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(Re)Connecting Analytic Philosophy and Empirical Research: The Example of Ritual Speech Acts and Religious Collectivities

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Abstract

In this paper, I demonstrate how philosophical insights and empirical research on the use of religious language can be fruitfully combined to tackle issues regarding the ontology of religious collectivities and the agency of group actors. To do so, I introduce a philosophical framework that draws on speech act theory and recent advances in the fields of collective intentionality and social ontology, with particular attention paid to the work of Raimo Tuomela. Against this backdrop, I discuss a brief case study based on my fieldwork among Jehovah’s Witnesses in Switzerland and Germany. In particular, I call attention to the structure of the Witnesses’ ritual interactions and to the types of speech acts that are performed in their congregational settings. I argue that the communicative framework provided by these rituals is particularly suited to the creation of genuine group intentions that cannot be reduced to the private intentions of the individual group members. In conclusion, I argue that most of the language used in religious contexts does not deviate much from everyday language; however, particular ritual settings can elicit performative effects and constitute new social realities that can have a concrete impact on both individuals and religious groups.

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Notes

  1. Reasons of space allow me to present only a short summary of my position; an exhaustive discussion will be available in Rota (in preparation). I am thankful to Jens Schlieter and to the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

  2. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, a chiliastic Christian community, was founded in the 1870s by Charles T. Russell (1852–1916). Today, this growing global denomination has more than eight million active members (see Chryssides, 2016). The empirical data presented here form part of a 3-year SNSF research project (2014–2017) that I co-directed with Oliver Krüger at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. The data were collected in seventeen long-format semi-structured interviews with Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany and Switzerland and a quantitative pen-and-pencil survey of four Swiss congregations (N = 183). In line with institutional guidelines and conventional ethical guidelines in the social sciences, all interview excerpts are presented here in anonymized form.

  3. It is worth mentioning that influential philosophers like Michael Bratman also advance conceptually reductivist accounts of collective intentionality as a non-summative network of interlocking personal intentions (see Bratman, 1993, 2014).

  4. In this context, the term ‘linguistic’ extends to ‘non-linguistic communication of the sort which only linguistic practitioners can communicate non-linguistically’ (Schmid, 2012: 359; see also Habermas, 1981).

  5. Margaret Gilbert advances a different philosophical framework with similar consequences for empirical research on collective intentions (e.g., Gilbert, 1989, 1996, 2003). While reasons of space preclude further elaboration of her alternative approach here, I discuss her ideas and their practical application elsewhere (Rota, 2019).

  6. In his work, Tuomela constructs a complex typology of collective intentions, which I cannot discuss here. My focus will be on we-mode collective intentions, which Tuomela describes as ‘full-blown’ collective intentions.

  7. In her work on collective intentions, philosopher Margaret Gilbert comes to a similar conclusion, which she calls the ‘disjunction criterion’ of shared intentionality (see Gilbert, 2009).

  8. Ideally, we can imagine the following practical syllogism playing out in the reasoning of the speaker: (1) ‘We intend to distribute the magazines’; (2) ‘I am one of us’; (3) ‘I will do my part in distributing the magazines.’ Indeed, the last sentence of the paragraph already suggests how the individual agent can begin to contribute to the collective goal. For a discussion of the relationship between collective intentions and individual participatory intentions, see Tuomela and Miller (1988).

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  1. Institute for the Science of Religion, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Andrea Rota

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Rota, A. (Re)Connecting Analytic Philosophy and Empirical Research: The Example of Ritual Speech Acts and Religious Collectivities. SOPHIA 61, 79–92 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00899-5

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