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The perception of religious meaning and value: an ecological approach
Nathaniel F. Barrett*
1. Introduction
The meaningfulness of the religious life is perhaps its main attraction and support,
and yet no other aspect of religiosity is so poorly understood, especially by outsiders.
As a result, meaning is at risk of becoming encapsulated as the black box of
religiosity: a special quality of experience that is presumed to account for religious
beliefs and behaviors that are otherwise hard to explain. For instance, the
philosopher Tim Crane (2010, para. 19) recently suggested that religious belief is
sustained even in the face of contrary evidence, because what is central is the
commitment to the meaningfulness (and therefore the mystery) of the world. Crane
may be on the right track here, but by linking religious meaning with mystery, he
leaves the former completely undefined and seemingly out of reach. What sustains
belief is not just an abstract idea of meaningfulness, but rather something more direct
and experiential. If so, how does religious belief or practice provide access to
experiences of meaning? Moreover, how can outsiders come to understand such
experiences?
To clarify the issue at hand, let us distinguish two dimensions of religious
meaning. The more accessible dimension is the content of religious belief and
experience that can be articulated and reported to outsiders. Important as it may be,
this content is still fairly abstract: it does not capture the more richly textured and
dynamic dimension of religious meaning that emerges when it is really felt; that is,
*Email: nbarrett@unav.es
# 2013 Taylor & Francis
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when religious meaning comes alive for the insider during specific acts of religious
practice such as prayer or worship. The elusiveness of this second dimension*not
just for outsiders but for insiders as well*has been termed the problem of
presence (see Engelke, 2007; Luhrmann, 2012, p. 15).
No doubt, yearning for the felt presence of the object of religious belief is
widespread among religious persons and motivated in large part by the desire to
confirm belief. However, I propose that an even deeper motivation is the search for
value. The experience of rich and abiding value, impervious to hardship and
misfortune, is ultimately what sustains religious belief and the religious life as worthy
of commitment. Accordingly, what makes the feeling of presence so important to
religious practitioners is not just the confirmation of belief, but also the value that is
discovered in religious practice when its meanings come to life*that is, when the
meanings of religious practice are perceived. In other words, I propose that value is
an essential aspect of what distinguishes the religious insiders experience of meaning
as a perceptual experience.
With this distinction in hand, it seems that religious meaning can be accessed and
appreciated by outsiders in all respects except for the value that is carried by
perceptual experience. At least this much is clear: if the difference is really
experiential, then theories that invoke belief to explain experiential differences are
simply begging the question. For even if we accept that belief is a condition for the
full experience of religious meaning, we still need a testable theory of how the
experience of meaning changes under this and other conditions so as to provide
access to value.
In what follows I present the outlines of an ecological approach to the perception
of religious meaning and value. Generally speaking, an ecological approach adopts
the basic theoretical orientation of the psychologist James J. Gibson (1904!79),
especially his insistence on the essentially interactive nature of perceptual experience.
The kinds of investigations I have in mind for the ecological approach would focus
on the perceptual experiences of seasoned practitioners engaged in highly structured
and overtly religious activities such as rituals, ceremonies, festivals and the like. Such
studies would then constitute a basis from which the ecological approach could be
extended to a wider range of activities, perhaps even the religious life as a whole.
At the heart of this approach is the thesis that value-rich experience requires
skillful engagement with a suitably complex and meaningful environment. However,
to fully explain what I mean by an ecological approach, I will have to articulate a
host of theoretical commitments that distinguish it from constructivist theories of
perception, a large and diverse family that includes most computational theories of
mainstream cognitive science (e.g., Marr, 1982). Among these commitments are the
following claims: (1) perception and perceptual learning are primarily processes of
discrimination rather than construction; (2) perceptual discriminations selectively
engage an inexhaustible wealth of meanings embedded in dynamic patterns or
flows of stimulation made available by the organisms active search for meaning;
(3) as a form of direct, interactive engagement, perception cannot be modeled as a
serial, hierarchical process that builds from simple to complex meanings; and (4) a
complete understanding of perception requires careful investigation of the environmental structures that specify important meanings for a given species, community, or
individual.
Admittedly, the following argument carries a heavy burden insofar as it involves a
basic reorientation of thought about perception in general. Why return to the
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drawing board when cognitive theories of religion are just now gaining steam? The
turn from mainstream cognitive and perceptual theory to a radical alternative
(Chemero, 2009) is motivated here by the conviction that our experience of value
cannot be understood as something manufactured by the mind, as presumed
by constructivist theories. Thus the ecological approach couches a theory of the
perception of religious meaning and value within a broader theory of meaning and
value in general. This broader theory can be sketched as follows.
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by their depth, that is, their ready access to multiple levels of meaning, each
constituting a complex contrast. I propose that whatever cognitive value such
experiences might have, their richness and depth of meaning can also be enjoyed as
an intrinsic value, as an end in itself. The exceptional richness of contrast or valuecharacter that manifests intrinsic value is a kind of tertiary value.4 Like secondary
values, tertiary values are achievements of perceptual skill, but they may not have
much importance in the way of primary value (i.e., they may be merely aesthetic).
In principle, tertiary values can be enjoyed in an unlimited range of situations, but in
practice they seem to require environments of suitable complexity. This requirement
is due to the fact that, even more than primary and secondary values, tertiary values
are experienced through intricate forms of interactive involvement.
The preceding distinctions of primary, secondary, and tertiary values are
intended only as rough markers within a continuum and will not be used hereafter.
Indeed, my point has been to show that value-rich experience is not clearly marked
off from other kinds of experience. On the contrary, the experience of value is rooted
in perception and even more deeply in the basic processes by which an organism is
constituted in relation to its environment. Perceptual activity is a specialized form of
engagement*that is, a structured form of interaction through which an organism
seeks optimal attunement with important and meaningful regularities of its
environment*and as such it seeks to maximize the value that it carries (see Neville,
1981; Reed, 1996). However, intrinsic value emerges as a prominent factor in
experience only when engagement is highly skilled, which is when perceptual
discriminations are finely attuned to especially rich sources of meaning.
When defined in this way, the experience of intrinsic value does not require the
addition of any special, inherently value-bearing quality to perception. In fact,
because the experience of intrinsic value is dependent on a coherent stream of
complexly meaningful contrasts, there is no such thing as a simple, value-bearing but
otherwise meaningless quality in experience. Rather than ascribing value to certain
distinct meanings, spheres, or levels of perception, the ecological approach views
value as a generic trait of perceptual experience. As discriminations become more
richly and vividly textured, perceptual experience moves along a continuum toward
especially value-rich experiences that we treasure for their own sake. Vividness and
richness of texture are intended here to convey not just increased diversity of contrast
but also increased intensity, insofar as intensity can be combined with diversity (see
Neville, 1981; Whitehead, 1929/1979).
In most cases, the experience of intrinsic value depends on skilled interaction
with a suitably complex environment, which, as I have already noted, is the kind of
environment that supports intricacy and depth of meaningful engagement. It follows
that the experience of value cannot be triggered by simple stimuli, and it cannot be
had all at once. Emphasis on the continuous, interactive, cumulative, and above all
temporal character of value-rich experience is a large part of what distinguishes the
present approach as ecological. It marks a metaphysical turn from theories of
perception based on the ideas of atomistic sense-data (Heft, 2001) and an empirical
turn from the cognitivist preoccupation with mechanisms inside the head.
