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    Yehuda Programmatic Attempt at An Anthropology of Knowledge

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    Yehuda Programmatic Attempt at an Anthropology of Knowledge

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    A PROGRAMMATIC ATTEMPT AT AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE YEHUDA ELKANA The Hebrew University of Jerusalem The Van Leer Jerusalem Foundation 1. Introduction V 2, Science as a Cultural System 6 3. Thick Description 10 4. Towards a Theory of Growth of Knowledge 13 A. Critical dialogue 13 B. Images of Knowledge 45 C. The Sources of Knowledge 19 D. Some Historical Examples 21 5. Science and Other Cultures 27 A. The Issues 27 B. Western Science 29 C. Literacy 31 D. Is the Meaning in the Text? 34 E, Common Sense 38 F, What is Left of the “Great Divide"? al 6 Cunning Reason vs. Epistemic Reason 42 A, The context of justification and the context of discovery 42 B. Modes of reasoning 47 7. Some Sociological Problems of Science 48 A. The switch to sociology 48 B, Post-mature and premature discoveries $2 C, Some shorter examples 59 8. Science, the Epic Theatre . 66 1. Introduction Traditionally, the main preoccupations of philosophy of science were the justification or refutation of the conclusions of science; critical study of methodology; the pursuit of truth presupposing the quest for certainty; 1 Everett Mendelsohn and Yehuda Elkana (eds.), Sciences and Cultures, Sociology of the Sciences, Volume V, 1981. 1-76. Copryight © 1981 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, 2 ‘Yehuda Etkana search for absolutes and universals; discarding the ‘merely’ psychological or merely sociological. Reason in philosophy of science was epistemic reason, History of science, while in an historiographical turmoil for decades, was mainly preoccupied with the history of Western science, and especially (though not exclusively) its successes; it was either a Marxist influenced analysis of ideas following socio-economic needs or a history of disembodied ideas. The latter presupposed that only ideas beget ideas and that an idea, once conceived, can be taken up or dropped, used or abused by an ‘external’ factor like society, with its political ideology and technical needs. Sociology of science attempted to study science as an activity and often presupposed that, in order to study an entity like the scientific community objectively, (just as it studied religion or labour), there was no need to under- stand in depth what the scientists were doing, It could almost be said that the institutions of science and its organization are independent of their cotent. Yet all these three areas (history, philosophy and sociology of science) belong to Western culture. As against that, anthropology traditionally con- centrates on other cultures and their various dimensions: science is rarely admitted to be one of them. In comparative anthropology questions are posed as to whether there exists a gap (Gellner's “Big Ditch’) between Western and non-Western modes of thought, between scientific and non-scientific thinking, whether all cultures are ‘rational’ to the same degree. Comparative studies of art, religion, ethics, politics abound; however, there is no discipline called comparative science. Cognitive psychology attempted to study humans as such, rather than ‘humans within a given culture. Jointly with anthropology it presupposed that the human universal can be filtered out (‘abstracted’) from the jungle of cultural differentials. The various theories of development by stages — Piaget, Kohlberg in the moral sphere, or Ericson’s psychoanalytic studies, all accept some universal mental characteristics underlying everything human. In spite of the impressive successes in these various fields of research, there has been a growing dissatisfaction with the overall results. The dissatisfaction can best be seen by some new preoccupations which are common to all these disciplines. The basic debate between realism and relativism is being conducted as much in history and philosophy of science as in anthropology and in psychology. The series of studies by scholars like Robin Horton, Ernest Gellner, Peter Winch, Ian Jarvie, Joseph Agassi, Mary Douglas, and many A Programmatic Attempt at an Anthropology of Knowledge 3 others, all deal with anthropology as much as with history or philosophy of__ science. ‘Realist’ philosophers of science like Putnam or Mary Hesse are taking more and more cognizance of anthropology and psychology, The importance of Kuhn’s ‘Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ lies in that it is sociology as much as it is history or philosophy. The resulting intellectual turmoil was and is indispensable but not yet illuminating. All these major enterprises still share several presuppositions which, in my opinion, necessarily prevent any genuine breakthrough. The presuppositions are that: (i) a choice between realism and relativism is unavoidable; (ii) that human universals, once found, can be abstracted from cultural ‘noise’; (iii) that all reason is epistemic; (iv) that, once sociological influences on history of ideas are admitted, we must give up the hope for a rational explanation of great historical changes. I do not accept any of these four presuppositions. Against them I would like to offer different and