Micronesian) Cultural Philosophies
Correlative Thinking in Pacific Island (Micronesian) Cultural Philosophies James D. Sellmann University of Guam Abstract To continue the project of explicating Pacific values and worldviews, this paper focuses on correlative thinking in some of the cultural philosophies of the Pacific islands, especially Micronesia. Correlative thinking differs, in degree, from scientific and academic logic that emphasize the truth-value of statements. After examining aspects of correlative thinking in Bali and the Philippines, I extract some characteristics of Pacific philosophies from cultural practices, myths, and beliefs. Unlike William Alkire (Alkire, 1972), I find that Pacific islanders use correlative thinking, not dualism, to fill their canoes and baskets of wisdom, so that they can navigate between contemporary logic or scientific thinking, and their cultural knowledge systems and ways of reasoning. Key words: correlative thinking, philosophy, Pacific and Micronesian cultures; ways of reasoning. Introduction Is there a universal form of human cognition? If there is a universal form of reasoning, is it based on correlative nondual thinking, monism, or dualism? Or are there significant cultural differences in the way people think, reason, and describe the world? If there are differences in reasoning, then are they differences in kind or degree? More specifically, do indigenous reasoning approaches differ from academic or scientific reasoning? If they do, then in what ways do they differ? These questions are crucial for understanding human nature, culture, and the crux of the issues concerning cultural essentialism, cultural incommensurability, and cultural assimilation. By further developing some of my earlier work, I explicate some of the ways that nondual correlative thinking appears in the Pacific, especially in respective Micronesian cultural philosophies (Sellmann, 2006, pp.
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