Cross-cultural epistemic practices

should provide a framework for the effective investigation of the entire complex problem of the intellectual processes of society—a study by which society as a whole seeks a perceptive relation to its total environment. It should lift the study of intellectual life from that of a scrutiny of the individual to an inquiry into the means by which a society, nation, or culture achieves understanding of the totality of stimuli which act upon it. The focus of this new discipline will be upon the production, flow, integration, and consumption of all forms of communicated thought throughout the entire social pattern. From such a discipline should emerge a new body of knowledge about, and a new synthesis of, the interaction between knowledge and social activity. (Shera, 1965, pp. 15–16)