THE
CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS' PARADOX WITH REGARD TO HIS "NEOLITHIC PARADOX."
WHEN SCIENTISM HAS PREVENTED HIS REACHING TRUE CONCLUSIONS ABOUT FACTS HE
HOWEVER CAREFULLY DESCRIBED.
Renato Cocchi,
a neurologist and medical psychologis; a sociologist.
Summary.
The so
called "Neolithic paradox" that Claude Lévi-Strauss has invoked to
justify the "man's mastery of the great arts of civilization - of pottery,
weaving, agriculture and the domestication of animals ", by hypothesizing
a scientific method then lost in the following thousands of years, is not a
paradox at all. The acquisitions were reached with the natural scientific
method, never lost and still working and used, at least in the medicine.
A true
"paradox" is the fact that an eminent anthropologist, as Lévi-Strauss
was, has been misled by scientistic conception for which the only progress of
the science is creditable to the Scientific Experimental Method.
Key
words: Lévi-Strauss, Claude, The savage
mind, Neolithic, paradox, Experimental Scientific Method, Narural Scientific
Method, reversebrain, similarity, opposition, cause-and-effect, cognitive
mechanisms, mistake, scientism, results.
Theoretical and research bases
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The so called "Neolithic paradox" forwarded by the
anthropologist Claude Lévi Strauss in his "the Pensée Sauvage" book (
Too
clearly supposing of being a different scientific method from the Experimental
Scientific Method, he did not arrive the theoretical conclusion about what he
had under his eyes. So he "preferred" gets rid of the problem, by
naming it as a paradox. Personally, I believe that in nature and in the history
don't exist any paradoxes, but, at most, inadequate explanations.
It is
better however now apply to the words of the same Lévi-Strauss to point out
what surely was an error of his mind, unfortunately "not savage," but
darkened by a wrong conviction rather commune. Currently, in the overwhelming
majority of the scientists, there is the thought that the only possibility of
scientific progress is what comes out the use of the Experimental Scientific
Method.
The text of Lévi-Strauss.
This is
the whole text of reference of Lévi-Strauss, (Am. translation, 1966) that
subsequently I shall comment.
"But
the fact that modern science dates back only a few centuries raises a problem
which ethnologists have not sufficiently pondered. The Neolithic Paradox would
be a suitable name for it.
Neolithic,
or early historical, man was therefore the heir of a long scientific tradition.
However, had he, as well as all his predecessors, been inspired by exactly the
same spirit as that of our own time, it would be impossible to understand how
he could have come to a halt and how several thousand years of stagnation have
intervened between the neolithic revolution and modern science like a level
plain between ascents. There is only one solution to the paradox, namely, that
there are two distinct modes of scientific thought. These are certainly not a
function of different stages of the development of the human mind but rather of
two strategic levels at which at which nature is accessible to scientific
enquiry: one roughly adapted to that of perception and the imagination: the
other at a remove from it.
It is
as if the necessary connections which are the object of all science, neolithic
or modern, could be arrived at by two different routes, one very close to, and
the other more remote from, sensible intuition.
I am
not however commending a return to the popular belief (although it has some
validity in its own narrow context) according to which magic is a timid and
stuttering form of science. One deprives oneself of all means of understanding
magical thought if one tries to reduce it to a moment or stage in technical and
scientific evolution. Like a shadow moving ahead of its owner it is in a sense
complete in itself, and as finished and coherent in its immateriality as the
substantial being which it precedes. Magical thought is not to be regarded as a
beginning, a rudiment, a sketch, a part of a whole which has not yet
materialized. It forms a well-articulated system, and is in this respect
independent of that other system which constitutes science, except for the
purely formal analogy which brings them together and makes the former a sort of
metaphorical expression of the latter. It is therefore better, instead of
contrasting magic and science, to compare them as two parallel modes of
acquiring knowledge. Their theoretical and practical results differ in value,
for it is true that science is more successful than magic from this point of
view, although magic foreshadows science in that it is sometimes also
successful. Both science and magic however require the same sort of mental
operations and they differ not so much in kind as in the different types of
phenomena to which they are applied.
These
relations are a consequence of the objective conditions in which magic and
scientific knowledge appeared. The history of the latter is short enough for us
to know a good deal about it. But the fact that modern science dates back only
a few centuries raises a problem which ethnologists have not sufficiently
pondered.
It was
in neolithic times that man's mastery of the great arts of civilization - of
pottery, weaving, agriculture and the domestication of animals - became firmly
established.
