Reason and Morality

Joanna Overing

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781135800468
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First Published in 1985. What is the place of reason and conversely of the unreasonable, the contradictory, the emotional and the chaotic in social life? What is the nature of general human rationality? Are there such things as incommensurable world views? How efficacious are typologies or 'modes of thought' or cognitive styles? These are some of the controversies addressed by the contributors to this volume which draws together papers from the 1984 Malinowski Centennial Conference of the ASA.

1
Introduction¹

Joanna Overing

The debate

The recent debates in Britain on rationality,² which revolve around reflections on the epistemological presuppositions of anthropological fieldwork, and include the hoary issue of comprehending in general ‘other minds’, began in 1970 with the publication of Bryan Wilson’s edited volume, Rationality. This collection of essays by philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists used as a focus the 1964 article by Winch, ‘Understanding a primitive society’, which challenged Evans-Pritchard’s contention (1934, 1935, 1937) that Azande beliefs about witchcraft and oracles are logical (they obey universal laws of logic), but mistaken. Very briefly, Winch argues that our sense of reality is a social construction based on the conventional discourse of our society, the corollary of which is that unrelated language communities may well have incommensurable world views and rationalities.³

The predominant position over the years has been against Winch and in agreement with Evans-Pritchard, i.e. that Azande beliefs are fictitious, though as logical in argument (and in the same way) as those of Western science. The debate has been carried through more by philosophers than by anthropologists and has therefore increasingly narrowed to focus upon internal issues raised in the analytic philosophy of science rather than those emerging from ethnographic fieldwork. In Rationality and Relativism (Hollis and Lukes 1982), a follow-up volume to Rationality where the positions of the philosophers have become more refined and strongly drawn, much attention is given to the question of the empirical verifiability and truth-value of strange beliefs and to the problem of which universals of mind, perhaps a priori ones, we must assume to exist for the translation of strange beliefs to be possible. With a few notable exceptions,⁴ it was agreed by these philosophers that the cognitive skills developed by Western scientists are—on the criteria of truth-value and power over the physical— superior to all others in the history of the world, and such skills should therefore be the yardstick by which we measure and judge all others.⁵ Hollis and Newton-Smith go so far as to label mistaken beliefs, those that the methods of Western science would not validate, as ‘irrational beliefs’ (Hollis 1982:69; Newton-Smith 1982; Hollis and Lukes 1982:12). With a wave of the empiricist’s wand the status of ‘rationales’ in human experience has thus been consigned to the category of ‘the wrong and the daft’, and the question of the form and purpose of such rationales in human social life appears no longer to be of interest.

Less focused, and therefore broader in scope, are two other collections of essays that also form a critical part of the history of this particular debate, the 1973 collection of essays, Modes of Thought, edited by Horton and Finnegan, and Philosophical Disputes in the Social Sciences, edited by S.C.Brown, and published in 1979. In the latter volume an essay by Horton entitled ‘Material-object language and theoretical language: towards a Strawsonian sociology of thought’ anticipates in Rationality and Relativism much of the discussion on ‘bridgeheads’⁶ into the thought of others. In Philosophical Disputes an important section is also addressed to Karl-Otto Apel’s article, ‘Types of Social Science in the light of human cognitive interests’. Apel, whose views are associated with the Frankfurt School of social theorists, calls in question the neutrality of all science by arguing that the type of understanding being sought reflects particular value-laden cognitive interests. This is a topic missing from the other volumes on rationality, reflecting the fact that the concern with investigator reflexivity is more Continental than British in tradition. The Horton and Finnegan volume, Modes of Thought, has in contrast to other collections considerable anthropological content, and as such was little discussed in Rationality and Relativism. It is also pertinent to note the shift within anthropology itself in its formulation of issues. Reflection upon the topic of rationality is not the same today as it was in 1973. In Modes of Thought, as the title indicates, a major concern was over the delineation of distinct ‘modes of thought’ differentiating ‘the modern’ and ‘the traditional’, ‘the scientific’ from the ‘non-scientific’. In brief, whatever the issue, there remained in the early 1970s a conviction that the West was a highly rational place, while ‘traditional’ people lived a more poetic, mystical, less rational and more restricted world of thought.⁷ The crisis of faith within science had not yet left its mark.

