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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
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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

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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

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