Saving belief: on the new materialism in religious studies

Abstract

One of my enduring memories from graduate school has me shuffling back and forth between the classrooms of Mircea Eliade and Donald Davidson, trying to shake a persistent headache. Though at the time I did not see it in such antiseptic terms, it now strikes me that the general problem was the status of attributions of intentionality – in particular, how to respect the dizzying variety of religious belief and practice while recognizing that all of us share pretty much the same set of concepts. I was impressed early on with the principle of charity – roughly, the claim that broad agreement is a condition of linguistic interpretation, a claim defended, of course, by Davidson, but also endorsed in one form or another by Baker, Bennett, Brandom, Dennett, Putnam, Rorty, and Stich, to name only a few. While it is not a miracle cure, I have continued to urge its application to several of the outstanding methodological problems that arise in the study of religion, including reductionism, rationality, and relativism. In the present chapter I turn from application to defense. I would like to address an important doubt about just how relevant this literature is to religious studies, after all. When the above-named philosophers discuss action and interpretation, they typically give pride of place to the notion of belief.

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