The Temptations of Theory

When students of religion are tempted to theorize, they are more apt to spread confusion than to get things right. In Believing and Acting (2012), Scott Davis offers philosophical therapy for the resulting perplexities. There is no more instructive methodological essay in the field. Because the temptations Davis identifies are real, any would-be theorist of religion, society, or culture would be well advised to take his diagnoses seriously.“Understanding religion,” according to Davis, “requires nothing more than the sensitive and imaginative reading of human phenomena informed by the best available historical narrative.” The study of religion is a tangled garden in need of “judicious pruning and weeding” (2012, 3). In some cases, the prudent gardener will need only to reshape something that goes by the name of “theory.” Davis praises Mary Douglas, Clifford Geertz, and Wayne Proudfoot for freeing earlier research programs of their theoretical excesses. These are Davis's model gardeners, the heroes of “the pragmatic turn” he recommends. What links the three together, he argues, is that they borrow their pruning hooks from the same shed—the pragmatic philosophical tradition initiated by C. S. Peirce.1The book has villains as well as heroes. In “cognitive studies and the postmodern hermeneutics of suspicion,” Davis finds nothing worth saving. He concludes that they “should probably be uprooted altogether” (2012, 4). In somewhat different ways, these programs fail to learn what pragmatism has to teach about studying human beings as rational agents. The lessons that figure most heavily in Davis's critical project come from Donald Davidson.2 While I mostly agree with Davis on what those lessons are and admire the acumen with which he explicates them, I worry that he is too quick to dismiss some research programs as worthless. If we are not careful here, something valuable will end up in the compost heap.Davis argues that Peirce was basically right about how inquiry works. Inquiry is the activity in which human beings engage to resolve their doubts about what is the case and what to do. Like other things we do, it is something we can do well or poorly. Properly conducted, inquiry is part of living well. It is a norm-governed affair. Methodological reflection is inquiry into the norms that ought to govern the practice of inquiry, the norms for fixing belief and intention in response to experience.Natural science is a kind of inquiry in which theorizing plays a central role. When devising, testing, and revising theories of “objects and events in the material world,” natural scientists are engaging in a respectable cognitive endeavor. Science strives “to account for these objects and events in terms of their simpler constituents” and for the ways in which interactions among material objects “produce more complex phenomena.” One objective of natural science is to achieve “general accounts of properties and behavior, preferably couched in mathematical form, that can be tested against the experience of the inquirers” (2012, 2).Because human beings belong to the material world, they fall within the purview of natural science. The laws of physics apply to human bodies as well as to billiard balls. Chemistry illumines the causes of such human experiences as migraines and depression. Biology explains how a species with our cognitive, expressive, and social capacities evolved. In all of these fields, scientists posit generalizations to make sense of human beings as entities or organisms in the material world. The generalizations are credible insofar as they are able to explain the evidence.The natural scientists' generalizations are lawlike hypotheses about what causes what. Generalizations of this sort not only posit regularities in the behavior of objects under actual conditions, they also imply something about what would have happened in counterfactual conditions. It makes sense to posit lawlike hypotheses to explain the behavior of cancer cells in human bodies, but that is because cancer cells do not have minds of their own. Medical science rightly aspires to explain the behavior of such cells in terms of probabilistic laws. We know what it means to seek a theory of this kind.The behavior of human beings typically requires a different sort of explanation. Much of what human beings do must be interpreted in terms of beliefs, desires, intentions, and other mental attitudes. What is Tom doing? He is winking at Judy. Winking is a paradigmatic instance of intentional action. When Tom winks, it makes sense to ask him why he did it and to expect his answer to take the form of a reason (see Anscombe 1959). To begin explaining why Tom winked at Judy, one would presumably need to say something about the intention with which he winked. The next step might be to inquire into the beliefs, desires, and other attitudes that gave rise to that intention. Another step might be to inquire into whatever shared attitudes, habits, relationships, and practices led Tom to expect Judy to attribute a particular sort of significance to his wink.We are now on the terrain of Geertz's interpretive sociology, where the indispensability of intentional vocabulary makes generalizing an inherently tricky business.3 Whatever regularities we posit to explain the winking, praying, celebrating, prescribing, or proscribing that some group engages in will, according to Davis, hold only for the most part, because we will always need to make room for the possibility that the human beings engaged in these activities might change their minds and behave accordingly. For reasons neither they nor we can foresee, they might begin behaving differently. And this means that whatever human behavior ought to be counted as intentional action falls outside the scope of the sort of theorizing that seeks lawlike generalizations. The generalizations of interpretive inquiry need ceteris paribus clauses. They hold only when other things are equal—that is, when the human beings under examination find no reason to change their minds about what they are doing. Generalizations that hold only when other things are equal entail counterfactual conditionals that also hold only when other things are equal. So the sort of theoretical generality available to the interpretive inquirer is much weaker than the sort available to the natural scientist.