often contradictory ones, which underly various theoretical approaches in psychology and anthropology; however, they have not yet systematically been brought in contact with history, philosophy and sociology of science. Thus, I shall state my counter-theses and point to those areas and theories in anthropology, psychology and history on which I would like to base any arguments. I shall claim: (ia) that realism and relativism are simultaneously followed by most people on most issues (two-tier-thinking); (iia) that the quest for human universals outside a cultural context is meaningless; . (iiia) that there exists at least one other kind of reason, namely metic (cunning) reason; (iva) that, once we realize that no sufficient and necessary conditions for historical change can be found, necessary conditions for change can be rationally analyzed; for this it must be understood that all knowledge follows the rules of epic theatre and of dramatic theatre. On the basis of these new presuppositions we can claim that the typical historical quest for understanding different periods in our own Western culture, the typical anthropological task of understanding other cultures, and the psychologists’ aim of understanding the different stages of cognitive, 4 ‘Yehuda Elana moral or emotional developments are all basically one and the same question, and the tool for dealing with them is translation, Caveat When expressing views such as mine, and when rejecting the accepted trath of epistemic reason, or when talking of comparative study of culture, and even more, of comparative science, one is immediately exposed to attacks from the liberal middle as being “associated with current trends toward mystical obscurantism, anti-intellectual intuitionism, or anti-scientific humanism”. ‘And — to continue this relevant quotation — “Actually these attitudes are as alien to Cassirer’s as to my own sceptical, analytic, constructionalist orientation” (1). (ia) Below I shall argue in greater detail that on most issues we select a framework relativistically in full consciousness of the fact that we cannot prove the correctness of the choice and realize that we could have made a different choice. Yet, once our choice is made, we behave towards the selected framework, we think of it realistically. These two attitudes or views are held simultaneously: that is we engage in two-tier-thinking. To illustrate: we are conscious of the fact that we cannot ‘prove’ that our religious view is the correct one, that our ethical standards are the generally right ones, that our medicine is exact while voodoo ox Hopi medicine are mere superstition, that there is no absolute third language in the framework of which the correctness of a translation can be compared to the original text, yet we live with our -religion, moral code, medicine, physics, or tnslation-code as if they were ‘absolutes’. We even speak two different languages -- one of relativism and one of realism ~- simultaneously. (iia) Universalistic cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis and comparative anthropology are slowly yielding to the context-oriented approach of Michael Cole, Jerome Bruner and the ‘rediscovered’ and translated works of Alexander Luria and Lev. Vygotsky (2). Their presupposition, as against the well-en- trenched stimulus/response approach, is that any changes man may introduce into his environment — and this environment includes the different cultural contexts — will influence his later behaviour, Thus no behaviour can be abstracted from the context and observed in universalistic terms. Such an approach undercuts also the centuries-old Descartes-Locke debate on innate A Programmatic Attempt at an Anthropology of Knowledge 5 ideas versus tabula rasa at birth, to which the influence comes only from the outside, This dichotomy becomes spurious because, whatever may have been there originally, it cannot and will never be abstractable from the context, (The reason I mentioned Locke and not Bacon is that only the nineteenth century vulgarization attributed to Bacon is a purely externalist approach. In reality Bacon was just such an interactionist as Cole or Vygotsky (3)). (iiia) Scientific disciplines traditionally have been and continue to be for- mulated in terms of epistemic reason: logical deductive argument, objectivist and claiming irrelevance of subjective or personal characteristics, biases or views of reader/listener as much as writer/lecturer. Conviction, bribe, delusion, illusion, manipulation are not mentioned in this process except as examples to be eliminated as obstacles to reason. Classical rhetoric or the legal process of convincing the other partner are replaced by the presupposition that ‘truth is manifest’. Since it is quite clear that we do not know exactly how dis- coveries are made, the distinction between context of discovery and context of justification has been introduced. The context of justification is being conducted in the language of epistemic reason; the context of discovery has been given up as irrational and is declared an issue for psychology but not for logic or history. Yet we know from historical studies in Greek literature and from the classical and Renaissance studies of rhetoric that there is metic (cunning) reason too: a reason which considers the views or presupposition and individual history of the listener/reader and