biomarkers. Let us consider some examples of how the subjective–objective (or
emic-etic) distinction would play out in the chapters of this volume.
In the developed world, patients are presumed to know some of their techno-
logically sophisticated biomarkers through medical consultation. Gerber and
Madimenos (Chap. 12 , this volume) describe the intriguing results of a study in
Qatar, in which 523 women were interviewed and asked whether they had vitamin
Ddeficiency (along with several other health conditions). They seem all to have had
beliefs about the matter, but there was very low correlation between a woman’s
belief that she had a deficiency and an actual deficiency. This may have resulted
from the fact that women’s beliefs were influenced by media reports of the con-
dition rather than medical consultation, but it certainly demonstrates a lack of
epistemic privilege for this particular case of self-knowledge. This appears not to be
a case of emic-etic, or subjective–objective, but of two sorts of objective infor-
mation that simply come from different (and inconsistent) sources. Other examples
of biomarkers are similarly unprivileged with respect to the subjective–objective
contrast. For some, one’s beliefs about one’s own health-related condition are not at
all epistemologically privileged. For others, such as degree of pain, of sleepless-
ness, or of anxiety, one’s privilege seems stronger. We believe that we have
privileged access to our own pain. How about our own sleeplessness or anxiety?
Lampl et al. (Chap. 4 , this volume) offer a gratifying (to parents at least) example
of emic’s superiority to etic shortsightedness. A recent careful study of young
children’s growth patterns show that well-known parental reports of rapid, nearly
overnight episodes of growth in their children seem to match newly uncovered
scientific facts, even though those claims had been dismissed as anecdotal for (at
least) decades. Surprisingly, parental reports of a child outgrowing their shoes
overnight may have a legitimacy that had never been recognized simply because of
the customary methods and growth theories of the etic researchers. This is a
remarkable result, but it would be unwise to generalize.
Our intuitions should probably trend in the other direction with the results
reported by Lieberman (Chap. 10 , this volume). In‘obesogenic environments,’
descendants of ancestral populations of humans which had evolved the‘thrifty
gene’would presumably not have been selected to favor an emic ability to accu-
rately judge their own food intake. The‘thrift’of the gene amounted to storing
away whatever nutrition was available, against possible future famines. The etic
abilities of modern food scientists are far more accurate in estimating food con-
sumption. Food appetites that have been produced by the confluence of thrifty
genes and the obesogenic skills contrived by food marketeers result in radically
mistaken self-estimates of food consumption. Whatever sympathy or alliance we
may feel for the unfortunate victims of the laissez-faire market of food salesman-
ship, we are more likely to trust the consumption estimates based on science rather
than our own optimistic recollections. So objective wins over subjective in this
case. Moreover, we know why it does; evolution tells the sad story.
Fisher and Thurston (Chap. 11 , this volume) describe an emic-etic contrast in
which menopausal women who are prone to hotflashes sometimes seem to sleep
through them. But is this a correct interpretation? Objective biomarkers (measures
306 R. Amundson