Folk Science and Belief Legend

Anthropology, UFOs, and epistemic authority: the perils of ethnography at the fringe Ryan J. Cook ○ Anthropology ○ University of Chicago "…the private folklore of science understands that the most original proposals are also the ones that find it hardest to get support." Henry H. Bauer. 1992. Scientific literacy and the myth of the scientific method. U Illinois P.

Western Folklore, 1990

The ambiguity inherent in belief legends makes it all but impossible for the folklorist to presume to know the "truth" about Bigfoot. Such assertions are likely to be at the root subjective, and they draw folklorists into the legend debate, a process they would do better to observe than to participate in. Observations of the debate process within culture can reveal a great deal about the Bigfoot legend. One can better understand how emergent beliefs become legend in a contemporary context and how traditional beliefs withstand challenges even in a dynamic, information-filled setting. The debate within culture is occurring on two levels: in the published writings of Bigfoot researchers and in the memorates and conjectures of ordinary people who are especially interested in Bigfoot. The second part of this paper briefly describes the debate about Bigfoot's nature as reflected in the popular press. The third part examines the extent to which the published debate has influenced the thinking of active bearers of the legend in Central Ohio and the memorates they tell. In his article "Humanoids and Anomalous Lights: Taxonomic and Epistemological Problems," David Hufford argues that it is possible that some reports of Bigfoot may not be legend at all; rather, some might be reports based on what he terms an "objectively real referent" that sometimes becomes embedded in a traditional narrative and sometimes not. Hufford asserts that "large hair-covered bipeds" reported in different parts of the world under a variety of names might actually exist. Accounts of Bigfoot's size and appearance are quite similar across the United States and Canada, according to Hufford. My thanks to Bill Ellis for sharing his material on Bigfoot with me.

Walters, Holly. "But What Is It Really? The Problem of Science, Pseudoscience, and Religion in Fossil Folklores." (In Press, 2021). In Addressing Pseudo-Archaeology: A Guide for Teachers and Professionals. Digital Press at the University of North Dakota.

Cognitive Science, 2002

People feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they really do; they are subject to an illusion-an illusion of explanatory depth. The illusion is far stronger for explanatory knowledge than many other kinds of knowledge, such as that for facts, procedures or narratives. The illusion for explanatory knowledge is most robust where the environment supports real-time explanations with visible mechanisms. We demonstrate the illusion of depth with explanatory knowledge in Studies 1-6. Then we show differences in overconfidence about knowledge across different knowledge domains in Studies 7-10. Finally, we explore the mechanisms behind the initial confidence and behind overconfidence in Studies 11 and 12, and discuss the implications of our findings for the roles of intuitive theories in concepts and cognition.

Folia Linguistica, 2020

Folklore refers to information that we have learnt as a part of the history of our own people and that has passed on from generation to generation for hundreds, or even thousands of years. This paper shows that as an information source folklore has features in common with other information sources, most notably hearsay, but it nevertheless constitutes an information source of its own, characterized as [−personal] [−direct] and [+internalized]. In addition, the paper proposes a formal-functional typology based on the element used for folklore coding. It is also shown that the semantic similarity of the coded element with the proposed definition of folklore corresponds to its frequency. Finally, the paper discusses the central theoretical implications this study has for our understanding of evidentiality.

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2013

2012

SUNlite, 3(3), 17-18., 2011

Paranormal phenomena, such as encounters with UFO’s and alien beings, have emerged as a viable category in the study of religion, and mysticism in particular. The work of scholars like Jeffrey Kripal has put such phenomena “on the table” of religious studies, where these powerful, seemingly nontraditional mystical experiences may be analyzed and compared alongside their more well studied peers. Exploring these as instances of mysticism involves an expansion of that category and an exploration of its own roots in the global history of religions and mythology. Using the novel methods of historical-comparative research into the deep history of human mythology developed by Michael Witzel and Wim van Binsbergen, as well studies of shamanism, I analyze a number of such paranormal UFO phenomena in terms of Witzel’s “path dependency” theory of mythology, which “indicates the influence of early, foundational cultural features on successor cultures,” which, transposed to the experiential level, indicates the influence of earlier forms of mystical experience coded in the deepest layers of myth on subsequent experiences and encounters extending to the present. When looked at against this wider cultural and religious background, these phenomena can be seen to have deep roots in human culture, roots which continue to exert their influence and constrain or condition the nature of mystical experiences, which, in this view, can be similarly shown even in their more classical expressions to be so influenced and conditioned.