The northern Ghanaian and non-Ghanaian immigrants whose descendants are today referred to as members of the zongo community began to settle in Kumasi just before the beginning of this century, around 1896, when the British placed a Resident in the town. The word zongo, a Hausa term meaning the camping place of a caravan, or the lodging place of travellers (Abraham 1962: 967), was used by the British to refer to the section of the town where Muslim traders lived. It was used interchangeably with “Hausa settlement,” “Mohammedan settlement,” and “strangers' quarter.” The term Hausa was itself “a generic term used to refer to all up-country traders” (Annual Report, 1906–1907). In this chapter the history of the settlement of the zongo is described, and the several current usages of the term zongo are clarified. First, something must be said about the position of Muslims in Asante before the British conquered it and made Kumasi the administrative center of the Ashanti Crown Colony in 1901. In many ways there is a significant pattern of structural continuity in the position of strangers in the two periods. The British, and the Chief Commissioner in particular, replaced the central authority of the Asantehene, but the strangers remained in Asante under the patronage of the governmental authority in both the colonial and the precolonial periods.

In discussing the structure of the Mossi community, we have so far avoided describing the political process. In this section, through the presentation of a case study, we are able to see how structural changes affect political action – how situations that appear as conflicts in day-to-day political life reflect deeper changes occurring in the immigrant community. The events which took place within the Mossi community after the coup which ousted Nkrumah in February 1966, particularly the contest over the selection of the headman, demonstrated the importance of the generational differences we have outlined. A description of these events shows how the distinct value orientations of first- and second-generation immigrants affect political life and how generational cleavages are handled, so as to prevent the dissolution of the ethnic community. These events are comprehensible only when placed in the context of the multiethnic zongo, for many of the stresses which the Mossi community experienced in 1966 had to do with changes that had affected all strangers in the preceding years. In the period immediately after the 1966 coup there was a great resurgence of overt expressions of ethnic identity among many stranger groups, although these manifestations of ethnicity were completely divorced from national political concerns. In fact, it was the claim that ethnicity was apolitical, and that it implied the absence of conflict, which enabled the stranger communities to reemerge and heal the wounds they felt they had incurred during the period when party alliances had cross-cut ethnic communities.

The extensive use of the idioms of kinship and affinity among first-generation urban immigrants is intrinsically involved with affirming the significance of ethnic identity. Moreover, as the discussion in chapter 6 suggests, it is the persistence of the ideology of unilineal descent among most northern immigrants which makes this idiom so appropriate for generating corporate ethnic categories in town.

Individuals can claim eligibility in the same ethnic category on the basis of common paternal ancestry; and some ethnic categories are related, affinally, because of putative marriages between their founders. Other ethnic categories in town are not related to each other in this way at all, and some do not emphasize unlineal descent as a principle of inclusion. But those which do - those with a traditionally strong emphasis on this principle - conceive of the relationships between certain ethnic categories in terms of affinity, while relationships within the ethnic community are conceptualized as though they were relations between agnates. It is a person's ethnic identity, based on descent, that determines the possibility of activating such generalized affinal and agnatic ties.

What I have referred to earlier as specific kinship differs from this in the urban context, in that there is less emphasis on unilineal descent. Although ethnic identity is still primarily determined by patrifiliation, for the immigrant Mossi the ideology of unilineal descent does not lead to corporate kinship groupings in the sense of joint residential or propertyowning groups.

The incorporation of immigrant groups into the zongo and the simultaneous persistence of ethnicity are two analytically separable processes of change. In the example presented in this book, incorporation - political, economic, religious, and social - often entails the abandonment of traditional culture and the adoption of new behavior patterns. Nevertheless, this does not preclude the reassertion of ethnic identities based on provenance in constantly changing forms. Through a comparison of Mossi immigrants in two generations, I have tried to show that cultural change does not necessarily lead to the disappearance of ethnicity; not only do new ethnic identities and new cultural patterns emerge, associated with the incorporation of immigrants into larger communities, but older identities persist also, with new symbols being adopted to maintain boundaries.

