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Rationalism
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Rationalism, empiricism, and Kant
Rationalism: the idea that human beings
achieve knowledge because of their capacity
to reason.
From the rationalist perspective, there are a
priori truths. Progress of the intellect over the
centuries has resulted from reason.
Plato (428–327 bce) and Leibnitz (Gottfried
Wilhelm Baron von Leibniz, 1646–1716)
Empiricism
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Empiricism: we are born tabula rasa–with a
“clean slate.”
What we come to know is the result of our
experience written on that slate.
John Locke (1632-17045): We see and hear
and taste things; we accumulate experience;
we make generalizations. We understand
what is true from what we are exposed to.
And so, David Hume held, we can never be
absolutely sure that what we know is true.
Kant (1724–1804): a way out
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A priori truths exist: if we see those truths it’s
because of the way our brains are structured.
The human mind, he said, has a built-in
capacity for organizing sensory experience.
Today, many scholars to look to the human
mind itself (cognitive neuroscience) for clues
about how human behavior is ordered.
Noam Chomsky and B.F. Skinner
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Chomsky: Any human can learn any language
because we have a universal grammar
already built into our minds. This is why
translation is possible across all languages.
Skinner: humans learn their language the
way all animals learn everything –by operant
conditioning, or reinforced learning.
Example: Babies learn the sounds of their
language because adults reward babies for
making the right sounds.
The dilemma of rationalism vs. empiricism
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Empiricism holds that people learn their values and
that values are therefore relative.
Rationalism holds that there are transcendental
truths, which is are not subject to the principle of
relativism.
Hume and others made the idea of a mechanistic
science of humanity as plausible as the idea of a
mechanistic science of other natural phenomena.
But … I consider myself an empiricist, but I accept
the rationalist idea that there are universal truths
about right and wrong.
From Democritus to Newton
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The scientific method is barely 400 years old.
Its systematic application to human thought
and behavior is less than half that.
Aristotle insisted that knowledge should be
based on experience and that conclusions
about general cases should be based on the
observation of more limited ones.
But Aristotle did not advocate disinterested,
objective accumulation of reliable knowledge.
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Until the 17th century, scholars relied on
metaphysical concepts to explain observable
phenomena. Even in the 19th century,
biologists still talked about vital forces as a
way of explaining the existence of life.
Democritus (460–370 bce) was a materialist.
But without the technology we have today –
microscopes, compasses and sextants,
computers – his work had little impact.
Exploration, printing, and modern science
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1413: Spanish ships began raiding the coast
of West Africa, hijacking cargo and capturing
slaves from Islamic traders.
The compass and the sextant made it
possible to go farther from Europe.
These breakthroughs were based on
empirical observation, as were those in
architecture and astronomy by the Mayans
and Egyptians.
The development of science required more.
Johannes Gutenberg (1397–1468)
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First edition of the Bible from movable type in
1455.
By the end of the 15th, every major city in
Europe had a press.
Printed books provided a means for the
accumulation and distribution of knowledge.
Eventually, printing made organized science
possible. But writing hadn’t done it, and more
was still needed.
Martin Luther and literacy
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Martin Luther (1483–1546) was born just 15
years after Gutenberg died.
Protestant Reformation began in 1517:
challenged the authority of the Roman
Catholic church to be the sole interpreter and
disseminator of theological doctrine.
This required literacy on the part of everyone,
not just the clergy. Literacy didn’t cause
organized science, but it helped make it
possible.
Bacon and Descartes
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Francis Bacon (1561–1626): focused on
induction, the use of direct observation to
confirm ideas and the linking together of
observed facts to form theories of how
natural phenomena work.
René Descartes (159–1650): distinguished
between the mind and matter and argued for
the independent existence of the physical and
the mental world.
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Descartes envisioned a universal
science of nature based on direct
experience and the application of
reason.
Isaac Newton (1643–1727)
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Pressed the scientific revolution at Cambridge
University.
Calculus, celestial mechanics and other areas
of physics.
Just as important: the hypothetico-deductive
model of science that combines both
induction (empirical observation) and
deduction (reason) into a single method.
Science, money and war
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The scientific approach to knowledge making
was established just as Europe began to
experience the growth of industry and the
development of large cities.
