Despite inferring that you are a Leafs fan - Go Sens!
That said, I believe "indigenous ways of knowing" is unlikely to be redeemable for the simple reason that implies the indigenous have different ways of obtaining knowledge. They do not.
Do they have a different perspective? Perhaps.
Do they know things Western scientists do not. Quite possibly.
Does their knowledge come from a different source? Most definitely.
However, all knowledge of the natural world comes from observation.
You are attempting to salvage the term by turning "knowing" into a synonym for "thinking."
I am open to "indigenous ways of thinking" and "indigenous ways of looking at the world," but unless "knowing" is specifically in reference to oral tradition vs. reading a book, I'm afraid I will continue to view it as “noble savage” mysticism.
'Ways of knowing' implies a process of discovery, a formula; the author luminates those ways as holistic processing, and he implores us to welcome such a cognitive style as equal (superior) to the cognitive style of a civilization that founded the scientific method and discovered physics. Systemization is the synthesis of a confluence of smaller units. The very concept of a system discloses smaller units, and if Natives propose a system, I want to know how they connected its units and if they logically meld through cause and effect. That should be the human baseline; anything else is instinct and superstition. Both are typical of low intelligence and female sex. Natives have an average IQ of 85, and the San "Bushmen" tribe's general IQ is 55. A holistic cognitive style removed from analytical processing may be how our ancestors navigated life, and less intelligent races today are not sufficiently cognitively developed to follow the White Man's way of knowing.
Thank you for this thought provoking article. I have 2 main issues with the premise: the first is best expressed by Leslie MacMilla's excellent comment: how much original indigenous knowledge actually remains for first nation descendants in Canada (and also Australia and the US) after centuries of contact with WEIRD knowledge systems? Almost no one claiming first nation heritage in these countries live off the land in anyway resembling how their forebears used to. (Obviously not true of the Sand tribe, etc.) And the second is that scientific models adapt to indigenous ways of knowing - if a scientist thinks an input factor might be relevant to an outcome and not in a model, they track it, test the hypothesis that it is a driver of outcomes and based on these results decide whether and how to adapt the model.
My 2 issues do not eliminate all the value of indigenous ways of knowing described in this article, but do limit it, IMO, to areas where the natural sciences have not yet incorporated it in a rationale way, to areas not studied by natural sciences (social sciences) and from those groups of indigenous people who retain sufficient indigenous knowledge from their forebears,
The author refers to something I'm familiar with: "WEIRD" people — "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic." To me, the very formulation of this term suggests an implied bias against the people it purports to describe.
But I'm sympathetic to the idea that there are different ways of perceiving the world. The differences between myself and my wife in our perceptions often make that clear. So the idea that there are cultural or group differences in the perception of the world is reasonable. I'm just not convinced that any potential integration of "WEIRD" and indigenous "ways of knowing" is a *good* idea.
Scientific inquiry has expanded human knowledge about the greater universe in ways that "indigenous ways of knowing" could never match.
Scientific inquiry could do this only by "separating the chaff from the wheat" in order to reach the reductive "essences" of phenomena, which could then be reorganized into an "empirical whole" that is more explanatory of the greater reality.
We may not like what it shows — that we are not the center of a reality in a fundamentally indifferent universe — but that may be the most important thing to learn from "WEIRD" ways of inquiry.
I know it's a well-known concept. I maintain that the word "weird" is considered a disparaging term by almost everyone, and using it to label Western culture or Western "ways of knowing" has clearly negative implications.
Think of it this way: if one wishes to make a recognizable acronym out of the identified cultural characteristics: western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic, one might have had:
WEIRD
WIRED
WIDER
So of these, we choose the one with the most negative connotations.
To me, the entire exercise of coming up with carefully selected--perhaps curated?--attributes and arranging the initial letters purposefully into a snarky acronym is the hallmark the Millennial and Gen-Z brand of self-loathing, writ large.
Thanks. I don't know if choosing "WEIRD" as the acronym represents the purposeful or unconscious thoughts of certain younger generations (I'm 76), but self-loathing, guilt, and snark are definitely rampant in American culture now. Thanks for your anagrams. They certainly put an illuminating spotlight on the chosen acronym.
