Empirical philosophies of mind

Three anthropological contributions within the debates on rationality and modes of thought are considered here: Horton's ‘African Traditional Thought and Western Science’, Gellner's Legitimation of Belief and Needham's Belief, Language and Experience. It is argued that within these texts, seemingly diverse and even opposed in theoretical position though they are, certain anthropological imperatives are common. Various philosophical views are invoked in these works in order to grapple with recurrent problems of social anthropology, a discipline conceived as the ‘empirical philosophy of mind’ and expressing itself as an essentially epistemological discourse. These attempts are unsuccessful but the reasons for their lack of success can be traced to certain constraints within the anthropological problematic itself.