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Science, Ethnoscience, and Ethnocentrism

Article in Philosophy of Science · June 1982

DOI: 10.1086/289052

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Science, Ethnoscience, and Ethnocentrism
Author(s): Ron Amundson
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Philosophy of Science, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Jun., 1982), pp. 236-250
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Philosophy of Science Association
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 SCIENCE, ETHNOSCIENCE, AND ETHNOCENTRISM*

RON AMUNDSONt
Department of Philosophy
University of Hawaii at Hilo

The conventionalist epistemology of cultural anthropology can be seen to be

embedded in the methods of 'cognitive anthropology', the study of folk con-
ceptual systems. These methods result in indiscriminately depicting all folk sys-
tems 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 episte-
mological prejudice may be peculiar to the cognitive sciences.

Emic methods in anthropology attempt to describe a culture from the

point of view of a native. The goal is a description 'from within', artic-
ulating the beliefs about the world and culture which are used by the
native. Methods have been developed to systematize emic description,
using techniques of semantic analysis. The use of these methods has been
variously labeled 'cognitive anthropology', 'ethnographic semantics', and
'ethnoscience'. The term 'ethnoscience' is currently in disfavor, as it is
said to suggest both that other kinds of anthropology are not scientific,
and that native thought forms are. I use this unfashionable term in the
present work because I wish to entertain the possibility that native cog-
nition is, in some aspects, genuinely scientific.
Cultural anthropologists are quick to point out that there are no real
folk sciences. Folk biology is not scientific biology. It is not always ob-
vious how this distinction is made. One importantfeature of 'real' science
is seen to be systematic attempts at falsification; another is the 'inter-
cultural validity' which results from such systems. Let us suppose that
the scientific character of a system is a matter of method, and not merely
success. In this case, intercultural validity is irrelevant to the scientific
nature of a folk system. We can judge the intercultural validity of our
systems just because we have access to other systems-folk cultures do
not. The matter of falsification is a little more complex. Moder science

*Received February 1981; revised October 1981.

tI 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.

Philosophyof Science, 49 (1982) pp. 236-250.

Copyright? 1982 by the Philosophyof ScienceAssociation.

236

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 SCIENCE, ETHNOSCIENCE, AND ETHNOCENTRISM 237

is experimental, and seeks falsification for its hypotheses, or so it is said.

Folk cultures do not. There are two problems with this criterion. First,
some cognitive systems are reasonably called 'scientific' which are not
actively experimental-the physical systems of Aristotle, Euclid, and
Ptolemy spring to mind. Second, the apparentunfalsifiability of folk sci-
ences may not be the result of 'prescientific' cognition at all. I will argue
that the epistemological/metaphysical foundations of cultural anthropol-
ogy bias the results of ethnoscientific inquiry in such a way that a gen-
uinely scientific folk cognitive system could not be described as such.

1. Epistemologies. Epistemology plays a more complex role in a cog-

nitive science than in a natural science. Like other scientists, those in
cognitive areas (which I mean to include 'non-cognitivist' behaviorists)
adopt principles which describe how scientific work is, or should be,
carried out. Unlike other scientists, cognitive scientists are studying
beings who themselves are knowers. The scientist is to discover the prin-
ciples by which these knowers operate. So it is possible in principle for
a cognitive scientist to hold one epistemology as descriptive of his/her
own scientific work, but a different one as empirically true of the knowers
he/she is investigating. While this seldom happens, we must be able to
distinguish the self-conscious, partly normative, scientific epistemology
of the scientist from the empirically-based epistemology he/she infers to
be true of those being studied.
The predominant self-conscious epistemology of cultural anthropology
is scientific conventionalism. I will contrast this view and the research
methods with which it is coordinated with the alternative of scientific
realism. While my tastes in this matter may become obvious, the con-
clusions I will urge do not require the truth, or even the plausibility, of
realism. All that is required is that some people are realists, and so for
all we know a priori some folk cultures have realist views. But, I will
argue, the methods of ethnoscience will not allow the discovery of a folk
realist science, even if such a thing exists. Perhaps conventionalism is
true, and any such folk would be philosophically mistaken. Still the
'world of the native' who is a realist is different from the non-realist
native. Anthropology ought to be able to spot this difference.
The kind of realism I will be considering need not (and won't) be elab-
orate. It is similar to the versions discussed by Hesse (1974, p. 290 ff.)
and endorsed by Putnam, at least in (1970) and (1973). The naturalworld
(on this version) exists with an objective structureindependent of human
knowledge of the structure. Much of our language, in particularthe lan-
guage of science, is intended to refer to features of this objective struc-
ture. A realist need not be committed to the objective truth of any par-
ticular scientific statement or theory, but only to the possibility of an