No one
today would any longer think of attributing these enormous advances to the
fortuitous accumulation of a series of chance discoveries or believe them to
have been revealed by the passive perception of certain natural phenomena.
Each
of these techniques assumes centuries of active and methodical observation, of
bold hypotheses tested by means of endlessly repeated experiments.
Each
of these techniques assumes centuries of active and methodical observation, of
bold hypotheses tested by means of endedless epeated experiments.
A
biologist remarks on the rapidity with which plants from the New World have
been acclimatized in the Philippines and adopted and named by the natives. In
many cases they seem even to have rediscovered their medicinal uses, uses
identical with those traditional in Mexico. Fox's interpretation is this:
Plants
with bitter leaves or sterns are commonly used in the Philippines for stomach
disorders. If an introduced plant is found to have this characteristic, it will
be quickly utilized. The fact that many Philippine groups, such as the Pinatubo
Negritos, constantly experiment with plants hastens the process of the
recognition of the potential usefulness, as defined by the culture, of the
introduced flora (R.B.Fox, pp. 212-13; quoted by Lévi-Strauss).
To
transform a weed into a cultivated plant, a wild beast into a domestic animal,
to produce, in either of these, nutritious or technologically useful properties
which were originally completely absent or could only be guessed at; to make
stout, water-tight pottery out of clay which is friable and unstable, liable to
pulverize or crack (which, however, is possible only if from a large number of
organic and inorganic materials, the one most suitable for refining it is
selected, and also the appropriate fuel, the temperature and duration of firing
and the effective degree of oxidation); to work out techniques, often long and
complex, which permit cultivation without soil or alternatively without water;
to change toxic roots or seeds into foodstuffs or again to use their poison for
hunting, war or ritual - there is no doubt that all these achievements required
a genuinely scientific attitude, sustained and watchful interest and a desire
for knowledge for its own sake.
For
only a small proportion of observations and experiments (which must be assumed
to have been primarily inspired by a desire for knowledge) could have yielded
practical and immediately useful results.
There
is no need to dwell on the working of bronze and iron and of precious metals or
even the simple working of copper ore by hammering which preceded metallurgy by
several thousand years, and even at the stage they all demand a very high level
of technical proficiency.
Any
classification is superior to chaos and even a classification at the level of
sensible properties is a step towards rational ordering. It is legitimate, in
classifying fruits into relatively heavy and relatively light, to begin by
separating the apples from the pears even though shape, colour and taste are
unconnected with weight and volume. This is because the larger apples are
easier to distinguish from the smaller if the apples are not still mixed with
fruit of different features. This example already shows that classification has
its advantages even at the level of aesthetic perception.
For
the rest, and in spite of the fact there is no necessary connection between
sensible qualities and properties, there is very often at least an empirical
connection between them, and the generalization of this relation may be
rewarding from the theoretical and practical point of view for a very long time
even if it has no foundation in reason. Not all poisonous juices are burning or
bitter nor is everything which is burning and bitter poisonous. Nevertheless,
nature is so constituted that it is more advantageous if thought and action
proceed as though this aesthetically satisfying equivalence also corresponded
to objective reality. It seems probable, for reasons which are not relevant
here, that species possessing some remarkable characteristics, say, of shape,
colour or smell give the observer what might be called a 'right pending
disproof to postulate that these visible characteristics are the sign of
equally singular, but concealed, properties. To treat the relation between the
two as itself sensible (regarding a seed in the form of a tooth as a safeguard
against snake bites, yellow juices as a cure for bilious troubles, etc.) is of
more value provisionally than indifference to any connection. For even a
heterogeneous and arbitrary classification preserves the richness and diversity
of the collection of facts it makes. The decision that everything must be taken
account of facilitates the creation of a 'memory bank'.
It is
moreover a fact that particular results, to the achievement of which methods of
this kind were able to lead, were essential to enable man to assail nature from
a different angle. Myths and rites are far from being, as has often been held,
the product of man's 'myth-making faculty', turning its back on reality. Their
principal value is indeed to preserve until the present time the remains of
methods of observation and reflection which were (and no doubt still are)
precisely adapted to discoveries of a certain type: those which nature
authorised from the starting point of a speculative organization and
exploitation of the sensible world in sensible terms. This science of the
concrete was necessarily restricted by its essence to results other than those
destined to be achieved by the exact natural sciences but it was no less
scientific and its results no less genuine. They were secured ten thousand
years earlier and still remain at the basis of our own civilization.
