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In Quest of an Heuristic Approach to the Study of Mankind

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Laura Thompson
Laura Thompson*
Affiliation:
Society for Applied Anthropology
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Extract

The epoch-making revolution that has been taking place in mathematics and physics during the past hundred years is gradually changing our whole conception of reality and of the function of science in regard to it. We have discovered that the “common sense” view of the world which has become ingrained in the feeling-thought habits of Western man, especially since the seventeenth century, contains elements of serious limitation and even an illusion both from the standpoint of immediately intuited experience and from that of demonstrated scientific fact. Moreover, by a long drawn out tortuous process, lasting over many centuries and involving the constant creation and correction of an enormously complicated scientific structure, we have finally arrived at an understanding of what may be the root of our difficulty. It seems that certain peculiarities of the over-all grammatical structure of those languages that have conditioned the feeling-thought world of the West have tended to lead us astray. Their correction, however, has so far been possible only through the invention of new esoteric languages, such as the symbolism of mathematics and the new logic. By means of these “languages of science” modern mathematicians and physicists have at last succeeded in freeing themselves from the shackles of their everyday speech and “common sense” concepts, at least so far as their scientific work is concerned.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , January 1946 , pp. 53 - 66
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association 1946

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Footnotes

1

This paper was presented in less abbreviated form at the Sixth Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion, New York, August 23–27, 1945. I wish to express my appreciation to the Conference Staff for permission to publish it, and also to Donald H. Andrews, Eugene Ayres, David Bidney, John Collier, Carleton S. Coon, Manuel Gamio, Clyde Kluckhohn, Dorothy Lee, and Maria Rogers for helpful comments on the manuscript.

The approach herein suggested is largely an outgrowth of my four years’ work as coordinator of two interrelated cooperative social research projects; namely, the Research on Indian Education sponsored jointly by the United States Office of Indian Affairs and the Committee on Human Development of the University of Chicago; and the current Research on Administration sponsored jointly by the Indian Office and the Society for Applied Anthropology. The sponsors do not necessarily endorse it, however, and unless otherwise specified, the writer assumes sole responsibility for all statements.

References

Notes

2 Some of these peculiarities are described more fully in the writer's forthcoming publication, Toward World Citizenship. For illuminating comparative data see Dorothy Lee, Conceptual Implications of an Indian Language, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1938; A Primitive System of Values, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 7, No. 3, 1940.

3 Florian Znaniecki stated a tendency in sociology which is also marked in the other social sciences when he wrote: “Since sociology has become a recognized academic discipline, the preparation of sociologists for scientific work usually follows the regular pattern of university education. Young sociologists are subjected to the guidance of older faculty members, forced to avoid the risk of premature originality, and encouraged to select for their Master's and Doctor's theses only problems which are known in advance to be solvable in accordance with the standards recognized by their departments. Safe results are preferred to uncertain innovations, especially as the scientific status of sociology in the judgment of other scientists is still rather insecure.“—”Controversies in Doctrine and Method,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 50, 1945, p. 514.

4 Bridgman, P. W., The Logic of Modern Physics, New York, 1938, p. 210.

5 Planck, Max, Where Is Science Going?, New York, 1932, p. 131.

6 Ibid., pp. 154–155.

7 Prologue to Ibid., p. 10.

8 Whitehead, A. N., Science and the Modern World, New York, 1930, pp. 90–91.

9 See Bridgman, op. cit., pp. 3–33.

10 This point has been made by D. Bidney in “On the Concept of Culture and Some Cultural Fallacies,” American Anthropologist, Vol. 46, pp. 30–44, 1944.

11 For a detailed exposition of this point see Korzybski, A., Science and Sanity—An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, Lancaster, 1933.

12 Northrop, F. S. C., “The Method and Theories of Phsycial Science in Their Bearing upon Biological Organization,” Growth Supplement, 1940, pp. 127–154.

13 Ibid.

14 The purpose of this research is to attempt to gain insights regarding administrative policy and practice from an integrative investigation of several Indian societies viewed as wholes. Techniques from cultural anthropology, sociology, psychiatry, psychology, medicine, ecology, and linguistics are being used in this cooperative endeavor. The five tribes being studied are the Hopi, Navaho, Papago, Sioux, and Zuni.

15 The analysis of the Hopi field data was presented in The Hopi Way, University of Chicago Press, 1944.

16 Toward World Citizenship, op. cit.

17 Thompson, L. and Joseph, A., op. cit., p. 11.

18 For an analysis of the Hopi language from the conceptual point of view, see the following articles by B. L. Whorf: “The Punctual and Segmentative Aspects of Verbs in Hopi,” Language, Vol. 12, 1936. “Science and Linguistics,” Technology Review, Vol. 42, 1940. “The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language,” in Language, Culture and Personality, Essays in Memory of Edward Sapir, Mcnasha, 1941.

19 See the following forthcoming studies: Thompson, L., “Logico-aesthetic Integration in Hopi Culture,” American Anthropologist, October, 1945; Toward World Citizenship; Implicit Configuration in Hopi Symbolism.

20 See the works of Whitehead, Northrop, Croce, Cassirer, etc.

21 Cassirer, Ernst, An Essay on Man—An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture, Yale University Press, 1944, pp. 24–25. See also White, L. A., “The Symbol: The Origin and Basis of Human Behavior,” Philosophy of Science, Vol. 7, pp. 451–463, 1940.

22 I refer here to Hopi villages which have maintained their traditional ceremonial cycle and organization practically intact, not to those which have lost it or major parts of it.

23 Here I am thinking of an extension of the methods of cooperative action research, developed by Kurt Lewin, Ronald Lippitt and their associates, from the association level to the community and the society level.

24 By “cooperative leadership” I mean the sympathetic integrative type of leadership designed to draw from the group the spontaneous, creative response which leads to cooperative discovery and voluntary cooperative action. See Lippitt, R., “An Experimental Study of the Effects of Democratic and Authoritarian Group Atmospheres,” University of Iowa Studies in Child Welfare, Vol. 16, pp. 45–199, 1940; “From Domination to Leadership,” Journal of the National Association of Deans of Women, June, 1943, pp. 147–152.

25 Thompson, L. and Joseph, A., op. cit., p. 130.

26 Ibid., pp. 130–131.

27 See Ibid., pp. 25–30; Titiev, M., Old Oraibi, A Study of the Hopi Indians of Third Mesa, Harvard University Press, 1944, ch. 6; Cushing, Fewkes, and Parsons, “Contributions to Hopi History,” American Anthropologist, Vol. 24, 1922, pp. 258–268; Toward World Citizenship, op. cit.