"Other ways of knowing," aka Different Cognitive Styles

[tama]

119. Thanks for your response

There are many levels of interpretation of experience/experimental level in science. If we talk about physics and other fields of natural philosophy, the word "theory" is usually reserved for the level of mathematical description of phenomenological world, and the math is in turn "interpreted" into natural languages.

So if you say that - and I don't necessarily disagree - that mathematical level "map" is not just interpretation, but it is the landscape, then you are also strongly implying a metaphysical statement about meaning and ontology of mathematical Platonism. Which on the levels of philosophy and metaphysics is of course a matter of interpretation, plausibility and belief. And myth. Plato's Academy is very much the founding myth of Western science.

The field of scientific mathematical etc. languages is generally and normatively much more narrow than that of mythical language. It basically deals with only the extroceptive externalized and objectified world - and mathematical imagination. Not generally with introceptive areas, ethics, "alternate states" of mind and shamanistic journeys, foundations of social customs and rituals and nature relation of the community, etc.

If we mean by nature the whole of being and experience, not just extroceptive world that science concentrates on exploring, there is nothing supernatural in experiences of communications with spirit worlds, most usually in dreams etc. "alternate" states of consciousness. Sure, those experiences have various culturally and linguistically differing interpretations, but the experiences as such are just as natural as all other experiences. To repeat, for something to be deemed "supernatural", you have to start from an exclusive definition of nature. For ingidenous peoples generally "nature" does not mean and is not an exclusive definition (which in any case would be unprovable myth or metaphysical belief, not a testable fact) of being and experience, but inclusive participatory relation of being and experiencing as part of the whole, not outside the whole of nature.

Question about degrees of freedom of possible interpretations is very interesting. As mythical language generally deals with life's journey on all levels, There would be two basic principles. A well functioning mythology gives good guidelines as a map to life's journey, which is a limiting principle, but also does not want to limit the possibilities of experience, learning and creation.