When described in ecological terms, the importance of value-character cannot be
overestimated. In human experience, a marked degree of value-character is arguably
an essential ingredient in the feeling of concrete reality. In other words, because of its
dependence on the intricate, mutual involvement of body and environment, valuecharacter signifies the presence of something encountered rather than imagined or
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This is because the kinds of involvement that are regularly singled out by insiders as
religiously meaningful likely depend, in most cases, on the availability of a minimally
complex environment, the structures of which can be engaged (albeit differently) by
outsiders.
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discussed theory of religious perception, which is based on his more general theory
of appearing (Alston, 1993), proposes that the presence of God is marked by
positive feelings that uniquely correspond to their object*that is, by the intrinsic
qualitative distinctiveness of a way of appearing (Alston, 1991, p. 44). Accordingly,
the experience of a person who perceives Gods presence includes the appearance of
some intrinsically distinct quality*a God percept*that is entirely unavailable to
someone who does not perceive Gods presence (see also Barrett & Wildman, 2009).
In contrast, for the ecological approach, differences of perception are not a
matter of certain discrete qualities being available to some people and not to others.
Rather, some people discriminate qualities better, or at least differently, than others.
This position accords better with what Luhrmann says about her subjects
experiences of Gods presence: none of them claim that Gods presence is announced
by new feelings. On the contrary, Luhrmann (2012, p. 114) stresses that her subjects
learned to pick out Gods presence from everyday experience: Gods voice is like a
fuzzy radio station . . . that needs more tuning. Youre picking up the song, and its
not so clear sometimes.
While this understanding of perception as discrimination is not unique to the
ecological approach, it is crucial to the ecological turn from processes inside the
head to interactions with the environment. In a seminal paper, Gibson and Gibson
(1955) define their emerging viewpoint on perceptual learning in sharp contrast with
a widely accepted premise of modern perceptual theory:
It seems to us that all extant theories of the perceptual process . . . have at least this
feature in common: they take for granted a discrepancy between the sensory input and
the finished percept and they aim to explain the difference. They assume that somehow
we get more information about the environment than can be transmitted through the
receptor system. In other words, they accept the distinction between sensation and
perception. The development of perception must then necessarily be one of supplementing or interpreting or organizing. (Gibson & Gibson, 1955, p. 33)
Thus, Gibson and Gibson claim that all meanings of perceptual experience are
carried by stimulus information (although not all at once). What changes during
perceptual learning is our ability to pick out or differentiate this or that meaning as a
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significant contrast. Like Luhrmann, they use wine tasting to illustrate perceptual
learning by differentiation: the connoisseur tastes more than the novice because he
or she discriminates more of the variables of chemical stimulation (Gibson &
Gibson, 1955, p. 35).
However, if we apply this approach to all kinds of perception, including the
perception of religious meaning, do we not need to hold conclusions about the
veridicality of perception in check? To say, as Gibson and Gibson do, that when a
person perceives more, he or she discriminates more, seems to guarantee that all
perception is successful*it seems to presume that all perceptual learning is a process
of gaining greater correspondence with the stimulus array, and by implication, the
world.
Gibsons embrace of some version of direct realism remains one of the most
philosophically challenging and controversial features of the ecological approach
(Chemero, 2009). Although I cannot hope to settle the issue here, I will discuss in a
later section how the ecological approach bears on questions of religious truth. Here,
I present several brief qualifications to indicate how the ecological approach might
account for perceptual errors and the role of past experience in perception.
The first qualification is to point out that the specification of meaning is never
unequivocal. Rather, meanings are more or less reliably specified*or better yet,
constrained*by patterns and variables of stimulation that are more or less regular,
but never perfectly law-like (Chemero, 2009, pp. 119!120). The second qualification
is that the process of perceptual differentiation is always highly selective and
evaluative, as argued above. The move from undifferentiated to differentiated
stimulus can take as many paths as there are variables available to discriminate,
and these paths are not equivalent for all interests and purposes. Perceptual success is
a matter of making the right discriminations for the situation at hand, and is thus
defined in relation to a wider context of purposeful activity. Third, it is important to
acknowledge that self-organized neural dynamics play a much greater role in
perception than Gibson and Gibson were ready to admit (e.g., see Freeman, 1999;
Kelso, 1995).
This last qualification softens the distinction between enrichment and differentiation, and thus between constructivist and ecological approaches, but it does not
do away with it altogether. In fact, a variety of neurodynamical theories of
perception (e.g., Cosmelli, Lachaux, & Thompson, 2007) are crucial to the long-term
viability of the ecological approach, as they support its implicit denial that the
perception of meaning is a serial, hierarchical process (see Noe, 2009, pp. 149!169).
Moreover, these theories suggest how it might be possible to explain the role of past
experience and culture in the perception of meaning without conceding to
constructivism.
Dynamically speaking, past experience informs perception by shaping the
intrinsic patterns of perceptual dynamics (Kelso, 1995). These intrinsic patterns do
not determine perceptual meaning, but rather how perceptual meaning is determined
by the environment. In other words, the actual trajectory of perceptual dynamics is
determined by the coupling of endogenous neural dynamics with the exogenous
dynamics of environmental perturbations. Moreover, it is important to realize that
dynamical patterns of environmental perturbation can be engaged only by a system
of equivalent complexity (Sporns, 2011, pp. 255!256). Thus, neurologically speaking,
what distinguishes interactive perceptual theory from constructivism is not neural
complexity per se but how that complexity is used to perceive: when combined with
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neurodynamical theory, the ecological approach claims that intrinsic dynamics are
coupled with extrinsic dynamics of commensurate complexity.9
To put this point in terms of perceptual meaning, past experience supplies the
organism with a vague network of possible meanings that are newly specified (and
modified) by each perceptual encounter. Accordingly, although the ecological
approach is usually characterized by its emphasis on what is there to be perceived
(Gibson, 1979, p. 239), it also entails the radical claim that animals perceive with
more than just their sense organs: they perceive with their entire embodied history of
past experience.
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a wealth of meanings that are not easily found in assemblages of discrete stimuli
(Reed & Jones, 1982, pp. 333!349, 376!378).
The temporal character of stimulation flow is of essential importance to the
ecological view. The aforementioned inexhaustible richness of meaning that is
carried by the sensory array depends on the way in which sensory stimulation
constantly changes in relation to the organisms ongoing activity. Moreover, to
embrace a temporal and thus relational picture of perceptual meaning has important
phenomenological and even metaphysical ramifications, as succinctly expressed by
the first tenet of William Jamess philosophy of radical empiricism: the relations
between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct
particular experience, neither more so nor less so, than the things themselves (as cited
in McDermott, 1977, p. 136). Because we can directly engage structures of relation,
James concluded from this statement of fact that perception need not be
constructive (see Heft, 2001, pp. 31!37). In addition, I suggest that the temporal
character of perception is essential to the experience of intrinsic value, insofar as this
character entails cumulative depth and richness of meaning.
Let us consider a fairly simple example of how meaning is carried by stimulation
flow. The most discussed example is what is known as optical flow. As we
approach a surface, for instance, we experience a radial expansion of detail in our
field of vision centered on the point where our trajectory meets the surface. This flow
is obviously an interactive phenomenon, as it is generated by movement, and in turn
provides ample information for the regulation of movement (Gibson, 1979, pp. 227!
229). For example, the rate of expansion of detail specifies time to contact, an
essential piece of information for a wide range of activities (Lee & Reddish, 1981).
