Pragmatic Inquiry and Religious Communities: Charles Peirce, Signs, and Inhabited Experiments by Brandon Daniel-Hughes (review)

What does it mean to understand religious traditions most fundamentally as communities of inquiry? This is the question raised by Brandon Daniel-Hughes' Pragmatic Inquiry and Religious Communities, which uses Peirce's writings on inquiry to frame religious traditions as "large-scale hypotheses, expressed in religious symbols, narratives, and rituals that work to signify reality…by cultivating beliefs and rules for action that may truly indicate the real world and orient believers with it by guiding them into more harmonious relations with one another and their environments" (p. 23). Academic interest in Peirce and religion has been steady for several decades, and has perhaps even grown in recent years. Such interest extends at least as far back as the work of Robert C. Neville, Michael Raposa, Robert Corrington, or Peter Ochs, also encompassing such younger figures as Annette Ejsing and Leon Niemoczynski. Daniel-Hughes' book is a worthy contribution to this discourse.

It helps to summarize the development of the book's argument across its six chapters. The book's first two chapters are its most careful in terms of the Peircean source material. Daniel-Hughes spends Chapter 1 unpacking Peirce's theory of inquiry. A highlight of the first chapter is a lucid exposition of "The Fixation of Belief," which, in spite of this being one of Peirce's best-known writings, feels fresh in the way in which Daniel-Hughes reframes inquiry as a communal as well as individual pursuit. Specifically, Daniel-Hughes uses Peirce's theory of inquiry to get at the insider/outsider issue regarding religion, showing how one can "toggle" between first-person and third-person perspectives for religious experience. As he puts it:

Peirce is often praised for calling attention to the first-person perspective and noting that inquiry is always a contextual affair, thereby giving the lie to any context-neutral or "God's-eye view" theory of inquiry. But we misread Peirce if we take him to suggest that we are, so to speak, trapped in a cycle of perpetually unreflective inquiry… We can… inquire into how best to inquire, and this sort of inquiry entails taking up the third-person philosopher's point of view and coming to see ourselves and our habits of inquiry as both agents and objects of inquiry. The particular genius of Peirce's theory of inquiry is that it recommends developing intelligent habits of toggling between the two perspectives when appropriate.

(P.22)

What such toggling gets us, Daniel-Hughes suggests, is the ability to extend naturalistic inquiry into the interpretive habits of religious communities to reveal how "beliefs that we inhabit are not first principles or certain foundations; they are a biologically and socially evolved collection of overlapping and sometimes contradictory forms, behaviors, and customs that we have inherited from our environments, our ancestors, our cultures, and our earlier selves" (p. 15). Chapter 2 builds from Peirce's theory of inquiry to develop a fourfold taxonomy for inquiry rendered as a Cartesian graph, with the horizontal axis of the graph charting inquiry in terms of risk and the vertical axis in terms of self-control. This graph establishes at least two claims that later emerge as central to the book's arguments. The first is that scientific and religious forms of inquiry are continuous; the second is that religious inquiry contains both progressive and conservative elements.

Chapters 3 and 4 develop from this basis for inquiry a robust exploration of how religions-as-inquiry structure other types of hypotheses. For example, Daniel-Hughes argues that religious inquiry is fundamentally communal in nature, which is a claim for which Peirce's texts offer plenty of support. Two distinctions emerge here as particularly important. The first distinction is between good and bad forms of religious inquiry. At the risks of oversimplification, good religious inquiry draws from indigenous sources of self-correction and points toward harmony...