ABSTRACT
Rival hypotheses compete, one hypothesis gets to be widely accepted and pushes out the others. How does this happen? If facts do not speak for themselves how is any particular piece of knowledge ever established? The different peoples that anthropologists study have different versions of the world. Very often the energy that drives the world in their version is theistic or spiritist, or magical. I suggested once that the world of the Lele, a Zairois people, was just as securely founded in knowledge as ours.1 I did not mean that bows and arrows were more efficient artillery than guns, or that manual pounding of grain in wooden mortars was more efficient than an electric mill. I meant that the doctrines of the cult of the scaly anteater provided explanations of misfortune and success as satisfying intellectually as our best stochastic explanations can ever be. The latter are notoriously unsatisfying since they make a narrower sweep. Being told by the doctor that you are ill because there is a 90 per cent probability of being infected in the current flu epidemic may be sound but hardly explains anything at all and gives no guidance for future action. Being told that you are ill because you ate the wrong food at least confirms a dietary theory and tells you what to do. The problem of how theories get confirmation, why wrong theories get espoused, and what we mean by wrongness in a theory is still central to anthropology. Nelson Goodman’s work on projection affords a number of leads for putting these questions on a better footing.