While the discussion has been restricted to the case study presented here, this situation is by no means unique. It is characteristic of many societies the world over - rural or urban, industrial or preindustrial - where peoples of diverse origins have come together, by choice or not, to create new communities. It is characteristic of all situations where memories of separate histories have been transformed into markers of social, political, or economic status. If one insists, as I have, on looking at ethnicity in time perspective, as a process of social and cultural change, one will probably be struck by how rare are those situations where ethnicity implies the persistence of “traditional” cultural identities.

Like many books that were originally dissertations this one has gone through numerous revisions since it was presented to Cambridge University in 1969. In that year, a considerable body of literature appeared on the subject of ethnicity and, since then, a number of important works on several issues relating to migration and trade in West Africa, the Asante, and the Mossi have been published. Over the last five years, partly as a result of these publications, my views on a number of issues raised in this book have changed, and indeed are still changing. But there comes a point at which one has to accept the somewhat patchwork quality of one's endeavor and the knowledge that interpretations inevitably change as one's awareness of facts and their implications grows.

My debts in writing this book are many and go back for such a long time that it is possible to mention only the most important ones. First, I want to acknowledge my enormous gratitude to the people in Ghana and Upper Volta whose lives I have tried to understand. In the text, all names have been changed, except those of persons whose positions as public officials are so well known as to make this caution meaningless. There are points in a book such as this when one is uncertain whether one is writing anthropology or history, or indeed if that is a meaningful distinction at all. At these moments the decision as to whether or not to change names becomes difficult.

In the present century philosophers have been extremely interested in language. To the layman this interest often seems curious, if not down-right perverse. After all, there are so many aspects of reality that seem more important than questions about words and meanings: are not the nature of the cosmos, the foundations of knowledge, the present plight of mankind, all more fitting subjects for philosophical essays?

In part this attitude rests on a misconception of the nature of philosophy. Philosophy is often the starting point for what eventually turn out to be new consensuses in science and in human affairs; but the starting point is usually dry and technical. Bacon paved the way for all of modern empirical science by arguing that scientists should put their questions to nature, and not to the a priori intellect; but it was Newton and not Bacon who discovered the law of Universal Gravitation. Locke paved the way for the ideologues of the American revolution; but he did not make it. To be sure the plight of mankind may yet be improved (or made worse!) by a new consensus in morals or in politics arising out of philosophical ideas being published right now; but one must not expect technical philosophical books to bear their social significance on their sleeves (or dust jackets). If philosophers have become very interested in language in the past fifty years it is not because they have become disinterested in the Great Questions of philosophy, but precisely because they are still interested in the Great Questions and because they have come to believe that language holds the key to resolve (or in some way satisfactorily dispose of) the Great Questions.

It is strikingly apparent that the twentieth century has been a golden one for the sort of philosophy that is logically and empirically oriented. Merely to list the names of the analytical philosophers who have achieved greatness or near-greatness in this century is to provide impressive evidence of this: Russell and Wittgenstein (who stand on a level by themselves); G. E. Moore (whose influence Keynes described so well in the lovely memoir ‘My Early Beliefs’); F. P. Ramsey (also memorialized by Keynes); Carnap and Reichenbach; John Austin; and – to take the risk of mentioning some philosophers in mid-career – W. V. Quine and Nelson Goodman. The writings of these men have illuminated field after field of philosophy: ethics (Moore); mathematical philosophy (Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine); epistemology and philosophy of science (all of the figures mentioned). The nature of moral valuation; of natural laws; of mathematical necessity; the nature of language and its relation to reality; of truth and meaning; of common sense knowledge and of scientific knowledge; and above all, the nature of philosophy itself, have been the subject of essays and books as brilliant, as full of insights and surprises (including surprising mistakes, naturally) as any produced in the entire history of philosophy. If any further evidence were needed of the healthy state of philosophy today, it would be provided by the hordes of intellectuals who complain that philosophy is overly ‘technical’, that it has ‘abdicated’ from any concern with ‘real’ problems etc.

