Studies the social science of moral inquiry as an attempt to develop a psychology and sociology that would explain the complex in terms of the simple as the new physics was doing in the natural realm.

Modernisation, whatever else it involves, is always a moral and a religious problem. If it has sometimes been hailed as an exhilarating challenge to create new values and meanings it has also often been feared as a threat to an existing pattern of values and meanings. In either case the personal and social forces called into play have been powerful.

‘Courageous or Indifferent Individualism’ is the subject on which I have been asked to speak, and I must first attempt to interpret what the conveners of this conference had in mind in asking me to speak on this subject. First of all, individualism must be taken for granted as our fate as modern persons; but, second, there is more than one kind of individualism and we must discriminate between them. Courage is the first, though not the highest, of the classical (...) virtues. Indifference cannot be considered a virtue in any context.Thus I might reformulate my title as ‘Virtuous or Vicious Individualism.’ Put this way, my subject might seem to be concerned exclusively with ethics. Ethics will be central in my discussion, but I want to talk about more than ethics. I want to talk about the philosophical anthropology which lies behind these two forms of individualism, and I about their connection with different kinds of political and economic policy.But before I proceed further I want to be honest about why, after reading the position papers and other materials sent to me in advance, I think I was asked to participate in this conference and speak on this subject. If I am wrong, you can correct me in the discussion period. I believe it is because the American economy, American political influence, and American culture are all exercising an enormous pressure in a single direction on Europe, and indeed on the whole world, to be more like us, to be Americanized.As a strong critic of recent tendencies in my country, I think I have been asked to help you understand the nature of this pressure and even maybe to suggest some ways it might be resisted. Later this year I will go to Italy and Brazil with the same mission. Globalization is often a euphemism for this kind of Americanization and I have begun to feel that it is into the discussion of globalization that I am being pulled. (shrink)

I want to argue that in the modern world national cultures are distinctly different from one another, and although not homogeneous, are homogenizing: that is, each national society has a culture that, while allowing for difference, nonetheless presses in the direction of a single dominant profile. This is to put in more abstract terms the argument of Habits of the Heart that America has a first language, composed of two complementary aspects, utilitarian and expressive individualism, and also second languages, namely (...) biblical and civic Republican languages that have tended to get pushed to the margins.Already in the Introduction to the new paperback edition of Habits, my coauthors and I suggested that the individualism which is America's dominant cultural orientation was not solely derived from 18th century Utilitarianism and 19th century Romanticism, but had roots in both of our second languages as well. In my November, 1997, address to the American Academy of Religion, “Is There a Common American Culture?” I took the argument a step further, reaching almost to the point from which I want to start this paper. There I argued that beyond the homogenizing effect of television, education, and consumerism, and deeper even than utilitarian and expressive individualism, there was a still, small voice, a tiny seed, from which our current cultural orientation derives.Nestled in the very core of utilitarian and expressive individualism is something very deep, very genuine, very old, very American, something we did not quite see or say in Habits, and its core is religious. In Habits we quoted a famous passage in Toqueville's Democracy in America: “I think I can see the whole destiny of America contained in the first Puritan who landed on those shores.” Then we went on to name John Winthrop, following Tocqueville's own predilection, as the likeliest candidate for being that first Puritan. Now I am ready to admit, although regretfully, that we, and Tocqueville, were probably wrong. That first Puritan who contained our whole destiny might have been, as we also half intimated in Habits, Anne Hutchinson, but the stronger candidate, because we know so much more about him, is Roger Williams. (shrink)

In 1919 Emily James Putnam gave twelve lectures at the New School under the title of “Habit and History.” The course description is as follows:The long predominance of habitual conduct over individual initiative in primitive society and in the early empires; the biological and social limitations which tend to foster habit and develop it beyond its proper sphere; the technique of habitbreaking inaugurated by the Greeks and becoming a characteristic of western society; an effort to appraise the amount of excessive (...) and undesirable habit in thought and action generally connected with such concepts as nationalism, religion, the status of women, etc.It is an interesting challenge, eighty-two years later, to try to understand what Mrs. James meant by that description and how to think about those issues today. Mrs. James contrasts the term `habitual conduct' to the term `individual initiative,' and finds the former more characteristic of primitive society and the early empires whereas the latter, beginning with the habit-breaking Greeks, is more characteristic of Western society. She does not reject habit altogether, indicating that it has a `proper sphere,' but only `excessive and undesirable habit,' and she suggests that nationalism, religion and the status of women are spheres where such excessive and undesirable habits are to be found.Without being able to peruse her lectures in detail, I cannot be sure of all that she is implying. One might note that in her contrast between habit and individual initiative she privileges, as until recently we have been wont to do, the West as against the rest. This contrast, with its whiff of Orientalism, might serve to warn us that, although the contrast at the heart of her lecture series is still part of our common sense today, it, like the contrast between the West and the non-West, ought not be affirmed until subjected to a degree of critical suspicion. (shrink)

After distinguishing three kinds of pluralism, an individualist pluralism at one pole, a communalist pluralism at the other, and a third more complex concept ofpluralism, I address the meaning of commitment in America as iIIuminated by these distinctions. This continues a line opened up in Habits of the Heart. An earlierversion of this paper was presented at Marquette University in the Edward J. O’Donnell, S.J., Distinguished Lecture Series.

