A skeptic’s guide to “intercultural communication”—debunking the “intercultural” and rethinking “culture”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Starting with a critique of so-called intercultural communication, the present paper contests and challenges the prevalent and dominant essentialist views of “culture”. It is exposed that these views have a detrimental underlying logic that is both destructive and self-destructive. Instead, the paper proposes a radically new idea of culture, a minimalist approach supported by insights gleaned from contemporary semiotic inquiry. In this approach, culture is defined as a biological instinct to acquire information through modeling, that is, learning by models. This instinct is at work, or is realized, in specific acts of such modeling, resulting in cultural practices and cultural artifacts. In the case of humanity, a cultural practice is anything a human does that can be modeled by another human and a cultural artifact is any object that humans make and can model. The paper argues it is imperative to keep in mind that when we deal with the “intercultural”, we are only dealing with concrete yet different cultural practices or cultural artifacts. This is an effective way to completely refute essentialism. In a sense, the paper is meant to be a wake-up call, instead of a fighting talk. Its main objective is not to negate or obliterate the field of “intercultural communication”, among others, but rather to save them from themselves—a true and worthy field of “intercultural communication” is a field against essentialism, instead of an accessory to essentialism, whether the commission is “before the fact” or “after the fact”.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".