On the Limited Foundations of Western Skepticism towards Indigenous Psychological Thinking: Pragmatics, Politics, and Philosophy of Indigenous Psychology

The problem of defining culture has exercised anthropologists but not cross‐cultural psychologists because psychological science is based on quantitative forms of empiricism where the validity of categorical boundaries is determined by their predictive utility. Furthermore, many indigenous psychologies have been allied to nation‐building projects in the developing world that choose to gloss over within state ethnic differences for the purposes of national strength and unity. Finally, Carl Martin Allwood’s target article “On the foundation of the indigenous psychologies” (2011, Social Epistemology 25 (1): 3–14) is grounded in western thinking about science that privileges analytical philosophy, particularly the importance of constructing definitional categories as the basis of its critique of indigenous psychologies. This is a limited basis for thinking about psychological science whose flaws have been exposed by highly visible critiques on analytical versus holistic thinking. From the point of view of Asi...