“Human beings are clearly part of the natural world,” writes Davis, “but as long as we persist in treating them as rational, we will need to use intentional language, the language of beliefs, wants, rejects, and the like.” Davis follows Davidson in referring to this language as “anomalous” (Davis 2012, 105). What they mean is that our use of this language involves treating human beings as rational agents, in the minimal sense of beings that do things for reasons. To make sense of human action as an expression of rational agency is necessarily to make judgments about what attitudes would actually give someone reason for doing something and about what beliefs someone situated in a particular time and place would actually have reason to accept. These are normative judgments, and to make them is to adopt a normative stance with respect to one's fellow human beings. The study of human beings as rational agents is an inherently normative affair. Its explanations always retain an element of normative judgment. And for this reason, they cannot be reduced to the lawlike generalizations of natural science.Not everything human beings do requires intentional explanation. When Tom blinks, for example, he is not typically enacting any intention at all. If Judy pokes her finger at his eye, Tom blinks. It is an automatic reflex. If you asked Tom why he blinked in response to Judy's poking, he wouldn't answer by stating his intention. His explanation would be that Judy did the sort of thing that generally triggers the reflex. Presumably, what triggers blinking in Tom is what triggers blinking in anyone with the standard physiological properties. A scientist who runs enough experiments should be able to specify both the relevant parameters and the relevant causal generalization. The result would be a theory of the blinking reflex—a theory of the very sort that the natural sciences aspire to formulate and assess.Cognitive science is causing a stir these days in the study of religion. Davis thinks that there is less reason for excitement than meets the eye. He doesn't deny that major advances are being made in the study of the human brain, nor that some of these advances could have some bearing on the study of religion. His complaint is that the champions of cognitive science as an approach to the study of religion have thus far failed to do justice to Davidson's arguments about the anomalousness of intentional language. In a series of astute critical readings, Davis demonstrates that the advocates of cognitive science repeatedly equivocate on crucial terms in a way that obscures the significance of their findings for the study of religious behavior as a species of rational agency. A theory of blinks might teach us something about the physiology of winking, but it wouldn't tell us much about what Tom was doing when he winked at Judy. By the same token, a theory of brain states might teach us something about the physiology of meditation, but it won't tell us much about what meditators are doing or why they are doing it.The appropriate conclusion to draw from Davis's critique of cognitive science is that caution should prevail. Henceforth, any student of religion vaunting the significance of a cognitive scientist's findings should be expected to exhibit care in making transitions from statements cast in physiological language to statements cast in intentional language. The bar of clarity should be high, and Davis should be thanked for raising it. As a result, the burden of proof rests with any student of religion who neglects or denies what Davidson calls “the nomological slack between the mental and the physical” (qtd. in Davis 2012, 108). It does not follow, however, that cognitive science should be uprooted from the religion curriculum. Research programs need time to reach maturity. Like other products of rational agency, they can take unexpected twists and turns. For all we know, some future scholar will do for cognitive science what Geertz did for Weber and Douglas did for Durkheim.Suppose that Tom and Judy enter a building on Madison and Vine, and sit on a long bench. When the organ plays, the two of them rise and sing. What are they doing? That depends on their intentions, which are in turn related to their beliefs and other attitudes. We listen to the words they are singing. Later we pepper them with questions. As time goes by, we watch them do and say many things. Each week they return to the building on Madison and Vine. They sit, kneel, rise, and sing. Discerning a pattern, we seek to explain it. Tom and Judy appear to be doing these things intentionally, so we need a hypothesis about the intentions with which they are acting. We make sense of the intentions we attribute by attributing beliefs and other attitudes to Tom and Judy, attitudes that would give them reason to do what we take them to be doing.The default starting point for all such explanations is to take the people being interpreted as rational in their beliefs and intentions and to take their beliefs as true. The rationale for this strategy is not that people generally turn out, on examination, to be highly rational beings who rarely fall for falsehoods, but rather that an initial presumption of rationality and truth is the only strategy under which interpretation can be constrained by evidence. Davidson's somewhat misleading name for the strategy's rationale is the principle of charity (in Davis 2012, 146).Interpretive charity begins, then, on the assumption that our fellow language users are rational agents and believers in truths. We attempt to make sense of their verbal and nonverbal behavior on that assumption, attributing attitudes to them and mapping their utterances onto ours in whatever way renders them most intelligible to us as agents who act for reasons. Davidson's point is that only by starting in this “charitable” way are we able to keep attributions of irrationality and falsehood from running rampant. Deprived of the default assumption, our interpretations would be unconstrained by the behavioral evidence. In the end, we will still need to conclude that any given human being we study is irrational in some respects and a believer in some things we take to be false. But no interpretation of intentional activity can qualify as empirically grounded unless it situates irrationality and false belief within a context of rationality and true belief.4The first implication of Davidsonian charity is that a suitably empirical approach to the study of intentional activity is inescapably normative. To interpret someone's behavior as intentional is to attribute attitudes to him or her that might have some chance of making sense of that behavior, on the whole, as a rational response to the same world in which the interpreter lives. Like it or not, this involves judging those attitudes in relation to norms of rationality and in relation to one's own convictions about truth and falsity.The second implication of Davidsonian charity is that no sense can be made of the idea that different groups employ alternative conceptual schemes. Postulating such schemes might seem like a promising way to acknowledge the evident differences of belief and language that distinguish one religion or culture from another, but it actually derails the