I’m wondering if I can formalize Primitivist epistemics as a kind of sub-discipline. Here is an attempt:
- With any inquiry, start by analyzing the context of the question as an anthropological issue. Examine the framework used to construct the question—its utilitarian context; then the necessary components of its underlying worldview; and finally its semiotic structure-then test these against the ontological constraints of both cultural relativism and objective reality (facts and patterns that are universal enough in application to qualify as objective).
Use these all to contruct an analysis of the hypothesis before you qualify the research or question at hand as culturally / socially relative or on the spectrum of natural law. - Build a historiography of this context, and repeat the process at constructive junctures in the past that helped build the query’s formulation and relevance from its origins in the past. Repeat until you have winnowed away cultural relativism to the highest degree possible (or desirable) to further inform the context of the original question.
Repeat across cultures, and account insofar as possible for translations, universals, humanism, and missing layers in the historical or empirical record—until you reach prehistory, or the constraints of reason and science therein. - Return to the question at hand.
We can structure inquiries in terms of humanism and remain more pbjective than if we presumed we were working outside of a cultural framework.
I would hope that rather than alienating the sciences from any cultural perspective that does not practice scientific empiricism, this humanizes the role of the sciences and academic disciplines, and serves to put the original culture of an inquiry and its practices into useful context.
This should help shape our ability to ask fundamental questions, to work without prejudice, and to appreciate the cultural function of rational inquiry as a unique epistemic tradition that both includes and transcends languages, economies, religions, and time-to bridge our own perspective with all human knowledge from the past and present, in some way.
We can build a universal dialectic without sacrificing any of the humanity or utility of any respective cultural epistemic.
We can bundle art, artifact, metacognition, lineage, and ecology as a wholesome approach to gathering and garnering wisdom from the world-both evident, documentary, and phenomenological (which is our biological bridge to the noumenological).
I’ve been taught (biologically) that challenging notions of cultural supremacy will earn me contempt and social suffering,
and a mighty force of attrition,
aimed at either severing me from my own right to truth and inquiry, or from my own culture that feels itself threatened by the recognition of self-reflection.
But an individual’s right to truth is just that- indivisible. And a culture’s fear of its own image can never bridge individuals and the universal, without brutalizing both in the struggle to merely maintain appearances.
Wouldn’t it be nice, as an afterthought, to be allowed to be transparent about altruism from the outset of a dialectic or inquiry?
One could say unashamedly, “I am trying to deconstruct an obsolete historical prejudice that I’ve seen cause real injuries,” or, “I simply find this beautiful and curious,” or, “I find that people have more compassion for their ecologies when they have insightful information on how butterflies migrate,” and not have to explain ourselves—if the rationale is sufficiently self-evident?
We are not trying to cipher cold rationalism into every problem—quite the opposite. We are placing our own knowledge in the crucible of discovery to see what endures throughout time, and the embodies the most endearing and inalienable sentiments of our species.
Ultimately, this is about recognizing the biology of knowledge.
Within this field, it would be nifty to compile a kind of interdisciplinary epistemic field guide.
You would want to distinguish methodologies that define Bell curves of certainty and event horizons for realms of epistemic discovery.
For example, in the field of archeology there are known probabilities that presume the likelihood of artifact discovery. Most items of material culture are undiscovered, buried, subject to decay or geological shifts, or of disputed antiquity.
You can blueprint this with graphs and carbon-13 tables, migration patterns, known constants and deductive novelties (like the advent of weaving, pottery, and symbolism—or the evident transformation of soft tissue patterns that are presumed because they are unfossilized or unpreserved).
In physics you can summarize quanta and particle distinction and its utilities, the tools of discovery and the state of the art.
In language theory you can draw intercultural parallels to discover anthropological or archetypal constants, or map the documentary record of written history to explain the event horizons of etymology and neurolinguistic development.
The debate over human egalitarianism as a biological trait, or the cultural resistance to linguistic recursion could be documented as the ongoing puzzles of ontology that they are.
Disciplines could collaborate, and describe their epistemic frameworks and currents states of affair with some mutual interest and academic congruency.
Potentially the next major advancement in humanity’s collective relationship to knowledge and empiricism, and a direct result of the global informations age and the demands of the anthropocene.