Those cities were filled with uneducated
factory laborers. This created a need for
increased productivity in agriculture among
those not engaged in industrial work.
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The new method for gaining knowledge
about nature promised bigger crops,
more productive industry, and more
successful military campaigns.
Science and safe passage …
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The speaker of the Massachusetts
House of Representatives wrote to the
commander of the British forces, saying
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“Though we are politically enemies, yet
with regard to science it is presumable we
shall not dissent from the practice of
civilized people in promoting it.”
The appeal worked. Williams got his
free passage.
From Newton to Rousseau
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Physics and social science were developed at
about the same time, and on the same
philosophical basis, by two friends, Isaac
Newton and John Locke (1632–1704).
A formal program for applying the scientific
method to the study of humanity would come
200 years later from Auguste Comte, ClaudeHenri de Saint-Simon, Adolphe Quételet, and
J.S. Mill.
John Locke
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Locke: the rules of science apply equally to
the study of celestial bodies and to human
behavior .
Essay Concerning Human Understanding : we
cannot see everything, and we cannot record
perfectly what we see, so some knowledge
will be closer to the truth than will other
knowledge.
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Prediction of the behavior of planets
might be more accurate than prediction
of human behavior, but both predictions
should be based on better and better
observation, measurement, and reason.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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(1712–1778)
Argued that humanity had started out in a
state of grace, characterized by equality of
relations, but that civilization, with it’s
agriculture and commerce, had corrupted
humanity and lead to slavery, taxation, and
other inequalities.
Rousseau was not, however, a raving
romantic. He held that the state embodied
humanity’s efforts, through a social contract,
to control the evils brought on by civilization.
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The Enlightenment philosophers, from Bacon
to Rousseau, produced a philosophy that
focused on the use of knowledge in service to
the improvement of humanity, or at least to
the amelioration of its pain.
The idea that science and reason could lead
humanity toward perfection seems naïve
today but …
Enlightenment and revolution
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These ideas were part of the American
and French revolutions and are
reflected in the the writings of Thomas
Paine (1737–1809) and Thomas
Jefferson (1743–1826).
“We hold these truths to be self-evident
. . .”
Auguste Comte (1798–1857)
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Argued that the production of
knowledge had developed in three
stages:
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(1) religion (capricious gods);
(2) metaphysics (essences);
(3) positive knowledge, based on reason
and observation.
The mastery of nature metaphor
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Some people are very uncomfortable with this
“mastery over nature” metaphor.
But few people would give up the material
benefits of science.
Over-prescription of antibiotics leads to drugresistant bacteria. Will we stop using
antibiotics? Or will we rely on more science to
fight the new bacteria?
The same principle applies to air conditioning
and its consequences.
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Understanding begins with questions about
how things work.
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Do good fences really make good neighbors?
Why do women earn less, on average, for the
same work as men in most industrialized
countries?
Why is Barbados’s birth rate falling faster than
Saudi Arabia’s?
Why is there such a high rate of alcoholism on
Native American reservations?
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Why do nation states, from Italy to Kenya,
almost universally discourage people from
maintaining minority languages?
Why do public housing programs often
wind up as slums?
If advertising can get children hooked on
cigarettes, why is public service advertising
so ineffective in lowering the incidence of
high-risk sex among adolescents?
The reaction against positivism
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Ferdinand C. S. Schiller (1864–1937):
since the method and contents of
science are the products of human
thought, reality and truth could not be
“out there” to be found, as positivists
assume, but must be made up by
human beings.
Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911)
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Argued that the methods of the physical
sciences were inappropriate for the
study of human beings.
Human beings live in a web of
meanings that they spin themselves. To
study humans, he argued, we need to
understand those meanings.
Humanism
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This humanist argument goes back to
Protagoras’ (485–410 bce) dictum:
“man is the measure of all things” –
truth is decided by human judgment.
Humanism has been historically at odds
with the philosophy of knowledge
represented by science.
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Humanists do not deny the
effectiveness of science for the study of
nonhuman objects, but emphasize the
uniqueness of humanity and the need
for a different (that is, nonscientific)
method for studying human beings.