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238 RON AMUNDSON

objectively accurate description of the world. The conventionalism of

cultural anthropology is similar to that expressed by Poincare with regard
to geometry, and Quine with regard to 'radical translation'. It is most
familiar to philosophers via the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis of linguistic rel-
ativity, a view rejected in its particularsby most current anthropologists.1
Conventionalism is the view that, with respect to a given domain, there
is no truth of the matter, no objective structure to be accurately (or in-
accurately) described by language. In such a domain the choice of a the-
ory (or a language, or a world-view) is more or less arbitrary,subject to
constraints only of convenience, not of objective truth. According to a
conventionalist, a theory orders or classifies the phenomena. It does not
describe a pre-existing order. The domain of which the anthropological
conventionalist speaks is large-all areas of human cognition.
We classify because life in a world where nothing was the same
would be intolerable. It is through naming and classification that the
whole rich world of infinite variability shrinks to manipulable size
and becomes bearable. Our methods of classification are entirely ar-
bitrary and subjective. There is nothing in the external world which
demands that certain things go together and others do not. It is our
perception of similarities and differences together with a set of hi-
erarchical cues that determine which things go together. We not only
react to certain discriminable stimuli as if they were the same, we
name them and organize them into groupings. (Tyler 1969, p. 7)
The task of the cultural anthropologist is to discover (classify) the na-
tive systems of classification.
The intended objective of these efforts is eventually to provide the
ethnographer with public, non-intuitive procedures for ordering his
presentation of observed and elicited events according to the prin-
ciples of classification of the people he is studying. To order eth-
nographic observations solely according to an investigator's cate-
gories obscures the real content of culture: how people organize their
experience conceptually so that it can be transmitted as knowledge
from person to person and generation to generation. (Frake 1962, p.
85)
A conscientious conventionalist will notice that he must apply the same
critique to his own cognitive activities as he applies to the folk cognition.

'Linguistic relativity is usually challenged on its linguistics rather than its relativism. It
is argued, for example, that cultures with very different languages have similar world-
views. (Cf. Bright and Bright 1965) I know of no challenge to the philosophical inference
from differences in world-view to relativity of truth. This does not show a reluctance to
do philosophy, however, as this inference is often made and affirmed.

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 SCIENCE, ETHNOSCIENCE, AND ETHNOCENTRISM 239

Anything else would be ethnocentric. An anthropologist's model is said

to confer objective structure on a system . . . "And the use of 'confers'
is deliberate, since it would be quite accurate to say that until the ex-
planatory model was constructed, the system had no objective structure."
(Caws 1974, p. 7. See also Chaney 1978.)
The topic of the present study is not the philosophies of anthropolo-
gists, but the methods of anthropology. The conventionalist attitudes
noted above may be methodologically innocuous. Einstein was never a
Machian positivist, even when he said he was. However, the conven-
tionalism of anthropologists is embedded in the methods of ethnoscience.
Its effects can be seen in the methods used and the data reported from
the field.