Now, let us consider the environmental conditions of optical flow. The dynamic
patterns of optical flow require an environment filled with complexly textured
surfaces. Without discernible gradients of texture, there is no flow, and without flow,
important information such as time to contact is unavailable. (If you have ever
jumped into the glassy-smooth surface of a lake, you may have experienced the
disorientation of suddenly being unable to perceive how fast you are approaching the
surface.) Clearly, the environmental conditions of optical flow obtain in ways that are
more or less adequate for the specification of certain meanings, like time to contact.
Also, it is easy to imagine alternative ways of encountering, describing, and
measuring these conditions, which do not rely on optical flow (e.g., touch).
From this simple example, we can extrapolate a basic*indeed, obvious*but
important point about environmental conditions in general: while real-world
structural complexity is abundant and ubiquitous, within specialized spheres of
interest, certain environments are evidently structured so that relevant meanings are
more or less readily available to our perceptual systems. Of course, such differences
are always relative to forms of engagement, but that does not make them merely
subjective. Given a set of perceptual skills and interests, some environments are more
readily and deeply engaged than others. This applies to every possible category of
human perceivers: the species as a whole, various cultures, various forms of expertise,
and particular individuals. Moreover, insofar as an environment can be engaged in
multiple ways, its distinctive structures*which are sometimes enacted by the
perceiving subjects themselves*can also be examined and described in multiple
ways. In other words, by holding a form of perceptual engagement constant, we can
detect differences of environmental suitability relative to that form, and by
comparing how an environment shows up for different forms of engagement, we
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saying that the meanings therein are specifically encoded by the performance. Rather,
the various features of the performance could directly specify the meanings for
appropriately attuned listeners of a common cultural background and orientation.
Thus, the ecological approach is sensitive to the variety of perceptual experiences that
different listeners have.
This last caveat*that certain meanings are available only to listeners of a certain
background and orientation*might seem to constitute a major concession to
constructivist theory. However, the radical nature of the ecological approach reemerges when we take seriously Clarkes claim that complex, culturally specific
meanings can be heard in the music, rather than just associated with it. For a
constructivist view, what we actually hear is restricted to the most basic properties of
sound: musical meanings are interpretations or associations prompted by what we
hear. Thus, the variety of ways in which different listeners hear the same piece is
accounted for by a serial process, which proceeds from simpler and more stimulusbound properties through to more complex and abstract characteristics that are less
closely tied to the stimulus and are more the expression of general cognitive schemata
and cultural conventions (Clarke, 2005, p. 12). In other words, something as
complex as a politically subversive meaning of Hendrixs performance is not carried
by the acoustic stimuli; rather, it is added to the listening experience at a high-level
stage of processing.
In contrast, Clarke argues that the difference between meanings specified by basic
features of pitch or timbre, and meanings specified by more complex features of
melody or musical genre, need not be a matter of directness. Rather, the difference is
the duration and distribution of the relevant patterns of musical sound involved in
the specification of meaning. Remember that the ecological approach asserts that all
(or nearly all) meaning is carried by temporally extended, dynamic patterns. Once
that premise is accepted, there is no clear upper limit to the duration and complexity
of patterns that can be directly engaged. So, continuing with the Hendrix example,
Hendrixs use of distortion, feedback, and special rotating speakers specifies various
kinds of instability through fairly simple features, while his use of bends, trills, and
breaks of free improvisation specifies instability in a more complexly distributed way.
And yet, all these features, as well as the highly abstract cultural dissonance of
rock music and the national anthem, are equally present in the music and can be
directly perceived (Clarke, 2005, pp. 59!60).
Still, granted that ecological and constructivist approaches posit very different
kinds of perceptual dynamics, at the level of the actual listening experience they are
difficult to distinguish.10 As stated in Section 4, a fully worked-out version of the
ecological approach registers the wide diversity of listening experiences by its
claim that we listen with our entire embodied history of experience. Thus, one
listener hears a performance differently from others, because the dynamical network
that he or she brings into interaction with the performance registers its structural
features differently. Of course, a standard constructivist model of hierarchical
processing also accounts for this difference, but with less interaction. Outside of
neuroscience, how do these theoretical differences translate into empirically testable
claims?
Clarke (2005, pp. 189!204) cautiously advances the claim that common patterns
of musical structure do constrain our listening experiences in objectively detectable
ways. In the most basic sense, Clarkes claim is fairly uncontroversial: regardless of
cultural background and experience, a musical piece that is usually heard as tranquil
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Clarke (2005, p. 67) argues that motion character is a pervasive and deep-seated
component of listeners responses to even quite simplified materials.
The broader implication is that music affords peculiarly direct insight into a
limitless variety of subjective experiences of motion and embodiment*real and
virtual (Clarke, 2005, p. 90). According to sociologist Tia DeNora (1999, p. 54),
music is a material that actors use to elaborate, to fill out and fill in, to themselves
and to others, modes of aesthetic agency and with it subjective stances and
identities. Other researchers (e.g., Watt & Ash, 1998) have found evidence that
listeners are prone to hear person-like qualities in music, from which they conclude
that musical motion is commonly experienced as an encounter with a virtual
person (as cited in Clarke, 2005, p. 89). Perhaps, then, the phenomenon of virtual
motion can help us to understand the various kinds of agency experienced in and
through music in religious settings. Perhaps ecological investigations may reveal
patterns in the way that music is used to cultivate experiences of supernatural
agency (e.g., see Engelke, 2007; Luhrmann, 2012, pp. 25!26, 33). The phenomenon
of virtual motion suggests a host of possible investigations into music as a source of
religious meaning.
These enticing possibilities raise an important question, however: does an
ecological investigation of the environmental conditions of certain religious
experiences necessarily presume that these experiences are not as they are taken to
be*that is, encounters with divine presence? I suggest that one of the special virtues
of the ecological approach is that it leaves room for interpretation in this respect.
Granted, to explain the religious experience of personal presence in terms of virtual
motion does rule out certain positivistic interpretations of this experience qua
supernatural. However, as William James (1902/1982, p. 14) pointed out, to admit
that all religious experiences must have neural conditions does not preclude the
possibility that such experiences are bearers of genuine religious meaning and value.
A similar point can be made with regard to environmental conditions.
Moreover, it is important to recognize the difference between meaning and truth;
here I am concerned only with the former, and its relation to value. The most
sophisticated evaluations regarding the truth of religious experience*especially
pragmatic evaluations (e.g. Neville, 2009)*require careful interpretation in relation
to the wider context of lived religion, a context well beyond the scope of
investigations proposed here. What I have in mind are rather focused studies of
specifically religious and, preferably, highly structured behavior settings (Heft,
2001): a Hindu festival, a Shinto shrine, a Taoist funeral, or a Jewish celebration of
Sukkot. Even if such an investigation were to succeed in delivering a full
understanding of how a particular kind of behavior setting serves as a rich source
of religious meaning and value, this understanding would constitute only a first step
toward a pragmatic evaluation of religious truth.
7. Personal presence as a form of engagement
In this final section, I wish to address a form of religious experience that would seem
especially ill-suited to the ecological approach. This is the experience of religious
reality as personal presence and the use of mental imagery as the primary tool
for cultivating such an experience. Although these characteristics are fairly widespread in religious history, they are especially important to contemporary American
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environment (see also Abram, 1996). As argued in Section 2, the enrichment of value
and the refinement of skill go hand-in-hand, and in animistic cultures personification
is a crucial technology of the imagination that exemplifies this two-sided
development. Through personification, hunter-gatherer cultures refine their intimate
involvement with a particular habitat, and at the same time cultivate a richly
expressive set of rituals and art forms*these are not separate developments but
interrelated aspects of a single, tightly integrated form of life (Barrett, forthcoming).
