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

The aim of Brandon Daniel-Hughes’s book is to explore the following provocative hypothesis: religious communities are communities of inquiry. As suggested by the title, the writings of C. S. Peirce (1839–1914) provide the primary resources and rationale for this claim; his ideas on belief, habit, community, continuity, pragmatism, semiotics, and inquiry are deeply constitutive of the project. And for the most part, Daniel-Hughes’s integration produces a compelling read; however, that is not always the case, especially concerning the notion of religious inquiry’s “primary referent” (xiv). Nonetheless, Daniel-Hughes brings forth a fascinating and fecund interpretation of religious practice that will be valuable to scholars of religion with interests in pragmatism, philosophy of science, and naturalism.

Chapters 1 to 3 concern Peircean viewpoints on inquiry to make intelligible the hypothesis. Chapter 1 deals with inquiry’s doxastic nature: religious traditions are “large-scale inquiries” into the real world engaged in a continuous flow of “belief-doubt-belief cycles” (22), and their members are so invested in their beliefs that they function as “embodied hypotheses and living experiments” (23). Chapter 2 locates religious communities within a high control / high risk mode of inquiry that is most relevantly understood as gradual investigation into the “vital matters” of practical life (47). As a result, they engage the world with “inefficient, risk-averse, and maximally self-controlled” (50) care, which imbues them with their conservative character. Chapter 3 focuses on how selves are “developmental teleologies” (63) that are continuous with their “scaled up” analogues: communities (68). That continuity ends up serving a view of inquiry that aims at the long-run preservation of its own “working harmony of habits” (87), which makes “true” interpretations those that will maintain the harmony of whatever habits enable it to engage the world and produce enduring beliefs (94–95).

The remainder of the book concerns the consequent features of the synthesis of the Peircean framework with religious communities. In chapter 4, religion is established as that inquiry that is attentive to the grounding of persons, communities, and the world itself in ultimacy, that is, following Robert Neville, the entirely indeterminate and absolute nothingness that contextualizes all determinate things (122–23). As such, ultimacy cannot be a subject of inquiry or properly engaged, which means that religious interpretation is always about some reflection on “the values of determinate reality” resulting from our “encounter” with ultimacy (123). In other words, as ultimacy provides no “corrective feedback” to our inquiry, our existential questions are refracted back upon the world of which we are a part (124).

Chapter 5 details the characteristics of “venerable” (150) religious traditions in their role as inquiring communities. First, those traditions enable inquiry by instilling in their members vital and embodied beliefs and habits that promote the longevity and primacy of inquiry in the social fabric of a community’s environment (138–39). Second, they cultivate and conserve inquiry by serving as “loci of communal common sense” (149); that is, the traditions foster a form of largely unconscious, practical reasoning that makes gradual “progress toward ultimate orientation” (150). Third, the traditions utilize a variety of vague signs that they claim reveal ultimacy (160). Due to their vagueness, these signs may be interpreted, adapted, and determined in myriad ways for continuous inquiry (159). Finally, venerable religious traditions self-correct and self-control inquiry by effecting “inefficient” strategies to develop their existing sign networks, a process Daniel-Hughes calls “reformaintenance” (167).

Chapter 6 sums up religious inquiry from the viewpoint of Peirce’s semiotic triad of sign-vehicle, object, and interpretant. From the perspective of the sign-vehicle (or material sign), adopting the signs of a religious community (“semiotic orthodoxy”) means to be both habituated into the sign-networks of the religion to the degree that those habits are instinctual to its members (“indoctrination”) and charged with improving upon those signs when genuine doubt...