It was his view that culture is public, because “meaning is,” and systems of meanings are what produce culture, because they are the collective property of a particular people. We cannot discover the culture’s import or understand its systems of meaning, when, as Wittgenstein noted, “we cannot find our feet with them.” Geertz wants society to appreciate that social actions are larger than themselves:  It is not against a body of uninterrupted data, radically thinned descriptions, that we must measure the cogency of our explications, but against the power of the scientific imagination to bring us into touch with the lives of strangers.” In seeking to converse with subjects in foreign cultures and gain access to their conceptual world, this is the goal of the semiotic approach to culture. Cultural theory is not its own master; at the end of the day we must appreciate, that the generality “thick description” contrives to achieve, grows out of the delicacy of its distinctions, not the sweep of its abstraction. The essential task of theory-building here is not to codify abstract regularities, but to make thick description possible; not to generalize across cases, but to generalize within them. During Geertz's long career he worked through a variety of theoretical phases and schools of thought. He would reflect an early leaning toward functionalism in his essay "Ethos, Worldview and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols", writing that "the drive to make sense out of experience, to give it form and order, is evidently as real and pressing as the more familiar biological needs." Geertz's research and ideas have had a strong influence on 20th-century academia, including modern anthropology and communication studies, as well as for geographers, ecologists, political scientists, scholars of religion, historians, and other humanists. University of Miami Professor Daniel Pals (1996) wrote of Geertz that "his critics are few; his admirers legion." Talal Asad attacked the dualism in Geertzian theory: the theory does not provide a bridge between external symbols and internal dispositions. Asad also pointed out the need for a more nuanced approach toward the historical background of certain concepts. Criticizing Geertz's theory of religion in general, Asad pointed out a gap between 'cultural system' and 'social reality' when attempting to define the concept of religion in universal terms. He would also criticize Geertz for ascribing an authorizing discourse around conversations of comparative religion that, Asad argues, doesn’t really exist.