With respect I think you are uncharitably misinterpreting the idea. Weird simply means unusual and that is central to what Joseph Henrich was trying to communicate with the WEIRD acronym, that western ways of thinking are wildly unusual relative to all other times and places, yet we are prone to the assumption that we are close to a universal human default, particularly in psychology research.
And left-wing champions of indigenous knowledge are infinitely *more* susceptible to this bias - while they like the idea of mystical indigenous knowledge and the noble savage they always essentially take for granted that the indigenous wisdom will boil down to "exactly what we (liberal academics) think, but more so" - more kumbaya, more feminist, more anti-racist etc., that if you strip off "colonialism" you will somehow be left with a purer form of liberal colonial thinking underneath. In reality, virtually if not literally all other cultures on earth are drastically more patriarchal, parochial, xenophobic, less scientific etc. etc. and that we are the vanishing minority for being any other way.
As to your suggestion, "wired" suggests a technological cause, but we are seeing now that not all "wired" cultures are "weird" and probably vice versa. Henrich posits that it stems from Christianity's influence on Europe, but he was wise to keep the acronym purely descriptive and agnostic of causal theories. It's a clever acronym for an important idea, and well thought out.
With respect, this sounds like the sort of semantic dodge that would be used by those who invented WEIRD, were momentarily pleased with it (and themselves), and now defensive since they've been outed as woke.
WRT how traditionalist forms of worldview compare to the sort of arrayed and repeatable methodologies that evolved from the Enlightenment and are currently used to ease humanity's interface with the physical world in ways that no tribal elder ever will be able to, I'd compare the two ways of observing and analyzing reality to bronze versus steel edged weapons. Bronze was just fine until something better came along. It still has its uses, but are limited to niche endeavors.
You are opting to free-associate from a position of smug ignorance rather than even momentarily look into the subject or its authors. Henrich is about as far from woke as you can go, a Hayek recipient positing that Latin Christianity is the architect of western superiority and its intellectual fruits. If that is what being outed as woke looks like to you, the outing has happened to someone, but it isn't Henrich.
You, meanwhile, were unable to discern a description from a value judgement, conflated feeling offended with having a point and then doubled down on your confusion when offered a patient explanation because you were already invested in having a tantrum over his accurate use of a word you don't like.
Weird means unusual, strange, out of the ordinary. That is the first definition in any dictionary you open. Not 'bad' or 'inferior.' Whatever emotional baggage you have married to that word is your own problem.
WEIRD was chosen because unusual is the point, that modern westerners are psychologically distinct compared to the rest of humanity, past and present. That is a finding, not an insult. Both of you are not defending the west. but defending the illusion that the west has no accent.
Excellent article, interesting subject. Having immersed myself in the ontological thinking of Barry Smith who champions a form of Perspectivalism, I can't help but translate the Indigenous ways of knowing and Western modes of knowing distinction into an integrated world lens. Substance ontology isn't "Western" and process ontology isn't "Indigenous," they're just different structural assumptions that prove more or less adequate depending on whether you're analyzing stable properties or dynamic relationships.
The difficulty with your first case cited is that the Micmac elder was looking at an upstream variable, turbidity, which the scientists had overlooked (allegedly), but he was treating it as an *outcome* relevant in its own right. The scientists were looking at objective evidence of fish health as the relevant outcome, not at the turbidity of the water they swim in. To the Indians, turbidity is a politically useful outcome even if it has no relation to fish health -- the fish are healthy even if the river water is more turbid -- because it gives them ammunition to oppose hydroelectric development on the rivers. (That's why the elders went there in the first place.) By opposing it, they extract more rent from the hydro industry in exchange for their "consent" for the river being made more turbid. The fact that the fish are fine is irrelevant politically. River turbidity becomes an outcome that they, as "stewards" of the river, must be compensated monetarily for. If the river wasn't more turbid, they would find some other "harm" under the ways of knowing rubric to agitate with.
This political anti-settler rent-seeking activism that permeates our relations with indigenous people in Canada is what poisons any well-intentioned efforts by scientists to be open-minded about this sort of thing, unless they are allies of the "1492LandBack" movement. Many are, or profess to be in order to get federal grants, enthusiastically incanting their land acknowledgements and fealty to indigenous mumbo-jumbo when they present their work.