The Hollis and Lukes volume addresses itself to the crisis of faith within philosophy, initiated by its own historians and sociologists, over the empiricist’s paradigm of rationality.⁸ Within science the idea of a ‘single world’ is being challenged. For instance, both Kuhn (1964) and Feyerabend (1975, 1978) have forcefully argued against the belief of Western science in a unified objective world unaffected by the epistemic activities of the scientists themselves; rather, they say, the world, from the perspective of our knowledge of it, is how we view it through the paradigms we create. Richard Rorty has recently portrayed the moral commitment of Western philosophy to Reality, Truth, Objectivity, and Reason as ‘a self-deceptive effort to eternalize the normal discourse of the day’ (Rorty 1980:11). In a powerful critique, Rorty rejects philosophy’s search for the rational foundations of knowledge. The faith of Western science in a universal rationality is being shaken, and as Hollis and Lukes comment (1982:1), ‘recent upheavals in the philosophy of science have turned the historian or sociologist of science into something of an anthropologist, an explorer of alien cultures’. Such ‘anthropology’ of science unnerves many philosophers, and most of the contributors to Rationality and Relativism argue against what Hollis and Lukes label ‘the temptation of relativism’ within the philosophy of science. In so doing, they are defending their control of reality construction, one based on Reason, the ideal of Objective cognition, and a bedrock of Reality.⁹

It is important to stress the point that the issues of rationality, relativism, translation, and commensurability as discussed in the Hollis and Lukes volume are being defined by analytic philosophers who have a particular view of science and humankind to defend. Their discourse on relativism, and definition of it, suits their interest in maintaining a particular world view within the philosophy of science. The position of extreme relativism that they have attacked (see Hollis and Lukes 1982) is one that threatens their definition of humankind, science, and reality; but it is also a red herring, as are the styles of reasoning and practices of other cultures which in fact do not interest them. Extreme relativism as they discuss it is a stance no anthropologist would seriously hold. We wish to encourage, in Hirst’s words, ‘points of contact’ between cultures, not discourage them, or the idea of them. Our business is, after all, ‘translation’.

The social sciences have traditionally thought themselves dependent upon the natural sciences; but the battle going on today within the philosophy of science frees social inquiry from such dependency. Those who are involved in social inquiry can now ask interesting questions about translation and relativism which have previously been banned by the thought police of philosophy. We do not need to agree with the authority of such traditional distinctions as ‘the rational’ and ‘the irrational’ and the notion of knowledge to which they are attached. We can now raise such issues as the role of paradox and faith in social thought and practice, about which we know little: both are probably more powerful forces in society than logic and reason (also see Gellner 1982:184). In short, our questions can now be framed by our knowledge interests, and not those of the philosophers of science who must get their own house in order. Our knowledge interests have to do with understanding the theories, knowledge, ethical thought, and practices of other cultures, and not with defending a particular notion of rationality, humankind, and Western science.

It is unfortunate, but because of the interests they are defending, the philosophers in this debate on rationality have not, on the whole, been especially helpful to anthropology. Indeed, it sometimes appears that the entire canon of rationality would be as useful to the field anthropologist in the chore of understanding how a specific people (with perhaps the exception of analytic philosophers) use ideas and formulate them as would a plan of the London underground railway. Anthropological concerns are considerably different from many of those of philosophy. Usually the philosophers are not asking social questions; usually anthropologists are not asking for universal criteria of truth. Anthropologists are asking about moral universes, their basic duty being to understand the intentions and objectives of actors within particular social worlds, as well as what these actors say, understand, believe truth and those worlds to be, a task in metaphysical description.¹⁰ The anthropologist deals as a matter of course with multiple theories of mind and knowledge, while traditionally many philosophers have been concerned with one, and one moreover that equates truth with value-free facts about the material world. The facts of the ethnographer, the truths we describe, are in contrast almost always tied explicitly to a world of values.

