Cartoon Versions of Science and the harms they do (in Anthropology)

One can’t help but share in Chagnon’s frustration at the hasty decision of the majority of his disciplinary peers to disown its historical connection to any branch of the complex and variegated scientific tradition. After all, until very recently (and to some extent to this day still in languages such as French and German), a ‘science’ was any relatively systematic body of knowledge, anything the goal or product of which was scientia, and it is only in the very most recent times that the notion has been reduced to the figure of somber men seeking to run the world on the basis of claims of unassailable expertise. Yet the cartoon version of science that Chagnon proposes in response, in its total failure to recognize that there might be special problems of theory-ladenness, power inequality, looping effects, prejudice --in a word, all those factors that make the scientific study of humans a more delicate matter than the study of other domains of nature--, can easily make one wish to take the ‘postmodern’ turn oneself, if only to get away from this astoundingly simplistic pretense of scientificity.--Justin Smith (writing about Napoleon Chagnon’s book, Noble Savages: My Life among Two Dangerous Tribes- The Yanomamö and the Anthropologists (Simon & Schuster, 2013).

Justin is one of the leading historians of philosophy of my generation.  He is also a staunch defender of the fact that "one can in fact approach the subject matter of anthropology naturalistically, using the conceptual tools of European traditions of thought, and still come up with theoretically sophisticated accounts of indigenous beliefs that remain nonetheless sensitive to the actual concerns, to the ‘voices’, of the people being studied." (He also wants to bring some anthropological methods into the history of philosophy.)

Now, Justin's piece is certainly worth reading as an introduction to the complexities of the politics of anthropology, both 'internal' to anthropology and the variety of 'external' ways it interacts with the subjects studied and the culture(s) of science within it operates--all of this framed in a deep historical perspective. The piece also nicely introduces the reader to a wide variety of theorizing within Anthropology. For me, the most significant feature of the essay comes near the end:

Thorough, unsimplistic anthropology can already, in itself, amount to something close to advocacy: it shows the richness of other worlds, and therefore the tragedy of destroying them. Chagnon’s work does none of these things, for reasons that are all interconnected, and that at bottom have to do with an impoverished and caricatural understanding of science. The AAA’s decision to extinguish any mention of science in its own self-understanding, in turn, is surely a symptom of the same impoverishment.

One important possible role that philosophers (and historians) of science can play is to discuss and explore the consequences of the tacit and explicit philosophies of science(s) in the science(s)'s self-understanding. (Obviously, they may also cause mistaken -- (e.g., Popper) or dangerous (Kuhnian Paradigms) to become popular.) This reminds us that the relatively low status (and low number of practitioners) of philosophy of the human (and social) sciences within philosophy may be deplored for philosophical and political reasons. Luckily, we at NewAPPS have a world-class philosopher of anthropology in house!