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Standardized Error and Japanese Character: A Note on Political Interpretation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

John F. Embree
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Extract

Back in 1927 Vilhjalmur Stefansson wrote a little book entitled The Standardization of Error. In this essay he shows first of all that errors which fill social needs become standardized and, he suggests, it might be construed as antisocial to try to destroy them by raising points of fact. To this end, there is an advantage to knowledge by definition in contrast to knowledge by observation. This, as the writer points out, gives to arithmetic its finality. Two and two is by definition four. In the social sciences also, we have many ‘facts’ that are so by definition and so become immutable.

Type
Research Notes
Information
World Politics , Volume 2 , Issue 3 , April 1950 , pp. 439 - 443
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1950

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References

1 Gorer, Geoffrey, “Themes in Japanese Culture,” Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1943, V, 110.Google Scholar

2 Benedict, Ruth, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Cambridge, Houghton Mifflin, 1946, p. 260.Google Scholar

3 Leites, Nathan, “Psycho-Cultural Hypotheses About Political Acts,” World Politics, Vol. I, No. 1 (October 1948), p. 107.Google Scholar

4 Mead, Margaret, “The Implications of Culture Change for Personality Development,” The American Journal of OrthoPsychiatry, Vol. 17, No. 4 (October 1947).CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

5 Embree, John F., The Japanese Nation, New York, Farrar & Rinehart, 1945, pp. 235–236.Google Scholar