everything is not culturally-mediated -- continued

i recently chatted with my geography phd student friend who believes that everything is culturally-mediated. apparently, i misinterpreted what he said about the ability of people in a culture to determine non-cultural human things about other people. what he argued was that we can know that people do not have culture (according to our definition of culture), but we can't investigated it; in essence, we can know of something, but we cannot know about it. so, here is his argument redone:

1) everyone presumably has culture at present (definitions of culture vary, but they tend to include -- although they are not limited to -- language, symbolism, artifacts, etc. -- evidence of social interaction)
2) theoretically, even alone individuals isolated from the rest of society have culture (thus, culture is defined by *sharable*, not necessarily shared traits; obviously, an isolated person would not know about language unless he/she had somehow created his/her own language, which is highly unlikely, so one's definition of culture for this person would have to be narrower than the definition for people in #1)
3) however, if there are people alone without culture, we can't study them in any depth through the lens of culture (this is a contestation of #2, a contestation that the remaining steps refute. the "lens of culture" being an epistemology that is shaped by cultural influences, and thus is biased and cannot be objective), but we can study them enough to determine whether or not they possess culture (thus, we can only determine that they do not possess culture, but we cannot convey what it is like to not possess culture).
4) why can't we study people who don't possess culture in any depth? because the only way we can access -- i.e., examine in depth beyond simply a diagnosis of whether or not a person possesses culture -- things about people is through culture. (remember: just because the only way we can access things about people is through culture -- i.e., part of "everything is culturally-mediated" -- does not mean that everyone necessarily possesses culture because of it. the assumption that everyone presumably has culture at present is not dependent on the notion that everything is culturally-mediated or vice-versa. so #4 does not bring us full circle back to #1, but instead is the end of an evolution of things that have occurred in the preceding steps.)


ok, so now that that's been cleared up, let's examine some arguments about what is means for everything to be culturally-mediated. i will demonstrate in the following examples that this idea is either not worthwhile, suffers from a glaring flaw (e.g., begging the question, etc.), or ends up at a dead end which cannot justify the premise -- that everything is culturally-mediated -- to be true in the first place.


if everything is culturally-mediated, then...
--> results in knowledge being universal and objective (this step is contrary to what is normally believed, but i want to see where it leads)
--> "everything is culturally-mediated" is not a worthwhile idea, because it is only as pertinent as any other discipline's importance to an event (e.g., "everything is metaphysically-mediated" would be in philosophy's domain, etc.) and without an ontology (which it should have if knowledge is objective and thus everything can be defined philosophically) it is ill-defined
--> without an ontology, "everything is culturally-mediated" is strictly epistemic
--> can knowledge be both objective and culturally-mediated due to a relationship between the two?
--> sometimes yes, sometimes no
--> either all knowledge is objective or all knowledge is subjective -- there is no in-between or compartmentalizing (for argumentation behind this argument, see "criticism of discourse" entry)
--> if knowledge is objective, then it is either not culturally-mediated, or if cultural mediation occurs, then it bears no relationship to the establishment of knowledge

if everything is culturally-mediated, then...
--> results in knowledge being subjective and/or relativist
--> how do we prove that everything is culturally-mediated if our means of investigation are all subjective and/or relativist? (and thus are inherently limited in scope -- our epistemology limits our ability to evaluate all possible metaphysics -- and cannot ever clearly define what everything is since "everything" is relative to what constitutes it; the only way this could work is if the definition of "everything" is amended, in which case "everything" is not really everything, and thus '"everything" is culturally-mediated' either possesses an asterisk of sorts or is not truly representative of what it claims to be)

if everything is culturally-mediated, then...
--> we can only know that someone does not possess culture, we cannot examine the underlying non-cultural principles of the someone who does not possess culture
--> why can't we examine the underlying non-cultural principles of the someone who does not possess culture?
--> because everything is culturally-mediated

everything is culturally-mediated
--> all interactions with people involve cultural mediation from all parties involved
--> what happens if we interact with someone who is determined to not possess culture?
--> we cannot interact with him/her
--> what happens if the person appears to pick up things from our culture like an infant picks up language, etc.?
--> the person is then considered to possess culture
--> at what point did the person change from not possessing culture to possessing culture? for example, if the first "cultural thing" a person did was point with a finger to express some sort of basic symbolism and this was done from mimicking people who possessed culture, where did the impetus for the finger-pointing start from if he/she did not possess culture? what was the "first cause"? was it cultural or non-cultural?


furthermore, a culture can only determine whether or not a person meets its criteria for culture. its criteria for its own culture is only a limited subset of culture at large; establishing a criteria for culture so as to include the common traits of all known cultures in the world is impossible because our culture's interpretations of other cultures are culturally-mediated. that is to say, they are biased and therefore subjective and/or relativist, thus preventing us from establishing an objective criteria of culture as it relates to all cultures in the world and successfully applying it to determine whether or not a person possesses this culture or not. also, one must ask whether a culture can truly know itself; analogously, it is commonly assumed that a person knows his/her psychological states best, but there is some debate now in philosophy of psychology ("epistemic justification") as to whether this is really true. so while a culture ultimately holds power over what it claims to be, it might not be the most accurate source for defining what it is. considering this, the accuracy of determining whether or not a person possesses a certain culture can be called into question.