There
still exists among ourselves an activity which on the technical plane gives us
quite a good understanding of what a science we prefer to call 'prior' rather
than 'primitive', could have been on the plane of speculation. This is what is
commonly called 'bricolage' in French." (Lévi-Strauss, 1966).
The analysis and the discussion of the text.
"But
the fact that modern science dates back only a few centuries raises a problem which
ethnologists have not sufficiently pondered. The Neolithic Paradox would be a
suitable name for it."
Clearly
Lévi-Strauss believes, so making a mistake, which the science is only what
derives from the application of the Experimental Scientific Method, which
Galilean published in 1632. On the other hand the discovery of the planet
Jupiter's satellites ("the Medicean planets"), the same Galilean made
it with the use of a spyglass (then, with a helped observation), and not surely
according to the Experimental Scientific Method. Jupiter's moons are still
there, and their discovery was an absolutely scientific result, all verified
and confirmed.
Of the
rest, even after the launch of the first artificial satellite, the astronomy is
nearly all not-experimental, but not for this it is a not-science, and less
that is never astrology.
"To
transform ..... there is no doubt that all these achievements required a
genuinely scientific attitude, sustained and watchful interest and a desire for
knowledge for its own sake. For only a small proportion of observations and
experiments (which must be assumed to have been primarily inspired by a desire
for knowledge) could have yielded practical and immediately useful
results."
It exists
and it is always existed, even a "Natural Scientific Method" which it
is not learnt at school, but is connatural to cognitive mechanisms of human
beings. (Cocchi, 2004).
As with a
current point of view, corresponding to a rational reflection, it consists in:
1.
Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena.
2.
Formulation of an hypothesis to explain the phenomena. In physics, the
hypothesis often takes the form of a causal mechanism or a mathematical
relation.
3. Use
of the hypothesis to predict the existence of other phenomena, or to predict
quantitatively the results of new observations.
4.
Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent
experimenters and properly performed experiments".(AA, 1996).
The first three steps form the Natural Scientific
Method. The addition of the fourth step gives the rise of the
Experimental Scientific Method.
This
latter one is only completion and it can reduce the times of reaching the
results, but it is not, as very much they believe, and evidently even Lévi-Strauss
believed it, the opposition to some not-scientific thing.
To return
to the so called "Neolithic paradox," we are exactly dealing with
first three steps over described, which steps were valid in the Neolithic time
and are valid even today.
"No
one today would any longer think of attributing these enormous advances to the
fortuitous accumulation of a series of chance discoveries or believe them to
have been revealed by the passive perception of certain natural phenomena.
Each
of these techniques assumes centuries of active and methodical observation, of
bold hypotheses tested by means of endlessly repeated experiments."
There
is only one solution to the paradox, namely, that there at which nature is
accessible to scientific enquiry: ..... It is as if the necessary connections
which are the object of all science, neolithic or modern, could be arrived at
by two different routes, one very close to, and the other more remote from,
sensible intuition."
What is
more bewilder, and it is a paradox not of the Neolithic, but of the same
Lévi-Strauss, it is he hypothesized the possibility of another Scientific
Method. At the end he denied it because it would belong only to the
"sensible intuition," to the not-rational, and then it would have not
any dignity of science.
"Neolithic,
or early historical, man was therefore the heir of a long scientific tradition.
However, had he, as well as all. his predecessors, been inspired by exactly the
same spirit as that of our own time, it would be impossible to understand how
he could have come to a halt and how several thousand years of stagnation have
intervened between the neolithic revolution and modern science like a level
plain between ascents?"
Then, in
the Neolithic there was another Scientific Method, which then has been lost.
This discourse is full absurdly. There has not been any "stop" and less that never "stagnation millenniums." New acquisitions have been done
exactly with the same method set in action from the Neolithic man, a method
that still works and it is useful.
Then no
any "dark millenniums," as the Middle Age does not encompass the so
called "dark centuries."
The
scientific acquisitions occurred in the Neolithic, those "of pottery,
weaving, agriculture and the domestication of animals" have not
perhaps needed so many time, and the same Lévi-Strauss contradicts himself.
