science of the concrete

is a kind of logic in such institutions as totemism, which is neither irrational, pre-logical, peripheral, nor primitive, but on the contrary, obsessed with logic, rationality, and standards common in all human societies.

Totemism, in which animal species feature overwhelmingly, thus appears as a particular form of a mode of thought that in the past has been called 'irrational', 'pre-logical', 'peripheral', 'primitive', and which Levi-Strauss's work (especially in La pensee sauvage, 1964)[9] made us appreciate as obsessed with logic, rational, standard and common in all human societies past and present including everyday life and untutored thought and expression in the contemporary North Atlantic society even though in the latter the influence of the institutionally and politically dominant forms of scientific thought filters through in the untamed everyday and ritual expressions, masking their wildness and creating embarrassment. In the light of the ubiquitous and ineradicable presence of 'untamed thinking' (for which Levi-Strauss coined the felicitous term 'the science of the concrete'), contemporary scientific thought constitutes not the norm of human thought, but the exceptional case: one in which the conditions for the production of, and the assignment of truth to, verbal statements of a propositional form lies not only in their well-formedness and their referring to the natural world, but in the application of very elaborate, strict, intersubjective procedures stipulating the conditions under which such truth is assigned in an epistemologically valid and accountable manner.

science of the concrete, n.All

science of the concrete