chooses its arguments so as to convince him. It is this kind of reason that is at work in legal proceedings and in science during the process of discovery. (iva) If knowledge is viewed as predetermined — if science could have developed only the way it did; if life is like an original Greek drama: an unfolding of the inevitable ~ then the historical question we ask is: ‘how did that which had to happen take place?” That is, we are looking for sufficient and necessary conditions. On the other hand, if we presuppose, as I do , that anything can happen; that whatever has happened could have happened otherwise (the epic theatre) then our historical quest is at most for necessary conditions: ‘Why did it happen that way, though it could have happened otherwise?” I shall now make an attempt to outline a theory of the growth of knowi- edge, a built-up armory of analytic tools which will relate in greater detail to the above four principles, 6 Yehuda Elkana 2. Science as a Cultural System There are many intellectual histories written from different aspects: those of political and social ideas and institutions are standard; some emphasize the central importance of religion, others the social role of the arts and especially of visual art; but there exist also ambitious ‘total’ histories of Western music. Some histories of philosophy have the same ambition of comprehensiveness, Yet there is no history of science which pretends to be also a history of culture. Depending on the onlookers’ images of knowledge, science is almost always upgraded or downgraded, to be in a class by itself — different. Science is rarely considered as much of a totality of human culture as is art or religion, because it is seen as something different, unique, apart. The few exceptional cases in which science is considered to be the whole of human culture gener- ally present that arrogant, technocratic view which stems not from seeing science as inclusive of art, religion, etc., but rather from eliminating the other dimensions of culture by treating them as obsolete, irrelevant or simply of a different order of importance for modern man. My basic presupposition is that the various dimensions of culture: religion, art, science, ideology, common-sense, music are correlates, they are all cultural systems. I reject the alternative approach, according to which culture can be viewed as an ‘arithmetical sum of its dimensions which can then be sliced up into Religion, Art, Science, etc. It seems to me that any interpretative approach must start by selecting a focus, a vantage-point from which it views the totality of a culture. Thus one can consider the whole of Western Culture as primarily a Culture of Religion, which does however have aspects relating to art, science, ideology; similar to the way in which some of the great nineteenth century compendia of religious history tried to expose their subject. One can see the whole of culture through the prism of philosophy or art or music. For some primitive cultures it has been admitted by Western men on rare occasions that Art could be such a ‘totalizing’ prism; magic used to be the other. | demand the same approach for Science. Any culture, and Western or European culture especially, can be viewed as the Culture of Science connected with the mystical, religious, artistic, musical, ideological aspects, Perhaps we could remind ourselves of the attempts of seeing the whole of culture as an area of class-conflict or of ideational conflict: take Marxism or A. D, White's ‘The Warfare of Science A Programmatic Attempt at an Anthropology of Knowledge 1 and Christianity’. I am adducing approaches which 1 reject, in order to point out that, though no such interpretive essay is ever complete, yet any such attempt is more illuminating than the summation-of-dimensions view. More- over, my approach is open-ended: the number of slices/dimensions on this model must be finite, and the size of each diminishes as their number grows; on the other hand, there is no limit to multiplying points of view, each from a chosen perspective, Is this in itself ‘good’?, Does multiplying the points of view make one richer in understanding? In my opinion, yes. Yet, although this seems to be self-evident, it is thought-provoking to find express opposi- tion to this view, for example, in Mary Hesse’s work. According to her, not only does it not enrich one to multiply points of view, but to do so is down- right harmful for historical understanding. Though it is not so formulated, Hesse’s approach is rooted in the old, Positivistic horror on meeting the hermeneutic ‘Verstehen’ approach. On the other hand, although mine is an attempt to give a rational theory of understanding culture by multiplying dimensions, I find the hermeneutic approach of Dilthey (if not of Schleiermacher) congenial. Science as a cultural system echoes the well-known papers of Clifford Geertz. This concept of culture “ , . . is essentially a semiotic one. Believing with Max Weber that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun”, we must take “culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law, but an interpretive one in search of meaning” (4). The word ‘semiotic’ in the above definition is either misleading or in the analogy the word is not to be taken literally but metaphorically: for, though. the web is spun by man himself, yet it has a reality