A PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS OF CONTEMPORARY ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY

This dissertation presents a critique and analysis of the epistemological foundations, ontological assumptions, and explanatory principles of contemporary anthropological theory, as well as a critique and analysis of the social scientific and pseudoscientific alternatives to the anthropological approach. The various epistemological foundations are summarized and analyzed; epistemological responsibility is defined as the critical appeal to sense experience, logic, and authority. It is argued that falsifiability is the essential criterion of the scientific method. Scientific progress is described as the successive appearance of progressive paradigms, and techniques for the comparison and evaluation of commensurable and incommensurable paradigms are outlined and illustrated. Anthropology is defined as a science addressed to the interrelated problems of the maintenance of human life and the maintenance of human identify, whose chief virtue lies in the distinction between culturally-specific (emic) and objectively-valid (etic) approaches to knowledge of the human condition. Four contemporary anthropological paradigms--cultural determinism, cultural materialism, structuralism, and symbolic anthropology--are given detailed exposition and analysis. Cultural determinism is described as imprecise, unparsimonious, and theoretically inadequate; structuralism is described as intuitive, unverifiable, and unscientific. Cultural materialism and symbolic anthropology are described as incommensurable but complementary paradigms, both of which address significant, meaningful, and valuable questions in demonstrably scientific fashion. It is argued that paradigmatic debate in anthropology is frequently an emotive activity; detailed attention is given to the debates surrounding the image of limited good and the sacred cow of India to illustrate that argument. This study's major conclusion is that the discipline of anthropology constitutes the demonstrably best approach to the understanding and explanation of human behavior among all of the social scientific and pseudoscientific alternatives.