2. Semantics and Anthropological Method. Among the domains of

inquiry for ethnoscience (the semantic domains, or cognitive systems) are
kinship terminology, ethnobiology, ethnogeography, names of body
parts, terminology of direction (north, south, etc.), classification of fire-
wood (fastburning, good tinder, etc.), kinds of food, kinds of drink, ways
of preparingfood, color terminology, religious systems, diseases, and of
course many more. Any organized system of things, events, behavior,
or emotions is a candidate for analysis. The analysis is not of the things
(etc.) themselves, but of the organization visited upon the things (etc.)
by the minds of people. The intension, not the extension, of native con-
cepts is at issue. (Cf. Tyler 1969, p. 3; Goodenough 1956)
The conventionalist doctrine is carried into the field in the form of a
uniform method for all cognitive anthropological analysis. Each area of
folk cognition is to be analysed as a classification system, and described
semantically. The system is represented in an 'arrangement'of concepts.
The best example of such an arrangement is a folk taxonomy. This ar-
rangement is similar in structure to a Linnean biological taxonomy, but
can be applied to such diverse domains as kinds of furniture, or kinds of
things to eat at a restaurant.Others kinds of arrangementhave been used,
varying with the relations of class inclusion, intersection and so on which
hold among the concepts being arranged. (Tyler 1969, p. 6 ff.) It is up
to the investigator to determine which arrangementis suitable for a given
domain, and it is not assumed that the kinds so far developed exhaust
possible cognitive systems. It is, however, assumed that any cognitive
system can be adequately represented by some semantic arrangement.
This may seem harmless. It is not.
The central concept of traditional semantics is the analytic definition,
the specification of necessary and sufficient conditions for the use of a
term. Given the definition of 'bachelor' as 'unmarried male', the state-
ment 'All bachelors are unmarried' is analytically true-true by defini-

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240 RON AMUNDSON

tion. Recent work in the philosophy of science has shown that the re-
quirement for semantic definition for all scientific terms strongly biases
the issue against scientific realism. (Cf. Kripke 1972, Putnam 1970) The
realist anti-semanticists claim that semantics gives an inadequate account
of many scientific expressions, whose function is not to describe or to
classify but to refer. It is argued that these expressions, 'natural kind
terms', can succeed in referring even when our deepest beliefs (concern-
ing those characteristics we would be tempted to use in an analytical
definition) are substantially mistaken. Logical positivists have long since
noted that requirements for complete analytic definitions are inconsistent
with scientific practice; on the present view even a partial definition is
too much. Natural kind terms function as proper names of natural kinds.
Not all such terms succeed in referring, of course. 'Phlogiston' is a failed
naturalkind term-phlogiston does not exist. Oxygen exists, so 'oxygen'
succeeded.
The science-as-classification view is semanticist and conventionalist.
A method of classification is like a filing system, and there are indefi-
nitely many ways to devise consistent, even useful, filing systems. Once
a classification scheme is devised, the terms used for its classes can be
analytically defined, either by listing the members of the class or by citing
necessary and sufficient characteristics from outside the system. The first
method is the anthropologist's 'arrangement', the second is the more
complex 'componential analysis'. (Goodenough 1956)

3. Kinds of Kinds. The semantic analysis of 'bachelor' is simple and

convincing. 'All bachelors are unmarried' does not require empirical dis-
covery (it seems) and its denial would naturally be taken as a linguistic
misunderstanding. Kinship terms, the most favored single domain for
anthropological semantics, are similar to 'bachelor' in this regard. Some-
one who denies that his father's brother is his uncle must be confused
about 'uncle'. Kinship systems differ with the culture, and there are no
non-cultural constraints on the systems used. Conventionalism is true of
kinship-there is no objective kinship structure in the world which in-
dividual kinship systems are directed towards representing. (There are,
or course, rather important objective facts about biological parentage.)
Other systems of classification are, like kinship, adequately defined se-
mantically. Examples are the categories of food custom. In North Amer-
ican culture beefsteak is a 'main course', and ice cream is a 'dessert'.
There seems no serious possibility that we are mistaken in this matter.
There are anomalous cases-is a hamburger a 'sandwich', a pudding a
'dessert'? In these cases what is needed, if anything, is a decision rather
than a discovery. Such decisions may have reasons behind them, but they

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 SCIENCE, ETHNOSCIENCE, AND ETHNOCENTRISM 241

