Abstract
Error theories hold that claims about sacred objects are uniformly false when (and because) their existence is supposed to depend on the occurrence of highly implausible supernatural events involved in their creation or causal history. It is therefore an illusion to believe that the concept of being sacred corresponds to a real property. Social constructionists maintain that sacred entities are constructs of concepts, discourses, or practices, just like gods, angels, witches, and devils. Claims about sacred objects are therefore uniformly true. I present an institutional account of sacred objects as covert institutional entities, and distinguish between true beliefs that help create the institutional facts and false beliefs about their origin.
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Notes
- 1.
I distinguish unintended social facts and covert institutional facts. An unintended social fact is either a by-product of an institutional practice or a social consequence of individual actions.
- 2.
Geertz continues: “They are felt to sum up, for those for whom they are resonant, what is known about the way the world is, the quality of the emotional life it supports, and the way one ought to behave while in it” (Geertz 1973, p. 127). Sacred symbols ‘thus relate an ontology and a cosmology to an aesthetic and a morality; their particular power comes from their presumed ability to identify fact with value at the most fundamental level, to give to what is merely actual … a comprehensive normative import.’ (ibid.)
- 3.
My aim in this paper is not to give a full account of the phenomenon of the sacred.
- 4.
The constructivist/error theory controversy is discussed by Haslanger (2006), who investigates the concept of race.
- 5.
Langton (2009) distinguishes self-verifying beliefs and self-fulfilling beliefs. Collective acceptance of a certain object’s sacredness is self-fulfilling, insofar as it establishes a belief’s truth. A belief is self-verifying when it provides evidence for itself. These latter beliefs may be false but justified. For example, someone who is ranked as inferior can be made to act as if she is inferior, even when she is not (Langton 2009, p. 11).
- 6.
There are other senses in which beliefs can be self-validating, as in the case of self-fulfilling prophecies (‘There will be thousands of people in the park this evening, and it will be awesome’), but none of these processes and mechanisms create institutional facts in Searle’s sense. Thanks to a referee for pointing this out.
- 7.
In 2010 Searle stresses the role of deontic powers and desire-independent reasons even more than in earlier works. The whole point of Declaratives is to create deontic powers (2010, p. 101).
- 8.
Technically, what is at work is an intention to represent something as something else: it takes the conditions of satisfaction of a belief-like intentional state and imposes it on a brute object, which is, in this case, a mountain (see Rust 2010, p. 132). Searle (2010, p. 58) seems to acknowledge that there can be institutional facts that do not presuppose collective intentionality.
- 9.
Searle seems to accept the uniformity of existence: everything exists in the same sense of ‘exist’. It does not therefore follow that there is a uniform way in which everything came into existence. Institutional properties (status functions, in Searle’s terminology) can be imposed on persons, actions, and objects.
- 10.
But compare Searle (1995, p. 117), where he complains about ‘the steady erosion of acceptance of large institutional structures around the world’ and ‘the breakdown of national identification in favor of ethnic tribalism’. Institutions come and go, but it is not the purpose of Searle’s theory to morally evaluate institutions.
- 11.
Focussing on a token allows me to bypass some subtle but in this context irrelevant qualifications of the theory involving the type/token distinction.
- 12.
See Smith (2007) for refinements of Searle’s ontology.
- 13.
Here and in what follows I distinguish a collective from a community. A community may contain apostates and dissenters. The collective is constituted by members who accept/recognize and approve of H. Non-members of G may or may not fall under deontic powers of the institutional fact maintained by G (this depends on the tolerance of their religion).
- 14.
A building that counts as a mosque can be recognized as an intended institutional object, even by a fundamentalist Muslim. I don’t hold that all sacred objects are covert institutional facts.
- 15.
Any object may obtain intrinsic value due to a relational property. Think of relics that have an emotional value for a person because of their origin, their former owner, etc. The value attached to an object on the basis of obtaining these properties does not require acceptance by a collective.
- 16.
It could be added that if sacred mountains are institutional facts, they may generate ‘institutional reasons’ for action (Mackie 1977). It is a conspicuous feature of social interaction that we often explain our actions via an appeal to social norms that govern practices (‘why are you not willing to climb that mountain?’ ‘Because it is sacred’). Institutional reasons are usually regarded as the providence of perfectly good explanations but, as Mackie (1977, p. 79) notes, an institutional reason is a reason only for those who accept the underlying institutional practice.
- 17.
Notice that it is impossible that there could be universal ignorance about an institutional property. ‘Mount Popzatetl is sacred, but nobody knows it’ is conceptually incoherent. Nothing could be sacred unless someone believed it to be sacred (although some obvious qualifications apply: as an anonymous referee pointed out, if for some community all mountains with the height of exactly 2,412 m are holy, there may be unmeasured mountains no-one has ever heard of that are holy).
- 18.
The idea that it should be possible for people to discover that certain facts are based on conventions or institutions was stressed by Burge (1975), who argued that people who act according to a convention (in our case: who believe an institutional fact) may deny that they follow a convention. The status of a convention or institution need not be fully open to participants in order for the convention or institution to exist as such.
