Abstract
Section 5.1 argues that religious traditions are best understood as fallible inhabited experiments and embodied hypotheses. The social and existential security religious communities’ promise is only ever provisional, but they offer a wealth of resources for pursuing further avenues of inquiry within their boundaries and a rich store of semiotic resources for deeply engaging the world. Section 5.2 addresses the efficiency of inquiry and expands upon Peirce ’s treatment of sentiment, commonsense, and instinct. The argument is applicable both to religious and non-religious communities but is particularly relevant when inquiry involves matters of vital importance. Section 5.3 examines religious communities of inquiry, especially enduring, traditional, large-scale religious communities. Venerable religious traditions of inquiry are best understood as deeply invested experimental explorations of the value of engaging the world with a suite of culturally mediated habits and signs. These traditions cultivate and conserve a variety of vague signs, rituals, myths, and habits for engaging the world. The vagueness of the signs, it argues, enables relatively rich inquiry and flexible engagement within a multitude of contexts. Section 5.4 argues that religious traditions also become venerable through developing interpretive habits and signs that encourage correction and reform through disciplines of self-control.
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Notes
- 1.
I take seriously Pascal Boyer’s criticism that social scientists often hastily equate traditionalism and conservatism as if the connection between the two were obvious and as if conservatism were the conscious intent of members of “traditional” cultures. Boyer ’s criticisms are worth serious consideration, as is his recommendation that we pay closer attention to the “causal interpretation” of truth claims and rituals. I contend that the present semiotic approach to tradition and conservatism is a meaningful step toward addressing his insightful criticisms (see Boyer 1990).
- 2.
Weissman ’s remarkable argument is spread out over two volumes (1987, 1989). Roughly speaking, the first volume prosecutes the case against intuitionism while the second proposes an alternative method of inquiry based on fallibilism and testing hypotheses that is generally compatible with the Peircean model of inquiry that I advocate here.
- 3.
See especially Peirce ’s seminal 1868 essays “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man” and “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities” (CP 5.213–317).
- 4.
This distinction would likely be challenged by many interpreters of Peirce as an unhelpful domestication of some of his most interesting early work on doubt and the interruption of habit. Specifically, my suggestion that we consider the possibility of dormant doubt might sound to some like creeping skepticism, as if I were chasing paper doubt out the front door only to allow it to return by the back window. This is not at all my intention, and the remainder of the text will, I hope, show that I allow no such room to cavalier universal skepticism.
- 5.
It is critical to keep the continuity of cognition in mind when considering the distinction between active and dormant belief just as it is important when considering intuitive cognition and reflective cognition. We may consciously reflect on our intuitions. We may also become so adept at particular reflections that they become habitual and unconscious. Here Robert McCauley ’s distinction between practiced naturalness and maturational naturalness is helpful wherein “naturalness” is taken to mean unreflective, intuitive, and unconscious (see McCauley 2011, pp. 20–30). Peirce ’s distinction between instincts and dispositions is similar though; as noted above (Sect. 3.3) he begged leave to use “instinct” to cover both learned dispositions and unlearned instincts.
- 6.
“Some philosophers have imagined that to start an inquiry it was only necessary to utter a question whether orally or by setting it down upon paper, and have even recommended us to begin our studies with questioning everything! But the mere putting of a proposition into the interrogative form does not stimulate the mind to any struggle after belief. There must be a real and living doubt, and without this all discussion is idle” (CP 5.376).
- 7.
