Norman:

You write,

> It's really quite simple: teach Indians science the way you would
> Cinese Americans, Jewish Americans, Italian Americans, and
> white-bread WASPS.

This simple stuff gives me the hardest time.  It seem here that two
kinds of problems are getting mixed up.  One is scientific -- a type of
problem leading to consideration of and experiment with matters
largely unrelated to the inquirer's present use and enjoyment of his
immediate surroundings.  To a certain extent, solution to these
problems depend upon eliminating the qualitative in situations in
order to establish a systematic relationship of facts and concepts to
one another.  These kinds of problems lend themselves to a method
now popularly known as scientific method, and the answers, when
reached, can be double checked by experiment in places and
cultures far removed from the first ones.

The other kind of problems involve the best immediate use of the
environment and thus can never be duplicated in another time and
place.   These problems often require a high degree of sensitivity
toward social norms, morals, history, politics, and all that is
common in the everyday life of the problem solver; they require the
logic of common sense.  This is the stuff your mom knows, even
though you are the one with the PHD; this is people who may not
know how rain is formed but know enough to come in out of it; this is
the reason the barely literate salesmen are the highest paid and
most valuable employees in the company.

I do not claim these two approaches to be entirely separate.  In an
evolutionary sense, I think that scientific method grew out of
common sense inquiries.  Thus, they share some attributes.  But it is
really hardly surprising that in the modern world immediate use and
enjoyment problems implicating a wide range of environmental
factors require a slightly different logic than those inquiries which
only create repeatable experiments.

So back to American Indians.  I suspect that faced with the problem
of when water boils at sea level, an American Indian ought to turn to
the same methods used everywhere in the world for solving those
kinds of problems.  When faced with the problem of how to interest
a particular group of American Indians in scientific careers, I hope
the problem solver could turn to a well of common sense that takes
into account the social, political and geographic environment in
which the problem exists.


--
                Simon

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