beyond what we tend to denote as ‘semiotic’. We should stick to this reality of the web. If we do, we can now with greater ease go on from the concept of culture to that of a ‘cultural system’: ... if common sense is as much an interpretation of the immediacies of experience, a gloss on them, as are myths, painting, epistemology, or whatever, then it is like them historically constructed, and like them subjected to historically defined standards of Judgement. It can be questioned, disputed, affirmed, developed, formalized, contem- plated, even taught, and it can vary dramatically from one people to the next. It is, in short, a cultural system , , . (5) (My italics, Y. E,) This is a broad, non-restrictive, rather weak definition, but it constitutes a 8 Yehuda Efkana strong thesis which also implies that there is no general theory of culture or of a cultural system, This weak definition applies verbatim to science. Whether we mean by science the sum total of views on the world or, more narrowly, we mean by it organized knowledge, or we mean ‘Wissenschaft’, it is still the case, in my view, that science is historically constructed, that it is subjected to historically defined standards of judgement; moreover, science can be questioned, disputed, affirmed, formalized, contemplated, taught, and, above all, science does vary dramatically from one people to the next, it may in some aspects dramatically vary from one discipline to another and it certainly does vary dramatically from one period to another. That science can be questioned, disputed, affirmed, developed, formalized, contemplated, taught, will cause no surprise. On the contrary, those who readily accept this claim are those who consider science as ‘Science’: it is qualitatively essentially different from all other cultural dimensions together, not just different from, say, religion and magic and art, as much as art is different from religion, and magic is different from all the others, However, those who accept the ~ criticizability of science will find difficulty with Geertz’s claim that religion or common-sense, or ideology can be questioned, disputed, affirmed, devel- oped, formalized, contemplated, taught, etc. What the defenders of modern scientism will balk at will be the claim that science, too, should be subjected to historically defined standards of judgement, and even more, that science should vary “dramatically from one people to the next”, The claim is controversial, and a host of queries and counter-arguments come to mind here. Is this view anti-rationalistic or anti-science? Is this extreme relativism? What about basic facts?, what about certainty, ratio- nality, Western progressivism? Does this mean that ‘anything goes?’. I shall try to deal with some of these issues. In a nutshell: | shall claim that science is the most important dimension of Western culture; that, relative to a frame- work which is also mine, cultures are so ordered that Western ‘scientific culture’ is the most rational; that, relative to that framework, there is pro- gress, though not linear progress; that in a given framework solid realism applies, but that relativism is also correct, and thus there can be no all- embracing framework external to all other frameworks which is culture- independent. As mentioned above and argued below, realism and relativism can be held simultaneously, a view I called two-tier-thinking, and anarchy or ‘anything goes’ does not follow from this approach. Finally, the key concept A Programmatic Atiempt at an Anthropology of Knowledge 9 holding all these theses together is ‘images of knowledge’. 1 shall come back to these claims one by one. it has been claimed that there is no theory of culture. What does this mean? What would be implied by affirming the existence of a theory of culture? Possibly it would permit one to apply a template to the varieties of human behaviour and arrive at an ‘analysis’ (6), It would be the quest for a better and more general template which ideally would be true for all cultures and all times. It would then be sub-divided into sub-theories: a theory of Art, a theory of Science, a theory of Religion, a theory of Ideology, all being dimensions of Culture. Above all, it would include firm criteria of progress in the progressive dimensions of culture, like Science and perhaps Art, and it would supply the rules of demarcation between the various dimensions of culture, In short, a theory of culture would be, in general, what philosophers of science have been seeking for decades: they wanted a theory of science, No such theory can exist, since it would mean that there is somewhere a context-independent all-embracing context of all contexts with criteria which are true forever (7), That there is no context of all contexts is accepted even by such staunch realists as Hilary Putnam. By viewing a cultural system in historical developmental terms, it is exactly such an all-embracing framework which is forbidden. The objection could be raised that the above argument applied to culture in general or to most of its several dimensions, but not to Science. The reason is — or so the objection would run — that religions are many, art is versatile, ideologies vary, values a multitude, but science is of only one kind. Naturally there can be pseudo science, pre-science, etc., but whatever Real Science is, it is unique. This is