apparent progress been made? well, first of all, philosophy has yet to solve numerous outstanding epistemological problems. however, a more fundamental issue doesn't lie with the existence of problems in the discipline -- every discipline has problems that have yet to be solved -- but with the underlying approach in attempting to solve these problems (sometimes one must wonder if some philosophers are actually attempting to solve these problems but are instead just dancing around them and making things more complicated in the process). richard rorty once commented something along the lines of how philosophy's ultimate failure was its inability to escape its own cultural limitations. i'm not sure exactly what he meant by this statement, but i'm sure it's either one of two possibilities: 1) culture makes philosophy subjective, or 2) philosophy's goal at the outset of the 20th century to fulfill its expected potential was investigate its own problems with language. if rorty's criticism is for the first possibility, then i would consider it irrelevant as one could argue that culture "taints" any discipline, from math to history. also, i would use searle's argument that "ontological subjectivity does not preclude epistemic objectivity" to render this idea of cultural interference as moot. it seems to me that people accusing science as being untruthful are doing so because it is not a complete and independent whole, a perfect ontology; they don't understand the history of epistemology and how science -- physics -- eventually became a branch independent of metaphysics due to epistemological foundations, not metaphysical incongruities. as a result, their criticisms of science result from ontological misunderstandings, mistaking a perfect external realm of the existence of objects of study with a perfect internal interpretation and method of inquiry into an external realm. the epistemological foundations they attack to undermine science's authority are also part of the same epistemological foundations that allowed science to separate itself from metaphysics, and as a result, abdicate some of its universal claims. if rorty's criticism is for the second possibility, then he is correct: philosophy has failed to overcome its internal issues with language, and it is the conflict over how to address this core problem that has resulted in the analytic/continental divide. however, i would like to revisit searle's quote that "ontological subjectivity does not preclude epistemic objectivity". the argument that language is embedded in culture is commonly used to dismiss analytic attempts at philosophizing about language -- "philosophy of language" is the name of this area of specialization. however, i believe that people making this argument fallaciously mistake culture for being solely its metaphysical manifestations, hence being ontologically subjective. when one realizes that culture is ultimately epistemological and not metaphysical, then the possibility for language as being culturally-embedded being an objective notion instead of a subjective one makes the case for an objective inquiry into the study of language and culture much more compelling. ultimately, artificial intelligence will empirically help resolve the dispute one way or another, with computational linguistics embracing the paradigm of traditional linguistics, while postmodernist philosophers, with their insistence of language and culturally being inextricably linked together in a subjective fashion, and an accompanying approach in linguistic anthropology have not been applied to artificial intelligence and have remained exclusively in the realms of the social sciences and humanities.