The question of describing models of vernacular thinking without including conditions (entities, premises, beliefs) unnecessary for understanding within the interpretation has been addressed in the field of folkloristics for a long time, with various punctuations. At times, the so-called extended simplicity principle has been applied to the vernacular worldview, according to which the interpretative construction with the lowest number of interchangeable elements is probably the most correct. Ethnologists and folklorists have been able, and even tended to, imagine themselves as intellectually a few steps ahead of the human objects of their research, which has resulted in variously simplified interpretations of folk culture.

In the following, I examine certain questions of vernacular epistemology with the aid of folklore material. My viewpoint is constructivist to the extent of not considering necessary, for example, the presupposition of the unitary nature of a vernacular worldview or the people's belief in the supernatural as an explanatory principle for their worldviews. I'm also inclined to think that there is no substantial need for the mechanically repetitive, collective hypothesis of the subject directed by tradition. It is thus a question of the criteria of the subject of research. When writing about the relationship between science and magic, philosopher G. H. von Wright has pointed out that ‘the world of imagination that magic is based on, is not a bunch of suspicious “hypotheses” that could be experientially verified or disproved, but completely another way of thinking that is basically alien to us’ (von Wright 1987: 40).