Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T09:19:41.422Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Science, Ethnoscience, and Ethnocentrism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Ron Amundson
Ron Amundson*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy University of Hawaii at Hilo
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The conventionalist epistemology of cultural anthropology can be seen to be embedded in the methods of ‘cognitive anthropology’, the study of folk conceptual systems. These methods result in indiscriminately depicting all folk systems as conventional, whether or not the systems are intended by the native to represent objective features of the world. Hypothetical and actual ethnographic situations are discussed. It is concluded that the anthropologist's projection of his/her own epistemology onto a native system is ethnocentric. This epistemological prejudice may be peculiar to the cognitive sciences.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , June 1982 , pp. 236 - 250
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

†

I would like to express my thanks to Dan Brown and Craig Severance for their noble, though not entirely successful, attempts to remedy my anthropological shortcomings, and to Pila Wilson for discussions of Hawaiian culture. I am also grateful to the editor and an anonymous referee for many helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

References

REFERENCES

Black, M. B. (1969), “Eliciting Folk Taxonomy in Ojibwa”, in Tyler (1969).Google Scholar
Bright, J. O. and Bright, W. (1965), “Semantic Structures in Northwest California and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis”, American Anthropologist 67: 249–258.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caws, P. (1974), “Operational, Representational, and Explanatory Models”, American Anthropologist 76: 1–10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chaney, R. P. (1978), “Structures, Realities, and Blind Spots”, American Anthropologist 80: 589–596.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dwyer, P. D. (1976), “An Analysis of Rofaifo Mammal Taxonomy”, American Ethnologist 3: 425–445.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frake, C. O. (1961), “The Diagnosis of Disease among the Subanun of Mindanao”, American Anthropologist 63: 113–132.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frake, C. O. (1962), “The Ethnographic Study of Cognitive Systems”, in Anthropology and Human Behavior. Washington, D.C.: The Anthropological Society of Washington. Reprinted in Tyler (1969).Google Scholar
Glick, L. B. (1964), “Categories and Relations in Gimi Natural Science”, American Anthropologist 66: 273–280.Google Scholar
Goodenough, W. H. (1956), “Componential Analysis and the Study of Meaning”, Language 32: 195–216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hesse, M. B. (1974), The Structure of Scientific Inference. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hunn, E. (1976), “Toward a Perceptual Model of Folk Biological Classification”, American Ethnologist 3: 508–524.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kripke, S. (1972), “Naming and Necessity”, in Davidson, D. and Harman, G. (eds.) Semantics of Natural Language. Dordrecht: Riedel.Google Scholar
Putnam, H. (1970), “Is Semantics Possible?” in H. E. Kiefer and M. K. Munitz (eds.) Language, Belief and Metaphysics. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Putnam, H. (1973), “Meaning and Reference”, The Journal of Philosophy LXX: 699–711.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Suppe, F. (ed.) (1977), The Structure of Scientific Theories, 2nd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Tyler, S. A. (ed.) (1969), Cognitive Anthropology. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.Google Scholar
Wallace, A. F. C. (1965), “The Problem of the Psychological Validity of Componential Analyses”, American Anthropologist 67: 229–248. Reprinted in Tyler (1969).CrossRefGoogle Scholar