The end

This Friday I will be defending my PhD thesis at the University of Southern Denmark (official notice here in Danish). So now seems to be a good time to end this blog.

On the ‘politics of defining religion’

That there is such as thing as the ‘politics of defining religion’ is a fact. Definitions of religion are often used as political tools in disputes over economic privileges, public estimation, and legal rights. The question is how this bears on the problem of providing a definition of religion. Some think that the lesson to be learned is that scholars and lay people alike are social actors and that, for this reason, a definition of religion is never objective and reliable. There are, however, reasons to resist this conclusion.

First, it should be noted that even if it is a fact that there are many examples of politically motivated definitions, it does not follow that all definitions are politically motivated. This is of course unless one thinks that every act is a political act or something to that effect—but even so there could be room for degrees and qualifications so that, for instance, some definitions (in addition to the political motivation) are also informed by academic research and standards.

Secondly, the basic disagreement in ‘politics of defining religion’ is not about defining religion, but concerns distribution of privileges and goods. Because arguably if definitions are politically motivated, this must mean that they are ‘tailored’ to suit a specific agenda. So if someone is in opposition to a specific new religious movement such as Scientology, this political preference is prior to the attempt to provide an articulation of a demarcation. For instance, a criterion of ‘financial transparency’ is obviously designed to out rule Scientology—presumably the advocates do not revise their categorization of the Roman Catholic Church even if they on reflection come to believe that such transparency fails to apply. But if this is the general pattern in the politics of defining religion—that first comes the distrust and the wish to exclude, then comes the search for reasons to back one’s politics—then it appears that the heart of the disagreement in the politics of defining religion is in fact not definitions of religion, but rather political questions about which religions are desirable and should have a share in the economical and other privileges of a society.

The recognition of political issues behind what appears to be disagreements over the definition of religion is also relevant to the difficulties in the legal system. If the letter of the law is concerned with rights of religions, then lawsuits have to decide what counts as religion. But it may well be speculated that the purpose or spirit of the law is really not to secure rights and privileges to religions as such, but to promote the interests of religions which are useful to community. Historically, religion was simply assumed to be something benevolent and useful to community, and so the political task of formulating principles of which kinds of religions are of value has not been brought into focus.

So, instead of remaining satisfied that religions should have certain privileges qua religions, legislators could be called upon to consider openly whether all religions should have these privileges just because they are religions or whether something else is more politically desirable. This would no doubt prove a highly controversial political matter, but it would probably help deflate the politics of defining religion somewhat.

About (not) being religious about something

I think I have discovered an interesting asymmetry in relation to the expressions ‘being religious about’ and ‘not being religious about’:

The positive variant, such as ‘Ann is religious about her garden’, means that Ann is very careful and conscientious about it because it is very important to her. In contrast, the negative variant, such as ‘Bill is not religious about Linux’, means that although Bill thinks Linux a terrific operating system, he is not dogmatic in his attitude; he agrees it is in principle possible to convince him there is a better one (even if he does not consider this a likely scenario).*

But whereas ‘being religious about’ can sometimes mean ‘being dogmatic about’ (instead of ‘being conscientious about’), ‘not being religious about’ only means ‘not being dogmatic’ and not ‘not being conscientious about’ (on the contrary, stating that one is not being religious about something is actually a way of saying it is highly important).

So there is a difference in sense between ‘being religious about’ and ‘~ not being religious about’, and I think this difference reveals something interesting about the way religion is normally conceived: namely that religious beliefs are regarded as sort of ‘immune’. The idea is that religious beliefs are assumed not to yield, even to what appears to be a far superior argument (and maybe also that the believer is fully aware of this and possibly considers it a mark of distinction).

If I am right, this shows that the ordinary way of seeing religion goes against the common philosophical misconception that religious beliefs are a purely intellectual matter.


* Note that only the negative variant is viable in Danish.

