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Rationality and Understanding
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
Extract
I wish to discuss some of the problems that arise when we attempt to understand beliefs and actions that are alien to the things we believe and do. This will involve my saying something about the concepts of rationality and understanding so as to provide grounds for a claim I wish to make that we can understand beliefs, or doctrines, and actions that would not count as rational by our standards. I shall further examine a problem, in education, not all of whose perplexities have been resolved by empirical research in conceptual development: the problem of how children with only a limited familiarity with the conceptual frameworks of their own culture can come to understand conceptual frameworks and ways of acting radically at variance with their own. British children, from the ages of eight or nine onwards, hear stories of the lives of the Aboriginals and the Eskimoes, and learn about the Romans, the Vikings and Elizabethan England, the beliefs and prophecies of the Old Testament, moral stories of the classical world and even the characteristics within their own societies of such institutions as monasteries. Not only have they to meet the problems of the historian and the anthropologist of understanding ways of life strange and distant, but they encounter them without the conceptual familiarity with the beliefs and actions of their own society possessed by the former. Lacking settled criteria of intelligibility for understanding their own society, they are asked to develop the criteria of intelligibility necessary to making some sort of sense of societies very different from their own: a situation probably not paralleled in any other aspect of their education.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1975
References
1 Many of the discussions of these problems have recently been collected in one volume: Wilson, B. R. (ed.) Rationality (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970)Google Scholar. Whenever possible I shall refer to the papers in this volume.
2 For a much fuller discussion of these points see Toulmin, S. and Baier, K., ‘On Describing’, Mind, 61, 1952.Google Scholar
3 See Winch, P., ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’Google Scholar, in Wilson, , pp. 78–111.Google Scholar
4 See Gellner, E., ‘Concepts and Society’Google Scholar, in Wilson, , p. 36.Google Scholar
5 Evans-Pritchard, E., Nuer Religion (Oxford, 1956), pp. 131–132.Google Scholar
6 I try to avoid assumptions about the correct analysis of ‘belief’ statements.
7 In ‘Explaining Cargo Cults’, Wilson, , p. 51.Google Scholar
8 Here I accept Mr S. Lukes' formulation. See ‘Some Problems about Rationality’, Wilson, , p. 208.Google Scholar
9 Winch, P., The Idea of a Social Science (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), p. 114.Google Scholar
10 I do not discuss here Dr Leach's view that beliefs and doctrines are no part of an anthropologist's concerns.
11 For a fuller discussion of this point see Gellner, E., ‘Concepts and Society’Google Scholar in Wilson, , pp. 41–46.Google Scholar
12 By Lukes, S., ‘Some Problems about Rationality’Google Scholar, in Wilson, , pp. 209–210.Google Scholar
13 In ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’, Wilson, , pp. 107–111.Google Scholar
14 Winch, loc. cit.
15 The basis of this claim is the analysis of Professor Peters of what it is ‘to aim’ and what it means ‘to be educated’.