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A critical reply to Ryan Nichols’ commentary on my book The Ambivalences of Rationality: Ancient and Modern Cross-Cultural Explorations (2018) published in this issue of the Journal of Cognitive Historiography.

This book challenges the common assumption that the predominant focus of the history of science should be the achievements of Western scientists since the so-called Scientific Revolution. The conceptual frameworks within which the members of earlier societies and of modern indigenous groups worked admittedly pose severe problems for our understanding. But rather than dismiss them on the grounds that they are incommensurable with our own and to that extent unintelligible, we should see them as offering opportunities for us to revise many of our own preconceptions. We should accept that the realities to be accounted for are multi-dimensional and that all such accounts are to some extent value-laden. In the process insights from current anthropology and the study of ancient Greece and China especially are brought to bear to suggest how the remit of the history of science can be expanded to achieve a cross-cultural perspective on the problems.

This chapter discusses the interpretation of what are commonly labelled magical acts or irrational beliefs, which earlier commentators (Frazer, Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard) often dismissed as failed technology or failed science, if not just superstitious rubbish. Following Tambiah, it introduces the contrast between the goals of ‘efficacy’ and that of ‘felicity’. In many cases the apparent aim is not causal efficacy, i.e. to achieve a particular effect or result, but felicity, where the criterion is rather what is appropriate to the occasion. It takes examples from ancient Greece and China to illustrate how these two criteria may differ and how they play out in the context of medicine, where rival styles of treatment have different aims in their attempts to heal or to secure well-being.

What conclusions should be drawn about human intelligence from the study of biological and cultural evolution? This chapter examines critically theories of some historical Great Divide among human populations, for instance Damasio’s Grand Synoptic Theory focussing on homeostasis or self-regulation, or Axial Age hypotheses stemming from Jaspers, that conjecture a radical break-through in the development of reflexive thought across Eurasia. Attempts to draw a line between more advanced societies and others considered primitive tend to oversimplify by underestimating our and their common cognitive capacities. The case of differences in spatial cognition is used to show how different cognitive capacities are in play but to argue for mutual intelligibility even across divergent paradigms.

A sense of the difference between right and wrong and a corresponding recognition of a concept of morality can be widely, maybe even universally, attested, as has been suggested for the Golden Rule (treat others as you would have them treat you). But how far does the great variety of explicit codified legal systems that can be attested across the world and over time undermine any possibility of treating law or even ‘custom’ as a robust cross-cultural category? This chapter investigates the similarities and differences in those systems in ancient societies (Greece, China) and in modern ones (e.g. Papua New Guinea) to throw light on the one hand on the importance of law for social order but on the other on the difficulties facing any programme to secure lasting justice.

This chapter considers what we can learn about mutual intelligibility from instances where it meets obstacles. That may happen not just where there is no desire to understand others, even no willingness to do so, where transparency is not the aim, but rather a deliberate cultivation of opacity. Difficulties may also arise because of perceived or imagined differences between human groups, including in their core values. It examines critically anthropological and philosophical theses to do with the radical differences in the ontologies presupposed or assumed by different human groups. The opacity of many communicative acts should not mislead us into taking the obstacles to mutual understanding to be always insurmountable.

This chapter outlines the history of the problem of reconciling, or of failing to reconcile, two conflicting intuitions, first an appreciation of the commonalities in the cognitive capacities that all humans share, and second, a recognition of the huge diversity in how they have been used including in the construction of contrasting belief systems and the adoption of divergent values. It criticizes various attempts to drive a wedge between different human populations and cultures with regard to their cognitive abilities. It evaluates so-called ‘fast and frugal’ reasoning and argues that the main effect of the development of formal logic was not so much to improve reasoning as to make available certain explicit distinctions that could be invoked in debate.

Is ‘religion’ a Western category imposed artificially on the experience, beliefs and practices of non-Western peoples? Or does religion correspond to some underlying universal biological, psychological or social human need? This chapter reviews some current theories on the definitional problems (Geertz, Boyer). It considers the evidence from ethnography and from ancient peoples to express scepticism about most universalist claims. There are thus problems in using this category across populations, although that is not to say that others’ behaviour and beliefs are totally beyond our reach. However, all the outsider comprehends about the mystic’s experience is that some exceptional event has occurred, not any of the content of that experience.

The final chapter takes stock of the limited conclusions of this study of the varieties of intelligence and the possibilities for mutual intelligibility. We can, it is argued, appreciate some cross-cultural human universals (language and sociability), yet we must be continually alert to the diversity of human experience and the dangers of imposing Western categories. But the chief lesson to be learned is that when we encounter beliefs and practices that diverge sharply from what we are used to, we should see this as an opportunity, rather than as a threat. The lack of common ground should not be treated as tantamount to denying the possibility of any understanding whatsoever, though such understanding as we can reach will often involve the revision of our own initial assumptions and categories.

