STS200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: List Of Natural Phenomena, Cultural Relativism, Melvin Konner

• School: University of Alberta
• Department: Science, Technology, and Society
• Course: STS200
• Professor: Tihamer Richard Kover

Document Summary

There is a tendency to view scienti c progress as an overall intellectual improvement. As out body of knowledge about the external world expands, people get more intelligent and more rational. The middle ages were mired in superstition and magical thinking. This tends to cast a poor light on the intellectual acumen of previous generation and historical periods. This also tends to cast a poor light on the intellectual acumen of non-western, less technologically advances societies. Non-western people are not historical fossils, they have their own culture and ways of viewing and understanding the world and these are incommensurate with ours. Indigenous peoples will often counter the claims of ecologists on the basis of their culture"s store of traditional ecological knowledge contained in their myths and oral traditions. Non-western indigenous peoples seem to view the natural world in ways that to modern, scienti c eyes appear magical, fanciful and completely opposed to what we would consider intelligent and rational.