Religion and Cognition

A Reader

D. Jason Slone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134941940
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The cognitive science of religion examines the mental processes that govern religious belief and behaviour. It offers a fresh and exciting approach to the scientific study of religion. 'Religion and Cognition' brings together key essays which outline the theory and illustrate this with experimental case material. The central topics in this new critical field of research are all addressed: meta-theoretical arguments for cognitive explanations of religion; theoretical models of cognition employed in the cognitive science of religion; prominent cognitive theories of religion; methods used to gather data and test theories; and experimental findings by cognitive scientists of religion.

Part I

1
Interpretation and Explanation: Problems and Promise in the Study of Religion*

E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley

Symbolic-cultural systems are a puzzlement. As forms of thought and types of behavior they seem bizarre. Why do the Dorze of Ethiopia say that the leopard is a Christian animal which observes the fast days of the Orthodox church while protecting their goats from marauding leopards on those same fast days? Why do the Yoruba of Nigeria think that marks on a divining board that a diviner makes and reads simultaneously disclose and determine their future? Why does a marriageable Zulu male regard it as more important to swallow a foul-tasting potion to become attractive to an eligible young woman of his clan than simply relying on special adornment? Why do some Christians assert that bread and wine, once consecrated, become the body and blood of Jesus Christ?

Answering questions such as these requires metatheoretical, theoretical, and substantive reflection. In this chapter we defend two crucial metatheoretical theses. The first is that interpretive and explanatory endeavors need not be antagonistic and, in fact, should interact in the study of symbolic-cultural systems. The second is that the competence approach to theorizing offers a means for developing empirically tractable theories of participants' representations of such systems.

The continuing vigorous debate among social scientists and humanists about the roles that interpretation and explanation play in the analysis of human affairs (and the extremeness of the positions that some adopt) should rapidly eliminate any doubt about the importance of this metatheoretical question for inquiries into symbolic-cultural systems. Most scholars agree that this issue is both serious and unavoidable. They differ widely, however, not only in their views of the relationships between interpretation and explanation, but also about the contents of the terms. Still, most do agree that interpretation involves questions of meaning and that explanation concerns causal relations (in some sense).

Proponents of the extreme positions maintain either that symbolic-cultural systems are only susceptible to interpretation (and not explanation) or that they are susceptible to explanation (and interpretation is irrelevant). The language they use frequently frames the pertinent issues in exclusivistic terms. On the one hand, scientistic thinkers (influenced by logical empiricism) read interpretive approaches as unduly subjective and personal, as speculations without foundation, and as deflecting inquiry from its true purposes—which are to produce law-like causal explanations of human behavior. On the other hand, hermeneuticists regard such scientistic views both as mechanistic (or "reductionistic") descriptions which are insensitive to the role that the investigator's subjectivity, values, and biases play in the pursuit of knowledge and as naive approaches which fail to appreciate the importance of questions of meaning for our understanding of human life and thought. The issue separating these feuding factions is whether or not the subject matter of the human sciences is privileged, hence requiring special categories and methods. Those of scientistic bent argue that no subject matter is privileged, that science is a unified enterprise, and that the only kind of knowledge worth pursuing is that which is produced by the kinds of methods the physical sciences employ. Those with hermeneutic inclinations fight for a privileged status for both subject matter and method and accuse those of scientistic bent of physics envy.

While the appeal to a privileged status for method and subject matter in the human sciences is widespread, it is particularly strong in the thought of those scholars involved in the study of religion and in the history of religions in particular. That field manifests a serious imbalance in favor of interpretation over explanation. For example, Eliade (1963, xiii) says:

All religious phenomenon will only be recognized as such if it is grasped at its own level, that is to say, if it is studied as something religious. To try to grasp the essence of such a phenomenon by means of physiology, psychology, sociology, economics, linguistics, art or any other study is false; it misses the one unique and irreducible element in it—the element of the sacred.