Is there any moral obligation to improve oneself, to foster and develop various capacities in oneself? From a broadly Kantian point of view, Self-Improvement defends the view that there is such an obligation and that it is an obligation that each person owes to him or herself. The defence addresses a range of arguments philosophers have mobilized against this idea, including the argument that it is impossible to owe anything to yourself, and the view that an obligation to improve onself (...) is overly 'moralistic'. Robert N. Johnson argues against Kantian universalization arguments for the duty of self-improvement, as well as arguments that bottom out in a supposed value humanity has. At the same time, he defends a position based on the notion that self- and other-respecting agents would, under the right circumstances, accept the principle of self-improvement and would leave it up to each to be the person to whom this duty is owed. (shrink)

Introduction 3 Chapter One: Natural Cognition 11 Chapter Two: Maturational Naturalness 31 Chapter Three: Unnatural Science 83 Chapter Four: Natural Religion 145 Chapter Five: Surprising Consequences 223.

Explanatory pluralism and the cognitive science of religion: or why scholars in religious studies should stop worrying about reductionism -- Interpretation and explanation: problems and promise in the study of religion -- Crisis of conscience, riddle of identity: making space for a cognitive approach to religious phenomena -- Who owns culture? -- Overcoming barriers to a cognitive psychology of religion -- Years in: landmark empirical findings in the cognitive science of religion.

Much recent work on Kant's argument that the Categorical Imperative is the fundamental principle of morality has focused on the gap in that argument between the conclusion that rational agents conform to laws that apply to every rational agent, and the requirement contained in the Universal Law of Nature formula.1 While it seems plausible – even trivial– that a rational agent, insofar as she is a rational agent, conforms to whatever laws there are that are valid for all rational agents, (...) there does not appear to be any obvious route from this seemingly trivial claim to the controversial and substantive principle of acting only on maxims that one can at the same time rationally will every rational agent to act on.2 In what follows, I argue that the connection between rational agency and mere conformity to universally valid laws is not as trivial as it may seem. Many readers, I suspect, assume that Kant makes the trivial claim about rational agency because rational agency is rational, and being rational requires conforming to those laws that apply to all rational beings. For instance, this assumption is implicit in Onora O'Neill claim that "the interest of a Kantian universality test is that it aims to ground an ethical theory on notions of consistency and rationality rather than upon considerations of desire and preference."3 But, as I contend in what follows, the requirement to conform to laws valid for all rational agents is based on the fact that rational agency is, not rational, but agency. Indeed, the arguments leading to the first formulation of the Categorical Imperative rely on the idea of rational willing as a kind of causation in order to show this. And, as it turns out, the claim that the concept of causation contains the idea of conformity to universally valid laws is not a trivial claim. (shrink)

Bringing Ritual to Mind explores the cognitive and psychological foundations of religious ritual systems. Participants must recall their rituals well enough to ensure a sense of continuity across performances, and those rituals must motivate them to transmit and re-perform them. Most religious rituals the world over exploit either high performance frequency or extraordinary emotional stimulation to enhance their recollection. But why do some rituals exploit the first of these variables while others exploit the second? McCauley and Lawson advance the ritual (...) form hypothesis, arguing that participants' cognitive representations of ritual form explain why. Reviewing evidence from cognitive, developmental and social psychology and from cultural anthropology and the history of religions, they utilize dynamical systems tools to explain the recurrent evolutionary trajectories religions exhibit. (shrink)