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Similarly, scientists do not deny the
inherent value of humanistic
knowledge.
To explore whether King Lear is to be
pitied as a pathetic leader or admired as
a successful one is an exercise in
seeking humanistic knowledge.
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The answer to the question cannot
possibly be achieved by the scientific
method, but examining the question
and producing many possible answers
leads to insight about the human
condition.
History of anthropology
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Anthropology developed in France,
England, and Germany and from the
beginning, there was tension between
scientists and humanists.
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In the 19th century, this split played out
between those who wanted to focus on
culture and those who wanted to focus
on biology – between those who
wanted to study the diversity of human
behavior and thought across the world
and those who were more interested in
the diversity of the human form across
the world.
Racial thinking
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This reflected racial thinking, an ancient
explanation of differences in culture and
behavior:
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people who are shaped and colored so
differently from us (whether us was
ancient Chinese or ancient Greek or 19th
century Europe) must practice their
different ways of life because of those
physical differences.
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Racial thinking remains with us today,
though the arguments have gotten
more sophisticated and, as a
consequence, more dangerous.
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More about this later. For now:
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There is no evidence that differences in
people’s values or behaviors are in any way
caused by differences in their genes at the
population level.
Slavery and anthropology
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The Society for the Observers of Man was
founded in France in 1799 by “a union of
naturalists and medical men” to promote the
study of natural history.
They mounted a three-year expedition to
what would become Australia and the
surrounding islands. Among the scientific
crew were a couple of anthropologists whose
duty it was to carry out measurement of
bodies and customs.
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The Society for the Protection of Aborigines
was founded in London in 1838.
England abolished slavery across the empire
that year; Sweden had done so in 1813;
Spain in 1821.
In France, the Ethnological Society of Paris
was founded as a scientific, rather than as a
philanthropic institution. A similar group was
founded in New York.
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From 1839 to 1871, while British
anthropology was thrashing itself into a
series of disciplines, American
anthropologists were gathering data
about American Indians.
Slavery was the political issue on both
continents, but the need for data
remained a constant as well.
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In Europe, gathering data about the
diversity of human cultures required
long expeditions – in the day of sailing
ships, with month-long crossings of the
Atlantic and no Internet cafes.
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In the U.S., scholars had to go no
further than the remnants of American
Indian communities to find what was,
to them, exotic kinship systems, foods,
marriage customs, child-rearing
practices, ways of acting in war, and so
on.
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While the Europeans invented
anthropological field research, they did
increasingly little of it because of
political obstacles. The countries were
at war with one another over colonial
expansion rights.
Unilinear evolutionism
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After Darwin, the idea of evolution swept the
scientific world.
Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) and others
sought schemes to account for the diversity
of human customs across the world.
In the spirit of the time, they assumed that a
universal evolutionary sequence that mirrored
the universal biological sequence that was
emerging for humanity.
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They assumed that Europeans were at the
top of some cultural evolutionary ladder.
All peoples went through the same
evolutionary phases to get from simple to
complex.
The details of the schemes varied, but the
idea was the same: savagery, barbarism, and
civilization.
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The level of any society was measured
in terms of how closely it matched
Western Europe in key areas of custom:
religion, kinship, and economic and
political behavior.
Edward Westermarck’s challenge
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1891: Westermarck publishes the History of
Human Marriage.
All combinations of marriage customs exist in
all levels of society.
The idea of universal, historical evolutionary
schemes, was crushed.
Cultural evolutionary schemes of different
stripes went on until the 1920s, but in the
U.S., at least, it died.
Franz Boas
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1889: Boas comes to the U.S. and is
appointed to the first chair of anthropology,
at Clark University. Moves to Columbia
University in 1899. Alfred Kroeber graduates
in 1901.
Historical particularism – kinship
terminologies and marriage customs could
diffuse anywhere in the world, as new words
do in languages.
Historical particularism
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The real work of anthropology, then,
was the historical reconstruction and
the recording of the different cultures
as faithfully as possible.
British functionalism: biological model
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1910–1930: Bronislaw Malinowski and
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown promote
functionalist explanations for cultural
diversity.
The biological model: People have basic
needs; the institutions of society meet
those needs.