Eliade, here, is asserting that religious phenomena are sui generis and that they can be "grasped" (understood, interpreted) only if we grant to the category of "the sacred" a unique and irreducible status. From this point of view, explanatory theory, as developed in the social sciences, simply misses the crucial point, namely, that "the sacred" is accessible only by special (interpretive) techniques. In other words, the privileged status of the subject matter requires a special method—hermeneutics.

Eliade's protectionism is not an isolated case. The theologian Rudolf Otto (1958, 8), who had a profound influence on the development of the history of religions as a separate discipline, claimed:

The reader is invited to direct his mind to a moment of deeply-felt religious experience, as little as possible qualified by other forms of consciousness. Whoever cannot do this, whoever knows no such moments in his experience, is requested to read no farther; for it is not easy to discuss questions of religious psychology with one who can recollect the emotions of his adolescence, the discomforts of indigestion, or say, social feelings, but cannot recall any intrinsically religious feelings.

From Otto's point of view, interpretation of religious phenomena not only excludes explanation but both presumes and requires a prior religious experience. Hans Penner (1986) has argued that Otto's appeal to a privileged status for religious experience is theologically motivated and continues to be an unacknowledged assumption in methodological discussions in the history of religions—even when it is explicitly denied!

Examples such as these from the field of the history of religions could be multiplied but would serve little purpose. Our goal is not to excoriate historians of religions but to show that acknowledging the issues which preoccupy them does not require defending the anti-scientific positions most adopt. In fact, we would be derelict in our duty if we did not also acknowledge that the pervasive emphasis on interpretation in the history of religions has encouraged deep sensitivity to the semantic complexities of religious systems and to the diversity and richness of religious forms of experience. Unfortunately, its neglect of explanation has left it bereft of systematic power and prone to highly individualist accounts of religious phenomena.

In addition to historians of religions, many scholars in the larger world of the social sciences and the humanities have taken the development of such sensitivities to the complexities of symbolic-cultural systems as a principled ground for preferring interpretation over explanation. Their views are typically rooted not, as in the history of religions, in claims about the privileged status of "the hole" or "the sacred," but in more extravagant claims about the autonomy of human behavior generally. Their view is that symbolic-cultural systems by their very nature require interpretive rather than explanatory approaches.

By contrast we hold that interpretation and explanation are complementary, and, in light of the imbalance within the study of religion in favor of interpretation that we wish to redress, the proposal of explanatory theories is more likely to advance our knowledge currently. In fact, a number of theoretical approaches are worthy of further attention. Their mere existence belies claims to the effect that plausible theories of religion are impossible.

In the next section we shall first describe the most prominent positions that have been advanced in the relevant literature concerning the relationship between interpretation and explanation. We think that both scientistic and hermeneutic hegemonists are wrong for claiming that the choices are between explanation and interpretation. Nor do we think that explanation is subordinate to interpretation. A more balanced position is not only possible but desirable.

Explanation and Interpretation: Three Accounts

When we are dealing with human subjects, their forms of thought, their types of practice, what are the respective roles of explanation and interpretation, however finely or coarsely they are distinguished? We think that a careful analysis of the debate discloses three views about how they are related. These are the actually occurring options in the literature as opposed to the much larger number of logically possible positions. The first are the exclusive positions to which we have already referred. Both hold that interpretation and explanation exclude one another. Their differences concern which of the two they favor. The second is the inclusive which maintains that explanation is and must be subordinated to interpretation. Inclusivists hold that the enterprise of interpretation always encapsulates explanatory pursuits. The third, which we shall defend, is the interactive. It proposes that interpretation and explanation inform each other. Novel interpretations employ the categories of theories already in place, whereas novel explanations depend upon the discovery of new theories which, in turn, depends upon the sort of reorganization of knowledge that interpretive pursuits involve. On the interactive view these two processes complement one another. We shall discuss each of these positions in order.

Exclusivism

The exclusivist positions are both hegemonistic views. Exclusivism takes two forms, one emphasizing the centrality of explanation, the other the centrality of interpretation. The first group of exclusivists, consisting of behavioral psychologists, sociobiologists, and others, holds that the only methods for systematic inquiry are the methods of the natural sciences. (See, for example, Skinner 1953, 87-90 and Rosenberg 1980.) The second, which focuses on interpretation exclusively, includes such post-modernist philosophers as Rorty (1982, 199) and holds that all inquiry is ultimately interpretive.