I also question whether any indigenous polity in Canada actually believes in indigenous ways of knowing beyond the straight-forward trial and error about when to set weirs to catch eels. All have been educated to the primary level in Canadian schools. Few could survive in the true wilderness any longer than I could. Most who live on Reserves drop out of high school and get trapped in the welfare culture but the ones who have made much of themselves have gone to university or trade school where they were surrounded by WEIRDness and work in the normal capitalist wage economy. Nearly all converted to Christianity 350 years ago and very few still believe in traditional animistic gods and creation legends. What I think we are seeing with these ways of knowing claims is the resuscitation of old fairy tales and their repurposing for political activist purposes. We settlers have been guilted into sacralizing these purported beliefs so as not to appear racist and to further the cause of "reconciliation" with its ever-moving goalposts. It seems easier and safer to go along than to debunk any of this, the way a heretical idea in "western" science would be.
This feels like an elephant in the room: how much of the indigenous first peoples culture and knowledge has survived the centuries of contact with European culture. Do Canadian first nation people really retain much original knowledge about living off the land? I think the main author's insights might be true of the few tribes in the world that live apart from otherwise omnipresent WEIRD-based knowledge systems, but that they are a very small group.
Yes, you were right, it was worth reading the whole thing. Cut out all the woo-woo and people who have lived in certain niches for a long time probably do have a highly attuned sensitivity to their environment.
I'm certainly not averse to seeing things in a non-western way. I lived and worked in Japan for 20 years and whenever I came across westerners during that time it struck me how unnatural we look: big, gangly, angular, long-necked: as unlikely as a giraffe. And our ways of thinking match our physical oddness. THAT way of thinking always struck me as odd, cold and distant, though infuriatingly invariably correct.
Anyway, I'd be more than happy if it turned out that we hadn't cornered the market in knowledge of the natural world and more primitive peoples were still able to contribute something to the conversation.
I'm curious as to who is more correct, Joseph Henrich or Peter Frost, on the origins of our WEIRDness. Henrich is of course the Hoover and Kleenex of the subject, yet I'd almost always put my money on Peter Frost. There's something about his writing that I like and immediately convinces me.
Ian McGilchrist has written 2 great books on the issue with modern society having a left hemisphere bias.
The left/ logic side of the brain is detail oriented while the right brain is more about the big picture. What was mentioned about the painting with the tiger matches this.
I came to say this. The article seems to be clearly describing aspects of the distinctions between the hemispheres. Roughly, the left hemisphere takes a narrow, analytic, instrumental view of the world as a collection of dead objects to be grabbed and used. The right hemisphere sees the world as an integrated whole of living beings and relationships. "Ways of knowing" would be what McGilchrist calls ways of attending to the world.
McGilchrist argues that the right hemisphere is properly dominant, for only it is able to see the big picture, while understanding the usefulness of the analytic perspective of the left. The left hemisphere, with its narrow instrumental view, sees no value to the right hemisphere's more holistic, intuitive view. An individual or society where the left hemisphere dominates becomes dysfunctional - as has happened in past civilizations, and as is happening to us.
I am not convinced by the argument about family structure. Emmanuel Todd (e.g. in Lineages of Modernity) provides strong evidence that the nuclear family is ancient. Denser kinship structures (e.g. with cousin marriage, primogeniture etc.) are a later development. Nuclear families in the West persisted on the less developed fringes of Europe (e.g. England). I think the emphasis on family structure in the article is a bit of a red herring, or perhaps turbidity.
It's in the very phrase: "Ways of knowing." What are these ways? What are the systems defined? The author implores us to welcome the holistic processing of the Natives as equal to our analytical processing, but analytical processing seems to me super-holistic processing: focusing on the connections of a system. Systemization is the synthesis of a system's constituents, and if you cannot identify the parts, how can you be confident there is a system? The very idea of a system implies smaller units. The fact whole swathes of people cannot recognize the forest is a collection of trees is the mark of stupidity. Natives do have an average IQ of 85, and the San tribe mentioned have a general IQ of 55. Coincidence? I think not.
Indigenous ways of guessing. A guess is called a hypothesis. Hypotheses are tested and may become theories. Masking this brute-force usurptation of our science as a ‘decolonial ethic’ is woman-speak for preemptively shaming reason-lovers for not obeying inherited racial primacy and inherent White illegitimacy. That mirrors female societies where women inherit superiority through fertility, which cannot be earned and reflects nothing of the woman's cognition but guarantees primacy of her opinions and preferences.