"A
biologist remarks on the rapidity with which plants from the New World have
been acclimatized in the Philippines and adopted and named by the natives. In
many cases they seem even to have rediscovered their medicinal uses, uses
identical with those traditional in Mexico. Fox's interpretation is this:
Plants
with bitter leaves or sterns are commonly used in the Philippines for stomach
disorders. If an introduced plant is found to have this characteristic, it will
be quickly utilized. The fact that many Philippine groups, such as the Pinatubo
Negritos, constantly experiment with plants hastens the process of the
recognition of the potential usefulness, as defined by the culture, of the introduced
flora (R.B.Fox, pp. 212-13)." (quoted by Lévi-Strauss).
The
experience here described, and reported by the same Lévi-Strauss, has not
certainly required "centuries and centuries" to reach these
results. Would we exaggerate about it? At its highest, it needed three-four
centuries, even if they can be even much less.
"This
science of the concrete was necessarily restricted by its essence to results
other than those destined to be achieved by the exact natural sciences but it
was no less scientific and its results no less genuine. They were secured ten
thousand years earlier and still remain at the basis of our own
civilization."
All quite
correct, but to believe that then this ability was missed.
"There
is only one solution to the paradox [The Neolithic scientificity, then lost] ,
namely, that there are two distinct modes of scientific thought. These are
certainly not a function of different stages of the development of the human
mind but rather of two strategic levels at which at which nature is accessible
to scientific enquiry: one roughly adapted to that of perception and the
imagination: the other at a remove from it."
I think,
there is here a hidden great mistake. The Natural Scientific Method "roughly adapted to that of perception and
the imagination" is all rational at least in the final moment of its
application, moreover as true that it allows exact statistic elaborations.
The base
of the data collection can well lead to "the creation of a 'memory
bank'" and its data are selected by the cognitive mechanisms of the
identity for similarity (identity on the attribute), of opposition, and of a
prelogical cause and effect relationship (The "post hoc, ergo propter
hoc").
If it
were otherwise, it raises one of more dramatic, or more ridiculous,
consequences of this position. It is that the whole research of the same
Lévi-Strauss is not scientific (it has not any experimental base) but it
belongs only to the collection of anecdotes.
"Any
classification is superior to chaos and even a classification at the level of
sensible properties is a step towards rational ordering. It is legitimate, in
classifying fruits into relatively heavy and relatively light, to begin by
separating the apples from the pears even though shape, colour and taste are
unconnected with weight and volume. This is because the larger apples are
easier to distinguish from the smaller if the apples are not still mixed with
fruit of different features. This example already shows that classification has
its advantages even at the level of aesthetic perception."
We are
dealing with arrangements done on the identity by similarity, or identity on
the attribute, and, each, as Lévi-Strauss rightly writes, has its value by
itself.
For the
rest, and in spite of the fact that there is no "necessary connection between sensible qualities and properties",... "not all poisonous juices
are burning or bitter nor is everything which is burning and bitter
poisonous." Nevertheless, the hazardous statement that denies
any "necessary connection between sensible qualities and
properties," is in its turn soon contradicted by writing that "there
is often at least an empirical connection between them, and the generalisation
of this relation may be rewarding from the theoretical and practical point of
view for a very long timr even if it has no foundation in reason."
"This
operation has nothing of aesthetical (who knows then Lévi-Strauss
does means with such adjective?) but "nature is so constituted
that it is more advantageous if thought and action proceed as though this
aesthetically satisfying equivalence also corresponded to objective
reality."
This is
exactly what often happens.
"There
still exists among ourselves an activity, which on the technical plane gives us
quite a good understanding of what a science we prefer to call 'prior' rather
than 'primitive', could have been on the plane of speculation. This is what is
commonly called 'bricolage' in French." (Lévi-Strauss, 1966)
Here, Lévi-Strauss
want to suggest that the cognitive activity of the Neolithic man can be found
again even today in the "bricolage." His idea runs for an elaborate
and simplistic explanation, which kept a great deal for its flair.
Without
any "bricolage" in the contemporary medicine even today we acquire
still scientific results with the same not experimental but effective way,
which the man of the Neolithic used. When the experiment is not feasible, and
often it is so, we are not without any escape route, or we have to look out
upon magic.
"
I have already mentioned that the clinic, as the diagnosis of the single case,
does not pertain to the experimental medicine, even if it was surely
substantiated by it. Besides the clinic, the epidemiology too does not take
part of it. Epidemiology is the sum of single cases concerning a population,
even when it not succeeds to reach with safety the incidence level but simply
that of the prevalence referred to the investigated sample.
