Cultural Entities

Abstract

Culture is a cluster of collective practices of beings endowed with understanding and will, practices reflected in habits acquired and transmitted from one generation to the next by means of a signaling system.

Cultural entities are those whose existence depends on there being a culture. Those cultural entities own real existence in the same sense as any other entities, with no categorical difference. The only relevant differences are those of degree of materiality and naturalness (instinctivity or genetic transmissibility).

Culture has its own nature. In the field of culture the more an entity serves as a raw material for further elaborations and variations, the more it couts as natural.

While staunchly keeping clear of any form of fictionalism or the like about cultural facts, we can go into the supervenience of the upper floors of culture on the lower ones by studying degree variations.

Rooted as they are in the physical world, characterized by historicity, contingency and precariousness, cultural entities are not inert inhabitants of some Heaven, Platonic Forms, or ideal abstractions.

Thus we do not need a third Realm outside the real world, because we can account for cultural entities with more sober and common-sensical conceptual resources.