No addressing the objective physics of the case; just pure obeisance to Indigenous folks for being Indigenous. You are so racist that you deem non-Whites unable to grasp rationality or to possess the curiosity and integrity to test their guesswork to find errors and refine their guess’ first draft. Indigenous ways of knowing are traditions their ancestors instated after trial and error and observing patterns and results, with thd caveat that they lacked a controlled environment to sterilize noisy variables and set controls against modified comparisons. Indigenous ways of guessing came from a super rudimentary scientific method. And yet proponents of Indigenous ways of guessing desire that primeval reckoning to be held pseudo-equitable (superior) to the scientific method. Westerners must test their guesses but Native guesswork receives uncritical acceptance.
Europeans knew that flies were born from rotten meat. Greeks knew that the uterus was motile and roamed the body. Americans knew smoking did not injure lungs. The author admits that Natives possess beliefs that counterpoise the perfect insight that Indigenous ways of knowing advertise. He advises Natives to drop those knowings, because they cast doubt on Native infallability. Such lumination of Natives being on par with Whites in the ‘can be wrong’ category and the assurance that the other knowings are correct (by whose measurement?) champions the scientific method.
I enjoyed the article.
Despite inferring that you are a Leafs fan - Go Sens!
That said, I believe "indigenous ways of knowing" is unlikely to be redeemable for the simple reason that implies the indigenous have different ways of obtaining knowledge. They do not.
Do they have a different perspective? Perhaps.
Do they know things Western scientists do not. Quite possibly.
Does their knowledge come from a different source? Most definitely.
However, all knowledge of the natural world comes from observation.
You are attempting to salvage the term by turning "knowing" into a synonym for "thinking."
I am open to "indigenous ways of thinking" and "indigenous ways of looking at the world," but unless "knowing" is specifically in reference to oral tradition vs. reading a book, I'm afraid I will continue to view it as “noble savage” mysticism.
'Ways of knowing' implies a process of discovery, a formula; the author luminates those ways as holistic processing, and he implores us to welcome such a cognitive style as equal (superior) to the cognitive style of a civilization that founded the scientific method and discovered physics. Systemization is the synthesis of a confluence of smaller units. The very concept of a system discloses smaller units, and if Natives propose a system, I want to know how they connected its units and if they logically meld through cause and effect. That should be the human baseline; anything else is instinct and superstition. Both are typical of low intelligence and female sex. Natives have an average IQ of 85, and the San "Bushmen" tribe's general IQ is 55. A holistic cognitive style removed from analytical processing may be how our ancestors navigated life, and less intelligent races today are not sufficiently cognitively developed to follow the White Man's way of knowing.
*systemization is holistic and analytical.
Haha great article. One of the few writings on HBD I would feel comfortable sharing with my left wing, “WEIRD” acquaintances.
Wasn’t it Michael Polanyi who wrote on Tacit Knowledge?
Typo, now fixed. Thanks.
—NC
Thank you for this thought provoking article. I have 2 main issues with the premise: the first is best expressed by Leslie MacMilla's excellent comment: how much original indigenous knowledge actually remains for first nation descendants in Canada (and also Australia and the US) after centuries of contact with WEIRD knowledge systems? Almost no one claiming first nation heritage in these countries live off the land in anyway resembling how their forebears used to. (Obviously not true of the Sand tribe, etc.) And the second is that scientific models adapt to indigenous ways of knowing - if a scientist thinks an input factor might be relevant to an outcome and not in a model, they track it, test the hypothesis that it is a driver of outcomes and based on these results decide whether and how to adapt the model.
My 2 issues do not eliminate all the value of indigenous ways of knowing described in this article, but do limit it, IMO, to areas where the natural sciences have not yet incorporated it in a rationale way, to areas not studied by natural sciences (social sciences) and from those groups of indigenous people who retain sufficient indigenous knowledge from their forebears,
The author refers to something I'm familiar with: "WEIRD" people — "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic." To me, the very formulation of this term suggests an implied bias against the people it purports to describe.