In a number of disciplines that include philosophy, history, social anthropology, psychology, cognitive science, and even archaeology, one can detect a certain deep-seated tension. On the one hand, there is an appreciation of the cognitive capacities that all humans have in common, on the other, a recognition of the huge diversity in that regard between different individuals and groups. This tension prompts one to ask not just how far we can come to terms with and balance both intuitions, but also, far more generally, the extent to which we humans can understand one another, across cultures and even often within them, the limits, in other words, of mutual intelligibility. What commonalities can we detect in the matter of cognition across human beings whenever and wherever they have lived? Are the diversities such that there are impenetrable barriers to communication and understanding?...

Although other living beings can communicate with one another using sounds and gestures, the range of the messages that humans can convey is far greater. But if language is a capacity that all normal humans possess, the variety of different natural languages poses severe problems for translation and mutual intelligibility. However, to argue that the obstacles to communication across languages and even within them are insurmountable is to underestimate where it is still possible to reach some provisional understanding. How far do different natural languages constrain what can be expressed or understood within them? Taking Chinese as one example, this chapter argues against linguistic determinism and stresses the possibilities of mutual intelligibility even while recognizing its limits

Do all humans engaged in ‘mathematics’? That is, can mathematics be considered a viable category of intelligent activity that can be applied cross-culturally? That question must be raised because of the evident diversity in the practices and ideas that have some claim to be thought of as relating to that category. This chapter considers the evidence from modern indigenous societies, such as the Wari’, and from ancient ones such as the Greeks and Chinese, to investigate the different notions that have been entertained (sometimes even with a single ‘culture’) and the various practices that have been cultivated and often highly prized, in relation to the key notions of quantity, number, shapes, and forms. It concludes that it is possible, within limits, to compare and contrast such ideas and activities.

Humans are all social animals, yet we live in societies of strikingly different kinds. This chapter examines what the development of human reasoning in all its diversity owes to our sociability. Taking examples from ethnography and more particularly from ancient Greece and China, it investigates critically the ways in which different social and political arrangements may foster or impede different modes of communicative exchanges. It considers how such arrangements may favour different core values and understandings of what it is to be human, including in particular the tension between more inclusive and more restricted views on that question. Recognizing that mutual misunderstandings may and do continue, it reflects on how and within what limits they may nevertheless be overcome.

This study investigates the tension between two conflicting intuitions, our twin recognitions: (1) that all humans share the same basic cognitive capacities; and yet (2) their actual manifestations in different individuals and groups differ appreciably. How can we reconcile our sense of what links us all as humans with our recognition of these deep differences? All humans use language and live in social groups, where we have to probe what is distinctive in the experience of humans as opposed to that of other animals and how the former may have evolved from the latter. Moreover, the languages we speak and the societies we form differ profoundly, though the conclusion that we are the prisoners of our own particular experience should and can be resisted. The study calls into question the cross-cultural viability both of many of the analytic tools we commonly use (such as the contrast between the literal and the metaphorical, between myth and rational account, and between nature and culture) and of our usual categories for organizing human experience and classifying intellectual disciplines, mathematics, religion, law, and aesthetics. The result is a robust defence of the possibilities of mutual intelligibility while recognizing both the diversity in the manifestations of human intelligence and the need to revise our assumptions in order to achieve that understanding.

Introduction 1. Humanity between Gods and Beasts? 2. Error 3. Ancient Understandings Reassessed and the Consequences for Ontologies 4. Language and Audiences 5. Philosophical Implications Epilogue Glossary of Key Chinese Terms and Names Bibliography Index

This piece is a response to Barbara Herrnstein Smith's article, “The Chimera of Relativism: A Tragicomedy,” in the Common Knowledge symposium on “comparative relativism.” The theme is complexity—as distinct from simple contrast or binarism of any kind—similarities as well as differences are observed in ancient Chinese and ancient Greek responses to cultural difference; also the significantly different views of these matters among the Greek philosophers. In the same vein, discussing studies of cultural/linguistic variability or counterclaimed universality among humans in color perception, the essay stresses the complexity of such cognitive activities, including the ongoing interactions among the multiple variables presumably involved. Noting the challenge that such intrinsic complexity and inevitable interactivity present to standard dichotomies of universality and cultural relativity, the essay concludes that these and other familiar dualisms have been made obsolete by a century of research in genetics, ethnography, and related empirical disciplines.

