Neil Postman Quote on Bronislaw Malinowski and Anthropology

"As Quine has said, 'Our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body.' Quine has uncovered an important feature of human thought here, one that the analytic-synthetic distinction overlooks. Beliefs are not held or tested atomistically, in a one-by-one fashion. Rather beliefs come in clusters, forming a worldview, which is then used to interpret experience. One's worldview as a whole confronts the data of language and experience. Simple appeals to language (analyticity) or observation (syntheticity) do not reveal whether or not our beliefs will be altered when challenged. People will grant revisionary immunity to certain core beliefs not on the basis of linguistics, but on the basis of an overall worldview. Those beliefs that are held most dearly and form the hearts of one's conceptual scheme will be the hardest to let go and the last we let go. Indeed, all of us have beliefs we will cling to regardless of almost anything! Only a revolution in our conceptual framework will alter these most central beliefs. These beliefs often appear to be almost insulated from testing; indeed, they are the standard by which everything else is tested...This is not to say that all human beings think in consistent systems, or even that most are aware of the nature of their own thought. It is virtually certain that everyone holds to some incompatible or inconsistent beliefs. Most people do not reflect on their own thinking enough to notice these inconsistencies or to notice the 'worldviewesh' character of their thought." Rich Lusk