Is Scientific Mythos Any Better Than Ashanti Witchcraft?













© 1995-2001 Untangle Incorporated
Last Updated: Tuesday, April 03, 2001

People's ability to mythologize is a result of their ability to create possible explanations to rationalize the wealth of sensory data that each person is awash in from the time they are born till the time they are dead.
It is this rationalizing that turns processed information into something we call facts. And because facts are in fact processed any statement of fact, such as weight, is often 'theory-laden'. Besides the learned component of perception, there are cultural preferences as to which facts are significant and in what way they are significant. An Egyptian in the building and surveying trade would have learned all that is implied in the fact: "That wall is 6 cubits long." Wall is one geometric oncept that is learned. Length is another learned concept. Length as taught is a relative term, a given length is a fraction or a multiple of a standard length defined by someone, somewhere, and propogated and inculcinated into the tradesman's knowledge of facts.
Because such perceptions include tacit definitions and relationships, all learned, if we change any of the definitions or relationships our perception of the facts will change. But such perceptions will not change easily, for several reasons:
  1. Facts are learned so early, or so subtley.that people aren't aware they are learned, so they make the statement that "facts are fixed and unchanging". A striking example of this is the famous quote by an US state senator in 1924 . The webmaster for MythHome has a personal story about the subtley of change and the feeling of rightness each change state is to the processor. A person adapts to their environment and believes it is 'natural' no matter what it is. Emergency room personnel have this problem on learning how many healthy people there are. In fact did you notice that this text you are reading is in English? Likely not. And of course reading and understanding English does not follow one from the other.
  2. Facts are selected out of the infinite number that the world presents to us. The Goldsteins elaborate on this point. I stress that discrimination of to what facts to include is not laziness or a human failing, it is due to the number of things which could correlate with the outcomes which are endless, or so much so as to be practically the same thing.
  3. In data there are often some facts which can be explained by one scientific generalization (theory) and not in an another theory. But that latter theory also is predicting some facts very well. And in most competing theories there is a body of overlapping facts they all can predict. So deciding one over the other requires careful gathering of more data, experimental whenever possible. The purpose of all this gathering is to refute theories which do not predict most, or explain the most facts very well. If a statement is not refutable it is not scientific.
    This is the specific difference that is meant by scholars by the Greek words 'mythos' and 'logos'. Myths are not refutable. Logical arguement is. You do not compare a myth to a logical statement because they are not the same kind of statement, and can not be compared. This is why "Creation Science" is an oxymoron. If you ask most proponents of it if their science was refutable, they would say of course not, as God is irrefutable, the word of God in the Bible is irrefutable, etc. In that case "Creation Science" is not science at all. It has no place in the list of scientific theories. That does not mean the world was not created by God, but it does mean that statement is not a debatable matter, so it is not a competitor to debatable matters.
    But within the class of debatable theories, although long after the debate is settled it may appear there was only one right decision, the Goldsteins point out that in the context of the time several of the facts could be used to support different theories, and some of the facts supported onee or the other, but not any two of the 'rival' theories. And there is also the issue of measuring with precision and accuracy. (Note I)
Now it should be clearer why a theory can survive even though it 'does not fit all the facts'. Few theories do fit all the facts.
Read here about
"Why the Caloric Theory Survived Count Rumford's Experiments"

With this background we can now discuss why the Azande (Ashanti?) concept of witchcraft is like a scientific system. It provides understanding of the world, it is widely applicable to many phenommena and it is based on experimental evidence.

pages 262-263:

Azandes believe that witches are born, and by biological processes inherit their abilities from their families. The Azandes has experimentally demonstrated that some people are witches since a distinct substance have been discovered in those people after death...[and some events require an explanation for their occurance that can not be provided by cause and effect.]...It is only those misfortunes that occur to people who have take normal and reasonable care in their work or their lives that need the explanation of witchcraft.
Further on page 266:
It would not be correct to say that modern science provides better explanations thatn witchcraft for the things the Azande wishes to explain. Why did this particular cut in the foot get infected while dozen of other such cuts did not?...A precise explanation of why this cut becomes infected and that cut does not is not always possible in sicinece. We do not usually observe all the facts necessary to reach a conclusion and are driven to explanations based on chance...[although ignorance would be a better retreat position, in that it is more honest and would encourage further study]
[The Azande deal with the world the same way as western science (when the knowledge is there), so a cut is made by striking a sharp rock with your foot that is not considered witchcraft. But if you struck your foot on a rock or a stump even though you were looking carfully and knew all about watching for stumps and rocks but you strike one anyway, then witchcraft provides an explanation for that most odd occurance of you losing your awareness, of confusing you, for no apparent reason].
further proof that it was witch hexing is if the cut festers. If it does n ot fester then perhaps the witch has lifted the hex. Note that if a person says they stumbled over the stump because they were not paying attention then that suffices and a witch is not invoked to explain the anomaly. If the foot festers then that is done by a witch to continue the malevance started with making the person confused even when they were being careful.
Now if there is such a belief then people would normally come up with a way to verify who is the witch causing this problem. Page 267 continues:
The Azandes have a procedure to ascertain if someone is threatened ... by witchcraft and who the witch is...by the use of...the poison oracle."
[The procedure is to force a poison (benge) down the throat of a fowl while addressing a question in a particular form of "Is (victim's name) (their condition) a threat by (witche's name)?".
If the fowl dies the answer is yes, otherwise no...Therefore to ask an Azande...what would happen if they were to administer poison without delivering the question ..is [to them] ... a silly question. An essential part of the process has been left out and therefore you are no longer testing the process as they understand it. An Azande does not know what would happen in this sort of situation .... and [does not care] since the correct procedure was not followed, the result is meaningless. [This is equivalent to checking the wrong facts in a scientific experiment, or not following the procedure as it is followed. You might say that if an incantation was done as part of an experiment, and you could get the result without the incantation then surely you would conclude that the incantation was not necessary. Well there are two arguements to consider: first if sometimes your experiment did not work could you say it was because you did not say the incantation? (And experiments sometimes fail). Secondly the point of the poison oracle is not the death of the chicken, but the death (or not) of the chicken when you ask the question. In other words the question is an integral part of the procedure and it is not done to see if chickens sometimes die if they are poisoned. This is the essential point to understand. The question cannot be tested. The result is meaningless without the question to an Azande.]
On page 269-270,
The Azande do not take the result of one such poison oracle as conclusive but must have 2 results which are the same [but quite properly so the question in the second test will be answered 'yes' only if hte fowl does NOT die. [The opposite result for the chicken than in the first test.]...The [result] is often [contradictory] which Western science uses as proof of uselessness of the whole procedure but to the Azande proves the opposite to... the Azande their are a variety of explanations for the differing results provided by their culture [such as]:
  1. wrong variety of poison
  2. breach of taboo...
  3. witchcraft itself...
  4. anger of the owners of the forest where the poison plant grows...
  5. etc..

[and the one interpreting is guided in the explanation by the behavior of the fowl when it died or did not die.]
Finally, pages 271-272
When the Azande disregard or brush aside the types of experiments we owuld propose to refute their belief in witchcraftthey are not acting differently then ourselves. We too stick with a theory that we have found useful in spite of awkward contradcitions unless we have a better one to replace it with. We may also fail to recognize contradictions and absurdities in our strongly held beliefs although these may be apparent to others who do not share those beliefs....
The Azande have survived as a people for a long period of time in a hostile and difficult environment and they have devloped a complex society based on both huntting gathering and agriculture; a society which includes many different occupations. [And part of their cultural system they use to interact with the world is their belief in witchcraft.]