Abstract
The methodology implicit in empirically grounded social scientific studies of religion naturally allies with forms of semantic holism. However, a well known argument which questions whether holism in general is consistent with the fact that languages are learnable can be extended into an epistemological one which questions whether holism is consistent with an empirical methodology. In other words, there is question whether holism, in fact, makes social science possible. I diagnose the assumptions on which that objection rests, pointing out that they are not necessary for semantic holism per se. I argue that a form of semantic holism along the lines advocated by W. V. O. Quine and Donald Davidson can avoid the objection. Moreover, when seen in this light, it has the resources to withstand an even deeper methodological problem. In so doing, though, several important but overlooked implications for the study of religion emerge.
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Notes
The objection might appear opaque and weak to those not particularly versed or interested in the intricacies and nuances of philosophical semantics. Social scientists, including scholars of religion, may not immediately see its relevance for their inquiries. I beg such readers to nonetheless persevere; again my main interest is not in defeating the argument per se but rather in drawing conclusions from it about the more specific forms which semantic holism must take. It is those forms which will have important methodological implications for social science.
Recall Wittgenstein’s example of the language that contains just four expressions: “block”, “pillar”, “slab”, and “beam” (Wittgenstein 1972, #2).
One of the anonymous referees suggests that the learnability objection rests on an unwarranted conception of the process of language acquisition “that looks like a programmer dumping a completed program into memory.” The analogy is apt given that Fodor’s real fear of holism is the difficulty it poses to the idea of mental content within the cognitive science program (Fodor 1987). The referee points out that once more reasonable theories of language acquisition are considered, especially those that include processes of socialization, the objection simply withers away. While I largely agree, my interests are not in defeating the learnability objection per se, but rather to use it to bring out a set of considerations instrumental in deepening our understanding of the methodological implications of holism for the study of religion. In the context of this article, ‘learnable’ and ‘learnability’ refer to the constraints needed to be satisfied in order for a linguistic expression to be grasped, not to the actual empirical processes of such mastery. For example, much research has been conducted into the important differences between first- and second-language learning, but from a purely semantic point of view there should be no differences in the semantic contents of tokens being used by first- and second-language users. Dresner (2002) argues that semantic holism is consistent with the empirical research on first-language acquisition.
There is a tendency in the literature to define holism and its rivals in terms of what each takes to be the smallest unit of semantic significance. Fodor and LePore, for example, describe the topic of their Holism; A Shopper’s Guide as follows: “This is a book about holism about meaning; roughly, its about the doctrine that only whole languages or whole theories or whole belief systems really have meanings, so that the meanings of smaller units—words, thoughts, and the like—are merely derivative” (Fodor and LePore 1992, p. x). This as an unfair characterization, and one not forced by the basic holistic thesis that the meaning of one expression necessarily leans on the meanings of others. To be fair, though, Fodor and LePore offer such a characterization as the ‘official’ version of holism though the spectre of the whole-of-language as the indivisible unit of holistic meaning haunts much of their discussion.
We must be careful to keep what I am calling “meaning realism” distinct from what Dummett calls “semantic realism” (Dummett 1978, 1991). Dummett’s semantic realism is the thesis that “every proposition, of the kind under dispute, is determinately either true or false” (Dummett 1991, p. 9); in other words, as tantamount to an unrestricted adoption of the principle of bivalence. Famously, he argues that the concept of truth needed to underwrite semantic realism would be either unlearnable or else fail to be fully mastered in linguistic usage, and so is untenable. In its place he adopts semantic antirealism in the form of holding that a proposition’s meaning lies in its verification- rather than its truth-conditions. Still, by regarding verification-conditions as genuine and determinate properties of propositions, he counts as a meaning realist in my sense. See Gardiner (2000) for elaboration and critique of Dummett’s position.
The lowest limit, I suppose, would be grasp of at least one other sentence. Part of Fodor and LePore’s (1992) challenge is whether even this lowest-of-limits is required for language learnability.