The exploration of dormant doubt deserves further consideration, though it is, I argue, closely related to Critical Commonsense and is best treated in that context. As defined thus far, dormant doubt would seem a sheepish attitude, but such an interpretation misses the genuine respect for feedback potential and corrective encounters that self-conscious practitioners of dormant doubt have. It is not always the case that dormant doubters want to protect themselves from correction, but rather that such doubters may recognize the precarity of their beliefs and appreciate those beliefs as valuable achieved harmonies. They acknowledge the fine line between destructive encounters and educational engagements with reality and hope to undertake the latter while avoiding the former. Dormant doubt is thus driven by two forces that do not always harmonize well with one another. On the one hand it acknowledges the value of achieved harmonies and ways of being in the world and is driven to preserve these, while on the other it is continuously lured on toward potentially corrective but inherently risky encounters with the unfamiliar. To be fair, dormant doubt, insofar as it exercises a kind of low-grade generalized doubt, may attempt to hold to two adverse propositions at the same time: I fully believe, in the sense that I am willing to act upon, all of my present beliefs and I believe that some of my present beliefs may be wrong and that it would be foolish to act upon them. But it puts off indefinitely the task of deciding which of these two propositions to adopt insofar as it sees the foolishness inherent in committing oneself unreservedly to either. Hence the conception is closely related to that of self-control and assessing the conditions under which such control is possible and warranted. It is also closely tied to Peirce ’s notions of fallibilism and continuity. Thus, Peirce wrote, “The principle of continuity is the idea of fallibilism objectified. For fallibilism is the doctrine that our knowledge is never absolute but always swims, as it were, in a continuum of uncertainty and of indeterminacy. Now the doctrine of continuity is that all things so swim in continua” (CP 1.171).
- 8.
The distinction between Pragmatism and Pragmaticism in Peirce ‘s later work (post 1905) is of considerable importance to scholars of Peirce , but interrogating this distinction requires a deep dive into his work on logic. For the purposes of this text, I emphasize only a particular strand of Pragmaticism: its focus on the purposeful elaboration of concrete plans for eliciting and exploiting living doubts for the purpose of furthering inquiry (for further analysis see Apel 1981).
- 9.
- 10.
Indeed, Peirce argues for the opposite point, suggesting that “Full belief is willingness to act upon [a] proposition in vital crises,” but that “[n]othing is vital for science; nothing can be” (CP 1.635).
- 11.
Per Peirce , “[a]mong the things which the reader, as a rational person, does not doubt, is that he not merely has habits, but also can exert a measure of self-control over his future actions” (CP 5.418).
- 12.
Bernstein cites the same paragraph as the clearest presentation of the summum bonum in Peirce ’s corpus (1965, pp. 87–88). The variant spellings of “development” are native to the Collected Papers.
- 13.
Peirce credits Galileo with the argument (see CP 6.477).
- 14.
“In an extreme case, where the likelihood is of an unmistakably objective character and is strongly supported by good inductions, I would allow it to cause the postponement of the testing of a hypothesis. For example, if a man came to me and pretended to be able to turn lead into gold, I should say to him, ‘My dear sir, I haven’t time to make gold.’ But even then the likelihood would not weigh with me directly, as such, but because it would become a factor in what really is in all cases the leading consideration in Abduction, which is the question of Economy—Economy of money, time, thought, and energy” (CP 5.600).
- 15.
While David Weissman largely avoids the notion of instinct, he powerfully makes the case for the perniciousness of something very much like the connection between instinct and immediate rationality that Peirce is refuting (see Weissman 1987).
- 16.
- 17.
Readers who have learned a second language as adults may be familiar with the phenomenon of thinking in one language and then translating one’s thoughts into a second. Religious adepts do not engage the world pre-religiously and then translate into the language of religious signs. They engage the world religiously, even if they have learned to translate their thoughts and experiences into secular languages.
- 18.
The discussion in the remainder of this section and the next leans heavily on the work of my teacher Robert Cummings Neville and the distinction he draws between the network meaning and the content meaning of symbols (see Neville 1995). While I cleave a bit closer to the Peircean tradition and vocabulary than does Neville , his text remains the most insightful study of religious semiotics available. This presents a considerable challenge insofar as I have so internalized the arguments of that text that I tend to think and write in Nevillian terms. I will not, therefore, cite chapter and verse of his text except when quoting directly from its pages. I do, however, credit any insights in this section to him and suggest that readers interested in a fuller treatment of these issues independently consult his work.