The reasons why personification might be particularly effective in this regard are
not hard to fathom. As Luhrmann (2012, p. 93) observes, ordinary human
interaction is extraordinarily dense*that is, characterized by extraordinarily rich
and multi-layered exchanges of information. Thus, one can readily imagine that
learning to engage non-human aspects of our environment in ways that approximate
interpersonal relations would likely entail, as a general feature, increased density of
interaction. To treat a non-human animal, thing, or occurrence (e.g., bear, river,
weather) as an intentional being is not simply to speculate about its thoughts, but to
regard it as having a distinctive causal personality to which one must carefully
attend and respond.
The point that I wish to emphasize is that the acquisition of this perceptual
skill is marked by increased value-character. Not all personalized interactions
are enjoyed as value-rich, of course. My point is that the more personal our
relations become, the more individuality is realized in and through the relationship; and this realization is a measure of both skill and value-richness. To
personalize a relationship is to make it more finely responsive and to make it more
appreciative at the same time: these enhancements of skill and value are two sides
of the same coin.
The notion of personification as a form of skillful engagement and value-rich
experience might seem to be a long way from evangelical spirituality. And yet, by
Luhrmanns (2012, p. 10) account, the yearning of evangelicals for the personal
presence of God is closely intertwined with their desire to experience the world as
good. Indeed, her account suggests that the deepest yearnings for presence have to
do with the search for a life worth living, as one pastor put it (Luhrmann,
2012, p. 338). For these evangelicals, to feel Gods presence is to feel more fully
alive, and to feel themselves and the world as worthy of Gods love (Luhrmann,
2012, p. 342).
Thus, what needs to be appreciated in Luhrmanns account is the way in which
this deeper goal of value-enhancement is realized, albeit fitfully, in and through the
cultivation of perceptual skills, the immediate object of which is the presence of God.
It does not seem to be the case that the presence of God, once perceived, supports an
abstract, intellectual conclusion that the world is good. Nor does it seem that
experiencing Gods presence leads subsequently to the experience of the world as
good. Rather, it seems that perceiving the presence of God is how the goodness of the
world is made available to evangelicals in experience. The experience of personal
divine presence is a way of experiencing life (Luhrmann, 2012, p. 11), and when it
succeeds, it seems to be an abundant source of value.
Of course, when presented in this way, it is possible to view the imagery of
personal divine presence as a feel-good trick: the value that it provides is merely
decorative and says nothing about the way the world really is. On the other hand, it is
also possible to see the enjoyment of deep and abiding value as confirming evidence
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for religious belief in a personal God. Again, a virtue of the ecological approach is
that it would allow researchers to study religious practices as sources of value while
remaining neutral on larger questions of religious truth. Nevertheless, it should be
recognized that while questions of value and truth should be distinguished (like
meaning and truth), they are not fully separable. Indeed, the evangelical example
shows how closely related they can be, and I would argue that this is the norm in
religious practice. Moreover, the evangelical example suggests that to interpret the
religious truth of personal presence requires careful consideration of its symbolic role
in engagement (Neville, 2009). Accordingly, perhaps a fuller understanding of the
value-richness of religious practices would lead to more sophisticated articulations of
religious truth claims.
8. Conclusion
The cognitive science of religion is sometimes portrayed as a welcome corrective to
studies of religion that prioritize thick description and interpretative understanding (i.e., verstehen) over scientific explanation. However, the standard cognitive
approach, which explains religious beliefs and experience in terms of underlying
information-processing mechanisms, necessarily widens the gap between insider and
outsider accounts*even when (or especially when) it aims at qualitative aspects such
as value. To explain the value of certain religious activities or objects in terms of
special qualities or unconscious mechanisms is to invoke a black box of religiosity;
such theories explain at the expense of understanding.
In contrast, the ecological approach depends crucially on detailed ethnographic
studies of religious experience, including participatory accounts. At the same time,
the self-conscious undertaking of an ecological approach should orient these studies
in new ways and require new methods of empirical investigation. One cannot give an
ecological reading to ethnographic data that has already been collected without
attention to the ecological conditions of perception. Thus, an ecological study is not
merely descriptive or interpretive, but rather a specially directed way of interacting
with live religious phenomena. Moreover, an ecological framework can help to bring
greater objectivity*in the sense of intersubjectivity*to ethnographic studies, as it
requires the systematic comparison of at least two ways of interacting with the
meaningful features of a religious environment. But above all, the ecological
approach supports the scientific search for general explanations of religious
experience without discounting the special meaning and value that such experiences
can have.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their extraordinarily helpful comments
on an earlier draft of this essay.
Notes
1.
This section draws from a number of sources outside ecological psychology, especially
American pragmatism and process philosophy (e.g., Alexander, 1985; Dewey, 1929/1958,
1934/1980; Whitehead, 1929/1979). A special debt is owed to the axiological metaphysics
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
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147
COMMENTARIES
The value of affordances
Luis H. Favela and Anthony Chemero*
148
that is appealing to Barrett. It also appeals to us. With the ecological approach,
Barrett believes that investigations can quantify interactions to obtain descriptions
of how religious meaning occurs. The objects of investigation are the practitioners in
rituals, ceremonies, and the like. In this way, religious meanings become accessible to
outsiders, that is to say, in the manner that ecological psychologists quantify
meanings in terms of affordances. We will address the issue of affordances below.
However, as Barrett explicitly states, value remains inaccessible because value is a
perceptual experience available only to the participant in the ritual*only to the
believer.
Barretts goal is to utilize ecological theory to give an objective account of the
second dimension of religious experience, that is, the feeling of presence. Barrett is
clear that the second dimension cannot be articulated and is inaccessible to outsiders.
Nonetheless, he claims that ecological theory can give a description of the conditions
that give rise to presence. Yet we contend: how does an investigator know if
conditions give rise to presence, which is a phenomenon that is not reportable? Note,
we utilize reportable here in a broad sense in terms of objectively quantifiable;
for instance, an experiment participant verbally reporting or pushing a button, or an
experimenter recording measurements of an activity.
We are not claiming that Barrett cannot apply ecological theory because the
phenomenon he wishes to account for is representation-hungry (see Chemero,
2009; van Rooij, Bongers, & Haselager, 2002). In other words, we are not claiming
that the perceptual, religious experiences discussed by Barrett reveal the limitations
of ecological psychology in accounting for certain cognitive capacities. Rather, what
is at issue is that, in the manner in which Barrett has set up the problem space, one
would not know if a situation (e.g., ritual) gave rise to a perceptual or value
experience unless somebody could report that it did. But if somebody could report it,
they would not be reporting on the dimension of religious experience for which
Barrett wants to utilize ecological psychology. It would seem that his ecological
theory would be merely getting at the first, reportable dimension.
Surprisingly, Barrett does not address affordances, despite their central role in
ecological theory. Much ink has been spilled over attempts to explicate the
ontological status of affordances, how they relate to the environment, how they
relate to the animal, and so forth (Chemero, 2003; Greeno, 1994; Jones, 2003;
Stoffregen, 2003; Turvey, 1992). However, it is generally agreed that affordances are
directly perceivable, environmental opportunities for behavior (Chemero, 2009,
p. 23). Moreover, affordances are meaningful for the animal. When investigating the
meaningfulness of animal!environment interactions, affordances are often all that
you need. In other words, the meaningfulness of an object affording step-on-ableness
for an animal is captured by the animals ability to step on the object. Although they
can help speed along an experiment, subjective reports are not always necessary
when investigating affordances. The objectively quantifiable, animal!environment
interaction is often all that needs to be present in order to account for the
meaningfulness of a situation in ecological terms (Lee, 1976; Warren, 1984; Warren &
Whang, 1987).