My thanks to one of the anonymous referees for pointing out the strong presence of this type of approach in the study of religion. This point can be expanded from the Religious Studies case to include others whose methodology relies a great deal on textual analysis, most obviously History and Literary Studies. While appreciation of the relevance of theories of meaning are relatively nascent in the social sciences in general and the study of religion in particular, it is much more developed there than in the humanities. See (Dasenbrock 1993, 1999; Davidson 1993) for discussion of the intersection of Davidsonian and literary theory.
Robert Yelle (2012) employs this basic semiotic principle in interesting ways in investigating various religious phenomena.
This is not to say that semantics is wholly independent of syntax; consider the intuitive differences between “John eats only apples” and “Only John eats apples”. See Gardiner (2014) for discussion of the relations between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics as informed by recent work in the philosophy of language.
See Engler and Gardiner (forthcoming) for further discussion of the impact of these conceptions of translation/interpretation on the study of religion. For ease of presentation in the following, I will prefer the terms ‘interpretation’ and ‘interpretability’ over those of ‘translation’ and ‘translatability’.
Quine sees this as necessitated by the general assumption of naturalism (e.g., Quine 1960). David Lewis explores this notion in more detail, stipulating that whatever evidence can be garnered for interpreting another’s speech must be entirely derived from knowledge of the speaker “as a physical system” (Lewis 1974).
My thanks to both anonymous referees for stressing the importance of this point and the need to clarify it.
G. Scott Davis objects to the Cognitive Science of Religion on the grounds that the bodily movements which CSR is capable of describing simply cannot be intentional, i.e., behavioral, ones (Davis 2012, Ch. 5).
The Voynich manuscript provides an interesting confirming instance. It consists of some 240 vellum pages carbon dated to the fifteenth century containing what looks undeniably like some sort of alphabetic writing in an unknown language. The individual symbols have been organized into a ‘glyphset’, and a clear set of grammatical rules for their use seems evident. However, the manuscript has resisted all attempts to ‘translate’ it into meaningful language. Some scholars have suggested that this is so because, despite the syntactical appearance of language, it expresses no genuine semantic content. In other words, its structural similarity to genuine books lends presumption to its being a book, and hence the product of intentional linguistic behavior on the part of some author or authors. Resistance to interpretation is taken by some as evidence that it is not such a product. In this case, though, even the skeptics regard it as an output of some sort of intentional behavior, such as deception, just not a linguistic one.
Distributed approaches to cognition have taken this a step further with the notion of that cognition can be ‘off-loaded’ onto external physical objects. Kevin Schilbrack employs these approaches in the study of religion, suggesting that religious objects and practices can themselves be understood as “physical aids [that] become an extension of one’s cognitive abilities”, and that religious social practices can be seen as a form of cognition which “‘leaks’ out of the head and onto the extra-cranial environment” (Schilbrack 2014, p. 40).
This form of meaning antirealism does not collapse into an incoherent meaning relativism, as there will be innumerably many provably incorrect proposed interpretations. Neither does it collapse into meaning nihilism (Malpas 1992).
One of the anonymous referees noted that Davidson’s thesis of the primacy of the idiolect over the dialect (Davidson 1986)—i.e., that there are no such things as ‘languages’ in the sense of a communal property governed by a codifiable set of social conventions—alone suffices to guarantee his form of holism is immune from the learnability objection. While I am inclined to agree, making the full case for this, including defending the thesis against its considerable controversy, would require an article all on its own.
Quine defined an observation sentence loosely as an “occasion” sentence whose “stimulus meaning” displays a high degree of constancy from speaker to speaker (Quine 1960, p. 43). In other words, for Quine, observation is understood and individuated on the basis of semantic constraints. In an article written late in his career, Davidson talked about the primacy of what he called ‘perception sentences’—i.e., sentences whose content are “given by the situations which stir us to accept or reject them” (Davidson 2005). He argued, however, that nonetheless grasping a perception sentence requires prior theory: “Even a simple sentence like ‘There’s a spoon’ if understood requires knowledge of what spoons are for, that they are persistent physical objects, and so on” (Davidson 2005).
