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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2457524" data-attributes="member: 7240">I guess part of what I was getting at with my question is the idea of anthropological and philosophical inference. We all, to one degree or another, have a theory of how history and human societies work. This issue is increasingly coming up on the suspension of disbelief thread. When I was asking about how players fill-in aspects of their character's cultural values, I was curious to see how much people deduced about their characters from looking at the rules or setting materials. For instance, if you end up in a culture in which land and property are primarily or exclusively held by female members, do you tend to automatically assume that the culture's ideas of divorce and sexual morality are going to resemble those of real-world cultures that hold property in this way? Or, if you are playing D&D and using standard item creation and appraise mechanics, are you going to assume that the culture has an objective rather than subjective theory of value? Are you going to extend this into a theory of language and assume that objects have true names too? The true name thing really hit me taking a Spanish course this year (I haven't studied a foreign language since 1988) -- naming objects was done with a reflexive verb. The literal translation of sentence naming a restaurant is "This restaurant calls itself ______." Similarly, I noted how the use of the subjunctive mood was far more common in Romance rather than Germanic languages and thought to myself, "no wonder Calvinism didn't sell down there given that very structure of the language denies predestination." While I'm a big fan of asking the GM cultural questions all the time, I don't want to keep peppering him with questions throughout the game so I tend to look for ways to deduce things about a culture based on real-world ideas of how culture and thought operate. Of course, this, itself is problematic because I'm importing a bunch of real-world assumptions about how things work whenever I do this. Or I'm "swallowing whole" systems of thought like Aristotelianism and applying the system in one place in the world because I see part of it in operation in another.</blockquote>

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