why, alongside comparative religion, comparative ideology and, naturally, comparative art, there is no field called Comparative Science. But if science is a cultural system like all others, a field of study of com- parative science could emerge It is an interesting fact, to be explored in the framework of sociology of knowledge, that almost all well-known anti- positivist social thinkers tended to exempt science from their general epis- temology: Durkheim, Lévy-Strauss, Geertz, it is part of positivism to apply some general criteria to most cultural dimensions but not to science. Feyerabend makes the valid observation: Even bold and revolutionary thinkers bow to the judgement of science, Kropotkin wants 10 Yehuda Elkana to break up all existing institutions — but he does not touch science. Ibsen goes very far in his critique of bourgeois society — but he retains science as a measure of truth. Lévy-Strauss has made us realise that Western thought is not the lonely peak of human achievement it was once thought to be — but he excludes science from his relativization of ideologies. Marx and Engels were convinced that science would aid the workers in their quest for mental and social liberation (8), On the other hand, many of the twentieth century philosophers of science who are thought of as positivists or even logical positivists were much more open and sophisticated than the views attributed to them, These vulgarizations in both directions are a well-known historical phenomenon and the underlying reason is the wish to simplify available philosophies so as to make them quickly usable for immediate normative purposes (9). I shall turn to our case here. 3. Thick Description One of the main analytical tools of an interpretative science is ‘thick descrip- tion’. The term is Ryle’s. Geertz uses it, and J shall heavily rely on it (10). “Thick description’ is the most fundamental everyday activity of the ethnog- rapher: he is interviewing informants, observing rituals, eliciting kin terms, tracing property lines, censuring households and writing his journals. For Ryle ‘thick description’ is a way of describing the complexity of thinking: he starts from the most elementary one-layer activity like, for example, counting the number of cars on the street. Describing this activity involves a very ‘thin description’. Then layer by layer (or step-by-step on a ladder) the activity becomes more complex and its description thicker. Thus, the kind of description we have to give when describing what a person is doing is somewhere on a continuum between the very thin to the very thick, and the thickness depends on the kind of activity we are describing. In ethnography the problem is always one of translation, so whatever the ethnographer is describing can no longer be a thin description. All this multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed one onto the other, is a good description of what a scientist is doing: formulating problems, choosing phenomena, i.e., demarcating the seemingly self-evident from the seemingly puzzling, observing selected relevant motions, changes, processes, sizes, colours, etc., tracing introductions and A Programmatic Attempt at an Anthropology of Knowledge ir connections between phenomena that had previously been firmly or vaguely regarded as unconnected; reducing one phenomenon to another and then interchanging frameworks; counting the population of a newly determined independent unit ... describing his experiments. No doubt he has to deal with a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, mostly superimposed on one another. Let us invent a typical passage from any historian of science’s commonplace book. Kepler is looking at the retrogarde movement of Mars, He observes the changes of the position of the star in relation to what tradition and authority have taught him to be fixed stars in God’s harmonious universe as revealed to man in the ‘Book of Nature’ and compares what he sees with his calculations which he knows to’be correct, logic being logic, and calculations being based on it, He also knows from common-sense (albeit a novel seventeenth century common-sense) that one should expect terrestrial bodies to behave fundamentally in the same way as do faraway celestial ones, and superimposed ‘on this common-sense knowledge (not shared by some of Kepler's and Galileo's Aris- totelian critics) in his theory of optics according to which it is reasonable to expect to see better with a telescope what is out there than without it. This short passage, probably harmless and not controversial to most his- torians of science, represents a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, some of them in the body of knowledge, some of them methodological, while some others epistemological. The body of knowledge is astronomy, and logic, mathematics, optics. The interrelations between them are epistemological. The sources of knowledge mentioned in such a brief passage are: observation, mathematical deduction, authority, tradition, harmony, and revelation. Their hierarchical ordering as to reliability is not manifest from the passages. How- ever, clearly some of the conceptual structures are superimposed upon each other. It is ‘thick description’, Which of the sources of knowledge is con- sidered legitimate in a given culture at a given place and time depends again on the socially defined