- 19.
Recall Marx’ famous claim that religion is the opium of the people.
- 20.
Members of G may promote belief in H to promote, establish, and maintain powers they derive from it. Kings are lucid enough not to take too seriously the idea that they are king by the grace of God.
- 21.
- 22.
- 23.
The discussion is not about ‘institutionalized religions’ or the institutional character of religion, but about institutional facts as constituents of religious practices.
- 24.
In a review of Jonathan Z. Smith’s To Take Place, widely read as a constructionist approach to sacred space (Smith 1987). That human agency is involved in creation of the sacred is a simple consequence of methodological naturalism and reflects that all artefacts are human-dependent entities. Smith’s claim that ‘ritual is not an expression of or a response to ‘the Sacred’; rather, something or someone is made sacred by ritual’ is, when it reflects methodological naturalism, trivially true, not an exciting discovery that vindicates social constructivism.
- 25.
- 26.
See Rust (2006, p. 162) for further considerations.
- 27.
Beckford (2003, p. 7) observes that ‘social scientific perspectives on religion are sceptical towards common sense definitions of religion’. But note that the distinction between natural facts and institutional facts is a manifest distinction.
- 28.
But do not confuse this with the elusive ideal of full codifiability: ‘A test for the presence of genuine institutional facts is whether or not we could codify the rules explicitly. In the case of many institutional facts, such as property, marriage, and money, these have … been codified into explicit laws. Others, such as friendships, dates, and cocktail parties, are not so codified.… If the rights and duties of friendship suddenly became a matter of some grave legal or moral question, then we might imagine these informal institutions becoming codified explicitly, though of course explicit codification has its price. It deprives us of the flexibility, spontaneity, and informality that the practice has in its uncodified form.’ (Searle 1995, p. 88).
- 29.
- 30.
I owe this suggestion to an anonymous referee.
- 31.
Compare Frege’s example in On Sense and Reference.
- 32.
See Thomasson (2003, p. 590) for a discussion of delicate issues about knowledge and ignorance involving institutional facts.
- 33.
Note that members of G may have false beliefs about other communities. If they hold that their mountain is the only holy mountain in the universe, they are mistaken. What explains their mistake is, as we shall see, a false belief of what determines the extension of the concept of holiness, although they correctly grasp the meaning of the predicate ‘being sacred’.
- 34.
There is a difference between explaining why Mt. Popzatetl is holy, and justifying one’s belief that it is holy. The latter is justified by evidence, and the only legitimate evidence is that ‘one is being told so’ (it is essentially knowledge by testimony). Their own explanation of its sacred nature is of course mistaken.
- 35.
Thanks to Frank Hindriks for pressing me on this issue.
- 36.
‘Acceptance, as I construe it, goes all the way from enthusiastic endorsement to grudging acknowledgment, even the acknowledgment that one is simply helpless to do anything about, or reject, the institutions in which one finds oneself.’ (Searle 2010, p. 8).
- 37.
My claim is not that they must be covert institutional facts. In the Catholic religion, churches are created by a declarative: the consecration of the church in the name of the Catholic Church by a bishop. The Church can therefore acknowledge that a building’s counting as a church is a matter of acceptance (by the appropriate authorities).
- 38.
And see Searle (2010, p. 107), where the point is repeated and generalized: ‘(People) tend to think of institutions like private property, or human rights or governments as human creations. They tend to think of them as part of the natural order of things, to be taken for granted in the same way they take for granted the weather or forces of gravity… Sometimes, indeed, they believe institutions to be consequences of a Divine Will’.
- 39.
- 40.
Compare the child who pointed out that the emperor has no clothes.
- 41.
Rappaport’s definition of sanctity, as ‘the quality of unquestionableness imputed by congregations to postulates in their nature objectively unverifiable and absolutely unfalsifiable’ (Rappaport 1999, p. 281) can be straightforwardly translated in Searlean terminology. Also fully in line with Searle’s theory is Rappaport’s observation that Ultimate Sacred Postulates (his terminology) are beyond empirical verification by scientific methods (see Rappaport 1999).
- 42.
These perceived inconsistencies, rather than direct attacks based on atheist considerations, have, at least historically, played a key role in secularisation processes.
- 43.
An important aspect of enhancing this process is that it requires the allowance to become acquainted with conceptual resources, in order to precisely articulate this insight. If one is deliberately withheld from these concepts, one can be the victim of epistemic injustice (Fricker 2009).
- 44.
Haslanger (2003, p. 318) applies a two-dimensional framework to biological categories like woman.
- 45.
This analysis is in line with Thomasson’s (2003) analysis of human kinds. A theory that assumes that ‘is holy’ is ambiguous should be rejected.
- 46.
I would like to thank Frank Hindriks, Jack Vromen, Paul Post, Anita Konzelmann Ziv, and an anonymous referee for valuable comments and suggestions.
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Buekens, F. (2014). Searlean Reflections on Sacred Mountains. In: Konzelmann Ziv, A., Schmid, H. (eds) Institutions, Emotions, and Group Agents. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6934-2_3
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