poetix said:
I think it's misplaced in all these cases
I like the distinction made between scientific attitude, method and world view, that's very useful. But where criticism is misplaced there isn't a problem to begin with, by definition.
If there is a problem it's when the truth of a (reductive? aren't all world views necessarily reductive?) world view is mistaken in the mind of the observer for absolute, final or exclusive Truth. It's not so much that this is unscientific (though really it is) or that it can set up unproductive oppositions with other world views (though I think we do see this), but primarily because it can lead to inaccurate and inflexible types of thinking
in that observer. It's where a perfectly good belief tips over into fanaticism, bringing with it the kinds of intolerances and chauvinisms that sort of thing tends to engender. Maybe that's something of an extreme scenario but it can certainly lead to blind spots in what is ideally an honest and rigorous approach. The final truth of a given world view is best understood as belonging within the scope of the systems and methods used to define it and to discern its characteristics.
poetix said:
the argument is seldom really about knowledge anyway: the kinds of intuitions and perceptions people associate with a "spiritual" worldview are not generally the sort of things anyone could know by any means whatsoever.
Can it not equally be said to be the other way round? Spiritual practice is concerned with that which can be directly experienced and participated in, whereas scientific investigations reveal much that we have to use imagination to apprehend and that must in a sense be "taken on faith".
But more seriously, although this is of course bound up with the various ways in which something can be said to be "known", I do wonder if this kind of statement doesn't rather misconstrue the nature of much spiritual practice...
poetix said:
I don't think the world view of animists represents their knowledge of the world exclusively or even particularly faithfully - it orients them practically and existentially within their world, but that's a subtly different question
I don't think it's necessarily accurate to characterise an animistic world view as simply involving some vague generalised idea to do with spirits in rocks and trees, though maybe that's not quite what you are doing here. Members of an animistic culture will more likely relate to
individual spirits in
particular rocks and trees. These kinds of perceptions and ways of interacting with the environment will be shared by participants in the culture and do indeed reflect knowledge and experience of the world faithfully, perhaps in some ways more so than the view of the proverbial "scientific rationalist" who would aspire to exclude from their world view anything which could not adequately be accounted for by current science.* Of course hardly anybody does this, not even Mr. D I would venture, and the truth is that we don't always have to make that choice.
* I understand it's been shown that personifying processes can be an efficient way of employing cognitive resources in thinking about them. In many ways I think it's true to say that animistic conceptions are more than just analogous to the insights of cybernetics and systems theory.