Towards an Integration of Ethnography, History and the Cognitive Science of Religion
نویسنده
چکیده
1. Although this remark does not apply to Laidlaw, who recognizes to a considerable extent the value and relevance of scientific enquiry. Scientific explanations and interpretive accounts of human behaviour, including religious behaviour, are different kinds of enterprise. It is tempting to think that although the questions asked by both scientists and humanist scholars look similar, they are actually incommensurate. Hilary Putnam's professor , caught with his trousers down in the girls' dormitory, may serve as an instructive illustration (Putnam 1978: 42–3; see Laidlaw, this volume). As Putnam observes, the question 'why was the professor there?' could be answered in a potentially infinite variety of ways, including that the professor was there so that he could not leave before midnight at a speed faster than light, given that nobody (certainly not professors) can travel faster than light. To the ethnographer or historian 1 it may seem that the answers suggested by scientific psychology have a similarly bizarre character, quite unrelated to the questions that matter to people in everyday life. Nothing could be further from the truth. Cognitive scientists are typically interested in fundamentally the same problems that perplex interpretive anthropologists, as well as historians and others. In the scenario Putnam presents, all would be eager to know about the professor's motivations and intentions. The ethnographer or historian might seek to contextualize the professor's own account of his intentions within a web of locally and temporally variable values (e.g. whether this event occurred
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