The Critical Bite of Cultural Relativism — Gili Kliger

Review of Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century by Charles King.

Boston Review
The Critical Bite of Cultural Relativism

Gili Kliger

Ethan Watters — There's Such a Thing as "Human Nature," Right?

Joe Henrich and his colleagues are shaking the foundations of psychology and economics—and hoping to change the way human behavior and culture is understood.

AlterNet
There's Such a Thing as "Human Nature," Right?
Ethan Watters | Pacific Standard

Here's a comment I made at FB on a similar matter.

As Ludwig Wittgenstein attempted to elucidate in his later philosophical works on on the logic of ordinary language, in particular Philosophical Investigations, language use is embedded in context. Human beings are part of that context and therefore cannot stand outside it and observe it. We have to observe it from inside and attempt to see to the best our ability now language operates in expression.

When we look at ordinary language use, we find a lot of things going on at once, which technical uses seek to simplify, in that while rich, ordinary language is not always precise. But technical languages are not rich enough to convey emotion, either. So there is a trade off between "matter and manner," logic and rhetoric, reason and emotion, for instance.

One of the most striking aspects of investigating language is that logic analysis reveals many things that are not usually noticed but which are extremely relevant. E.g., the way one uses ordinary language reveals that certain expressions that appear to be descriptive are actually playing a foundational role as norms, such as basic criteria, often ontological, epistemological, ethical and even esthetic.

In this way, one's use of language reveals a "worldview" or "world picture (Weltbild) that characterizes a "form of life" (Lebensform) as shared context. Thus, we could say that ordinary language has hidden assumptions embedded in it and just because they are shared even by large numbers doesn't guarantee their ontological or epistemological status.

Historically, many of these norms and criteria have been disproved or replaced for other reasons. Very often the scientific understanding of the time contributes significantly to a world view that later changes, as when the earth-centric view was switched for a heliocentric view, and the predominantly religious world view gave way to the chiefly scientific one. Historically the popular world view of a large number of fairly well educated members of a group also lags the state of the art scientific opinion, although there there may be significant disagreement among experts, e.g., the interpretation of QM is hardly a settled matter because it is not scientific but metaphysical.

Wittgenstein regarded the proper role of philosophy to be logical critique. Thus, philosophy becomes properly a logical exercise in determining the assumptions underlying a world view by examining the type of role they play in the "language games" in which they figure as rules. One could compare this to the institutional approach in economics and the cultural approach in sociology v. the "natural" approach that assumes.

In this sense Phil is correct about being wary of the use of science, e.g., in the case of evolutionary theory to justify eugenics, or social Darwinism in political economy. But that is a different issue from a theory as an explanatory and predictive instrument.

What Phil is really more concerned with is how the scientific community functions as a social and political institution and on what basis. To presume it is just science may not be true to the facts. The ability to use knowledge yields power, and there are many ways to use knowledge. Neoclassical economics is used to justify neoliberalism in political economy, for instance, but neoclassical economics is based on neoliberal assumptions that economics as a "science" does not justify, modeling assumptions not being treated as theoretical hypotheses. So the reasoning is circular.