attempt to account for those differences. Concepts are norms for using words in a shared world, not a veil of ideas separating us from the world and our fellows. Nearly any child, if transplanted into some linguistic community chosen at random, can pick up the norms of that community by observing how its members respond to their environment. Nearly any ethnographer, if similarly transplanted, can do the same. Good ethnographers find ways to communicate what they have learned.In both cases, the learning process is charitable in Davidson's sense, because otherwise there would be no way to ground it in behavioral evidence. The norms must be implicit in the behavior of language users if those norms are to serve their essentially public function of connecting people with one another and to the world they share. Do not the norms vary from one community to another? Of course they do to some extent, because the process of translating the discourse of one community into the discourse of another is sometimes difficult. Some terms circulating among the Navajo have no equivalent in the lexicon of Tom and Judy. But the indispensable strategy of interpretive charity places empirical constraints on how large the differences can be. It is no accident that the best ethnographies—even the ones sometimes thought to provide evidence of incommensurable conceptual schemes—actually proceed by making sense of such differences as there are by locating them, comparatively, against a backdrop of assumed similarities. All this is necessitated by the default presumption of charity.“Davidson's critics frequently go wrong,” Davis says, by “confusing the intellectual or psychological importance of a linguistic domain with its place in supporting the web of language as a whole” (2012, 131). Students of religion, ethics, politics, and scientific practice are interested, with good reason, in linguistic domains where differing commitments and norms have considerable impact on how people live and what they care about. It remains the case, Davis argues, that these differences, important as they are, can generally be rendered intelligible by tracing inferential connections between conceptual norms that are not shared across the boundaries of various communities and mundane commitments that are widely shared. “Davidson's argument implies that we already believe most of what the natives believe, just not the interesting stuff” (139). Our interpretive task is to trace connections between the interesting someone and the says, so that the interesting can be as into “the web and of a Postulating alternative conceptual schemes no in this reason Davis to postmodern theory is that it neglects the of Davidsonian as Davis to to learn a language is to to an essentially conceptual any such with its own norms of truth and rational there is no from which such norms can be in terms of some conceptual is true or false only to that it makes no sense to say of someone to a conceptual other than one's own that his or her statements are false or of irrational and the process of to the norms of some conceptual and thus a of a is by of and To this of one now the that any attempt on the part of to interpret the behavior of in terms of a conceptual must be as an of and the people being should be that this of is at with Davidson's approach to language, because in the on the assumption of alternative conceptual schemes. While I have doubts about the of Davidson's own approach is enough to his for to Davis in I do not Davis's that postmodern and theory should be uprooted and reason is that this interpretive and are fellow language To the to their theorizing as or to some of their as one to begin by that much of what they do is rational and much of what they believe is true. we and interpretive charity requires us to ask what in their theoretical activity as a response to their and what truth can be in their of these not only in the it to the behavior of our fellow more but also in the it to learn something from what they are about and Because Davis does not ask these he does not the possibility that the study of religion might from a kind of theoretical reflection that neither conceptual schemes nor generalizations about human it to temptations of its theory has many in language, and it has a that science. In of and who various human and ways of and on their and The theories they did not scientific theories in of the in those theories in normative as one might given that the to and to into how to things that now go by the name of theory in the study of human behavior more and theory than in physics or Some social aspire to with an the against and to and with the of them For of we can any account of at in part by these two a critical theory of Douglas and The reason he doesn't them as is that doing so would the of its One of the most instructive in Believing and Acting according to which some religious attitudes and practices are to be in terms of the they within a social context (2012, to account for how of action and social that postmodern under the of and Douglas to that use to to get in that is the way we have always that is that is or and that is the way us to do things. that the principle is the of social (qtd. in Davis 2012, Davis, all this is to be as what need to do by way of to take a in the communities from which they (2012, no point does Davis ask are doing of But we as any in which one or group is in a to we are able to how by achieve If religious practices of and religious of and will are among the means of such religion requires a of its own in a critical theory of society, and there is a place for in the study of is not a far from the idea that many their to the that the resulting and of The in Davis's or in that of his and it is there in a way that would it for critical I no reason why we ask who and by what religious means the is need not us in the theoretical that Davis so do they us to religion to alternative to the temptations of social theory is a of a and imaginative reading of human phenomena informed by the best available historical narrative.” I that a reading of human to qualify as must come to and the of into however, the of is to seem in where has of in the of we the very idea of a conceptual as a theoretical we will still have reason to ask this or that are in the of using is for that has in the project of and be being to and are among the that have into that A critical of their and is one of the historical our

Confusion · Epistemology · Field (mathematics · Interpretation (philosophy · Narrative · Nothing · Postmodernism · Pragmatism · Psychoanalysis · Reading (process · Sociology · Philosophy · Psychology · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious Education and Schools · Study and Philosophy of Religion

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