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  • Responses and Rejoinders
  • Peter Ochs

Dear Robert Segal,

Thanks for working through my longer paper: it is work beyond the call of duty! This time, I may see more clearly our common ground: a shared interest in the place of theory in religious studies. Please allow me, this time, to comment only on this interest.

I share your concern to maintain the legitimacy of theory. That is why I raise questions of logic (even though I am not very good at such things). I work on pragmatic logic because I understand the critique of "modern colonialism writ small" to be a critique of elemental habits of reasoning that get repeated whenever a kind of modern inquiry is performed. When, for example, I worry about "binarism," my concern is not the explicit claims of someone like Levi Strauss about binary objects of study like the raw and the cooked. My concern is about binary consequences of study: how certain kinds of inquiry may train scholars to think and act in the world in ways that unnecessarily divide realms of theory and practice, body and soul, observer-group, and observed group. To detect this kind of inquiry is to get past the rhetorical strategies of the inquirers and see what patterns of relation their work may generate whether they recognize it or not.

We have some ability to predict such consequences if we examine our patterns of reasoning and check for historical evidences about the social effects of such patterns in the past. I acknowledge that this search for evidence yields only hypotheses, of varying degrees of probability. But I also believe we have a moral responsibility to persist in this effort, because our tools of inquiry are powerful instruments that can harm as well as help the world. I do not give up on western-style inquiry; but, given what we in the modern West have done with "reason" the past two centuries, I cannot comprehend how we can simply "carry on the modern theory project" without more careful self-inspection. [End Page 499]

My paper suggests that we inherit over a 100 years of such self-inspection, yielding some workable alternatives to binarism. Physicists have, for example, long recognized that Newtonian mechanics cannot account adequately for the observed behavior of sub-atomic particles. The alternative to Newton has not been non-science, but quantum mechanics, and this post-Newtonian science may be analogous in some ways to post-colonialist practices of religious studies. One analogy concerns the relation of the observer to the observed. To measure bits of energy (such as photons or electrons) is to alter their trajectories in some ways. The implication is not that quantum measurements are "merely subjective," but that they represent actual relations between measurer and measured and belong to the history of each of these. Analogously, I hope we can acknowledge that our study of some group's religion becomes a part of that group's and our own histories. We may note, furthermore, that quantum logics cannot be reduced to the terms of two-valued logics, but may be identified with three (or more)-valued logics. Analogously, I hope we may recognize that forcing religious studies claims into the terms of two-valued logics may lead us to mispresent both our objects of study and the fact and character of our relations to them.

These are hardly new claims. Students of Dewey, Peirce, Wittgenstein, Austin, Davidson, Grice, Hacking, Bourdieu, and many others have nurtured models of inquiry that may be applied to natural, social, or literary inquiries, that acknowledge the relation of observer to the observed, and that at least resist the tendency of theorizers to leave divided cultures, discourses, and souls in their wake. Many scholars of religious studies already apply such models to their own work. One aspect of my paper is to applaud this turn and to suggest that it is morally as well as intellectually urgent.

Peter Ochs
University of Virginia
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