(1) For the first group explanation excludes interpretation because human thought and behavior should be studied, like anything else in the world, according to the strict canons of scientific investigation modeled after inquiry in the physical sciences. Interpretation is irrelevant, if not impossible, for such purposes. Explanation is simply scientific explanation. On this exclusivist view, if the human sciences aspire to be sciences at all, then they should be modeled after the physical sciences. Both should search for causal laws which describe the behavior of the objects in their respective domains. Interpretive factors simply get in the way and introduce needless obscurities. For example, concerns with subjectivity or intentionality only interfere with scientific progress (Rosenberg 1980).

This position was most forcefully developed in the heyday of the logical empiricist philosophy of science. However, its influence has persisted. Richard Rudner's discussion (1966) of the philosophy of social science is a fitting illustration. Rudner maintained that the structure of theories in the study of social and cultural systems should mirror the idealized accounts of theories in the physical sciences that earlier logical empiricists had offered. For Rudner, understanding social worlds (just as understanding the natural world) is essentially a consequence of formulating causal explanations.

More recently, Adolf Grunbaum (1984) has taken up this banner in his attack on recent hermeneutical reinterpretations of Freud by Habermas, Ricoeur, and Klein. For instance, Ricoeur, according to Grunbaum, reduces the object of psychoanalytic theory to the verbal transactions between psychoanalyst and patient and then argues that such verbal transactions require interpretive rather than explanatory approaches. Ricoeur, for example, says: "There are no 'facts' nor any observation of 'facts' in psychoanalysis but rather the interpretation of a narrated history" (1974, 186). Grunbaum argues that such a hermeneutic explication of psychoanalysis as interpretation rather than explanation conforms neither to the intention of Freud nor to the logical structure of his arguments. He argues that psychoanalysis, according to Freud, has the status of a natural science, in virtue of the fact that on Freud's view psychoanalysis proposes law-like generalizations to explain human behavior. Ironically, Grunbaum salvages the explanatory intent of Freudian psychoanalysis in order to scuttle it on different grounds, namely its "genuine epistemic defects, which are often quite subtle" (1984, xii) but which boil down to psychoanalysis' masking a crucial ambiguity about the role that suggestion plays in the psychoanalyst–patient relationship. Clearly, from Grunbaum's point of view, natural science is fundamentally explanatory and includes interpretive elements only incidentally. If psychoanalysis is to be a social science, then it should be modeled upon the natural sciences. There is no need to introduce interpretive categories.

What should be noted in this brand of exclusivism is how hermeneuticists such as Ricoeur play right into the hands of the scientistic exclusivists by acknowledging the right of the latter to establish the form and limits of explanation. For example, it is clear from the quotation taken from Ricoeur's work that he concedes to the logical empiricist the "observation of facts" which he then contrasts with narrative interpretation. He attempts to purchase autonomy for interpretation at the expense of its ability to contribute to explanation. Not surprisingly, as we shall see next, one form of exclusivism breeds another. Scientistic exclusivism leads to the hermeneutic variety, because it so limits acceptable subject matters and methods that it forces dissenters in response to focus upon just those features of human experience that extreme scientism ignores, such as the affective, the personal, the subjective, the meaningful, the valuable, and the imaginative, to name the most important.

(2) For the second group interpretation excludes the possibility of explaining human behavior, because all inquiry about human life and thought occurs within the ineliminable frameworks of values and subjectivity. This version of the exclusivity thesis is the mirror image of the first position and was partially developed in response to it. In this view human beings are subjects not objects; therefore we should explicate the meaning of their thoughts and actions, rather than the alleged causal factors that account for their behavior. Human science reveals its differences from natural science by paying attention to a world of meanings rather than a system of causes. Its approach must be semiotic rather than nomological.

While such a semiotic approach has many exemplars in the human sciences (for example, Lesche 19...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Religion and Cognition: An Introduction
• PART I
• PART II
• Index of Authors
• Index of Subjects