The Tribal History-An Obsolete Paradigm James A. Clifton Because it is one of the better-perhaps the best recent example-of the genre, Edmund J. Danziger's newly published The Chippewas of Lake Superior can serve as a point of departure for an assessment of that peculiarly American historiographic form known as the tribal history. In this slim volume, as we will see, Danziger pushes to their utmost limits the basic assumptions, methods, and rationalizations of this traditional approach to the scholarly task of unraveling the sense and patterns of the past of Native American societies. In so doing he clearly revealed the fundamental limitations and defects of the model adopted to structure this inquiry. These striking weaknesses, it must be emphasized, are deficiencies of what Thomas B. Kuhn calls a "normal paradigm," not the person. They express the failure of the long established customary set of ideas, restrictions, presuppositions, and techniques that mark the tribal history as a distinctive genre now grown obsolete. Hence these comments must be read as a critique of the tribal history paradigm, not of any particular author who is intellectually trapped by its form and style. As Kuhn observes in his study of the evolution of science and scholarship, the historical development of a branch of disciplined knowledge is more a thing of fits and starts than a continuously steady accumulation of demonstrated facts and tested propositions. Such development, he argues cogently, proceeds by sequential phases of normal and revolutionary science. The normal phase of scholarship-of which the tribal history is but one long established variety-is built upon a basic underlying paradigm that structures and restricts the efforts of scholars in the discipline.

Apperly and Butterfill (2009) argue that adult theory of mind (ToM) requires two parallel systems. One system, efficient but inflexible, enables rapid judgements by operating without explicit modeling of beliefs, while a separate, effortful system, enables richer predictions over more complex belief encodings. Here, we agree with their qualitative distinction but propose a different model: a single process, but with effortful re-representation leading to two phases of ToM reasoning. Efficient reasoning, in our view, occurs over representations that include actions, but not necessarily explicit belief states. Effortful reasoning, then, involves re-representation of these initial encodings in order to handle errors, resolve real-world conflicts, and fully account for others’ belief states. We present an implemented computational model, based in memory retrieval and structural alignment, that illustrates our approach.