In Defense of Reductionism

Abstract

interpreters were less tolerant of the participant's point of view or simply less interested in it, they were not the least reluctant to understand human beliefs and actions in their own terms rather than his. Indeed, they were not averse to evaluating those beliefs and actions, frequently pronouncing them false or foolish. What contemporary sociologist J. D. Y. Peel says of his nineteenthcentury predecessors holds for other disciplines as well: Early attempts to understand social phenomena were so tied to the peculiar interests of the social world of the sociologists himself, that he only tried to understand what seemed odd, deluded, perverse or unusual; and his understanding consisted in showing how the odd, deluded, etc., came to be believed, in contrast to the true and usual-what his own society believed (70). By contrast, contemporary interpreters typically strive to overcome their own professed biases and to appreciate the participant's point of view. What Mircea Eliade says of the interpretation of myth in particular applies to the interpretation of human phenomena in general: For the past fifty years at least, Western scholars have approached the study of myth from a viewpoint markedly different from, let us say, that of the nineteenth century. Unlike their predecessors, who treated myth in the usual meaning of the word, that is, as 'fable,' 'invention,' 'fiction,' they have accepted it as it was understood in the archaic societies, where, on the contrary, 'myth' means a 'true story' and, beyond that, a story that is a most precious posses