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PhilGoetz comments on Open Thread - Aug 24 - Aug 30 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Has anyone got opinions on Clifford Geertz? He's supposedly the most-influential American anthropologist. I began reading his famous book, Interpretation of Cultures, and I'm struck by how illogical it is. He has interesting insights into his own perspective, but he's consistently completely unable to comprehend anyone else's perspective. Odd, for someone who says that's the purpose of his own profession. He fails to draw even caricatures or straw men of behaviorism and cognitivism, his main opponents, and just says they're wrong, then tells entertaining stories until the reader forgets that he never dealt with them.
His big point is that culture shouldn't be seen as a body of knowledge that people in a culture have, but a "web of significance". As far as I can tell this is a distinction without a difference.
He emphasizes the importance of semiotics. This is not a good sign.
I read another chapter, on cockfighting in Bali, and I begin to understand him better.
When he dismisses cognitivism, he's probably thinking of Levi-Strauss. The introductory chapter which seemed illogical to me was probably not intended to be a logical argument of any kind, but a summary of his views. Geertz seems to have the common non-hard-science mystical view of human thought, as something not amenable to logical analysis, and a view of logic as reductionist. He seems, like I suspect Wittgenstein does, to think that a logical analysis of language means analyzing individual words, and that the information provided by context and by the ways the words are put together is somehow beyond the grasp of logic, and that language and human activity just can't be explained that way.