Terry F. Godlove exploits this idea in arguing that Kant is ultimately led in the Critique of Practical Reason to reject that any content can be given to the concept of God, a much more radical stance than he takes in the Transcendental Ideal of the Critique of Pure Reason. All that is left for the concept, Godlove explains on behalf of Kant, is its role in grounding the possibility of morality “in the hope that one day happiness will be apportioned to virtue” (Godlove 2014, p. 165).
If there were different types of meaning, then there would have to be a sense of ‘meaning’ which was more basic than these. Davidson’s project is predicated upon there being a number of bedrock concepts, such as meaning and truth, through which all other concepts are understood.
This trajectory is not limited to the logical positivists. In the case of religion, Karl Marx argued that such phenomena are to be explained as an opiate of the masses while for Sigmund Freud they are to be explained as an infantile need for a strong father figure; Emile Durkheim argued that god-talk was really disguised society-talk. There is currently a debate in religious studies concerning whether belief is a useful theoretical category for investigating religious phenomena at all. Some of it rests on a general worry about the appropriateness of folk-psychological concepts, but a good deal of it involves aspects that seem unique to beliefs categorized as religious. Part of the anti-belief argument is that either religious beliefs are really about ordinary mundane things, in which case they are explanatorily unnecessary, or else they are about things no empirical investigator can get at, in which case they are, at best, useless and, at worst, illusory. For a nice introduction to that debate, see (Godlove 1989a, 1994, 2002).
This distinction is analogous to one Fodor and LePore draw between being “hidden in practice” and “hidden in principle” (Fodor and LePore 1992, p. 80 ff). Although their position is adversarial to holism, they provide thought-provoking reflection on what they call the “nothing is hidden” thesis on whose plausibility they see Davidsonian holism as standing or falling. That thesis asserts the primacy of radical interpretation which outlaws the interpreter from bringing any prior semantic knowledge to acts of interpretation. Any evidence available to the radical interpreter, therefore, must be limited to what is open to view (e.g., public or observationally accessible) during the process of interpretation. Their critique questions whether “normal” interpretation presupposes the possibility of the radical variety. Time and space prevent me from further discussion, except to say that it strikes me that it question-beggingly presupposes some form of semantic realism.
Almost nothing has been written on this problem. For a notable exception, see (Godlove 1989b).
For a sample of semantically centered discussions of the ‘insider/outsider’ problem, see (Day 2004; Jensen 2011; Gardiner and Engler 2012). Jeppe Sinding Jensen (2014) makes much use of a distinction between ‘i-religion’ and ‘e-religion’, arguing for ‘e-religion’ having a privileged position for the scholar.
Thanks again to one of the anonymous referees for drawing this connection.
See (Schilbrack 2014) for an argument that convergence on adherents’ self-understanding forms the bedrock of interpretative success in the study of religion.
This is an implicit assumption common to much work in the Cognitive Science of Religion. See (Davis 2012, Chap. 5; Gardiner and Engler , forthcoming) for semantic critiques.
Godlove points out that first person authority with respect to religious discourse is often questioned by scholars of religion, and his analysis of why it is less secure in such contexts as opposed to more concrete discourse plays an important role in his discussion of the nature and use of “frameworks” within theories of religion. See his (Godlove 1989a, 1992, 1999).
Davidson admits that the ‘core/suburb’ distinction is a bit difficult to draw within the non-hierarchical spirit of holism. See Braver (2011) for critical reflection on this point. My notion of a holistically sensitive ‘semantic privilege’ goes a long way towards drawing that distinction.
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2011 meeting of the Western Canadian Philosophical Association and the 2012 meeting of the Canadian Philosophical Association. I would like to thank all participants for their insightful and helpful comments. I would also like to thank my frequent partner in matters religious and semantic, Steven Engler, for inspiring, clarifying, and enhancing the central arguments. It has gone through one round of review for the International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion resulting in two anonymous referees’ reports and a ’revise and resubmit’ decision. The original submission was substantially reworked to address concerns expressed by the referees. I would like to thank them for their insightful comments; this article is considerably stronger as a result.
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Gardiner, M.Q. Semantic holism and methodological constraints in the study of religion. Int J Philos Relig 79, 281–299 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-015-9516-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-015-9516-3