But I'm sympathetic to the idea that there are different ways of perceiving the world. The differences between myself and my wife in our perceptions often make that clear. So the idea that there are cultural or group differences in the perception of the world is reasonable. I'm just not convinced that any potential integration of "WEIRD" and indigenous "ways of knowing" is a *good* idea.
Scientific inquiry has expanded human knowledge about the greater universe in ways that "indigenous ways of knowing" could never match.
Scientific inquiry could do this only by "separating the chaff from the wheat" in order to reach the reductive "essences" of phenomena, which could then be reorganized into an "empirical whole" that is more explanatory of the greater reality.
We may not like what it shows — that we are not the center of a reality in a fundamentally indifferent universe — but that may be the most important thing to learn from "WEIRD" ways of inquiry.
Anyway, it's an interesting essay.
"WEIRD" is a well-known scientific concept — it is not anti-Western.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_World
—NC
I know it's a well-known concept. I maintain that the word "weird" is considered a disparaging term by almost everyone, and using it to label Western culture or Western "ways of knowing" has clearly negative implications.
But that wasn't even my main point.
I agree with your point.
Think of it this way: if one wishes to make a recognizable acronym out of the identified cultural characteristics: western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic, one might have had:
WEIRD
WIRED
WIDER
So of these, we choose the one with the most negative connotations.
To me, the entire exercise of coming up with carefully selected--perhaps curated?--attributes and arranging the initial letters purposefully into a snarky acronym is the hallmark the Millennial and Gen-Z brand of self-loathing, writ large.
Thanks. I don't know if choosing "WEIRD" as the acronym represents the purposeful or unconscious thoughts of certain younger generations (I'm 76), but self-loathing, guilt, and snark are definitely rampant in American culture now. Thanks for your anagrams. They certainly put an illuminating spotlight on the chosen acronym.
With respect I think you are uncharitably misinterpreting the idea. Weird simply means unusual and that is central to what Joseph Henrich was trying to communicate with the WEIRD acronym, that western ways of thinking are wildly unusual relative to all other times and places, yet we are prone to the assumption that we are close to a universal human default, particularly in psychology research.
And left-wing champions of indigenous knowledge are infinitely *more* susceptible to this bias - while they like the idea of mystical indigenous knowledge and the noble savage they always essentially take for granted that the indigenous wisdom will boil down to "exactly what we (liberal academics) think, but more so" - more kumbaya, more feminist, more anti-racist etc., that if you strip off "colonialism" you will somehow be left with a purer form of liberal colonial thinking underneath. In reality, virtually if not literally all other cultures on earth are drastically more patriarchal, parochial, xenophobic, less scientific etc. etc. and that we are the vanishing minority for being any other way.
As to your suggestion, "wired" suggests a technological cause, but we are seeing now that not all "wired" cultures are "weird" and probably vice versa. Henrich posits that it stems from Christianity's influence on Europe, but he was wise to keep the acronym purely descriptive and agnostic of causal theories. It's a clever acronym for an important idea, and well thought out.
With respect, this sounds like the sort of semantic dodge that would be used by those who invented WEIRD, were momentarily pleased with it (and themselves), and now defensive since they've been outed as woke.
WRT how traditionalist forms of worldview compare to the sort of arrayed and repeatable methodologies that evolved from the Enlightenment and are currently used to ease humanity's interface with the physical world in ways that no tribal elder ever will be able to, I'd compare the two ways of observing and analyzing reality to bronze versus steel edged weapons. Bronze was just fine until something better came along. It still has its uses, but are limited to niche endeavors.
You are opting to free-associate from a position of smug ignorance rather than even momentarily look into the subject or its authors. Henrich is about as far from woke as you can go, a Hayek recipient positing that Latin Christianity is the architect of western superiority and its intellectual fruits. If that is what being outed as woke looks like to you, the outing has happened to someone, but it isn't Henrich.
You, meanwhile, were unable to discern a description from a value judgement, conflated feeling offended with having a point and then doubled down on your confusion when offered a patient explanation because you were already invested in having a tantrum over his accurate use of a word you don't like.
If you genuinely believe that WEIRD simply means unusual, which I very much doubt, then you are genuinely weird.
Weird means unusual, strange, out of the ordinary. That is the first definition in any dictionary you open. Not 'bad' or 'inferior.' Whatever emotional baggage you have married to that word is your own problem.
