Defining Culture through Behavioral Repertoires and Justification Systems

Since Tylor's foundational 1871 definition of culture as a 'complex whole,' the concept has resisted consensus. By 1952, Kroeber and Kluckhohn had catalogued over 160 competing definitions, and the problem has not resolved since. The core difficulty, this analysis argues, is not merely semantic imprecision but a genuine Ontological conflation: the single term 'culture' is being applied across two catEgorically distinct phenomena operating at different levels of behavioral organization.

The first phenomenon — here called little-c culture — refers to shared, socially learned behavioral repertoires that coordinate group life. This is demonstrably not unique to humans; chimpanzees, cetaceans, and passerine birds all exhibit transgenerational transmission of behavioral patterns through social learning. The second phenomenon — capital-C Culture — refers to the plane of justification: the self-reflective, propositionally structured dialogue through which language-using persons explicitly articulate, contest, and transmit norms, values, and systems of knowledge. The distinction is not merely one of complexity but of Ontological kind — the difference between enacted behavior and reasoned account-giving.

The Tree of Knowledge framework offers a principled resolution by stratifying behavior across discrete ontological layers: biophysical ecology, technological artifacts, behavioral repertoire, and systems of justification. Mapping 'culture' onto this architecture dissolves the definitional impasse. little-c culture finds its home in the behavioral repertoire layer, shared with other social animals. capital-C Culture belongs to the justification layer, emergent specifically with language-using persons. The result is a non-circular, Ontologically grounded definition that neither over-extends to all social learning nor under-describes the full texture of human cultural life.