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.¹

The 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...