Earlier draft of this paper prepared with the fellowship support of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and a grant from the National Science Foundation, and distributed as Working Paper No. 39, Language-Behavior Research Laboratory (March 1971). (VM)

Criticism has been directed at a growing body of literature broadly referred to as ethnoscience, ethnosemantics, folk science, ethnographic semantics, and cognitive anthropology. Criticisms concern methodological and analytic aspects of ethnoscientific procedure, and the directions of ethnosemantic research from a theoretical point of view. The…