Cette étude pourrait s'appeler : la crise contemporaine de la mort, si ce titre n'avait déjà été donné par Edgar Morin à l'un des chapitres de son livre, L'homme et la mort devant l'histoire (1). Ce sont bien les mêmes mots, et la même chose aussi : ≪ affrontement panique dans un climat d'angoisse, de névrose, de nihilisme ≫, qui prend ≪ figure de véritable crise de l'individualité devant la mort ≫, et sans doute, nous le verrons in fine, de l'individualité tout court.

When scientists account for changes in a theory or the theory's position within the world of the science, they usually do so in terms of the intellectual content of the theory. For example, the rise of quantum mechanics is attributed to the fact that quantum mechanics was able to solve problems which the preceding theories could not handle. This represents one way of describing occurrences within science and is a major component of the attitudes which scientists possess about their world. Another manner of viewing the changes which take place in science is that of the sociology of knowledge. From this perspective science is viewed as an activity carried on by the men who create the scientific ideas. The history of science is analyzed in terms of the-scientist-who-does-something-within-aparticular-social-context; that is the ideas are viewed as inseparable from the men who put them forward and the social environment in which they occur (1).

In what follows I shall discuss a philosophical problem arising out of the practice of anthropologists and sociologists which may be stated, in a general and unanalysed form, as follows: when I come across a set of beliefs which appear prima facie irrational, what should be my attitude towards them? Should I adopt a critical attitude, taking it as a fact about the beliefs that they are irrational, and seek to explain how they came to be held, how they manage to survive unprofaned by rational criticism, what their consequences are, etc? Or should I treat such beliefs charitably: should I begin from the assumption that what appears to me to be irrational may be interpreted as rational when fully understood in its context? More briefly, the problem comes down to whether or not there are alternative standards of rationality.

The anthropologist starts with an empty notebook and it seems that everything he writes in it is discovered empirically. But is it? I shall argue here that the fact that the natives are ‘rational’ in Mr. Lukes first or ‘universal’ sense is not discovered empirically and that this puts Mr. Lukes' philosophical problem in a different light.

These comments are intended not as criticism of Steven Lukes' conclusions, with which I mainly agree, but to raise some questions about their further implications and suggest some answers to these questions (1).

The questions arise when we stand back and look at the entire set of positions on the matter of rationality represented by Lukes' five paradigms and his own argument. They fall easily into two groups, composed of the first four and the last two, counting Lukes' position as the sixth. The first group consists of the views of practising anthropologists primarily concerned with understanding and explaining certain quite specific sorts of peculiar beliefs. In approaching their task they make various assumptions about rationality, about the relation of modern scientific thought to primitive magico-religious thought, and about the type of attitude towards these alien forms of mentality which is appropriate to the scientific endeavour. The second group contains the views of philosophers reflecting on the methods and theories of anthropologists, emphasising the philosophical character of the problems they take up out of this reading, and which they treat with the techniques of linguistic or logical analysis. They are less interested in the specific peculiarities of certain primitive beliefs than with the formal criteria by which any different sets of beliefs can be logically classified and compared. And they are less concerned with understanding and explanation than with the assumptions made about the philosophical status of, and typical relations between, different sets and sorts of beliefs when understanding and explanation are seen as problematic. Thus the second group concentrates more exclusively on a higher-order inquiry than that with which the first group was centrally concerned (despite the fact that Lukes has successfully isolated this level of inquiry out of the less focussed methodological reflections of the anthropologists). The question can therefore be raised, how far the positions on rationality are detachable from the various explanatory methods and theories which are associated with them in the first group, and what implications for understanding and explanation, if any, follow from the positions on rationality adopted by the second group.