A stone-age anthropologist looks at ‘Tucson III’

There is more than one ‘hard problem'. Just as it is hard for consciousness to grasp itself, it is also hard to examine your own society from the ‘outside'. The same problem applies to scientific paradigms (Kuhn, 1962), our taken-for-granted assumptions generally, and the collective representations that sustain them -- such as soup spoons and scientific conferences (Durkheim, 1912; Bourdieu, 1977). To get an ‘outside’ view of ‘Tucson III', I asked my friend Tjiniman, who is a stone-age hunter, to help me out. He is studying anthropology part-time, though he does not believe everything he is told, and prefers to retain his traditional world-view. The following account is mainly his, with a few suggestions from me (CW).