Talk:Robin W. G. Horton

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Anthropology Mid‑importance

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Biography: Science and Academia

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You've done a nice job with this entry. I think it requires a little cleanup of references, such as placing titles of books in italics and making sure that everything is adequately cited. Note that I've added some hyperlinks to relevant entries, some of which you should consider editing so that they point to this new article once it's in Wikipedia mainspace. Once this article is in mainspace, you should add Horton's name to the List of anthropologists. Hoopes (talk) 20:35, 28 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ethnoscience?[edit]

I agree with Hoopes. You did a great job!

Anyway, having read Horton's articles from the 1960s, I do not see a justification for Horton's inclusion in the ethnoscience camp. Especially the line: "Robin Horton viewed religion from an ethnoscience approach..." seems to be misleading a bit. It gives the impression that Horton explicitly worked with the premises of ethnoscience. I do not think he did.

First of all, Horton was a disciple of British social anthropology and attempted to revive some ideas of Edward Burnett Tylor. Religious beliefs are in Horton's sense viewed as a sort of pseudo- or pre-scientific beliefs. They result from intellectual attempts to understand the world (like: Why are people sick? Why are human beings mortal? etc.). I am not sure if there is a similar intellectualist drive in ethnoscience. While there definitely are some overlaps between ethnoscience and Horton's approach, as far as I know, Horton did not use the ethnoscience label and ethnoscience as such was a trend within American cultural anthropology. It was related to names such as Lounsbury, Goodenough, Conklin or Pospisil. When you, for example, compare Horton's paper on Neo-Tylorianism from 1968 to William Sturtervant's paper on ethnoscience from 1964, Horton's article does not mention any of the ethnoscientists mentioned in Sturtervant's paper!

If I were you I would rephrase the sentence so it would say something like that Horton's approach was close to ethnoscience. If you insist on labelling Horton, then I would suggest the "neo-tylorian" or "intellectualist" label which would in a limited sense also apply to I. C. Jarvie. Another thing you might do is to present some stronger evidence that Horton's approach is ethnoscience.Aiman Fasil~enwiki (talk) 14:43, 19 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

As a historian of science who has done some work in ethnoscience (specifically ethnoastronomy), I would comment that Horton's two-part paper on "African Traditional Thought and Western Science", Africa (1967), which draws on Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), and his earlier "The Kalabari World-View", Africa (1962), which draws on Karl Popper and Stephen Toulmin, elaborate the similarities and differences between traditional thought and western science. I don't see him as engaging in a reductionist attempt to make religion merely science, but he did see that traditional religious thought shared some common elements with scientific inquiry. Whether or not he was using a formal ethnoscientific approach (and I leave that as an internal dispute among anthropologists), his insights were drawn from current work in the philosophy of science and did contribute substantially to later ethnoscientific research. --SteveMcCluskey (talk) 15:58, 19 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the reference to Horton's 1968 New-Tylorianism paper, it is a concise summary (in which he cites Kuhn on Western European science) of the significance of his earlier work. --SteveMcCluskey (talk) 19:16, 19 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I am sorry for my rather belated reply. There is not much to disagree with in what you wrote. However, I am still a bit unsure about Horton's contribution to ethnoscience. I do not want to contest your expertise in ethnoscience, but in such a case I would appreciate if you could supply some sources which claim any of this: (1) Horton calling his own work as work in ethnoscience; (2) somebody else classifying Horton as an ethnoscientist; or (3) somebody else classifying Horton's work as ethnoscientific. This is not just a matter of some internal dispute in anthropology, because if the entry claims that Horton was an ethnoscientist, the claim should be supported by some evidence. In short, since you classified Horton as an ethnoscientist, the onus of proof lies with you. --Aiman Fasil~enwiki (talk) 12:33, 18 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]