Traditional thought
If you have ever read any anthropology, you are bound, I think, to be struck by the astonishing range of ways in which human beings have tried to understand our world.
The Mbuti, for example, whom I have mentioned often already, think of the forest around them as a person—what we might call a “god”—and they think that the forest will take care of them. If they have a run of bad luck in their hunting, they suppose not that the forest is trying to harm them but that it has lost interest in them—that it has, as they say, “gone to sleep.” When this happens they try to waken the forest by singing for it, and they believe that if their songs please the forest, their luck will turn.Not only do most Westerners find such beliefs surprising, they are likely to think that they are unreasonable. Why should a forest care about anything, let alone human singing? And even if it did, how could it determine the success of a hunt for honey or for game?
This sense that Mbuti beliefs are unreasonable is likely to grow when you are told that the Mbuti know very well that other people who live nearby, people with whom they have complex social relationships, believe quite different things. Their neighbors, in the villages on the edge of the Ituri rain forest where they live, believe that most bad luck is due to witchcraft—the malevolent action of special people whom they regard as witches. In these circumstances, it is surely very curious that the Mbuti do not worry about whether they are right.
The fact that the Mbuti know that other people believe different things and this does not seem to concern them marks their way of thinking off from that of Western cultures. Most Westerners would worry if they discovered that people in the next town got on very well without believing in electricity.
We think our general beliefs can be justified, and if others challenge our beliefs, we are inclined to seek evidence and reasons for our position and to challenge their reasons and their evidence in response. The anthropologist and philosopher Robin Horton has used the term “adversarial” to describe this feature of Western cultures. We tend to treat our intellectual disputes like our legal disputes, trading evidence and argument in a vigorous exchange, like adversaries on a field of intellectual battle. Horton uses this word to contrast this Western approach to argument with what the Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka calls the “accommodative” style of many traditional cultures. Traditional people are often willing to accept and accommodate the different views of other groups.Indeed, the Mbuti, like many traditional peoples, tend not to give the justification of their general beliefs much thought at all. If we asked them why they believed in the god-forest, they would probably tell us, as many people in many cultures have told many anthropologists, that they believe it because it is what their ancestors taught them. Indeed many traditional cultures have proverbs that say, in effect, “Everything we know was taught us by our ancestors.”
Justifying beliefs by saying they have the authority of tradition is one of the practices that demarcates traditional cultures from formal philosophy. Even where I have cited distinguished philosophical authorities from the past—the “ancestors” of Western philosophy, such as Plato and Descartes—I have considered their arguments and tried to understand and criticize them. The fact that Plato or Descartes or Kant said something is not, by itself, a reason to believe it.
We should be careful, however, not to exaggerate the differences in the way Mbuti people and Westerners ordinarily justify their beliefs.
Most of what you and I believe, we too believe because our parents or teachers told it to us. Some of the differences between the Mbuti and formal philosophy reflect differences not so much between traditional and Western people as between formal and informal thought.Nevertheless, Westerners (and Western-trained people generally) are more likely to ask even their parents and teachers not just what they believe but why they believe it. And when Westerners ask why we should believe something, what they want is not just an authority but some evidence or argument. This is especially true in formal philosophy. Throughout this book I have tried to offer and examine reasons for believing the claims I have made, and the philosophers I have discussed have done the same.
I have also tried to proceed systematically. I have tried, that is, to connect arguments made on one subject—fallibilism, for example— with other apparently remote questions—such as the inevitability that our courts will sometimes punish the innocent, the underdetermination of empirical theory. And this shows up another contrast with traditional thought. Though anthropologists often try to make a system out of the thought of traditional peoples, they do not usually get much help from the people whose thought they study.
Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard, one of the founders of modern cultural anthropology, attempted in his book Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande to explain the theory of witchcraft implicit in the practice of the Azande people of southern Sudan. But when he discovered inconsistencies in their claims—it turned out that if you followed the Zande beliefs about the inheritance of witchcraft through, everybody was a witch!—they didn't seem to be very concerned about it.
The urge to give arguments and evidence for what you believe, and to make your beliefs consistent with each other so that they form a system, is one of the marks of formal philosophy.
We can say that formal philosophy aims to be systematic. But though this urge to theorize is important to philosophy, it is also central, as we saw, to science, and it is not hard to see that it is central to the whole range of modern intellectual life. In short, the systematic character of philosophy is not special to the subject. It is an outgrowth of the systematic nature of our current modes of thought.The reason why the Azande did not theorize systematically about witchcraft in the way that Evans-Pritchard did is that they did not want to. Their lives made sense to them in terms of the theories they had, and, so far as they could see, there was plenty of evidence for their beliefs. The evidence that witchcraft exists was as obvious to them as the evidence that electricity exists no doubt seems to you. People who were ill got better after the application of spiritual medicines; people died regularly after their enemies had appealed to powerful spirits. Of course, not everyone who is treated with spiritual medicine gets better; but then the lights don't always go on when you turn on a switch! The reason why the Zande did not think much about the evidence for their theories, in other words, is that they had no reason to suspect that they might be wrong.
Now, I imagine that you have been supposing that it is quite obvious that the Azande not only might be wrong but are. You probably also think that your belief that they are wrong is one that you can justify with evidence and reason, and that Azande people who respected rational argumentation and sensible principles of evidence would eventually come to agree with you.
If I had started not with Zande beliefs about witchcraft but with their moral beliefs, by contrast, I suspect you would suppose that the same would not apply. I suspect, in other words, that you probably believe there is some truth in moral relativism but none in relativism about such factual questions as whether there are any witches.
Yet just as moral relativists hold that what is good depends on who you are (or where or in what culture or when you live), some people have recently argued that what is true about factual questions depends on who you are (or in what culture or when you live).Relativism about factual matters is usually called “cognitive relativism,” and if you are not a cognitive relativist, then it is an important philosophical question whether you can defend your position. Relativism is important because its truth would set limits on the role of evidence and reason, and evidence and reason are central to formal philosophy. So it is important, too, that it turns out to be harder than you might think to defend the nonrelativity of factual beliefs. If we imagine what it would be like to argue with a convinced Azande, we shall see why.
9.3 lang=EN-US>