East Asian and Western thought differs substantially. East Asians are more holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality on the basis of the interaction of field factors with the object. East Asians make relatively little use of categories and formal logic, attend more to relations among objects, and rely more on "dialectical" reasoning, which is accepting of seeming contradictions. Americans are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and its attributes and using the attributes to assign the object to categories that can be understood by the application of explicit rules, including those of formal logic. The two mentalities are embedded in different naïve epistemologies and metaphysical systems which dictate the use of different mental processes to solve the same problem. We speculate that the origin of these differences is traceable to the markedly different social systems engendered by historically different subsistence economies.