Introduction

Although this symposium is devoted to problems in the field of mathematical linguistics (a peculiar field, in that some of its leading experts doubt its existence), in my paper I am not going to attempt to prove any theorems or state any results. Rather, I shall take advantage of my privilege as a philosopher and devote myself to a survey of work done by others in the area and to a discussion of issues raised by linguists concerning the work done in this area. There are, in addition to the difficult technical problems, whose existence everyone acknowledges, also very serious conceptual difficulties, as is shown by the fact that Chomsky's book Syntactic Structures, which is regarded by some as a foundation-stone for this kind of activity, has been described by no less an authority than Roman Jakobson as an argumentum a contrario (Jakobson, 1959), showing the impossibility of the whole enterprise.

What I want to do first is to provide, so to speak, a conceptual setting for the kind of work that Chomsky is doing. I believe that the conceptual setting I will provide is one that will be acceptable to Chomsky himself – but this, of course, is not vital. The interpretations of a scientific theory most acceptable to the scientist himself may often be the least tenable ones, and so we shall worry about finding an interpretation or conceptual setting, for the theory of grammars which seems to us to be correct, not necessarily one which some particular linguist will ratify.

Any discussion of the influence of logical positivism on the field of philosophy of mind will have to include the application of the so-called verifiability theory of meaning to the problems of this field. Also deserving attention, however, is the way in which Carnap and some of his followers have treated psychological terms – including everyday psychological terms such as ‘pain’ – as what in their own special sense they called theoretical terms; they have suggested that the states referred to by those theoretical terms might, in reality, be neurophysiological states of the brain.

The two lines of thought mentioned roughly correspond to two temporal stages in the development of the movement. During the early years (1928–36) attempts were made to apply verificationist ideas in a wholesale and simplistic manner to all the problems of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind. In recent years (1955 to the present) a much more sophisticated analysis has been offered, but it is one heavily weighted with the observational-theoretical dichotomy and with the idea of a ‘partially interpreted calculus’;. Feigl's identity theory (Feigl, 1958), while very much an individual doctrine and never the view of the whole school, fits chronologically into the transitional years between the two periods.

These two lines of thought also correspond to decidedly different tendencies warring within the divided logical-positivist soul. Verificationism, I think, may fairly be labelled an ‘idealist’ tendency; for, even if it is not identical with the view that the ‘hard facts’ are just actual and potential experiences, it makes little sense to anyone who does not have some such metaphysical conviction lurking in his heart.

Professor Smart is not only a philosopher whose work has stimulated us and provoked controversy among us; he speaks to us as a representative of Australian philosophy – of a philosophy which has ties to both British and American philosophy, as well as a distinctive flavor of its own. He is a kind of philosophical Ambassador – and would that all Ambassadors were as well liked! On the present occasion he speaks to us not of his own philosophical work, unfortunately, but rather gives his impressions of the scene here. And, being a good philosophical diplomat, his impressions are friendly ones. But even giving friendly impressions of his host country can land an Ambassador in hot water. So it is not surprising, even if it is regrettable, that I, as a native of this particular philosophical jungle, should feel compelled to rebuff compliments so nicely turned, and should sadly retort that what he praises as the beauties of our philosophical landscape seem to me to be merely weeds.

The views that Smart reports in extenso are the views of Paul Feyerabend. Smart also has a few words to say about some related views of Wilfrid Sellars. In my comment, I shall concentrate on Feyerabend's view, with which I am better acquainted than the papers by Sellars; and I shall rely not only on Smart's account of those views, but on the paper (Feyerabend, 1962) in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science to which Smart refers. Until otherwise indicated, all references to Feyerabend will be to this paper.