Finally, and this seems to be the most relevant feature of affordances for a project
like Barretts, affordances straddle or dissolve many apparent dualities, as Gibson
(1979) realized when he introduced the concept. Affordances are neither subjective
nor objective, or they are both; they are neither physical nor mental, or they are both;
they are neither fact nor value, or they are both (Gibson 1979, p. 129). This would
149
seem to make them the ideal tool for undertaking the scientific study of religious
value, and potentially for bridging the gap between the two perspectives on religious
experience that Barrett discusses. Indeed, Jayawickreme and Chemero (2008) use the
concept of affordances to sketch a theory of moral value; and Jayawickreme and Di
Stefano (2012) extend this sketch to give a theory of moral heroism. Why not also a
theory of religious value? We thus applaud Barrett for his attempt to give an
ecological theory of religious value. However, we think his account would be more
convincing if he were to avail himself of all the resources that ecological psychology
has to offer. The way that Barrett conceptualizes the two aspects of religious
experience*one as in principle reportable and the other not*makes it difficult, if
not impossible, for him to apply one of the central parts of ecological psychology,
namely, affordances.
References
Chemero, A. (2003). An outline of a theory of affordances. Ecological Psychology, 15, 181!195.
Chemero, A. (2009). Radical embodied cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gibson, J. (1979). An ecological approach to visual perception. Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin.
Greeno, J.G. (1994). Gibsons affordances. Psychological Review, 101, 336!342.
Jayawickreme, E., & Chemero, A. (2008). Ecological moral realism: An alternative theoretical framework
for studying moral psychology. Review of General Psychology, 12, 118!126.
Jayawickreme, E., & Di Stefano, P. (2012). How can we study heroism? Integrating persons, situations and
communities. Political Psychology, 33, 165!178.
Jones, K.S. (2003). What is an affordance? Ecological Psychology, 15, 107!114.
Lee, D.N. (1976). A theory of visual control of braking based on information about time-to-collision.
Perception, 5, 437!459.
Stoffregen, T.A. (2003). Affordances are enough: Reply to Chemero et al. (2003). Ecological Psychology,
15, 29!36.
Turvey, M.T. (1992). Affordances and prospective control: An outline of the ontology. Ecological
Psychology, 4, 173!187.
van Rooij, I., Bongers, R.M., & Haselager, W.F.G. (2002). A non-representational approach to imagined
action. Cognitive Science, 26, 345!375.
Warren, Jr., W.H. (1984). Perceiving affordances: Visual guidance of stair climbing. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 10, 683!703.
Warren, Jr., W.H., & Whang, S. (1987). Visual guidance of walking through apertures: Body-scaled
information for affordances. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance,
13, 371!383.
Nathaniel F. Barrett has written a sustained argument for why the ecological approach
is better than the social constructivist approach in understanding value-rich religious
experience. He posits that his approach has greater promise than the standard
cognitive science of religion (CSR), which prefers the information-processing,
*Email: AWG@teo.au.dk
150
A.W. Geertz
151
152
H. Heft
Professor Barretts analysis may be the first attempt to apply the thought of James
J. Gibson to religious experience. In most respects, this is an odd effort because
Gibson was not a religious man; and yet, in one way, the effort is not entirely
remote from Gibsons intellectual lineage. I have argued elsewhere that several of
the most central qualities of ecological psychology can be traced to William Jamess
philosophy of radical empiricism (Heft, 2001). And, of course, beyond philosophical circles, William James is best known for his book The Varieties of Religious
Experience (1902). A few words about both radical empiricism and The Varieties
are thus in order here.
William James summarized the tenets of radical empiricism in three claims:
(1) only those things that can be found in experience are to be included in ones
*Email: heft@denison.edu
153
philosophical system; (2) what can be found in experience are things and their
relations; and (3) because relations can be experienced, extra-experiential connections between things (such as those stemming from idealism) need not be postulated.
The Varieties is, among other things, a compendium of experiences of a spiritual type
that collectively James is willing to accept as data to be explained. A common feature
of both radical empiricism and The Varieties, then, is that James takes the structure
of immediate experience seriously.
Where does the ecological approach fit in here? Gibson claimed that visual
perception involves the detection of structure in an information-rich environment.
Like James, Gibson demurred when it came to positing extra-perceptual factors (such
as mediating mental representations) to account for the coherence of perceptual
experience. Such mediating processes might appear to be necessary if perceiving is
claimed to rely upon discrete sensations (sense data). However, following the Scottish
realist Thomas Reid, Gibson took sensation and perception to be distinct functions,
with perception being the basis for an individuals contact with the world. With an
adequate description of the potential information to be perceived*in the case of
vision, a description based on ecological rather than physical optics*perceiving can
be shown to be direct (i.e., unmediated). This is particularly the case when we
recognize that perceiving is fundamentally a perception-action process. Gibson, like
James, rejected that stimulation is imposed on a passive knower; for both Gibson and
James assumed that agency is an essential property of living things.
As for religious experience, ecological psychology is silent: the topic has rarely
been seen to fall within its purview. With that said, the following question remains to
be answered: does Barretts proposal for an ecological approach to religious
experience have any merit? If we expand his account of ecological psychology at
bit more, it could have.
The historical links between William James (1848!1910) and James Gibson
(1903!79) are to be found mostly in the work of Edwin B. Holt (1875!1948), who
was Jamess student and one of Gibsons graduate school mentors. One of Holts
intellectual contributions can be summed up by his phrase the recession of the
stimulus (as cited in Charles, 2011; Heft, 2011). Although the stimulus basis for
visual experience had long been sought in the patterns of stimulation on receptor
surfaces (sensations), Holt argued that it was an inadequate starting point if the goal
was to understand an organisms responses at a level of complexity greater than the
receptors*that is, at the level of the whole organism. To determine the basis of
behavior, which is a higher-order phenomenon, we need to look at structures in the
environment with a commensurate level of complexity. In short, when our interest
goes beyond neural impulses, the significance of the stimulus recedes. Holt, like his
mentor James, took the individual organism to be an agent. However, because Holt
matured professionally in the new era of behaviorism, his focus was on behavior; but
he nevertheless judged that behavior was not reactive but rather adient. Adience
here refers to the tendency of action to be directed toward*and even partially
constituted by*environmental structures. Holt (1931, p. 41) wrote: For it is
observable that the fundamental character of the normal organism, both in infancy
and in adult life, is an out-reaching, outgoing, inquiring, examining, and grasping
one. Moreover, in an earlier statement Holt (1915, p. 55) explained that these
external, and sometimes very distant objects are as much constituents of the behavior
process as is the organism.
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H. Heft
What are adient responses directed toward? Here we must move beyond Holt to
recognize that features of the environment have an invitation-character or what
Kurt Lewin called an Afforderungscharakter (as cited in Gibson, 1979). Some
environmental features invite particular actions. For instance, graspable objects invite
grasping, climbable surfaces invite climbing, and so forth. Gibson and his followers
worked out in considerable detail the nature of these relational features, which they
called affordances (Gibson, 1979). Koch (1999, p. 202) likewise emphasized the value
of experiential properties toward which I am adient. Most affordances in human
environments have been designed by societies out of the materials of the world to
create opportunities for particular actions.
