Radical Hope: thin and thick concepts

Without explaining in detail, Lear uses the language of “thin” and “thick” concepts in his discussion of deep cultural values. I’ve found this an interesting tangent.

The great 20th-century philosopher Bernard Williams… argued that there was a deep distinction to be made between what he called "thick" and "thin" concepts of proper behavior in the world.

A thin concept, like "good," could be understood in terms of abstract propositions, but a thick concept, like "courage," was so complexly interwoven into the kind of traditional society likely to recognize it that it became, in Williams's terms, a "piece of knowledge" for that society, a form of understanding, too deep, as Wordsworth said, for tears, that made that society work. But that kind of knowledge, Williams suggested, does not travel well. It cannot easily be lifted from one world and inserted into another. The motives underlying much of the action of Homer's Iliad are not, for instance, easily understood by anyone today.”
---John Clute scifi.com

This language, it seems to me, amplifies Donald E. Brown’s list of Human Universals. That is, virtually all human cultures feature prohibition of incest, for example, but what constitutes incest varies from culture to culture. The universal taboo is a “thin” concept; a “thick” and non-transferable concept of incest might be a deep prohibition against relations between first cousins.

Reviews of Radical Hope:
The Globe and Mail
A.M. New York