Pragmatism, Ethics, and the Disciplines

G. Scott Davis’s Believing and Acting (2012) affirms a pragmatist position against what he often terms the “temptations” of theory in religious studies. Such temptations are illustrated, as Davis sees it, by the Scylla of cognitive studies (which searches, in a reductionist way, for universal or innate neurological underpinnings of religious experience) and the Charybdis of postmodernist “power studies.” Davis is critical of both, and he makes some particularly valuable criticisms of the encroachment of cognitive studies in the field of religion and ethics. The move to embrace cognitive science is not unlike the current fad in literary studies to embrace “literary Darwinism” as an alternative to the (alleged) disarray and chaos of contemporary literary theory. Having grown weary of the idea that there are no universals or metanarratives to be found, some literary theorists happily embrace biological universals and concepts of “human nature,” which literary Darwinism seems to afford. Critics, however, charge that the problem with literary Darwinism is not so much that it is wrong, but that it doesn’t tell us anything very interesting about humans and the literature they create. It might show us that there are universal (perhaps biologically based) traits among humans. Themes about competition, adultery, reproduction, mate selection, child rearing, and so forth, do recur in fiction, and their appearance may well signal human preoccupation with such themes. But acknowledging this fact does not shed new or nontrivial light on the study of literature.

In much the same way, Davis argues that the findings of cognitive science, for religious studies, aren’t wrong exactly, but they give us little in the way of “non-banal” insights. We can affirm that religions have to do with “life and death” or with “social relations,” but “once we get down to the details the best we have are rules of thumb for exactly how things are going to develop” (2012, 100). Everything worth knowing is “local” (4). Yet the introduction of biology into the study of religion is, for the cognitivists, “not a mere addition to the scholarly tool kit, but the linchpin for the project as a whole” (100). The same is true of some forms of literary Darwinism, where the claim is not merely that biology offers new perspectives on the study of literature, but that this approach should, and ultimately will, subsume all approaches to literature.

Presumably, by “cognitive approaches” to the study of religion Davis means to refer to neuroimaging of the brain (showing, for example, how certain parts of the brain become active or inactive during “religious” states or meditative states), as well as arguments about, for example, the evolutionarily adaptive (or previously adaptive) function of ritual or religious experience. It is not entirely clear what the range of approaches is that he means to critique because he doesn’t describe them in much detail, other than referencing the work of Ann Taves and a project called EXREL. EXREL is a multiyear interdisciplinary initiative that aims to discover “both what is universal and cross-culturally variant in religious traditions” as well as the “cognitive mechanisms” that underpin religious thought and behavior (Davis 2012, 99). Part of Davis’s argument against such approaches is that the only way to study humans is to treat them as intentional agents. “Human beings are clearly part of the natural world, 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” (105). And this sort of language is “anomalous when compared to scientific language about the physical world” (107). Even our best rules of thumb, when dealing with humans, “will be indexed for a particular time and subject to broad levels of uncertainty.” Physical theory, on the other hand, yields standardized descriptions of physical events, given in language amenable to law (107–8).

To get at the particularity and irregularity of human religious experiences, Davis recommends a pragmatist approach. By pragmatism, Davis means especially the pragmatism of Peirce, but he also enlists a number of other “pragmatist” thinkers that his readers may or may not easily...