History and Significance of the EMIC/ETIC Distinction

Cultural materialism shares with other scientific strategies an epistemology which seeks to restrict fields of inquiry to events, entities, and relationships that are knowable by means of explicit, logico-empirical, inductive-deductive, quantifiable public procedures or operations subject to replication by inde­ pendent observers. This restriction necessarily remains an ideal aim rather than a rigidly perfected condition, for it is recognized that total operationalization would cripple the ability to state principles, relate theories, organize empirical tests. It is a far cry, however, from the recognition that unoperationalized, vernacular, and metaphysical terms are necessary for the conduct of scientific inquiry to Feyerabend-like invitations (13,14) to throw off all operational re­ straints, The plain fact of the matter is that many social scientists literally do not know what they are talking about and cannot communicate with each other because they cannot ground any significant portion of their discourse in a coherent set of describable observational practices. Under such circumstances, it is sheer obscurantism to promote the further expansion of unoperationalized terms.