Kenneth Pike, as a linguist, deduced he could extend the concepts of phonetic and phonemic used in linguistics to the behavioral sciences. He was proposing that there existed a scientific, culture-free way to analysis human behavior, both verbal and non-verbal.  It was a revolutionary idea, the idea that the subconscious was structured with “Innate positive universals” aka "etic data" which could be  discovered. But the idea was not new.   

 

Preceding Pike, psychoanalyst C. G. Jung (1875-1961) recognized that the unconscious mind was not a blank slate. It was structured with “archetypes” aka universal ideas, ideals, and principles for  living.   It contained "content."   

 

Pike called this content structured in the mind "etic data" aka “positive universals.” Once uncovered, etic data would provide the analyst with a perspective that was free from culture contamination.

 

Aware of the problem, cultural psychologists Norenzayan and Heine pointed out that  culture-free standards “provide the only legitimate criteria by which any particular socio-cultural practice or belief many be judged.” 

 

Besides Norenzayan and Heine, cultural anthropologist Robert Lawless wrote:

If we are bound by the perspectives of our own [emic] folk model, we will learn nothing

about why other people behave and think differently from us.  Such a sterile viewpoint is

called enthocentrism. Analytic models must have a trans-societal [ i.e., cultural-free ]

perspective” [Emphasis added]. 

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Agreeing with Norenzayan, Heine, and Lawless was cultural anthropologist Ward Goodenough who wrote:

"They (etic concepts) provide the frame of reference, the conceptual constants, through which to examine similarities and differences among specific behavioral systems of that type.” 

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Now forty years have past and academia is still waiting for that framework of conceptual constants to be created.  But before the "rigor that we now associate with language”  can be acquired and  implemented,  social scientists must stop treating man as a mere material being living in Nature.  Man also has a SOUL and MIND “housed” in a physical body.  And that MIND is not a physical organ called “brain.”  This immaterial MIND contains what  Pike calls “etic data” aka conceptual constants. 

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Sadly, very little has been done in uncovering the kind of knowledge structured in the mind that gives people the capacity to be moral, self-conscious, talking beings. To achieve the same “rigor” that linguists have when creating a sound alphabet, Pike wrote TALK, THOUGHT and THING, the emic road toward conscious knowledge (1993). 

 

For Pike, there existed two kinds of “conscious knowledge.”  First, there existed an innate conscious knowledge of “positive universals.”  Secondly, there existed a conscious knowledge of every misrepresentations of the universals their particular life-ways have created. 

 

Because man was “created in the image of God,” all people have “freedom to act,” a freedom which includes the capacity “to distort innate positive universals into negative particular action.”  As Pike points out, this means  “nothing bad is original; the bad  is a distortion of the good.”  In the Chácobo language, to my surprise, there was jia, ‘good’ and jia-ma, ‘good-not.’  “Bad was a distortion of the good.”

 

In this regard, Pike agreed with Marx who wrote: “the task of science is to reveal the essence, the internal, deep and underlying processes behind the multitude of phenomena, the outward aspects and features of reality” aka “emic.”

 

And that is exactly what  Pike set out to do when he proposed there existed an absolute frame of reference which could provide the analyst with a “trans-societal perspective.”  

 

While Norenzayan, Heine, Lawless, and Goodenough each acknowledged that “analytic models must have a trans-societal [culture-free]  perspective,”  none presented to academia a pathway or strategy as to how the conceptual constants structured in the unconscious mind could be uncovered.                                                                                 

 

Eventually social scientists gave up the task of achieving a “trans-societal perspective.”  They also came to the conclusion that the standards they were using for judging the cultural forms of other societies were shaped and contaminated by their own culture. With the exception of Pike, academia gave up their search for a culture-free standard for judging the validity of a tradition, custom, value, or prohibition. 

 

In the words of anthropologist Martin Ottenheimer, the cultural analyst must now “benefit from multiple perspectives achieved through the use of multiple [emic] frameworks.”   But, we must ask is: How can the social scientist "benefit" from a  material perspective which has detached universal meanings from universal forms common to all? 

 

Convictions:

1. Innate knowledge of positive universals “provide the only legitimate criteria by which any particular socio-cultural practice or belief many be judge. 

2. Knowledge derived from experience aka perceptions do not give us universal. “If all knowledge is based on experience alone, then there can be no knowledge of any necessary truth” (Gordon Clark).

3. To acquire a “trans-societal perspective, “it is absolutely essential  to  insist there exists and area of coincidence between God’s mind and  our minds” (Clark). 

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