are pragmatic reasons, not epistemic ones. They are reasons to classify
a hamburger as a sandwich, not reasons to believe that a hamburger is
in fact a sandwich.
So there are some cognitive systems which are adequately described
semantically. For these areas a conventionalist research methodology
does no harm. If there are areas of folk cognition inadequately dealt with
by semantics, the systems may well cover topics similar to those of West-
ern science. But even in these areas not all discourse will refer to (pur-
ported) naturalkinds. Western culture has sets both of scientific and non-
scientific terms for the same domain. I classify the plant world distin-
guishing between 'tree' and 'shrub', and also between 'coniferous' and
'deciduous'. I take the latter distinction to reflect a naturaldivision in the
world. The former is useful, but not intended (by me or my friends) as
scientific. Consider the difference between 'bug' and 'insect'; between
'varmint' and 'rodent'. I have been mistaken in the past in calling things
'insects', but no scientist is going to tell me that a centipede is not a bug.
Consulting scientists on whether centipedes are bugs is as inappropriate
as consulting them on whether hamburgers are sandwiches.
Let us call 'insect'-type terms (natural kind terms) realist class terms,
and 'bug'-type terms conventional class terms. A realist class term is
intended to refer to a feature of the objective world. (It need not succeed,
of course.) A conventional class term is intended to divide up the world
according to some interests or other, but is not constrained by the ac-
curacy of its objective reference. Conventional class terms can be defined
semantically, and are reasonably regarded as mere classification.
Conventionalism is not the view that realist class terms do not exist.
It is the view that realist classes do not exist. A conventionalist might
try to convince me (a confessed realist) that none of my realist class terms
succeed in objective reference. But he would be hard put to convince me
that I have no realist class terms. Naive as I may be, to argue that I am
not attempting objective reference with 'insect' would be as foolhardy as
arguing that I am mistaken in calling centipedes 'bugs'.
The anthropologist qua anthropologist ought not to participate in this
metaphysical debate. The purpose of cognitive anthropology is not to
discover metaphysical truths, but to investigate cognitive systems. Now
it is surely a feature of my cognitive world that I discriminate between
realist and conventional class terms-my 'conceptual universe' contains
real classes. It is an empirical question whether non-Western folk cultures
use realist class terms. Perhaps they are an artifact of Western science,
or perhaps they are a human cognitive universal. A significant question
of cognitive anthropology is: Do folk cognitive systems involve realist
class terms?

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242 RON AMUNDSON

This question cannot be answered using present methods. The methods

of classification and semantic analysis can be applied to, or better, su-
perimposed upon, systems of realist classes, but the results are mislead-
ing. What will appear as analytic definitions will actually be empirical
beliefs about the objects and classes named by the terms. These beliefs
will not be 'true by definition' as will counterpartbeliefs in conventional
systems. An instance of this problem can be seen in Black's (1969, p.
177) report on Ojibwa biological taxonomy. Besides the categories
glossed as 'humans', 'birds', and 'fish', Black reports a category glossed
as 'insects'. The 'insect' category includes terms glossed as 'snake',
'toad', and 'fly'. Black explains (unnecessarily) that the Ojibwa expres-
sions are not 'semantic equivalents' of the English glosses. My question
is whether the category glossed as 'insect' is a realist category or a con-
ventional category. Is it a 'bug'-like term or an 'insect'-like term? I can
see no way to answer this question. A realist system looks just like a
conventional system under present (conventionalist) analysis. But it is
importantto distinguish these two kinds of classes even if realism is me-
taphysically mistaken. The anthropologist's interest in intension rather
than extension disguises a third possible topic. Does the native informant
intend her expressions to have realist or conventional extensions? To in-
sist on analysing all folk systems as conventional is conventionalist eth-
nocentrism.

4. A Thought-Ethnography. Native Hawaiian food custom distin-

guishes between poi-food and fish-food. (I will use English glosses
throughout this discussion.) Poi-foods include rice, potatoes, breadfruit,
poi, and others. Fish-foods include meat, fish, tomatoes, seaweed, salt,
and others. These categories are determinable by eating custom-the eas-
iest way to tell that a food is a poi-food is to notice that it is eaten from
a large central bowl. Fish-foods are passed around the group in several
small bowls. These classes are pretty clearly conventional-they are mere
classification.
Imagine a village in which the kahuna (the priest, call him Kimo) no-
tices relations between eating habits and health. Families which eat only
poi-food tend to develop a certain disease, and those which eat only fish-
food tend to develop another disease. Kimo hypothesizes that a balance
of poi-food and fish-food is necessary for good health. Kimo spreads the
word in his village, and the disease rate drops. (The truth of Kimo's
hypothesis is irrelevant to the example, but it makes a better story.)
The cognitive significance of the terms 'poi-food' and 'fish-food' have
been changed in Kimo's village. But the classification system is the same.
Kimo's villagers will group the same foods under the category 'fish-food'
as people from any other village. Present cognitive anthropology, inter-