The structural model of functionalism
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The structural model: societies are
organisms and institutions adapt to
those needs.
Both are part of a revolt against both
evolutionism and historical
particularism.
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Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim: social
realities are separate from biological and
psychological realities and deserve their own
study, on their own terms.
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown took this up and
focused on the whole social system and its
needs rather than on the needs of individuals.
Institutions are functional when they serve to
perpetuate the whole social system, and
dysfunctional when they don’t.
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People in this scheme, were like molecules in
a system. T
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he molecules could be replaced by functionally
similar ones that played similar roles in service to
the longevity of the organism, and the proper
object of study, therefore was society itself.
Radcliffe-Brown rejected what he called
fanciful reconstructions of institutions or
customs – like where religious symbols come
from.
Teleology
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Functionalism is an excellent model for
fieldwork and for understanding how
things work.
But it is inadequate for explaining the
diversity of cultural forms because of its
teleological reasoning.
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Cultural materialism: This paradigm holds
that culture and social institutions are shaped
by infrastructural conditions.
Cultural materialists argue that the structural
components of society – including the
economy and governance – ultimately are
shaped by the infrastructure.
Agriculture was selected for, in the history of
human experience, by peoples who found it
more advantageous.
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Cultural materialism is based on the
principle of the priority of the
infrastructure and goes beyond Marx’s
materialist paradigm by including the
needs of reproduction, as well as the
needs of production in the mix of things
that shape structural and
superstructural components of society.
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Marxism is dialect materialism – the
needs of the so-called base, including
the means of production, continually
feed back into the infrastructure and
the then the structure of society.
Cultural materialism places the mode of
production in the infrastructure itself.
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It also is not based on the Marxist
ideology against capitalism. Cultural
materialists see capitalism as an
emergent phenomenon, based on
changes in the infrastructure around the
world.
Against materialism
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Structuralism: Claude Levi-Strauss. “The
structuralist paradigm in anthropology
suggests that the structure of human thought
processes is the same in all cultures, and that
these mental processes exist in the form of
binary oppositions (Winthrop 1991).
Some of these oppositions include hot-cold,
male-female, culture-nature, and raw-cooked.
Cognitive structuralism
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Structuralists argue that binary oppositions
are reflected in various cultural institutions.
The job of anthropology is to analyze
expressions of culture and to discover the
underlying schema.
Cultural schemas are contained in kinship,
language, art, and other expressive behavior.
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From a materialist perspective,
structuralism is a plan for studying one
component of society, the mental
superstructure.
Materialists and structuralists are both
concerned with understanding myth,
but they have different perspectives on
first principles.
Symbolic anthropology
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Symbolic and interpretive anthropology
is most associated with Clifford Geertz.
The goal of ethnography, says Geertz, is
to understand the cultural context that
produces symbolic behaviors, like a
purposeful wink.
Geertz on winking:
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What makes symbolic behaviors
meaningful to members of a culture?
Beliefs must be understood in context –
in terms of a cultural system that gives
meaning to both everyday events and
extraordinary events.
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It follows that action is driven by meaning.
The materialist paradigm is inappropriate for
this level of analysis.
Symbolic analysis is often applied to religion,
myths, and performance, but it can be
applied to any outcome, behavioral or
artifactual, and to organizational structures.
Post-modernism
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Postmodernism is a critique of science as a
so-called project of modernity.
Two components to the modernist
perspective: one is epistemological and the
other is ideological.
Like the humanists who rejected 19th century
positivism, post-modernists assert that our
essential subjectivity makes truth elusive.
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Furthermore, science has worked
against the legitimate aspirations of
oppressed people.
Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard
and others argue that we are in postmodern times – a time when meaning
has been destroyed.
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Today, anthropology is a very complex
discipline.
Medical anthropology, ecological
anthropology, political anthropology,
economic anthropology, post-structural
archeology, ethnoscience…
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The various paradigms and epistemological
perspectives are represented in these
fields.
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Religion and science have both failed to
provide clear answers to questions in which
we are all interested – not just questions
about life and death itself, but questions of
the moment.
Post-modernism and relativity: As a
consequence, people look for answers
anywhere they can.
The dilemma of relativism remains.