Atran S
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CREA (Ecole Polytechnique), Paris, France.
Behav Brain Sci. 1998 Aug;21(4):547-69; discussion 569-609. doi: 10.1017/s0140525x98001277.
This essay in the "anthropology of science" is about how cognition constrains culture in producing science. The example is folk biology, whose cultural recurrence issues from the very same domain-specific cognitive universals that provide the historical backbone of systematic biology. Humans everywhere think about plants and animals in highly structured ways. People have similar folk-biological taxonomies composed of essence-based, species-like groups and the ranking of species into lower- and higher-order groups. Such taxonomies are not as arbitrary in structure and content, nor as variable across cultures, as the assembly of entities into cosmologies, materials, or social groups. These structures are routine products of our "habits of mind," which may in part be naturally selected to grasp relevant and recurrent "habits of the world." An experiment illustrates that the same taxonomic rank is preferred for making biological inferences in two diverse populations: Lowland Maya and Midwest Americans. These findings cannot be explained by domain-general models of similarity because such models cannot account for why both cultures prefer species-like groups, although Americans have relatively little actual knowledge or experience at this level. This supports a modular view of folk biology as a core domain of human knowledge and as a special player, or "core meme," in the selection processes by which cultures evolve. Structural aspects of folk taxonomy provide people in different cultures with the built-in constraints and flexibility that allow them to understand and respond appropriately to different cultural and ecological settings. Another set of reasoning experiments shows that Maya, American folk, and scientists use similarly structured taxonomies in somewhat different ways to extend their understanding of the world in the face of uncertainty. Although folk and scientific taxonomies diverge historically, they continue to interact. The theory of evolution may ultimately dispense with the core concepts of folk biology, including species, taxonomy, and teleology; in practice, however, these may remain indispensable to doing scientific work. Moreover, theory-driven scientific knowledge cannot simply replace folk knowledge in everyday life. Folk-biological knowledge is not driven by implicit or inchoate theories of the sort science aims to make more accurate and perfect.
这篇关于“科学人类学”的文章探讨了认知在科学产生过程中如何制约文化。以民间生物学为例，其文化重现源于特定领域的认知共性，这些共性构成了系统生物学的历史主干。世界各地的人类以高度结构化的方式思考植物和动物。人们有着相似的民间生物分类法，由基于本质的、类似物种的群体以及将物种划分为低阶和高阶群体组成。与将实体组合成宇宙观、物质或社会群体相比，这些分类法在结构和内容上并非那么随意，在不同文化中也并非那么多变。这些结构是我们“思维习惯”的常规产物，而这些思维习惯可能部分是自然选择的结果，以便把握相关且反复出现的“世界习惯”。一项实验表明，在低地玛雅人和美国中西部人这两个不同群体中，人们在进行生物学推理时都倾向于相同的分类等级。这些发现无法用领域通用的相似性模型来解释，因为这类模型无法说明为什么两种文化都偏爱类似物种的群体，尽管美国人在这个层面上实际的知识或经验相对较少。这支持了将民间生物学视为人类知识核心领域以及文化进化选择过程中的特殊参与者或“核心模因”的模块化观点。民间分类法的结构方面为不同文化中的人们提供了内在的限制和灵活性，使他们能够理解并适当地应对不同的文化和生态环境。另一组推理实验表明，玛雅人、美国普通人以及科学家在面对不确定性时，会以略有不同的方式使用结构相似的分类法来扩展他们对世界的理解。尽管民间分类法和科学分类法在历史上有所不同，但它们仍在相互作用。进化论最终可能会摒弃民间生物学的核心概念，包括物种、分类法和目的论；然而在实践中，这些概念对于开展科学工作可能仍然不可或缺。此外，理论驱动的科学知识并不能简单地取代日常生活中的民间知识。民间生物知识并非由科学旨在使其更准确和完善的那种隐含或不成熟的理论驱动。