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 SCIENCE, ETHNOSCIENCE, AND ETHNOCENTRISM 243

ested only in the classification, will note no difference between the vil-
lages. There is a cognitive difference between the villages, quite clearly,
but it must be described in some other way than the classification of
foods. In the pre-Kimo culture it was custom which 'made' a food a poi-
food. But it is not custom which makes this food prevent this disease.
(Kimo takes it to be properties of the food, not of the custom, which
explain the prevention.) Under the old conception of the classes, the cul-
ture could 'make' a poi-food into a fish-food by changing eating custom.
No longer. Further, the new system allows the discovery of mistakes in
classification, nonsensical under the old system. Kimo's village might
discover that salt is not a fish-food, if it does not prevent the disease
which fish-foods generally prevent. This makes sense only if 'fish-food'
is not semantically defined as including salt. Even more strangely, Kimo
could make sense of the possibility that poi is not a poi-food. This is
paradoxical only if the class 'poi-food' is semantically defined-that is,
if it is a conventional class term. Kimo has instituted its use as a realist
class term. Such odd statements as 'Poi is not a poi-food' are common
in cases of scientific change. Whenever a feature taken as 'defining' a
scientific concept is asserted by a new theory to be false (of the things
named by the concept) the appearanceof self-contradiction results. Atoms
were originally 'defined' as indivisible. They are not. On a convention-
alist view the meaning of 'atom' has changed, and we are no longer talk-
ing about the same thing. On a realist view our beliefs about atoms have
changed, and what was described as a 'definition' of 'atom' was just a
firmly held belief about atoms. The possibility of smashing the atom, and
of discovering new poi-foods, are new possibilities, created by new the-
ories. These possibilities are features of the 'cognitive worlds' of humans.
But they cannot be discovered by simply investigating the classification
schemes used in these 'worlds'. 'Could be' cannot be derived from 'is'.

5. An Ethnography. Most ethnoscientific descriptions of folk beliefs

concern systems of class inclusion or attributeascription, which are easily
dealt with by 'arrangements'. These are not the kinds of beliefs making
up most of moder science. It would be hard to imagine a classification
scheme which could represent 'For every action there is an equal and
opposite reaction'. One exception is Charles O. Frake's (1961), in which
he discusses Subanun folk beliefs about disease development.2 This paper
deserves close attention for two reasons. First, Frake shows complete
confidence in the semantic method, even while using it in an unusually
complex domain. Second, he is exceptionally deliberate in describing his

2Glick (1964) makes another study of developmental beliefs. His study leads him to
question the adequacy of the semantic methods.

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244 RON AMUNDSON

methodology and the problems he had in dealing with the data.

Frake begins with a general discussion of 'disease concepts'. People
around the world, when ill, ask such questions as 'What kind of disease
do I have?', 'What caused this disease?', and 'What are my chances?'.
Frake states that the cultural answers to these questions are concepts of
disease, and that the meaning of a disease concept is "... the infor-
mation necessary to arrive at a specific answer and to eliminate others."
(p. 114) Thus disease concepts are given operational definitions-the
meaning of a disease concept is the information necessary to make a di-
agnosis. The concepts will receive analyses in perceptual terms-it is
what we perceive which allows us to diagnose. On Frake's view, while
individual cases of illness exist objectively, diseases do not.