- 19.
Here Peter Ochs and the tradition of Scriptural Reasoning that he founded might offer several important addendums to this claim insofar as different “people of the Book” may indeed be helpful readers and interpreters of one another’s texts within the context of interreligious dialogue. I take this as evidence that the boundaries between supposedly discrete traditions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are often quite permeable in practice, despite attempts by both insiders and outsiders to draw hard and fast distinctions. Indeed, the considerable overlap between the sign networks of these traditions—the same might be said about the network overlap of Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism as well as the overlap between Taoism and Confucianism—points not only to the historical links between the world’s major religious traditions but also to the phenomenon of mutual interpretability among religious traditions and communities that interpret their signs as having content meaning within a shared world (see Ochs 1998; Slater 2015).
- 20.
- 21.
Peirce recommended “to precide” and its cognates be used “to refer exclusively to an expression of a determination which is either full or made free for the interpreter” (CP 5.449 and 6.496).
- 22.
Returning to the example of preparing a wedding homily; I have before me a vague network of Christian signs involving marriage that I must render more determinate in the text of a homily. In this case the dynamic object is extremely complex and includes as components the Christian tradition, the individuals being wed, present and past cultural norms regarding marriage, gender, sex, family, procreation, and the good life, the religious literacy and identity of the audience, as well as my notions of what marriage is and should be in the present context. A good homily should harmoniously engage and, in a meaningful sense, “be true to” all of these components. The aim, however, is that the homily itself serve as a sign that not only describes the complex object and its components, but does so in a way that existentially activates the audience (its interpretants) so that the object and interpretants are harmonized. Only insofar as it accomplishes all three tasks does it have robust content meaning.
- 23.
Since all semiosis is triadic, it is never the case that a sign fails only its object or its interpretant. For the sake of analysis, however, it may often be simpler to treat semiotic failure as largely a failure toward either an object or an interpretant.
- 24.
The indexical signification of a sign in which iconic signification is dominant is often overlooked. There is, however, at least the implicit assumption on the part of many interpreters that somehow the real object caused the creation of the icon. It is worth noting that for most non-scientists, this causal process is taken somewhat on faith when interpreting scientific signs, but scientists and philosophers of science are often hyper-aware of the extended processes of experimentation and interpretation that yield even the simplest scientific icons. One of the unique norms of science is that findings should be replicable and that scientists should be able to describe the causal processes that generated their findings so that others might replicate the causal path.
- 25.
The ideality of this characterization of scientific practice and community should not be overlooked. Scientists, schools of scientists, and even entire scientific epochs often cling tenaciously or authoritatively to their signs of reality. The extended and cooperative processes of data collection, experimentation, and analysis that sometimes overthrow regnant signs are often referred to as “paradigm shifts” or “scientific revolutions,” but they are rarely the result of simple, “aha!” moments of sudden insight or semiotic clarity (see Agassi 2014).
- 26.
Peirce , however, went too far when he characterized the “scientific man” as follows: “Nothing is vital for science; nothing can be. Its accepted propositions, therefore, are but opinions at most; and the whole list is provisional. The scientific man is not in the least wedded to his conclusions. He risks nothing upon them. He stands ready to abandon one or all as soon as experience opposes them. Some of them, I grant, he is in the habit of calling established truths; but that merely means propositions to which no competent man today demurs. It seems probable that any given proposition of that sort will remain for a long time upon the list of propositions to be admitted. Still, it may be refuted tomorrow; and if so, the scientific man will be glad to have got rid of an error. There is thus no proposition at all in science which answers to the conception of belief” (CP 1.635).
- 27.
Ejsing ’s text offers an excellent constructive theological exploration of the theme of hope in Peirce ’s work and integrates Peirce ’s theory of inquiry with both Continental theological traditions and more recent strains of American religious naturalism.
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Daniel-Hughes, B. (2018). Religion and Traditions of Inquiry. In: Pragmatic Inquiry and Religious Communities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94193-6_5
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