In this regard, many cultures have found ways to solicit, or make more probable,
particular experiences. Barrett anchors religious experience (e.g., the experience of
presence) in the transactions between individual and environment. Using the terms
offered above, the actions of the seeker of religious experience are adient with respect
to particular structures of the environment; and reciprocally, certain properties of the
environment invite actions that create opportunities for the experience of presence.
Here, like Barrett, we can point to the arts, which create opportunities for the viewer
or listener to have particular experiences that would otherwise be difficult to achieve
on ones own. And shared experiences would contribute to foundations of community,
religious or otherwise.
The ecological approach may shed light on religious experience to the extent that it
asks us to consider the circumstances within which such experiences are apt to occur
for an individual who is already embedded in a particular belief structure. Surely, the
solutions as to what may give rise to such experiences are multiple. They include,
among other things, the spatial design and structure of ceremony, the sounds of prayer
and music, and the odors at particular forms of worship. It is not the case that religious
experience is reducible to any one of these properties, but rather that experiences are
most often realized in relation to particular affordance properties such as these.
Because action is adient (i.e., because intentional agents are seekers in the
broadest possible sense), one can choose (or not) to follow certain cultural paths that
have historically made particular experiences more likely. If we wish to understand
the environmental circumstances that are put into place to make such experiences
possible, thinking from an ecological perspective may prove to be useful.
References
Charles, E.P. (Ed.). (2011). A new look at new realism: E.B. Holt reconsidered. Piscataway, NJ: Transactions
Publishing.
Gibson, J.J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin.
Heft, H. (2001). Ecological psychology in context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the legacy of William
Jamess radical empiricism. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Heft, H. (2011). E.B. Holts concept of the recession of the stimulus and the emergence of the situation
in psychology. In E.P. Charles (Ed.), A new look at new realism: E.B. Holt reconsidered (pp. 191!219).
Piscataway, NJ: Transactions Publishing.
Holt, E.B. (1915). Response and cognition. Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, 7,
365!373, 393!409, (Reprinted in Holt, E.B. (1915a). The Freudian wish and its place in ethics. New
York: Henry Holt.)
Holt, E.B. (1931). Animal drive and the learning process: An essay toward radical empiricism (Vol. 1). New
York: Henry Holt.
James, W. (1902). The varieties of religious experience. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co.
Koch, S. (1999). The concept of value properties in relation to motivation, perception, and the axiological
disciplines. In D. Finkelman & F. Kessel (Eds.), Psychology in a human context (pp. 192!230). Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press.
155
156
T. Ingold
explained: This is who we are, and this is what we do. Religious practice can be
meaningful partly because it provides adherents with ways of defining and labeling
themselves.
Finally, we note in passing how Barretts discussion of two-tier models is
mirrored by sociological notions of discursive versus practical consciousness
(Giddens, 1984) and recent work using dual process models of action (Vaisey,
2009). At the end of the day, then, we see the ecological approach to religious
meaning as a step in the right direction and fully agree with Barretts conclusions
regarding the need for thick description and interpretative understanding of religious
experience. We also agree that there need to be more ethnographic studies of religion
that can speak to theoretical and empirical work from cognitive neuroscience and
contribute to an affirmative relationship between the biological, cognitive, and social
sciences.
References
Avishai, O. (2008). Doing religion in a secular world: Women in conservative religions and the question
of agency. Gender & Society, 22, 409!433.
Beyeler, S. (2012). Islam provides for women a dignified and honorable position: Strategies of Ahmadi
Muslims in differentiating processes in Switzerland. Womens Studies, 41, 660!681.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Translated by Richard Nice. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Lande, B. (2007). Breathing like a soldier: Culture incarnate. The Sociological Review, 55, 95!108.
MacGregor, C.A. (2008). Religious socialization and childrens prayer as cultural object: Boundary work
in childrens 19th century Sunday school books. Poetics, 36, 435!449.
Pagis, M. (2009). Embodied self-reflexivity. Social Psychology Quarterly, 72, 265!283.
Rose, N. (2013). The human sciences in a biological age. Theory, Culture & Society, 30, 3!24.
Vaisey, S. (2009). Motivation and justification: A dual-process model of culture in action. American
Journal of Sociology, 114, 1675!1715.
Wacquant, L. (2003). Body and soul: Notebooks of an apprentice boxer. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Winchester, D. (2008). Embodying the faith: Religious practice and the making of a Muslim moral
habitus. Social Forces, 86, 1753!1780.
Wuthnow, R. (2008). Teach us to pray: The cognitive power of domain violations. Poetics, 36, 493!506.
*Email: tim.ingold@abdn.ac.uk
157
ontological barrier between the mind in which such beliefs are to be found and the
world to which they pertain, which flies in the face of the very existential
commitment and the passion that infuses it*or in a word, the faith*that surely
lies at the foundation of religious sensibility. Religion, as theologian Peter Candler
(2006, pp. 30!40) has put it, is enshrined in a grammar not of representation but of
participation; in a recognition that knowledge and understanding are not superimposed on the world from the outside, in the attempt to explain or interpret it, but
grow from the inside, from the crucible of our involved participation in a world in the
continual becoming of which our lives and feelings are necessarily enmeshed.
In the cognitive science of religion, religious intuitions couched in the
performative grammar of participation are refracted through the distorting lens of
a grammar of representation that denies, a priori, the very commitment on which
participation depends. The inevitable result is to recast these intuitions as a spectrum
of beliefs in spiritual entities, which, if they existed in fact, would defy obvious
principles of physical and biological causation. Thus cognitivism, having already
corrupted what it sets out to explain, is locked in a circularity of its own making. As
Barrett puts it, theories that invoke belief to explain experiential differences are
merely begging the question. We should rather start from perceptual experience itself,
and James Gibsons (1979) theory of direct perception, with its emphasis on the
skilled engagement of the perceiver with the furnishings and textures of a richly
structured environment, offers a way to do so.
Nonetheless, although I remain an enthusiast, I am no longer sure whether
Gibsons approach takes us quite far enough. What I like about it is the focus on
attention. Learning to perceive, for Gibson, is learning to attend*to notice, to
discriminate, to pick things out. The skilled perceiver is an active explorer of his or
her surroundings, not a passive recipient of stimuli that have then to be processed
by the intellect in order to arrive at a hypothetical picture of what is out there.
Yet there is a contradiction at the heart of the approach, for while the perceiver is
described as moving, dynamic, and exploratory, the world to be perceived appears
to have been already laid out, like a furnished room awaiting its occupants, or a
stage with all its scenery waiting for the actors to make their entry. The
environment is there, for Gibson (1979, p. 139): its objects afford what they do
because of what they are, irrespective of the presence of any creature that might
happen upon them.
Yet religious experience, I would contend, does not lie in the perception of a
ready-made world, nor does religious practice lie in mastering the skills for engaging
with its constituents. It lies rather in the perception of a world that is itself
continually coming into being both around and along with the perceiver him- or
herself. It is because such perception is intrinsic to the process of the worlds cominginto-being that it is also imaginative, rather than opposed to imagination as Gibson
thought (Ingold, 2012, pp. 6!7). And while we may endorse Gibsons apt
characterization of perceptual learning as an education of attention (Gibson,
1979, p. 254), I would argue that the education to which novices lay themselves open,
in religious practice, is just the opposite of what Gibson had in mind. Recall that the
word attendre, in French, means to wait, and that even in English, to attend to
things or persons carries connotations of looking after them, doing their bidding,
and following what they do. In this regard, attention abides with a world that is not
ready-made but always incipient, on the cusp.