The fundamental unit of Subanun diagnosis is the diagnostic category

(or 'disease') labelled by a 'disease name'. Whereas an illness is a
single instance of 'being sick', a diagnostic category is a conceptual
entity which classifies particularillnesses, symptomatic or pathogenic
components of illness, or stages of illness. (p. 115)
To apply this view to Western medical science, the people we call 'small-
pox victims' all have illnesses. But the term 'smallpox' designates not
a kind of illness, but a 'diagnostic category', a conceptual entity. Clearly
on this view many ordinary statements about diseases are elliptical-'I
have smallpox' and 'Smallpox is caused by a virus' are examples, as well
as the recent news that smallpox has been eradicated. (Conceptual entities
are not so easily eradicated.) This application of Frake's analysis to West-
ern medicine is not unfair, since Frake glosses Subanun terms as 'mea-
sles', 'chicken pox', and 'smallpox'. Lest there be any confusion, the
metaphysics being expressed is Frake's own. There is no indication that
a Subanun informant told Frake that diseases are conceptual entities.
Conventionalism is a feature of Frake's 'conceptual world', not that of
the Subanun.
Subanun are reported to be quite unconcerned with the causes of dis-
ease, in the Western sense. There is, however, a set of beliefs regarding
developmental histories of certain kinds of disease. The developmental
ancestors of these diseases are referred to as 'prodromes'.
Prodromal criteria are diagnostically significant responses to ques-
tions of the origin or 'prodrome' of a given illness, the 'prodrome'
always referring to a prior and diagnostically distinct condition. A
derivative disease is one whose diagnosis depends on its having a
specified prodrome. When referring to a derivative disease, a query
about its prodrome must be answered by another disease name, pre-
viously applicable to the illness. A spontaneous disease, in contrast,

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 SCIENCE, ETHNOSCIENCE, AND ETHNOCENTRISM 245

is one for which the response to a query can be 'there is no prod-

rome.' . . . One cannot have 'deep ulcer' unless one has previously,
as part of the same 'illness,' had 'eruption,' 'sore,' and 'ulcer,' in
that order. 'Eruption' need have no prodrome, though it sometimes
begins as 'rash.' The latter disease is always spontaneous. . . . For
any derivative disease, a given prodrome is a necessary but not a
sufficient diagnostic criterion. If the evidence of other criteria over-
whelmingly points to a contrarydiagnosis, one must conclude-since
the criteriality of the prodrome cannot be discounted-that the pre-
vious diagnosis, or current information about it, is erroneous. Thus
an informant insisted that an inflammation on my leg was an inflamed
insect bite rather than an inflamed wound, even though I had told
him that I thought it had originated as a 'mini-cut.' I simply, ac-
cording to him, had not noticed the prodromalbite. In such cases the
existence of the prodrome is deduced from its criteriality to a diag-
nosis arrived at on other grounds. Our data would have been im-
proved had we earlier recognized the importance of these ex post
facto classificatory decisions as evidence of criteriality. (p. 127. Eng-
lish glosses are substituted for the Subanun.)

Frake earlier introduced the term 'criteria' as the culture's "explicit

definitions" of categories. (p. 123) Thus the Subanun are said to define
the disease term 'deep ulcer' by its perceptual characteristics, and by the
fact that it developed out of a set of three other diseases, each of which
was diagnostically distinct from 'deep ulcer'. What can be said about
disease B and its prodrome A? First, A and B are diagnostically distinct.
This must mean that A can be diagnosed without information that B will
develop, and B can be diagnosed without information that A had preceded
it. This happened in the diagnosis of Frake's 'inflamed insect bite'. Sec-
ond, A is criterial to B. This means that A is part of the 'explicit defi-
nition' of B. This is an odd state of affairs. The meaning of a disease
concept is the information necessary to make a diagnosis, A and B are
diagnostically distinct, but A is criterial to B, part of B's explicit defi-
nition. It would seem that 'has A as a prodrome' both is and is not a part
of the meaning of 'B'. If this is indeed a representation of the Subanun
conceptual system, they are a very confused folk.
The oddness of this analysis springs from Frake's method of analysing
every native belief and inference as being on a cognitive par. Each is
analytically true, true by definition. This method derives from the con-
ventionalist view of cognition as semantics. To believe that A is prodro-
mal to B is to mean 'has A as a prodrome' by the term 'B'. The belief
that A is a prodrome to B is thus true by the definition of the terms. Frake
says that, for a derivative disease, diagnosis depends on the disease's