The techniques employed by philosophers of physics are usually the very ones being employed by philosophers of a less specialized kind (especially empiricist philosophers) at the time. Thus Mill's philosophy of science largely reflects Hume's associationism; Reichenbach's philosophy of science reflects Viennese positivism with its conventionalism, its tendency to identify (or confuse) meaning and evidence, and its sharp dichotomy between ‘the empirical facts’ and ‘the rules of the language’; and (coming up to the present time) Toulmin's philosophy of science is an attempt to give an account of what scientists do which is consonant with the linguistic philosophy of Wittgenstein. For this reason, errors in general philosophy can have a far-reaching effect on the philosophy of science. The confusion of meaning with evidence is one such error whose effects are well known: it is the contention of the present paper that overworking of the analytic–synthetic distinction is another root of what is most distorted in the writings of conventional philosophers of science.

The present paper is an attempt to give an account of the analytic–synthetic distinction both inside and outside of physical theory. It is hoped that the paper is sufficiently nontechnical to be followed by a reader whose background in science is not extensive; but it has been necessary to consider problems connected with physical science (particularly the definition of ‘kinetic energy’, and the conceptual problems connected with geometry) in order to bring out the features of the analytic–synthetic distinction that seem to me to be the most important.

Introduction

1. In this paper I wish to examine certain general doctrines having to do with language which are employed by Norman Malcolm in his book Dreaming (Malcolm, 1959). I say ‘employed’, not ‘stated’, because Malcolm never does fully state these doctrines. Yet his arguments turn not on the linguistic properties of individual words, but on these almost formal principles, involving such notions as ‘concept’, ‘sense’, ‘logical independence’, ‘stipulation’, ‘giving a use’, ‘being unverifiable in principle’, ‘criterion’, ‘indication’ and ‘inference’.

His arguments are also of interest in that they can be read as simple versions of some famous arguments of Wittgenstein's as he is interpreted by Malcolm. If this interpretation of Malcolm's is faithful to what Wittgenstein had in mind, then these famous arguments are bad arguments and prove nothing. But this relation to Wittgenstein's philosophy may, in the present years, be a further reason for finding Malcolm's book interesting to discuss.

2. The following quotations will serve to indicate the flavor of the relevant parts of Malcolm's book:

1. (i) There are two concepts of sleep, because there are two methods of verification: ‘With adults and older children there are two criteria of behaviour and testimony; with animals and human infants there is only the one criterion of behaviour. The concept of sleep is not exactly the same in the two cases’ (p. 23).

2. (ii) ‘Asleep’ applied to a sleep-walker is a ‘new use’: ‘To say that a man who is walking is “asleep”, is a new use of the expression’ (p. 27).

3. […]

The typical concerns of the Philosopher of Mind might be represented by three questions: (1) How do we know that other people have pains? (2) Are pains brain states? (3) What is the analysis of the concept pain? I do not wish to discuss questions (1) and (3) in this chapter. I shall say something about question (2).†

Identity questions

‘Is pain a brain state?’ (Or, ‘Is the property of having a pain at time t a brain state?’)‡ It is impossible to discuss this question sensibly without saying something about the peculiar rules which have grown up in the course of the development of ‘analytical philosophy’ – rules which, far from leading to an end to all conceptual confusions, themselves represent considerable conceptual confusion. These rules – which are, of course, implicit rather than explicit in the practice of most analytical philosophers – are (1) that a statement of the form ‘being A is being B’ (e.g. ‘being in pain is being in a certain brain state’) can be correct only if it follows, in some sense, from the meaning of the terms A and B; and (2) that a statement of the form ‘being A is being B’ can be philosophically informative only if it is in some sense reductive (e.g. ‘being in pain is having a certain unpleasant sensation’ is not philosophically informative; ‘being in pain is having a certain behaviour disposition’ is, if true, philosophically informative).