I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Taking the meta point of view is fun and sometimes hilariously insulting. Calling a pharmacologist an ethnopharmacologist is taking such a meta position, and it will probably piss him off, unless he considers himself an ethnopharmacologist in the sense that he studies different culture's pharmacological thinking. In the latter case, he thinks he is meta, but you can still call him an ethnoethnopharmacologist and piss him off by being all meta-meta.
ReplyDeleteI would love to find a paleoethnopharmacologist and call him an ethnopaleoethnopharmacologist. I would start my article with the phrase "Ethnopaleoethnopharmacalogically speaking, ..."