![]() ![]() It can show in a few cases that just too much incoherence and inconsistency is involved in some position for any reasonable person to continue to hold it. “Analytic philosophy, that is to say, can very occasionally produce practically conclusive results of a negative kind. Hence perhaps the relatively easy, although to some contemporary observers astonishing, victory of Kamehameha II over the taboos (and the creation thereby of a vacuum in which the banalities of the New England Protestant missionaries were received all too quickly).” When the resources of a culture are too meagre to carry through the task of reinterpretation, the task of justification becomes impossible. ![]() In such a situation the rules have been deprived of any status that can secure their authority, and, if they do not acquire some new status quickly, both their interpretation and their justification become debatable. “Deprive the taboo rules of their original context, and they at once are apt to appear as a set of arbitrary prohibitions, as indeed they characteristically do appear when the initial context is lost, when those background beliefs in the light of which the taboo rules had originally been understood have not only been abandoned but forgotten. ![]()
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