On religion and social kinds

Defining religion has led me to a number of sub-discussions. One of these is the discussion about social kinds, and this is how I see this issue presently:

By ‘social kinds’ I wish to refer to kinds that involve human purposes or activities. Accordingly, social kinds are not just social kinds: there are several sub-categories, and it must be considered whether different definitional strategies are needed regarding these sub-categories. As far as I can judge, there is no fixed terminology and no customary way of demarcating or distinguishing between the social kinds. For this reason, and because of the complexity of the matter, it is impossible to give a complete overview over the issue here. Instead, I will focus on three types of social kinds (‘institutional kinds’, ‘artifactual kinds’, and ‘cultural kinds’) and indicate what distinguish them ontologically and conceptually and why the distinctions matter to defining social kinds.

A considerable amount of the attention on social ontology has been devoted to matters relating to collective intentionality. This approach has been particularly influential in discussions about institutional kinds (such as money, presidents, contracts etc.) which plausibly rely on collective intentions. Money, for instance, ceases to exist if people do not recognize it as such, and the reason for this is that institutional and artifactual kinds are causally dependent on being created (and sustained) intentionally.

Defining artifactual kinds (such as knife, chair, umbrella etc.) have often been considered philosophically problematic (most notably in Wittgenstein). Part of the reason is that although artifacts are physical objects, they cannot be treated in the same way as natural kinds. In contrast, they admit of multiple realization in terms of both materials, shapes and composition (think of the difference between a bean bag chair and wooden chair). An obvious alternative way of defining them is the through their function, i.e. what they are made for or (can be) used for. The view can be substantiated by the fact that we tend to see purpose as the standard of evaluation (e.g. the knife is meant for cutting – the good knife cuts well).

Some, however, have objected to functional definitions that, for instance, a broken clock is still a clock, that a table does not turn into a chair even if it is used for sitting on, and that nothing distinguishes the function of a cup from that of a bowl. Accordingly, an alternative approach replaces function as the determining characteristic for artifactual kinds with the successful intention of the creator to make something that belongs to the kind in question.

The intentional and the functional explanations may at first sight seem to underline the differences between artifactual kinds and cultural kinds (such as religion, mother tongue, gender, and family). Because, in contrast to artifactual kinds, family and mother tongue are hardly definable in terms of a function or intention. For instance, mother tongue is not a result of an intentional creation, and it appears that even dysfunctional families count as families. Interestingly, however, psychological experiments seem to suggest that the acquisition and use of artificial kind concepts is less straight forward than suggested by the functional or intentional accounts. For instance, even if objects are presented as fulfilling the function of e.g. an umbrella or boat, they are not accepted as such if they differ significantly in appearance. Likewise, Bloom claims that people – at least non-philosophers – tend to agree that an object which looks like and can be used for a chair is in fact a chair even though it was the result of a lightning striking a rock and thereby creating the object. Consequently, the conceptual structure of artifactual kind terms may be more complicated than is normally assumed. This indicates that conceptualizing artifactual kinds may have more in common with conceptualizing other types of social kinds such as cultural kinds (e.g. religion or family) than would otherwise have been expected.

Defining the nature of cultural kinds (and the meaning of the concepts that represent them) is particularly complicated because they evolve through time and vary between cultures, and I think this is the reason that concepts of cultural kinds are often vague concepts with loose boundaries. Even so, it appears definitions of phenomena within one culture are usually precise enough to enable comparison between cultures and decisions about whether a cultural kind concept (e.g. family, conflict, language, music, etc.) applies to phenomena in another culture. In a way, cultural kinds are manmade because they are causally dependent on the existence of humans and human purposes, but, as stated above, in general not with a specific function in mind. This means that the analysis from collective intentionality does not directly apply to them, and this makes it more difficult to provide a satisfactory definition.