158
T. Ingold
Thus, rather than the worlds lying in wait for the perceiver, it is the perceiver
who waits upon the world. As the philosopher Jan Masschelein (2010) has
observed, this kind of education is not an instilling of meaning and value into
the person, but a leading out of the person along a line of movement. That is
what education (from the Latin ex "out #ducere"to lead) literally means. To
be thus thrust out, into a world that has yet to reveal its hand, is unsettling. It
implies not the mastery of the skilled practitioner but the submission of one who*
being out of position, or ex-posed*is at the mercy of what transpires. As
indigenous people versed in the way of being that westerners call animism tell
us, only a fool would presume to know what the world will bring. The wise man, or
woman, looks, listens and waits for things to reveal themselves for what they are.
Along these ways of perception lie experience, understandings, and transformations
of the self. Indeed animism, contrary to what Barrett suggests, is not really about
ascribing intentionality to non-human entities, as though for humans and nonhumans alike, the executive cast of action followed the reflective cast of thought. It
is rather about attending to other beings, in perception and action, as they attend to
you*or, in a word, about corresponding with them (Ingold, 2013, pp. 105!108). As
with animism in particular, so religion in general, I would argue, is about neither
belief nor direct perception but mutual attention or correspondence. As the
philosopher Michel Serres (1995, p. 48) puts it, the opposite of religion is not
atheism or lack of belief but negligence.
Apart from these qualifications, only one thing really jarred in my reading of this
paper, and that is the authors insistence on a distinction between insiders and
outsiders, and between insider and outsider experiences. This strikes me as rigid
and insensitive to context, and somewhat out of kilter with the overall tenor of the
argument, which would put any such division in doubt. Moreover, it tends to obscure
the much more fundamental distinction between inside and outside ways of knowing.
As I have shown, it is by eliding this distinction that cognitive theorists miscast
religious intuitions as irrational beliefs. Finally, I did wonder about the stress on the
scientific search for explanations of religious experience. This seems to put science
and religion on opposite sides of a fence, with science doing the explaining and
religion the object to be explained. It seems to me that this division is untenable.
What if the source of religious experience lies in those pre-objective commitments to
the world in which we find our being, and which in turn underwrite the very
possibility of science?
References
Boyer, P. (2000). Functional origins of religious concepts: Ontological and strategic selection in evolved
minds. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 6, 195!214.
Candler, P.M., Jr. (2006). Theology, rhetoric, manuduction, or reading scripture together on the path to God.
Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans.
Gibson, J.J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Ingold, T. (2000). The perception of the environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. London:
Routledge.
Ingold, T. (2012). Introduction. In M. Janowski & T. Ingold (Eds.), Imagining landscapes: Past, present and
future (pp. 1!8). Farnham: Ashgate.
Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Abingdon: Routledge.
Masschelein, J. (2010). E-ducating the gaze: The idea of a poor pedagogy. Ethics and Education, 5, 43!53.
Serres, M. (1995). The natural contract (E. MacArthur & W. Paulson, Trans.). Ann Arbor, MI: University
of Michigan Press.
159
There is something remarkable about having been read with sensitivity and
thoughtfulness by a sharp reader. I would like to begin by thanking Nathaniel
Barrett for being such a reader.
I like this paper a lot. That is not surprising. Barrett and I share a similar
approach. We both think that what we are talking about*the experience of God, or
what Barrett calls value*depends on skilled interaction with a complex
environment. What I find new and exciting in his project is the way that it addresses
a puzzle that I am just beginning to struggle with, which is the question of how the
experience of God and the supernatural shift across cultural and historical
boundaries.
Barretts first move in this paper is to make the object of his study undefined
either by specific bodily phenomena or cognitive content. He writes of: the more
richly textured and dynamic dimension of religious experience that emerges when
it is really felt; that is, when religious meaning comes alive for the insider during
specific acts of religious practice. He goes on to define this as value: when the
meanings of religious practice are perceived. What makes this interesting is that it
removes what he is talking about from the possibility of a reductive explanation.
Value, as he conceives it, can be explained neither as primarily organic (a brain
event prior to cultural interpretation) nor as primarily cultural (an interpretation
in some sense acquired from another person and applied to the brain event), but
somehow partaking of both. People experience value when they become aware
in the moment of the reality of God.
Barretts second move is to argue that this awareness is not a higher-order
interpretation of a given sensory awareness (he describes this theoretical interpretation as the enrichment perspective), so much as a skilled ability to pay attention to
the environment. The skill involves discrimination*attending to what the rich
environment has to offer and seeing it as more complex. He uses as an example the
process of becoming more skilled at tasting wine. As the taster grows in skill, he is
not improving his ability to learn labels and impose those labels on fermented grape
juice. There are independent-of-the-taster differences between kinds of grape juice,
and the taster is learning to identify some of them. Juice from the grapes used to
make syrah is spicier than juice from the grapes used to make cabernet. An
ecological theory points to these real features of the grape juice in order to
understand the learning process.
Even though I wrote the account of wine tasting that Barrett uses, and did so in
order to describe what I saw as the process of knowing God, until I read Barretts
paper I did not realize how important the difference between the ecological and the
*Email: luhrmann@standford.edu
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T.M. Luhrmann
enrichment approaches could be. The ecological approach focuses your attention on
interaction, not interpretation, and on the way that the interaction changes the
complexity of the environment.
My next challenge is to compare the way that people experience God in
Pentecostal churches in three different settings: the Bay area, California; Accra,
Ghana; and Chennai, India. The motivation for the comparison is to understand
what I have come to call local theories of mind. Theory of mind is a phrase used
to describe the inferences that young children begin to draw about the world around
the age of three. At that point, children almost universally begin to realize that
people have minds and that their behavior can be explained by the knowledge and
beliefs and wants in their minds, which might not be held in common with others. I
have been interested in the cultural variation in these theories of mind*in what more
particular expectations about minds people might infer in particular places, and how
these particular expectations*that the mind is bounded or porous, for example, or
that thoughts can affect the world independently of the thinker*might shape
spiritual experience.
Part of this story, I think, is the kinds of thoughts that become good candidates
to be identified as generated by a supernatural or divine force. In general, I think
that there is a continuum of mental phenomena along which thoughts are
increasingly likely to be viewed as candidates for not me experience. (That is,
the thoughts do not come from the person whose mind it is, but from God, or a
spirit or demon.) On this continuum, the more spontaneous and the more vivid
such mental events are, the better candidates for external causation they become.
(Maybe there are two continua.) Dreams are often good candidates; so are loud
inner voices, or strong images, or thoughts that stop you in your tracks. I
think of this range of phenomena as a kind of topography of mind.
Barretts paper has made me realize that I do indeed think of this process that I
am trying to explain as an interaction between cultural expectations (local theories of
mind) and the psychological range of actual mental experience. I expect that some
cultures will elaborate these actual mental topographies more than others. Different
cultures will, in short, encourage people to discriminate between mental events in
ways that vary. These are real environmental differences that local cultures might
elaborate*or not. And to capture this, I will need to figure out how to ask questions
about that topography carefully.
