Psychological versus structural validity of knowledge; The case of ethnoscience

[...]the relationship between elicited category systems and the contents and processes of men's mind has been a point of enduring cntroversy, as is manifested in the debate on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. [...]relative analysis is inevitably mixed, for it relies both upon certain primitive terms which are defined much as they are in componential analysis and upon relative products that build upon the primitive terms ' 114 Arie de Ruijter attention from the establishment of a system that explains, and not necessarily replicats, human behaviour. [...]it was recognized that individual beliefs and actions do not exactly replicate cultural standards as set by the community, but nevertheless, Standard expectations and behaviour were accorded prime importance (Goodenough 1970:101). Because it was believed that the members of a single society utilize a single monolithic cognitive system, the explication of cognitive systems by a very limited number of key-informants the 'authorities' was feit to be suffieient for the explication of the cultural cognitive system. The above-mentioned development in the psychological validity debate from intentional to implicational meaning seems to be only a temporary refuge. Since the second half of the seventies there has been a shift from the observational-empirical methodology towards what might be caljed a 1' This doctrine of nearer approximations is not intended to suggest that such limit theories facilitate discovery of actual (native) cognition.