Lexington Books
Pages: 156
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜
978-0-7391-7399-2 • Hardback • August 2014 • $113.00 • (£87.00)
978-0-7391-7400-5 • eBook • August 2014 • $107.00 • (£82.00)
Kei Yoshida is project lecturer at the University of Tokyo.
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Rationality and Other Cultures: The Case of Peter Winch
Chapter 3: Problems with Charles Taylor’s Philosophy of the Human Sciences
Chapter 4: Defending Scientific Study of the Social: Against Clifford Geertz (and His Critics)
Chapter 5: Rationality Relativised or Degrees of Rationality: Marshall Sahlins versus Gananath Obeyesekere
Chapter 6: Psychoanalytic Anthropology Psychologized: The Case of Gananath Obeyesekere
Chapter 7: Why Cultural Interpretivism Fails: The Distinction between Nature and Convention, and the Unintended Consequences of Human Actions
Chapter 8: Conclusion
In the chapters dealing with specific interpretivists, Yoshida succeeds in highlighting the tensions here. Ultimately, he argues that interpretivists find no satisfactory stable nonrelativist position. . . .[T]here is much to admire in his discussion of particular interpretivists. He clearly characterizes at least central elements of their various positions and highlights commonly worthy misgivings.
— Metascience
This is an important and challenging book because the author seriously engaged with two bodies of literature that are rarely treated between the same covers. These are the literature of anthropology and cultural studies and the literature of critical rationalism. . . .[In the book] Yoshida advanced the discussion in an exciting and novel manner . . .This book deserves a wide readership across the full range of the social sciences, humanities, philosophy and methodology in the human sciences. Interpretivists should appreciate the effort that the author has made to come to grips with their literature. . . .This is a remarkable work of scholarship.
— Studies in Critical Rationalism
The debate over the rationality of other cultures has continued and branched in different directions since its high point in the 1960s, and is overdue for a critical survey. Kei Yoshida provides just this: a nuanced philosophical analysis of the main figures and of the issues between them from a strongly argued Popperian point of view.
— University of South Florida, Stephen Turner,
Anthropologists have long confused their liberal and tolerant values with a rudderless and amoral relativism. Kei Yoshida looks at prominent case studies and their protagonists and exposes this confusion for what it is. He shows that rational, scientific discussion of other societies is fruitful and unproblematic, and that a liberal and tolerant attitude to the mores of others need not be linked to an unrestrainedrelativism. Yoshida’s ringing defense of Enlightenment values is wholly convincing. All students of ethics and of anthropology will enjoy and benefit from this book.
— Ian Jarvie, York University
Kei Yoshida has provided a comprehensive Popperian refutation of the claim that cultural interpretivism—in all various disciplinary forms—operates with an account of rationality that is sufficient for making sense of the full range of human thought and action. It will be an invaluable research tool for those interested in the conceptual debates that have helped to define the frontiers of the more humanistic side of the social sciences for the past half-century.
— Steve Fuller, Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology, University of Warwick, author of Nietzschean Meditations: Untimely Thoughts at the Dawn of the Transhuman Era