Pragmatism and Naturalism in the Study of Religion

Abstract

The word naturalism is used in many different ways in contemporary philosophy. For some it has required that a properly naturalistic account of anything appeal only to what is countenanced by the natural sciences and, for a few, that any object of study be reduced to entities and forces studied by physics and chemistry. Research programs have been developed to “naturalize” numbers, norms, intentional states, and other seemingly recalcitrant concepts by performing the requisite reduction. But a naturalistic account should be concerned with explanation, not reduction. Even when granting a priority to the sciences, social scientific and historical explanations should not be ruled out of court from the outset. Attention to those explanations, as well as to the actual methods of the natural sciences, raises questions about the status in such an account of norms, values, and rule-governed practices. The issues of what is to count as a science and how one might place normative concepts with respect to the language of science have been matters of lively debate since the nineteenth century. Recently, there have been a number of attempts to formulate more liberal conceptions of naturalism.1 The Australian philosopher Huw Price distinguishes two ways of thinking about the topic.2 In the first the problem is regarded as one of where to place the normative in a world described by the natural sciences. How does one place values in a world of facts? The second, which Price favors, would begin with what science tells us about ourselves. Science tells us that humans are natural creatures, and our philosophical claims ought to be developed in accord with that. We can then try to explain in naturalistic terms how creatures like ourselves come to talk in these various ways. The point is not to place norms, values, and mental states in a landscape of science but to examine the language of norms and of states of mind as the product of human beings as natural creatures. In order to study this particular kind of natural creature, we must study its language and its culture. That study of