Radical Alternatives: Conceptual Schemes and Expressive Behaviour

Extract

Professor Mary Hesse wrote as follows:

“The thought forms of alien cultures may be so foreign to our own that it might make sense to say that I understand my dog, or even my chrysanthemums, better than I understand those people”.

No doubt that is a provocative formulation of the problem of understanding other people. In fact, as the context shows, what she means by understanding her dog is that she can teach him tricks and predict his visible behaviour. What she is suggesting, then, is that, confronted with people of a radically different culture from our own, we might find it impossible to teach them anything because their behaviour was unpredictable — so unpredictable as to make communication between us impossible. With the nearing prospect of inter-planetary, and eventually of inter-galactic, travel, of course, the question of communication with deeply alien beings is no longer entirely academic. But for a long time now, certainly, since the expansion of ethnography and social anthropology in the wake of the European colonisation of the rest of the world, we have been increasingly troubled by the thought that, even on Earth, human beings may already be, or may always have been, hopelessly unintelligible out of their own culture. It might even be something of a relief, in view of the appalling atrocities that have occurred this century, to accept that some people may simply see everything in a completely different conceptual framework from others. It would explain the horrifying breakdowns of consensus about moral and political values.