Aristotle's observation that all human beings by nature desire to know aptly captures the spirit of "intellectualist" research in psychology and anthropology. Intellectualists in these fields agree that humans' have fundamental explanatory interests (which reflect their rationality) and that the idioms in which their explanations are couched can differ considerably across places and times (both historical and developmental). Intellectualists in developmental psychology (e.g., Gopnik and Meltzoff, 1997) maintain that young children's conceptual structures, like those of scientists, are theories and that (...) their conceptual development--like the development of science--is a process of theory formation and change. They speculate that our explanatory preoccupations result, at least in part, from a natural drive to develop theories. Intellectualists in the anthropology of religion (e.g., Horton, 1970 and 1993) hold that, although it may do many other things as well, religion is primarily concerned with providing explanatory theories. They maintain that religion and science have the same explanatory goals; only the idioms of their explanations differ. The connections between the concern for explanation, the pursuit of science, the persistence of religion, and the cognitive processes underlying each clearly merit further examination. By considering both their cultural manifestations and their cognitive foundations, I hope to clarify not only how science and religion are related but some of the ways their explanatory projects differ. I shall argue that, despite their centuries' old antagonisms, no development in science will ever seriously threaten the persistence of religion or the forms of explanation religion employs or the emergence of new religions. (I strongly suspect that science will never seriously threaten the persistence of particular religions either, but I only aim to defend the weaker, collective claim here.) In this paper's fourth section I shall show that religion and its characteristic forms of explanation 1 are a natural outgrowth of the character and content of human association and cognition.. (shrink)

In the field of the social sciences, there exists an old and ongoing debate, circling around the question if social scientists should be concerned with the study of society, or rather with the search for the good society. Should they limit their role to the value neutral observation of social phenomena, or should they allow themselves to become fully involved in the quest for the normative conditions of the best possible society? And should they pursue the project of building a (...) grand theory, or rather agree to become practical, moving into the tricky areas of social work, moral education and politics?Today we will not try to solve this old dispute. I only want to refer to it because today’s speaker, Professor Robert Bellah, is a clear proponent of the second alternative, of understanding social science as a moral inquiry. Sociology, in his understanding is a moral science, as it implies a practical exercise: it provides a critical observation and reflection on the structural and cultural conditions of the concrete societal projects we are engaged in as members and citizens. How can our society become and remain independent? How can it be just and fair to all its members? How can it remain innovative and democratic, true to its traditions and open to newcomers?These are core issues of sociology as a moral and humanistic discipline. In trying to answer those questions, we are standing in a long tradition, reaching back to Aristotle, including the classics of modern times, Machiavelli and Hobbes, Marx and Tocqueville, as well as the founding fathers of contemporary sociology, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. (shrink)

Current sociology of knowledge tends to take for granted Robert K. Merton’s theory of cumulative advantage: successful ideas bring recognition to their authors, successful authors have their ideas recognized more easily than unknown ones. This article argues that this theory should be revised via the introduction of the differential between the status of an idea and that of its creator: when an idea is more important than its creator, the latter becomes identified with the former, and this will hinder (...) recognition of the intellectual’s new ideas as they differ from old ones in their content or style. Robert N. Bellah’s performance during the “civil religion debate” of the 1970s is reconstructed as an example of how this mechanism may work. Implications for further research are considered in the concluding section. (shrink)

Explanatory pluralism holds that the sorts of comprehensive theoretical and ontological economies, which microreductionists and New Wave reductionists envision and which antireductionists fear, offer misleading views of both scientific practice and scientific progress. Both advocates and foes of employing reductionist strategies at the interface of psychology and neuroscience have overplayed the alleged economies that interlevel connections (including identities) justify while overlooking their fundamental role in promoting scientific research. A brief review of research on visual processing provides support for the explanatory (...) pluralist=s general model of cross-scientific relations and discloses the valuable heuristic role hypothetical identities play in cross-scientific research. That model also supplies grounds for hesitation about the correlation objection to the psycho-physical identity theory and complaints about an explanatory gap in physicalist accounts of consciousness. These takes on psycho-neural connections miss both the sorts of considerations that motivate hypothetical identities in science and their fundamental contribution to progressive research. Thus, their focus on the contributions of research at multiple levels of analysis does not bar explanatory pluralists from considering heuristic identity theory (HIT). Arguably, it encourages it. (shrink)

Jerry Fodor has consistently cited the persistence of illusions--especially the M.

This anthology collects some of the most important papers on what is believed to be the major force in evolution, natural selection. An issue of great consequence in the philosophy of biology concerns the levels at which, and the units upon which selection acts. In recent years, biologists and philosophers have published a large number of papers bearing on this subject. The papers selected for inclusion in this book are divided into three main sections covering the history of the subject, (...) explaining its conceptual foundations, and focusing on kin and group selection and higher levels of selection.One of the book's interesting features is that it draws together material from the biological and philosophical literatures. The philosophical literature, having thoroughly absorbed the biological material, now offers conceptual tools suitable for the reworking of the biological arguments. Although a full symbiosis has yet to develop, this anthology offers a unique resource for students in both biology and philosophy.Robert N. Brandon is Professor in the Philosophy Department, Duke University. Richard M. Burian is Professor of Philosophy and Department Chairman, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.A Bradford Book. (shrink)

The influence of Patricia and Paul Churchland's work on contemporary philosophy and cognitive science has been profound. The Churchlands have challenged nearly all prevailing doctrines concerning knowledge, mind, science, and language.