In modern Western science the empiricist’s proposition is that truth is amoral and facts are autonomous from value. This understanding of truth is in sharp contrast to the belief systems of other societies where it is normal for truth to be tied to other truths that are social, moral, and political in scope (see Gellner 1973: 170 ff., Henry Myers Lecture 1974). However, since Kuhn’s publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolution (1964), philosophers of science are having greater difficulty in separating out the world of values from the task of science and the grounds for knowledge itself. If for no other reason, the proximity of human progress to human frailty cannot be dismissed. The more technology ‘develops’, the more it menaces our human frailty, as the tragedy of Bhopal so tragically attests. The entrenched clauses of the empiricist’s mechanical, neutral, and formal picture of the world are being unravelled, therefore, for many reasons, and there is confusion within science about its own knowledge interests. Thus, the view that morality is a domain to be looked at as an aside, separate from the pursuit of knowledge through Reason and empirical findings, is a belief that is being seriously questioned within science.

The contributors to this volume do not view morality as a separate area to be opposed to thought and reason. We thus speak of the moral aspects of thought, reason, and truth, as well as of practice. Part of our aim is to be aware of and to rectify our own privileging of rationality through a formalism that was premissed on the doctrines of the rationalist paradigm dictated to us as the proper one for ‘objective’ inquiry by the philosophers of science. They themselves are no longer sure of this program. Thus, we are now free to pursue knowledge other than that tied directly or solely to reason.

To be very simplistic but to the point, I for one consider it unthinkable to claim that a Piaroa of the Venezuelan rain forest is irrational when he says that rain is the urine of the deity, Ofo Da’a. The Westerner asserting that rain is H₂O and the Piaroa saying that it is the urine of a deity are doing so on similar grounds: both are relying on the knowledge of the supreme authority of their society, respectively the scientist and the shaman, on the nature of water.¹¹ What is more, the one truth does not necessarily go against the truth of the other. Faith in many worlds may or may not negate a faith in one.¹² This is simply another way of saying that issues about the ‘true’ are easily confused; for there are among others empirical truth, rhetorical truth, social truth (e.g. a marriage rule), and metaphoric truth, on all of which there is now a large literature by certain philosophers of science.¹³ Kenneth Burke (1966,1969) is one of the more interesting writers on the creative role of rhetoric and tropes in the construction of reality. Through metaphor and the linking of incongruous concepts, one can see things in startling new ways. Rhetoric, in its use of tropes, creates categories of thought and persuades through felt identifications which overcome real differences of substance and interest. This is done through verbal modes which are not subject to empirical confirmations. Such ‘entitlement’, the summarizing and making sense of complex events, affects the ways people act in society; for in creating social truths rhetoric structures reality (see Crocker (1977) on Burke’s understanding of rhetoric). The notion of truth like that of rationality is elusive and without meaning when not in the context of asking true (or, equally, rational) toward what end? All truths have their moral aspect, for instance.¹⁴ To hope to find universal and independent criteria of truth is a hopeless and Quixotic goal when the task is to understand knowledge actors have of their moral universe and their standards of validation with respect to it, which as often as not includes the world of nature. In summary, by focusing on the issue of the cognitive powers of Western though...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Degrees of intelligibility
• 3 Social anthropology and the decline of Modernism
• 4 Facts and theories: saying and believing
• 5 Is it rational to reject relativism?
• 6 Anthropos through the looking-glass: or how to teach the Balinese to bark
• 7 Reason, emotion, and the embodiment of power
• 8 Today I shall call him 'Mummy': multiple worlds and classificatory confusion
• 9 Fire, meat, and children: the Berti myth, male dominance, and female power
• 10 The Brahmanical tradition and the technology of the intellect
• 11 The Law is a ass': an anthropological appraisal
• 12 Maori epistemologies
• Name index
• Subject index