In addition to this, the problem of realism concerning social ontology needs to be considered. As within other domains, views on social kinds range from eliminativism to robust realism, and a core issue here is what realism concerning social ontology entails. When it comes to artifactual and institutional kinds, it is not unlikely that their existence is dependent on conceptualization – at least, many have argued that, for instance, money (and maybe also chairs) cannot exist without being conceptualized. In contrast to the case of artifactual and instutional kinds, I find it plausible that the existence of cultural kinds such as religion, gender, or art is not dependent on conceptualization, even though they are dependent on the existence of humans and human purposes and intentions. An important consequence of this is that realism concerning cultural kinds is less demanding than realism concerning e.g. institutional kinds. Often mind-independence is seen as a condition for realism. As this, however, automatically excludes realism concerning e.g. mental states, it has been suggested that instead of seeing realism in terms of mind-independence, realism should be seen as the position that something is real “… if the fact that it exists is not in itself a matter of opinion or conjecture” (cf. Oderberg 2007). On this view, realism concerning religion would be at least prima facie plausible in spite of its mind-dependence, while realism concerning money could prove harder to uphold because of its likely dependence on conceptualization.

So even if realism concerning artifactual and institutional kinds proves hard to defend, the same does not necessarily apply to cultural kinds. Amie Thomasson has argued that artifactual and institutional kinds fail to fulfill the dual demand of standard realism, namely independence of the mental and having natural boundaries (which is a condition for the possibilities of ignorance and error usually associated with realism). Nevertheless, she also shows that Searle in his analysis of social ontology overlooked that there may be “…entities (and kinds of entities) depending on mental states of various kinds, without their depending on any beliefs about them” (Thomasson 2003). As examples she mentions superstition and racism, and urges that even though these are not mind-independent, they can be unknown within a society and “… require substantive social and scientific discovery for their existence as well as nature” (Thomasson 2003). Other examples include jokes or insults: it is possible for someone to tell a joke or insult someone without having the concepts. In my opinion, religion counts as yet an example.

Exit 'science of religion'?

In an initiative called Just Science 2008, bloggers are encouraged to participate in 'a week of science':

"By signing up you stipulate that you will post at minimum 1 scientific post per day between February 4th and 8th of 2008. Additionally, you may not post any non-science entries for this period so that we may offer only science on our aggregated feed. What counts as science and non-science? [...] A post which uses a reference to Creationism before elucidating a biological topic is science; a post which discusses the social and religious dynamics of Creationism is not."

Does this mean that ‘science of religion’ in general is not science?

Symposium in the fall 2008

The 30th and 31st of September there will be a Danish symposium at the University of Southern Denmark on fundamental discussions in the Study of Religions.

Researchers from the Universities of Aarhus, Copenhagen and Southern Denmark (with a background in Philosophy and/or the Study of Religions) will address questions about for instance the concept of religion, objectivity, normativity, methodological approaches, criticism of religion and research dissemination. (On October 1 there will be a follow-up PhD course on the same topics.)

The symposium is supported by a generous grant from the Carlsberg Foundation.

More information (in Danish) is available here.

Concluding Conference: Religion in the 21st Century

The concluding conference of Religion in the 21st Century is held in Copenhagen September 19th - 23rd 2007 (conference homepage here). I will be presenting a paper entitled 'Defining Religion: A Fresh Philosophical Approach'. It concerns one of the preliminary issues in my PhD project, namely the view that the discussion about defining religion is one that should be avoided. My main point is that this view (although widespread) is misguided.

Defining religion has traditionally been seen as an unfortunate return to theological essentialism, and is often replaced with a constructivist approach. However, both the constructivism and the reasons for choosing it over a more realist approach are highly problematic. To show this, it is necessary first to untangle various discussions in the theory of religious studies regarding methods, subject field and the relation to religious (anti-)realism. My main point here is that the problematic aspect of theology is not the essentialism per se (and this means that scholars of religion might be giving up on a realist attitude towards defining for wrong reasons). Furthermore, the common constructivism concerning 'religion' is not exactly unproblematic.

I hope my paper and presentation will provoke some interesting discussions about these fundamental questions in the philosophy of religion.