Ethnoscience or cognitive anthropology is the study of people’s perceptions of their surroundings as reflected in their use of language. It is also an organized examination of thought across cultures, modeled after the principles of linguistics, specifically, phonemic analysis. The taxonomies resulting from such analyses reveal categories based on locally relevant criteria. Ethnoscience has been used by many different disciplines; thus there are studies in ethnobotany, ethnopedology, ethnoforestry, ethnoveterinary medicine, and ethnoecology.
In economics, the use of local taxonomic categories has been applied to analyze the effects of different types of soil on the adoption of new maize seed varieties (Bellon and Taylor, 1993). They asked farmers about the various soil types on their land, what characteristics they attributed to each type, and how they ranked those soils in terms of their suitability for maize production. Their hypothesis was that farmers’ perceptions of the soil qualities on their farms significantly affected their decision on whether to adopt new technology. Their results showed that the perceptions of land quality did indeed affect the adoption of new seed varieties. It was suggested that this type of analysis could be taken one step further by examining local classifications of such economic terms as benefits, costs, insurance, interest, security, and risk, in order to determine whether these were locally meaningful concepts.
Since decision-making is defined as the intentional and reflective choice in response to perceived needs, the understanding of how farmers perceive, name, and classify nature is an important first step towards improving decisions. As farmers’ pest management is likely to follow concepts of unbounded rationality, understanding their beliefs, knowledge, attitudes, and reasoning or cognition can uncover clues to help in designing better decision support systems.
For information to be applied, it has to be presented in appropriate perspectives and classifications. Farmers need to remember the information and become motivated to use it to guide decisions of behavior. Often information may be delivered and received but not utilized in decisions. This is especially the case for information dealing with new opinions, attitudes and behavior. The new information needs to be integrated into existing knowledge systems for it to be utilized. According to Anderson’s (1980) information integration theory, a new opinion is adapted through formation of a general impression, which is based on many information bits. How new information is processed will also depend on how it fits into an individual farmer’s existing cognitive structure. To obtain some insights into farmers’ cognitive structures, two ethnoscience tools introduced by Bentley could be very useful.