In the course of defending both a unified model of intertheoretic relations in science and scientific realism, Paul Churchland has attempted to reinvigorate eliminative materialism. Churchland's eliminativism operates on three claims: (1) that some intertheoretic contexts involve incommensurable theories, (2) that such contexts invariably require the elimination of one theory or the other, and (3) that the relation of psychology and neuroscience is just such a context. I argue that a more detailed account of intertheoretic relations, which distinguishes between the (...) relations that hold between successive theories at a particular level of analysis over time and those that hold between theories at different levels of analysis at the same time, offers grounds for denying Churchland's second and third claims and, therefore, undermines his eliminativism. The paper concludes by suggesting why it is, nonetheless, not unreasonable, given this more detailed model of intertheoretic relations, to expect the eventual elimination of common sense psychology. (shrink)

Unified, all-purpose, philosophical models of reduction in science lack resources for capturing varieties of cross-scientific relations that have proven critical to understanding some scientific achievements. Not only do those models obscure the distinction between successional and cross-scientific relations, their preoccupations with the structures of both theories and things provide no means for accommodating the contributions to various sciences of theories and research about long-term diachronic processes involving large-scale, distributed systems. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is the parade case. (...) Explanatory pluralism accommodates a wider range of connections between theories and inquiries in science than all-purpose models of reduction do. Consequently, it provides analytical tools for understanding the roles of the theoretical proposals about the evolution of the human mind/brain that have proliferated over the last two decades. Those proposals have testable implications pertaining to both structure and processing in the modern human mind/brain. An example of such research illustrates how those proposals and investigative tools and experiments cut across both explanatory levels and modes of analysis within the cognitive sciences and how those studies can yield evidence that bears on the assessment of competing theories and models. (shrink)

Cognitive science of religion (CSR) has increased influence in religious studies, the resistance of religious protectionists notwithstanding. CSR's most provocative work stresses the role of implicit cognition in explaining religious thought and conduct. Exhibiting explanatory pluralism, CSR seeks integrative accounts across the social, psychological, and brain sciences. CSR reflects prominent trends in the cognitive sciences generally. First, CSR is giving greater attention to the new tools and findings of cognitive neuroscience. Second, CSR researchers have done carefully designed, nonlaboratory studies of (...) experience, incorporating precise physiological measures, obtaining astonishing findings about the experiences of ritual participants and observers. Third, CSR theorists have advanced evolutionary hypotheses about religions from eight perspectives (cross-indexing three levels of selection with three mechanisms of selection). Cultural group selectionists headline credibility enhancing displays and Big Gods in the religious consolidation of large-scale societies. Other CSR researchers marshal counterevidence and advance alternative hypotheses. CSR findings are incompatible with the New Atheists’ projects on two fronts. (shrink)

Cognitive approaches to religious phenomena have attracted considerable interdisciplinary attention since their emergence a couple of decades ago. Proponents offer explanatory accounts of the content and transmission of religious thought and behavior in terms of underlying cognition. A central claim is that the cross‐cultural recurrence and historical persistence of religion is attributable to the cognitive naturalness of religious ideas, i.e., attributable to the readiness, the ease, and the speed with which human minds acquire and process popular religious representations. In this (...) article, we primarily provide an introductory summary of foundational questions, assumptions, and hypotheses in this field, including some discussion of features distinguishing cognitive science approaches to religion from established psychological approaches. Relevant ethnographic and experimental evidence illustrate and substantiate core claims. Finally, we briefly consider the broader implications of these cognitive approaches for the appropriateness of ‘religion’ as an explanatorily useful category in the social sciences. (shrink)

In this paper Wimsatt's analysis of units of selection is taken as defining the units of selection question. A definition of levels of selection is offered and it is shown that the levels of selection question is quite different from the units of selection question. Some of the relations between units and levels are briefly explored. It is argued that the levels of selection question is the question relevant to explanatory concerns, and it is suggested that it is the question (...) relevant to ontological concerns. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that we can best make sense of the practice of experimental evolutionary biology if we see it as investigating contingent, rather than lawlike, regularities. This understanding is contrasted with the experimental practice of certain areas of physics. However, this presents a problem for those who accept the Logical Positivist conception of law and its essential role in scientific explanation. I address this problem by arguing that the contingent regularities of evolutionary biology have a limited range (...) of nomic necessity and a limited range of explanatory power even though they lack the unlimited projectibility that has been seen by some as a hallmark of scientific laws. (shrink)