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246 RON AMUNDSON

having a prodrome, and that the prodrome is a necessary diagnostic con-

dition. On the ordinary interpretationof these statements, one would infer
that the prodrome's existence is epistemically necessary for a diagno-
sis-that the diagnosis of a 'deep ulcer' cannot be made unless there is
evidence of a previous 'eruption'. But this cannot be what Frake intends,
as he promptly gives a counterexample. His informant diagnosed Frake's
inflamed insect bite in the absence of evidence, indeed in the face of
counterevidence, that its prodrome had occurred. The statements about
the diagnosis simply mean that, once the diagnosis of 'inflamed insect
bite' has been arrived at (on whatever grounds) the informant will infer
that the prodrome had occurred. Since (on the semanticist view) any such
inference must be a semantic one, the prodrome is logically necessary
to the diagnosis, even though not epistemically necessary. The diagnosis
logically implies that the prodrome occurred, in the way that my judg-
ment that John is a bachelor has the implication that John has no wife.
For derivative diseases, prodrome queries must be answered by disease
names. What is the force of this must? Must this answer be given on pain
of logical contradiction, as one must answer 'No' to 'Is this bachelor
married?' Or must the answer be given on pain of contradicting widely
held beliefs, as one must answer 'No' to 'Is this mother a virgin?' To
be sure, we often infer nonvirginity from motherhood. But this does not
imply that nonvirginity is a part of the definition of 'motherhood'. Virgin
births may be poorly substantiated, but they are not self-contradictory.
It would seem that Frake's evidence for the 'criteriality' of prodromes
is just what he would have for the 'criteriality' of nonvirginity for moth-
erhood.
I will here venture an alternate interpretationof the Subanun concept
of derivative disease. The Subanun believe that there are distinct diseases
in the world. These diseases are given names. It is believed that a disease
can be (usually) identified by its perceivable characteristics. (Frake re-
ports borderline cases and disagreements.) Some of these diseases, which
we will call 'derivative', are believed to occur only as developments out
of specific other diseases. The occurrence of these earlier 'prodromal'
diseases is believed to be a necessary causal condition for the occurrence
of a derivative disease. It is considered to be a law of naturethat a certain
derivative disease only develops out of certain prodromes. Thus when a
Subanun identifies a derivative disease by its appearance, he or she will
very confidently infer the previous existence of its prodrome, even in the
face of counterevidence. To deny that its prodrome had occurred would
not be self-contradictory, but would deny what is believed to be a law
of nature.
This analysis implies that the Subanun have (self-consistent) empirical
beliefs about entities which are conceived to independently exist. It does

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 SCIENCE, ETHNOSCIENCE, AND ETHNOCENTRISM 247

not imply that these beliefs are true. If this analysis is to be rejected, it
should be on empirical grounds, not on metaphysical scruples concerning
whether diseases are real things or 'conceptual entities'. It will seem to
some people that these two accounts (Frake's conventionalist one and my
realist alternative) just say the same thing in different ways. This is not
so. On Frake's account, Subanun disease cognition consists of a system
of interdefined concepts. The only possible mistake in such a system is
a failure to follow the rules, e.g., a failure to answer a particularquestion
with a disease name when the system says you 'must' do so. All mistakes
are of the 'Bachelors are married' variety. On my account the Subanun
have empirical beliefs about diseases, elements of the natural world, to
which they refer with disease names. These beliefs are not true-by-def-
inition. The Subanun who says 'My deep ulcer had no prodrome' is de-
nying a well-established belief of Subanun medical science (if I dare use
the term), but he is not contradicting himself. Empirical falsification of
disease beliefs is possible on my account, impossible on Frake's. Un-
falsifiability-in-principle is a serious charge against the scientific status
of a cognitive system. It ought not to be made lightly. It certainly ought
not to be a methodological preface of every study of folk cognition.
Frake's methodology contains features which are not a necessary part
of every conventionalist system. For example, it is his commitment to
full semantic analyses for beliefs which results in each belief being an-
alytically true. This result is not peculiar to anthropological convention-
alists, however. Suppe makes a similar criticism of Feyerabend's account
of scientific theory change. (Suppe 1977, p. 638) Another extra feature
of Frake's methods is the goal of providing operational definitions of folk
concepts. Tyler criticizes this tendency on the grounds that it cannot ac-
count for classifications of deities. (Tyler 1969, p. 16) The failure to
adequately describe religions is not the only effect of operationalism in
ethnographic description. If any current philosophy of science is correct,
operationalism is also an inadequate basis for theoretical science. So if
this is the method used to define folk concepts, it is not a discovery but
a stipulation that folk cultures have no theoretical science and operate
only in the concrete realm.
Frake did not succeed in operationally defining Subanun disease
names. "Inadequacies in our data largely prevent confident definition
of Subanun diagnostic categories by distinctive stimulus attributes, or
cues, of illnesses." (Frake 1961, p. 124. Emphasis added.) This is, iron-
ically, the same bit of reasoning used by the informant diagnosing Frake's
inflamed insect bite. The prodromal bite was inferred in the absence of
any direct evidence of its existence, based on a firm belief that the present
disease could only have developed out of such a bite. Frake's failure to
discover operational definitions is used not to infer the absence of such