This introduction to the Common Knowledge symposium titled “Comparative Relativism” outlines a variety of intellectual contexts where placing the unlikely companion terms comparison and relativism in conjunction offers analytical purchase. If comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts in order to elucidate their similarities and differences, then relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method, usually involves the assumption that contexts exhibit, or may exhibit, radically different, incomparable, or incommensurable traits. Comparative studies are required to treat their objects as alike, at least in some crucial respects; relativism indicates the limits of this practice. Jensen argues that this seeming paradox is productive, as he moves across contexts, from Lévi-Strauss's analysis of comparison as an anthropological method to Peter Galison's history of physics, and on to the anthropological, philosophical, and historical examples offered in symposium contributions by Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marilyn Strathern, and Isabelle Stengers. Comparative relativism is understood by some to imply that relativism comes in various kinds and that these have multiple uses, functions, and effects, varying widely in different personal, historical, and institutional contexts that can be compared and contrasted. Comparative relativism is taken by others to encourage a “comparison of comparisons,” in order to relativize what different peoples—say, Western academics and Amerindian shamans—compare things “for.” Jensen concludes that what is compared and relativized in this symposium are the methods of comparison and relativization themselves. He ventures that the contributors all hope that treating these terms in juxtaposition may allow for new configurations of inquiry.

Western philosophy and science are responsible for constructing some powerful tools of investigation, aiming at discovering the truth, delivering robust explanations, verifying conjectures, showing that inferences are sound and demonstrating results conclusively. By contrast reasoning that depends on analogies has often been viewed with suspicion. Professor Lloyd first explores the origins of those Western ideals, criticises some of their excesses and redresses the balance in favour of looser, admittedly non-demonstrative analogical reasoning. For this he takes examples both from ancient Greek and Chinese thought and from the materials of recent ethnography to show how different ancient and modern cultures have developed different styles of reasoning. He also develops two original but controversial ideas, that of semantic stretch (to cast doubt on the literal/metaphorical dichotomy) and the multidimensionality of reality (to bypass the realism versus relativism and nature versus nurture controversies).

In this book, Jean De Groot (hereafter D) engages in a single-minded defence of a particular thesis about Aristotle's empiricism. Instead of focusing on his study of animals (D is not as sensitive as some would now be to the anachronism of calling this his "biology"), she concentrates on the use of mechanical notions, especially what she dubs the "moving radius principle." This expresses the idea that the speeds with which points on a circumference move vary directly with the length of the radius of the circle in question, where she correctly notes that it was more awkward to speak about this in fourth-century B.C.E. Greek since there was no single term for "radius," only various locutions such as "the [straight] line drawn from the centre." One surprising feature of her discussion is that although the moving radius principle applies to any circular motion, she sometimes speaks of it as one of the movements into which, in the concentric spheres models of Eudoxus, Callippus, and Aristotle, planetary motion is resolved.The book maintains that - despite some recent studies of which I would rate Sylvia Berryman's 2009 monograph, The Mechanical Hypothesis in Ancient Greek Philosophy , the most important - mechanical notions have been unjustly neglected both by Aristotelian scholars and by historians of Greek science, although D is careful to distinguish ancient Greek views from those associated with the "mechanical philosophy" of the seventeenth century. In the process, D attacks some views that are, to be sure, grossly exaggerated, straw men in other words. One is the idea that Aristotle "read physical principles off the surface of things" (p. 15), and a second, the view that would reduce his philosophy of nature to a "philosophy of common opinions about nature" (p. 15), i.e., that it is "dialectic" or "endoxic" in character, rather than adopting a "scientific attitude" to the subject, that is one that we can recognise as such.For this enterprise, D draws heavily on the Problemata and the Mechanica , works generally thought not to be by Aristotle himself but probably emanating from his circle. This is a legitimate procedure, she claims, for two main reasons. First, there is enough evidence in the admittedly genuine works (e.g. On the Generation of Animals II 1 and 5, and Movement of Animals 1 and 7) for Aristotle's interest in mechanical ideas, so we should be allowed to supplement this with material from more doubtfully authentic works. Second, "even the works accepted as Aristotle's own are, as far as we know, notes of his lectures written by his students, or by Aristotle himself and then rewritten or reorganized by others" (p. …

This chapter explores the relationship between mathematics and narrative from an Aristotelian perspective. Aristotle's philosophy of mathematics is radically different from that of Plato. For example, Aristotle did not postulate separate intelligible mathematical objects. For Aristotle, mathematics studied the mathematical properties of physical objects, in abstraction from the physical properties those objects possessed. Another divergence between Aristotle and Plato relates to comments that the former made in the Metaphysics about the activity of mathematicians and the actualization of certain potentialities in their work. In particular, three terms mentioned by Aristotle are problematic: orthe, diagramma, and energeia. The chapter argues that Aristotle challenged the conception of mathematics as atemporal, soon after Plato defended it, by insisting that mathematical proofs are produced by energeia.