| This dissertation develops a Both/And method of transforming conflicts between seemingly incommensurable cultural frames of reference such as the rationalist progressive and the religious right in United States politics. Includes multi-disciplinary case studies of Chinese and Western cultural philosophies, hemispheric asymmetry, modern and postmodern discourse, and a local cultural conflict in Sonoma County, California in 1949. Integrates concepts drawn from cognitive science, hermeneutic philosophy, Gestalt psychology, cognitive anthropology, complex adaptive systems theory, and East-West cultural studies.;Findings: Logos in the form of instrumental rationality has become the dominant Western cultural mythos, (logos as mythos ), and has displaced and suppressed cultural historical sources of moral guidance such as community and religious traditions. One path towards rebalancing the relative power of logos and mythos modes of thinking is to displace the conventional Western heroic story of the rise of logos with a different historical interpretation which celebrates western cultural history as the emergence of cultural agency. This alternative historical narrative has the advantage of subordinating both mythos and logos cognitive modes of construing order and making meaning within a broader cultural historical narrative which esteems the human capacity for moral, cultural choice without abandoning the pragmatic value of science and math. The construction of this alternative is an example of the use of the Both/And approach.;The Both/And approach interprets cultures as self-organizing complex adaptive systems. Cultural agents and agencies reproduce cultures by using cultural-cognitive recipes to construct cultural meanings. This approach intervenes in cultural conflicts to generate mutually educative discourses which empower conflicting parties to collaboratively learn plural ways of constructing meaning and creating new ways to frame their situation and new possibilities for negotiation and collaboration.;Keywords: conflict resolution, progressive, religious right, comparative cultural philosophy, cognition, logos, mythos, hemispheric asymmetry, schema, incommensurable frames of reference, cultural meaning, sociology of knowledge, culture as a complex adaptive system, cognitive anthropology, postmodern, Chinese philosophy, Both/And, constructivist, cultural agency, hermeneutic, cognitive science, history of science. |