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248 RON AMUNDSON

definition, but the poverty of the data. Both inferences could be mistaken.
Systems of belief about naturaldevelopment cannot be as rare amongst
cultures as they are amongst ethnographies. Their absence is surely due
to the difficulty of expressing them within the prevalent model of cog-
nition. Frake's study of the Subanun is an exception-the data have pen-
etrated an unreceptive methodology. This is a tribute to Frake's ingenuity
and scientific intuition. His difficulty in expressing the system leads me
to question the methodology. Such simple and reasonable systems ought
not be this hard to describe.

6. Prognosis and Conclusions. There have been recent movements

away from the semanticist methods, especially in folk biology. It is said
that species are "objective discontinuities" in nature (Dwyer 1976, p.
429), and even that species names are "semantic primitives" (Hunn
1976, p. 510). This comes very close to calling them names of species.
But, while the number of semantic analyses has dwindled, so has the
number of studies of folk science. One would hope that methods would
be developed to distinguish realist from conventional systems, and per-
haps describe other kinds as well. The study of kinship systems is worth-
while in itself, but it is an inappropriatemodel for cognition in general.
(Wallace criticizes the reliance on kinship analyses in (1965).)
If there are no realist folk systems, this fact must be established em-
pirically, not legislatively. The only methods which can discover the non-
existence of such systems are those which do not presuppose their nonex-
istence. Tyler cautions the anthropologist against imposing his own
semantic categories onto native cognition. (Tyler 1969, p. 11) This wise
advice conceals the presupposition that what is to be discovered about
folk cognition is semantic categories. The anthropologist would be well
advised to avoid this metaphysical assumption as carefully as the semantic
one.
The conventionalist epistemology and methods in anthropology were
undoubtedly developed to counteract a far more virulent form of ethno-
centrism. Early cultural studies tended to assess folk cultures by the de-
gree to which they approximated the culture of the (European) investi-
gator. Scales were developed to classify cultures with 'savagery' at one
end and, guess who, modem Europe at the other. This attitude had both
moral and scientific repercussions. It seemed to justify colonialism, if not
genocide. And it scientifically biased the reports of cultural investigators,
who assumed that the folk being studied were far less complex and
learned than the investigator. Anthropologists realized that it is not the
job of the anthropologist qua anthropologist to assess either moral or fac-
tual correctness of folk beliefs. An efficient way to discourage this kind
of judgment is to adopt the view that there is no moral or factual cor-

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 SCIENCE, ETHNOSCIENCE, AND ETHNOCENTRISM 249

rectness. The resulting methods are surely better than the old chauvinism
in their moral consequences, and in the accuracy of most cultural de-
scription. But in studying folk cognition, the methods again infect the
observations. Conventionalist methods in anthropology, like relativist
ethical theories, succeed in protecting beliefs from authoritarianattack
at the price of rendering those beliefs trivial. Folk cognition may indeed
be arbitrary, conventional, and unfalsifiable. But we cannot know this
until we have methods which would allow us to discover otherwise.
The difficulties we have seen for the anthropological study of cognition
result from an interaction between the self-conscious methodology of the
scientist and the substantive descriptions of cognition which result from
applying this methodology. But this is not simply a projection of epis-
temological prejudice onto the folk systems. Notice that, if the substan-
tive results were taken at face value, they would seem empirically to
validate the methods used by the scientist. This is not just because suc-
cessful results validate the methods used to achieve them. If folk cog-
nition really is what the semanticists have described it (discovered it?)
to be, then scientific conventionalism has not only philosophical, but em-
pirical support. While the historical details are beyond the scope of the
present study, I believe that similar relations can be shown between meth-
odology and substantive theory in several schools of psychology. Things
are difficult in the cognitive sciences-epistemology is both instrument
and subject matter. 'Know thyself' would be a simple task to complete,
if only we were granted the methodology with which to begin.

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