images of knowledge and has little to do with the body of optics or astronomy or physics. Which of the sources will be primary is context-dependent: if ‘celestial harmony’ as a metaphysical principle clashes with observation or with ‘calculation’ or both, it is only the multi- plicity of superimposed complex conceptual structures, the metaphysics of science and the images of knowledge that enable us to decide which is primary: thus 2 decision can be made only for a given, narrowly specified case. 12 ‘Yehuda Elkana Let us look at another such short example: Galileo’s Copernicanism and his telescopic discoveries, which have received lots of historical attention and have been at the focus of philosophical discussion. In that debate the dis- agreement is not so much on the ‘actual’ history, nor so much on the ‘actual’ astronomy or optics, but on the hierarchical ordering of the sources of knowledge. It was Koyré who dedicated volumes of his ramified and en- lightened research to prove that Galileo’s primary source of knowledge was not experience or experiment, but Platonic ratiocination. In the nineteenth century, Ernst Mach saw Galileo as the greatest ex- perimental innovator who had actually no predecessor, while the historical continuum-fan, Duhem, saw Galileo as a second-rate commentator on late medieval genuine innovators. Feyerabend, against all the others, and in the tradition of self-identification with Galileo (just as Mach, Duhem and Koyré saw in Galileo that ideal case- study, nay, almost a self-portrait) sees in Galileo the triumph of anarchy, needless to say, of epistemological anarchy. Had it been articulated that these conflicting views of Galileo actually constitute a debate on the hierarchy of the sources of knowledge in Galileo and in Galileo’s time, the historical studies would have been more enlight- ening. Some recent historical studies, like Machamer’s critique of Feyerabend or Calvelin’s analysis in his comprehensive book on Galileo are in this much- to-be-applauded direction (11). The problems connected with the work of Galileo are indeed fascinating: what did he know, what did he merely intuit, what experimental evidence was accessible to him, even before discussing whether or not be relied on it? Did Galileo know enough optics to construct a telescope? What were the common-sense expectations of what could be seen through the telescope? What auxiliary optical theories and theories of vision were necessary to be able to consider the phases of Venus and the moons of Jupiter, seen with the help of the telescope, as confirmation of the Copernican system of the world? Or was Copernicanism the primary commitment (in spite of much known empirical difficulties connected with it), and the fact that the telescope showed things which could be interpreted as supporting Copemicus then served to convince Galileo of the non-distinction between terrestrial and celestial phenomena or of the truthfulness of optical devices; or, perhaps of the validity of Keplerian optical theory (which he may not even have A Programmatic Attempt at an Anthropology of Knowledge 13 known then!), Machamer’s criticism, mentioned above, is important because Machamer has the history in much better shape than Feyerabend, and thus Feyerabend’s argument, where he leaves it untouched, is greatly strengthened. ‘Above all, Machamer does not reduce the poignancy of Feyerabend's claim that, in order to be a Copernican, to construct a telescope, and to use the evidence of the telescope as support for Copernicanism, Galileo not only had to disregard some empirical evidence and to proceed counterinductively, but he had to introduce new images of knowledge and new scientific metaphysics; these two are not distinguished by Feyerabend but are called new natural interpretations (e.g. circular intertia) and new senstations (e.g. the telescopic data). Actually this is acknowledged by Machamer too: If Feyerabend’s talk about the ‘changed sensory core of everyday experience’ and the ‘redrawing of conceptual lines’ is taken in the sense of alternative or new descriptions as T have suggested, I think his insight is of great importance (12). Both ‘natural interpretations’ and ‘sensations’ involve intertwined views about the world and about knowledge (13). I have tried to explain what ‘thick description’ is in history of science. While doing so I employed a methodological ‘thick description’ which entailed a seemingly circular argument: in order to explain ‘thick description’, or the distinction between observation and theory, I used the concept of images of knowledge, sources of knowledge, and a presupposed related theory of growth of knowledge. Now I shall try to elaborate this theory and the concept of images by relying on ‘thick descriptions’, and on the concept of science as a cultural system. This methodological ‘thick description’ is actually a hermeneutic circle. It is again in anthropology that we find a consciously hermeneutic approach: Hopping back and forth between the whole conceived through the parts which actualize it and the parts conceived through the whole which motivates them we scek to tum them by a sort of intellectual perpetual motion into explications of one another (14). 