The subject matter of culture: constraints, attunement and information

Abstract

Naturalistic accounts of culture share the assumption that culture is nothing more than information in people minds/brains and the environment. They do not provide, however, neither a definition nor a theory of information. I address this lacuna adopting a theory of information called “Situation Theory” (Barwise and Perry, 1983). I argue that the notions of constraint and attunement allow to account for cultural information, and, furthermore, that culture is, at a fundamental level, constituted by a set of constraints. Constraints are necessary for information to flow, and attunement to constraints is necessary for an organism to exploit such cultural information.

Keywords: Situations, situation theory, naturalistic theories of culture, cultural groups, constraints, conventions.