WEIRD was chosen because unusual is the point, that modern westerners are psychologically distinct compared to the rest of humanity, past and present. That is a finding, not an insult. Both of you are not defending the west. but defending the illusion that the west has no accent.
I would suggest that the WEIRD acronym was the product of WEIRD thinking.
How's that for a meta-analysis?
:^)
Excellent article, interesting subject. Having immersed myself in the ontological thinking of Barry Smith who champions a form of Perspectivalism, I can't help but translate the Indigenous ways of knowing and Western modes of knowing distinction into an integrated world lens. Substance ontology isn't "Western" and process ontology isn't "Indigenous," they're just different structural assumptions that prove more or less adequate depending on whether you're analyzing stable properties or dynamic relationships.
The difficulty with your first case cited is that the Micmac elder was looking at an upstream variable, turbidity, which the scientists had overlooked (allegedly), but he was treating it as an *outcome* relevant in its own right. The scientists were looking at objective evidence of fish health as the relevant outcome, not at the turbidity of the water they swim in. To the Indians, turbidity is a politically useful outcome even if it has no relation to fish health -- the fish are healthy even if the river water is more turbid -- because it gives them ammunition to oppose hydroelectric development on the rivers. (That's why the elders went there in the first place.) By opposing it, they extract more rent from the hydro industry in exchange for their "consent" for the river being made more turbid. The fact that the fish are fine is irrelevant politically. River turbidity becomes an outcome that they, as "stewards" of the river, must be compensated monetarily for. If the river wasn't more turbid, they would find some other "harm" under the ways of knowing rubric to agitate with.
This political anti-settler rent-seeking activism that permeates our relations with indigenous people in Canada is what poisons any well-intentioned efforts by scientists to be open-minded about this sort of thing, unless they are allies of the "1492LandBack" movement. Many are, or profess to be in order to get federal grants, enthusiastically incanting their land acknowledgements and fealty to indigenous mumbo-jumbo when they present their work.
I also question whether any indigenous polity in Canada actually believes in indigenous ways of knowing beyond the straight-forward trial and error about when to set weirs to catch eels. All have been educated to the primary level in Canadian schools. Few could survive in the true wilderness any longer than I could. Most who live on Reserves drop out of high school and get trapped in the welfare culture but the ones who have made much of themselves have gone to university or trade school where they were surrounded by WEIRDness and work in the normal capitalist wage economy. Nearly all converted to Christianity 350 years ago and very few still believe in traditional animistic gods and creation legends. What I think we are seeing with these ways of knowing claims is the resuscitation of old fairy tales and their repurposing for political activist purposes. We settlers have been guilted into sacralizing these purported beliefs so as not to appear racist and to further the cause of "reconciliation" with its ever-moving goalposts. It seems easier and safer to go along than to debunk any of this, the way a heretical idea in "western" science would be.
This feels like an elephant in the room: how much of the indigenous first peoples culture and knowledge has survived the centuries of contact with European culture. Do Canadian first nation people really retain much original knowledge about living off the land? I think the main author's insights might be true of the few tribes in the world that live apart from otherwise omnipresent WEIRD-based knowledge systems, but that they are a very small group.
Interesting article and perspective.
Two eyes are better than one.
But only if they are focused on the same thing. Two-eyed seeing is a metaphor, a figure of speech, not an actual way of examining the world.
The article might have been alright but my left-brain colluded with my right-wing self to click off the article before the fourth paragraph had ended.
It's worth reading the whole thing.
—NC
Okay, you've persuaded me.
Yes, you were right, it was worth reading the whole thing. Cut out all the woo-woo and people who have lived in certain niches for a long time probably do have a highly attuned sensitivity to their environment.
I'm certainly not averse to seeing things in a non-western way. I lived and worked in Japan for 20 years and whenever I came across westerners during that time it struck me how unnatural we look: big, gangly, angular, long-necked: as unlikely as a giraffe. And our ways of thinking match our physical oddness. THAT way of thinking always struck me as odd, cold and distant, though infuriatingly invariably correct.
Anyway, I'd be more than happy if it turned out that we hadn't cornered the market in knowledge of the natural world and more primitive peoples were still able to contribute something to the conversation.