4, Towards a Theory of Growth of Knowledge A, Critical Dialogue Knowledge grows by a continuous critical dialogue between competing total 4 : Yehuda Eikana world-views or competing scientific research programmes. This statement can be broken down to some analytical historical tools in the following way: Knowledge grows by the interaction of three factors which can be dis- tinguished only if time is stopped and a socio-cultural situation is, so to speak, photographed. I am idealizing for the sake of clarity. Three factors will be: (a) the body of knowledge; (b) the socially determined images of knowledge; {c) values and norms included in ideologies which do not directly depend on the images of knowledge. {a) At any given moment there is a state of knowledge with its methods, solutions, open problems, nets of theories and, at its core, scientific meta- physics. This view is shared by some parts of the scientific community, while others have different views on the world or on themselves or on society, with a different scientific metaphysics at the core. The two or more different theoretical networks are engaged in a critical dialogue. Depending on the stage of the science, on the time, the place, and the culture, there will prob- ably be several dominant research programmes and there will be a consensus among the groups which are in a critical dialogue with other groups. The subjects of their discussions will be disembodied ideas: ‘objective scientific knowledge’. However, among which individuals or groups will there be consensus and on what issues will there be disagreement, does not depend on the body of knowledge only, but mainly on the socially determined images of knowledge. (b) Beliefs held about the task of science (understanding, prediction, ete.), about the nature of truth (certain, probable, attainable, etc.), about sources of knowledge (by relevation, by ratiocination, by experiments through the senses) are all part of the time-dependent, culture-dependent images of science. It is the image of science which decides what problems to choose out of the infinity of open problems suggested by the body of knowledge: their scale of importance is fixed by socially formulated criteria; so is the deter- mination of the frontier of science. Theories of explanation, in the final account, also boil down to what by social consensus is decreed to be an acceptable explanation. Methodologies too are images of knowledge. (c) Ideologies, political considerations, social pressures, values and norms strongly influence the support given to institutions or to research programmes. A Programmatic Attempt at an Anthropology of Knowledge 15 These are the factors which will interact with a man’s image of knowledge, will thus push him into becoming a scientist, will determine the consideration of his career; ideologies influence the emergence of the dominant images of knowledge. It is only via these images that such considerations have an impact on the body of knowledge. The interest theory of scientists and the value- ladenness of their scientific views is trivially true and does not explain much. ‘As emphasized, the distinction between (a), (b), and (c) is artificial and can only be made for a point of time, as if time had stopped. On a time-sacle, the three interact and cannot be disentangled. The competing world-views or scientific research programmes will be seen as competing scientific metaphysics, as well as competing images of knowl- edge, no less than fierce, ideological battles (15). If we look for a dynamics of change we shall find something like the following: Ideologies and socio-political constraints heavily influence the consciously held views on knowledge, on its sources, on what is considered legitimate or acceptable — in short, on the images of knowledge. The images of knowledge are then the criteria for selecting from the infinity of available problems in the body of knowledge those on which the research will concentrate. On the other hand, this very problem-choice influences scientific metaphysics; these then, no jess than socio-political interests, influence a person’s view on society and political ideologies. B, Images of Knowledge Images of knowledge are socially determined views on knowledge (as against views on nature or on society . body of knowledge). Images of know!- edge determine for each culture, society, group or community the following issues: (1) sources of knowledge; (2) legitimization of knowledge; (3) audience or public of knowledge; (4) location on the sacred-secular continuum; (5) location of some of the aspects on a time-scale continuum; (6) degree of consciousness; (7) relatedness to prevailing norms, values, ideologies; 16 Yehuda Elana (8) translatability into sta‘ements about nature... . (1) Sources of knowledge can be sense-experience, ratiocination, revelation, authority, tradition, analogy, competence, originality, novelty, beauty, and many others. (2) Legitimization of knowlecge: Among the various sources of knowledge there is a hierarchical orde.. No dimension of culture has a single source of knowledge, but other images which serve as legitimizers determine which of them is of paramount importance.Thus, for example, revelation is of primary status in religion, yet ratiocination and experience also play a role in it. On the other hand, for the Rosicrucians, for example, a revealed truth was legitimized only if the senses corroborated it. In theoretical physics con- sideration

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