The study of divination remains of central relevance to anthropology for what it reveals about the relationship between intuitive and reflective cognition. What marks divination out is the reflective elaboration of the role granted to intuitive associations in arriving at verdicts, which produces two distinct forms of divinatory interpretation. Generative interpretation, exemplified by Cuban Ifá, relies on maximizing the opportunity for intuitive association to render divinatory results relevant to clients’ circumstances. In contrast, reductive interpretation, exemplified by Chinese six lines prediction, minimizes the role of intuitive association by relying on highly formalized sets of fixed interpretive principles. Both approaches yield specific diagnoses but arrive at them by emphasizing different cognitive processes. A focus on the generative role of intuition has led some anthropologists of divination to argue that divinatory truth is properly understood as distinct from propositional or representational truth. Instead, anthropologists should take seriously diviners’ claims to produce representational knowledge, demonstrating that claims for the “alterity” of divinatory truth stem from a lack of due acknowledgment of the role of reflection in moving from polyvalent divinatory results to specific verdicts or of the possibility of reductive interpretation as a key feature of certain divination systems.

中文翻译：

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还原、生成和真相

占卜研究仍然与人类学具有核心相关性，因为它揭示了直觉和反思认知之间的关系。占卜的标志是对直觉联想在得出结论时所起的作用的反思性阐述，这产生了两种不同形式的占卜解释。以古巴伊法为例的生成式解释依赖于最大限度地利用直觉联想的机会来呈现与客户情况相关的占卜结果。相比之下，以汉语六行预测为例的还原解释，依靠高度形式化的固定解释原则集，最大限度地减少了直觉联想的作用。两种方法都产生特定的诊断，但通过强调不同的认知过程来达到这些诊断。对直觉的生成作用的关注导致一些占卜人类学家争辩说，占卜真理被正确理解为与命题或表象真理不同。相反，人类学家应该认真对待占卜者关于产生代表性知识的主张，证明对占卜真理“另类”的主张源于缺乏对反思在从多价占卜结果转变为具体判决或可能性方面的作用的应有认识。还原解释是某些占卜系统的一个关键特征。