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Mentality and Mechanisms For Selecting Sense Interpretations of Perception
In developed civilizations the scope of normal interpretations is usually fixed as word-definitions in lexical dictionaries. The very fact of our ability to still understand texts of several hundred years old speak for considerable stability (inertness or rigidity) of the basic perception attitudes as well as sense interpretations in the context of a specific language and culture. These interpretations will often differ from officially accepted norms.
It relates to the fact that different mentalities have different perception attitudes, selecting their different combinations from a total number of elementary effects (categories, formations or perception gestalts). Since the object's interpretation is performed through perceptional combinations and never through single perceptual experiences, the meanings of the same phenomena would not be identical for various mentality segments. Perceptual combinations discussed above are integral semantic units that cause an individual bias in sense.
There is another factor that should be considered here – it is that people can have identical interpretations of one object, but quite dissimilar opinions on the other. All that either contributes to or hinders communication. That means that researchers should always specify the class of phenomena, objects and conditions accepted as a classification basis for allocating people to the same mentality groups. One can operate with a term of "shared mentality" or "mentality" only in a rigid context, dimensions and conditions.
From the above points we can deduce that a matrix of possible categorial interpretations of a class of phenomena in certain conditions can be designed for any person or a group of people. Assuming that another group yields the same interpretation and equal probabilities for the same class of phenomena and conditions, we can allocate them to identical mentality within the same class of phenomena and conditions.
Since the mental maps of two groups coincide, they share one mentality within the framework of these maps.
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