I'm curious as to who is more correct, Joseph Henrich or Peter Frost, on the origins of our WEIRDness. Henrich is of course the Hoover and Kleenex of the subject, yet I'd almost always put my money on Peter Frost. There's something about his writing that I like and immediately convinces me.
Ian McGilchrist has written 2 great books on the issue with modern society having a left hemisphere bias.
The left/ logic side of the brain is detail oriented while the right brain is more about the big picture. What was mentioned about the painting with the tiger matches this.
https://iainmcgilchrist.substack.com/p/metaphors-can-make-you-blind
Here's where it's demonstrated in an epic sci-fi show in the context of differing AIs.
https://robc137.substack.com/p/left-brain-vs-whole-brain-in-battlestar
I came to say this. The article seems to be clearly describing aspects of the distinctions between the hemispheres. Roughly, the left hemisphere takes a narrow, analytic, instrumental view of the world as a collection of dead objects to be grabbed and used. The right hemisphere sees the world as an integrated whole of living beings and relationships. "Ways of knowing" would be what McGilchrist calls ways of attending to the world.
McGilchrist argues that the right hemisphere is properly dominant, for only it is able to see the big picture, while understanding the usefulness of the analytic perspective of the left. The left hemisphere, with its narrow instrumental view, sees no value to the right hemisphere's more holistic, intuitive view. An individual or society where the left hemisphere dominates becomes dysfunctional - as has happened in past civilizations, and as is happening to us.
I am not convinced by the argument about family structure. Emmanuel Todd (e.g. in Lineages of Modernity) provides strong evidence that the nuclear family is ancient. Denser kinship structures (e.g. with cousin marriage, primogeniture etc.) are a later development. Nuclear families in the West persisted on the less developed fringes of Europe (e.g. England). I think the emphasis on family structure in the article is a bit of a red herring, or perhaps turbidity.
Reads like a summary of the geography of thought, by Nisbet?
However you parse the world, causation is causation. There's only one casual story.
It's in the very phrase: "Ways of knowing." What are these ways? What are the systems defined? The author implores us to welcome the holistic processing of the Natives as equal to our analytical processing, but analytical processing seems to me super-holistic processing: focusing on the connections of a system. Systemization is the synthesis of a system's constituents, and if you cannot identify the parts, how can you be confident there is a system? The very idea of a system implies smaller units. The fact whole swathes of people cannot recognize the forest is a collection of trees is the mark of stupidity. Natives do have an average IQ of 85, and the San tribe mentioned have a general IQ of 55. Coincidence? I think not.
Indigenous ways of guessing. A guess is called a hypothesis. Hypotheses are tested and may become theories. Masking this brute-force usurptation of our science as a ‘decolonial ethic’ is woman-speak for preemptively shaming reason-lovers for not obeying inherited racial primacy and inherent White illegitimacy. That mirrors female societies where women inherit superiority through fertility, which cannot be earned and reflects nothing of the woman's cognition but guarantees primacy of her opinions and preferences.
No addressing the objective physics of the case; just pure obeisance to Indigenous folks for being Indigenous. You are so racist that you deem non-Whites unable to grasp rationality or to possess the curiosity and integrity to test their guesswork to find errors and refine their guess’ first draft. Indigenous ways of knowing are traditions their ancestors instated after trial and error and observing patterns and results, with thd caveat that they lacked a controlled environment to sterilize noisy variables and set controls against modified comparisons. Indigenous ways of guessing came from a super rudimentary scientific method. And yet proponents of Indigenous ways of guessing desire that primeval reckoning to be held pseudo-equitable (superior) to the scientific method. Westerners must test their guesses but Native guesswork receives uncritical acceptance.
Europeans knew that flies were born from rotten meat. Greeks knew that the uterus was motile and roamed the body. Americans knew smoking did not injure lungs. The author admits that Natives possess beliefs that counterpoise the perfect insight that Indigenous ways of knowing advertise. He advises Natives to drop those knowings, because they cast doubt on Native infallability. Such lumination of Natives being on par with Whites in the ‘can be wrong’ category and the assurance that the other knowings are correct (by whose measurement?) champions the scientific method.
I knew this article was not worth my time, and my ways of knowing were spot on.
Only in Canada, you say? Pity.