On a
short stop, I shall remember that the exit polls, for the forecast of electoral
results, are a prevalence evaluation. They have their base on a limited
population, but selected with the best criterion for representing the general
population. Still a time, nothing to do with the experimental scientific
method.
Till
the end of the '
Only
by the "sham acupuncture" (done by false points, outside the
traditional points of the Chinese meridians) in subject used as controls, it
has found that the acupuncture was and is an effective therapeutic technique. Its
officially validation with the experimental scientific method did not
absolutely change it for the better.
It
worked already first and since a great deal of time, though its traditional
theoretical explanation is still much debatable. However a thing is the result
( It works - it does not work) already computable (1 or 0), an other one is the
related theoretical explanation ( It works because . . . ). This last depends
on the knowledge level and of the world vision of historical time when it had
it. An other thing still, finally, is its communication to other people, mainly
to the medical colleagues.
In
medicine something can work, and well too, even without that there is an
explanation of because it does it. Since over one hundred years the
acetyl-salicylicilate works, and it is only since about 20 years that we
discovered at least one cause (It stimulates the prostaglandins).
Beyond
the medicine, ours ancient progenitors reached several very scientific results
(EG. selection and cultivation of the food plants; domestication of the
animals) about 8500 years BC, in the area of the Fertile Crescent and in the
Mediterranean coasts (Cocchi, 2004). "The Experimental Scientific
Method, published by Galilean in 1632, was still far. On the other hand, the
discovery of the Jove's satellites, made by the same Galileus, did not surely
happen by using the Experimental Scientific Method. The Jove's satellites are
still there, and their discovery was a truly scientific result.
To
return to the medicine, great pharmaceutical firms finance explorations to
tribes with poor or any contacts with our civilization, to know from the local
medicine-men which are the curative plants used and for which troubles. They
not only look for saving time and money in the research, which so will be
already directed for taking the active substances out (Maxwell, 1990)
They
give for asserting that we may have medical scientific knowledge discovered
outside the Experimental Scientific Method."(Cocchi, 2004).
Conclusions.
The
hypothesis of the so called "Neolithic paradox" as forwarded by the
anthropologist Claude Lèvi-Strauss in his book "The Pensée Sauvage,"
comes out from an error of theoretical thinking, because he could not know how
being free from the frame of scientism. This fact has prevented him to accept
the existence of another, and more ancient Scientific Method, namely "the
Natural Scientific Method."
According
to the analysis of what this eminent anthropologist wrote about, it evidently
appears his defect of right conceptualizing, even with an accurate description
of the collected data. Two are the mistakes on it. 1. He did not know the
Natural Scientific Method; 2. He had a false belief, as for the Scientific
Method used in the Neolithic time to reach "mastery of the great arts of
civilization - of pottery, weaving, agriculture and the domestication of
animals" but the same has then been lost.
Too
supposing clearly the presence of a Scientific Method as different from the
Experimental Scientific Method, he could not to bring to theoretical conclusion
what he had under his eyes. So, he "preferred" gets rid of the
problem, by naming it as a paradox.
Unfortunately
the true paradox is raised from this wrong conclusion of Lévi-Strauss, as such
at all understandable, if not only justifiable in terms of scientism. By it, he
derived his wrong conviction that the science progresses only through the
Experimental Scientific Method.
References
AA.VV.
Introduction to the Scientific Method and Astronomy. University of Rochcster. Rochester
N.Y 1996 <www.teacher.nsrl.rochester.edu/phy_labs/
AppendixE/AppendixE.html>.
Cocchi R. Dominanza emisferica imperfetta e
comportamenti cognitivi: Considerazioni speculative. Riv Ital Disturbo
Intellet. 1994, 7: 55-61.
Cocchi R. Il metodo scientifico naturale
nella medicina contemporanea. Lo Spallanzani 2004, 18:
31-36.<www.stress-cocchi.net/Speculation5-it.htm>
Lévi-Strauss C. La pensée sauvage. Plon,
Parigi 1962 (Trad.it. Il pensiero selvaggio. Il Saggiatore, Milano, 1966).
Maxwell
N. Witch doctors apprentice: Hunting for medicinal planis in the Amazonia. (3rd
Edit.) Citadel Press 1990.
Posted on internet on 24 October 2007. Copyright by Renato Cocchi 2007.
Author’s address: Dr. Renato Cocchi, Via Rabbeno, 3
42100
Reggio Emilia
renatococchi@libero.it
Theoretical and research bases
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