“paradigms,” or clusters of accepted social-science theory.2 4 Any two ethnosciences can be mapped on one another, by way of comparing them. Each can be a different state-of-knowledge for the same culture. Each can be from a different culture. One can be from a specific culture and the other from a group of related cultures in which the first is included. The pair with which I will be concerned in this paper is, first, the whole of Western science and history and, second, a theoretical ethnoscience that I create by modifying the first in one respect: I withdraw the more glaring rationalizations for imperialism.
An ethnoscience has two additional properties which are axiomatic but testable. The first describes the relations among statements within the system. The second describes the relation between an ethnoscience and a corresponding value system. We can think of Western science and history at a given time as containing a certain number of persistent theoretical paradigms and historical reconstructions. This population of scientific and historical beliefs can be assumed to have an overall structure, however loose it may be. I will speak of a relation of “compatibility” between pairs of beliefs, meaning simply that they can co-exist. A pair in widely separated disciplines can no doubt contradict one another and still co-exist, and there are rare cases of this sort within single disciplines, e.g. particles vs. waves. The general rule would seem to be that accepted paradigms are likely to reinforce one another—by using common elements, for example—or at the very least be essentially unrelated. Compatibility on these terms is no problem. The same should hold true for pairs of historical beliefs and for mixed pairs, as in psychoanalytic history, for instance. This should also hold for paramount beliefs in public policy, e.g. the putative views of the electorate. Obviously, the concept of compatibility is proba- bilistic in specific cases and becomes axiomatic only when we deal with beliefs in aggregate. The axiom is best stated in the same form: in a given ethnoscience, through a given epoch, it is unlikely that any basic, important beliefs, scientific, historical, or public-policy, will be sharply and embarrassingly incompatible with any other such belief without a resolution of the conflict taking place relatively quickly. This axiom is closely analogous to the theory of cognitive dissonance, i.e. incompatible beliefs tend to get in one another’s way.