My initial evidence for this hypothesis is that, working with colleagues, I have
been talking to people with psychosis in these different settings (San Mateo, Accra,
and Chennai) and we have found that there are differences in the way that people
experience the auditory phenomena so commonly associated with schizophrenia. In
San Mateo, people intensely dislike their voices, and experience their voices as
violent; in Accra, people often report that they are hearing God and that God tells
them not to pay attention to their negative voices; and in Chennai, people report that
they hear their kin telling them to do chores. My interpretation of this is not (or not
only) that people in these different settings have different interpretations of their
voices. People with psychosis have different mental topographies than others*they
experience auditory streams that include good and bad voices, commands,
scratching, murmurs, and other events. My own hypothesis is that people with
different ideas about their minds interact with that auditory environment differently,
and that to some extent, they alter it. My sense is that people in Accra and Chennai
161
may hear more of the positive voices that lurk in their auditory environment, and
those in San Mateo may hear less of them.
There is, of course, substantially more work to do in exploring this hypothesis.
I mention it here because Barretts paper helps me to name the phenomenon that I
think I see. Were that all the papers one reads so fruitful!
Department of Religious Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA,
USA
*Email: taves@religion.ucsb.edu
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A. Taves
shift in wording goes to the heart of my difficulty with Barretts proposal: his
conflation of meaning and value.
I can use the following definitional paragraph to elaborate on key problems:
In contrast to the constructivist theories that view meaning as something added by the
organism to environmental input, the ecological approach views meaning as a basic
property of the interactive relationship between an organism and its environment. Any
feature of the environment has meaning if it can be registered by the organism as a
significant contrast: a discrimination of difference that has some potential consequence
for the regulation of organism behavior. . . . Value can also be understood in terms of
contrast, and thus as being closely related to meaning. In the most basic sense, value is
the importance that a significant contrast has for the organism.
We can begin with the portion that defines a significant contrast [as] a discrimination
of difference that has some potential consequence for the regulation of organism
behavior. A discrimination of difference in what most psychologists would refer to as
a percept. We can distinguish between a percept (a discrimination of difference),
a salient percept (a difference that stands out as potentially significant), and a
significant percept (a difference that*as best the organism can tell via appraisal
processes*is actually significant). Discriminations of difference (i.e., contrasts or
percepts) as such do not necessarily have consequences for the regulation of
behavior, as Barretts definition tacitly acknowledges. Organisms have evolved so as to
perceive contrasts with potential consequences as more salient (as attentiongrabbing). The consequences of a salient percept for the regulation of the organisms
behavior are potential, that is, undetermined and unclear. The potential consequences
have to be appraised, at which point, the organism determines*as accurately as it
can*what consequence (value) it has for behavior. This appraisal process is, as
Barrett argues, environmentally embedded and contextually driven. The organism
may err in its appraisal. In short, while I would agree that any contrast is potentially
significant in the broadest sense of the term, the conflation of perceptions of
difference, perceptions of salience (of potential value), and perceptions of significance
(of appraised value) obscures the differences needed to understand the problem that
Barrett is posing.
Any feature of the environment has meaning*I could expand this to read, any
stimulus (however generated) has potential value or significance if it can be registered
by the organism as . . . a discrimination of difference that has some potential
consequence for the regulation of organism behavior. This seems like a reasonable
definition of a salient stimulus. Some dreams (internally generated) are more salient
than others*they may stand out because we feel unusually aroused in the dream or
because they are particularly vivid and memorable. Their salience generates the sense
that they have potential, that they might mean something and, thus, that they might
have consequences for action. Upon reflection (an appraisal process), we might decide
that it was just a dream or that it had significance for something (e.g., understanding
our lives, signaling a new direction, or solving a problem).
In the last paragraph, I put mean in quotes to signal difficulties that I now
want to address directly. Meaning is a very slippery term and the phrase it might
mean something captures the difficulties nicely. In this usage, meaning something
is linked to an appraisal process. This usage asks: is it meaningful? Does it have
significance? Is it valuable? We also use meaning in a more descriptive way when
we ask: what did they mean by that? If we now turn to the first sentence in the
163
paragraph, in which Barrett distinguishes between the way that constructivist and
ecological theories view meaning, we find the word meaning used in these two
different ways. The conflation of two different meanings generates the impression
that one meaning is correct and the other incorrect rather than just being different.
This simply adds to the confusion, needlessly pitting so-called constructivist
approaches against ecological ones, when they are focusing on different questions.
The difference is analogous to what philosophers refer to as semantic and
foundational theories of meaning. Thus, as Jeff Speaks (2011) notes:
Even if philosophers have not consistently kept these two questions separate, there
clearly is a distinction between the questions What is the meaning of this or that symbol
(for a particular person or group)? and In virtue of what facts about that person or
group does the symbol have that meaning?
If we substitute input for symbol, the problem is evident. The semantic question
is descriptive and can be asked at any level at which input in processed. Thus, in
the semantic sense of meaning, we can view discriminations of difference or
recognition of patterns as meaning-making processes (see Paloutzian & Park,
2013; Park, 2005; Park & Folkman, 1997). Barrett, however, is asking the
foundational question: In virtue of what facts about [seasoned practitioners] does
the [input] have that meaning? The foundational sense of meaning does imply
values, such that meaning in the foundational sense translates as value for some
that it doesnt have for others.1 Questions of semantic meaning have been more
often asked by those whom Barrett labels constructivists. Questions of foundational meaning have been the focus of ecological psychologists.
In his generally quite accurate discussion of my book (Taves, 2009), Barrett
discusses what he views as its limitations. He notes that my approach aims mostly at
processes that, at least in theory, can be located inside the head. He recognizes,
however, that I stress the role of social interaction in relation to the attribution of
meaning and notes, too, that I could have included environmental structures and the
like under the heading of observable data. I agree that I could have expanded on
both of these points more fully. His focus, however, is on what he takes to be my
premise: that value is, at bottom, a simple quality of specialness that is ascribed to
certain things. He adds:
In the introduction above, I described meaning and value as closely related, such that
there can be no experience of value without meaningful contrast. For Taves, meaning
seems to drop out of her analysis of specialness at the most basic level, leaving behind a
highly abstract quality whose unconscious ascription is allegedly responsible for the
singularization of something as a bearer of special value (Taves, 2009, pp. 48!49).
However, to construe specialness as a quality whose ascription is triggered apart from
complex discriminations of meaning seems to entail the phenomenological claim that it
can show up without relation to the manner in which experience unfolds in time. . . . As a
result, Taves theory directs attention away from the ecological conditions of religious
experience.
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A. Taves
165
coupled perceptually in more than one way, depending on the circumstances and the
amount of information available.2
If we return to Barretts opening question in light of a more qualified
appropriation of Gibsons approach, there is much that we could investigate to
figure out why seasoned practitioners might perceive something*say, a feeling of
presence*that others, whether less seasoned practitioners or outsiders, do not. In
contrast to Barrett, I find it hard to conceive of a feeling of presence as anything
but a probabilistic assessment of a feeling. I have no difficulty, however, asking what
a feeling construed probabilistically as a presence might afford seasoned practitioners. It might, as Barrett hopes, provide an experience of rich and abiding value,
impervious to hardship and misfortune. On the other hand, it might not.
Luhrmann (2012, pp. 254!266) provides illustrations. Several of the seasoned
practitioners (congregationally recognized prayer warriors) in the Vineyard
churches that she studied not only had vivid positive feelings of a presence, but
also negative ones that they construed as demons. Beyond construing various
feelings and sensations as a presence, several congregants became preoccupied with
fighting off negative presences (spiritual warfare). In one case, others decided that
a prayer warrior named Sarah, who claimed to have seen an imp, needed
exorcism (Luhrmann 2012, pp. 260!265). Sarah was confused by this, but eventually
accepted that she was struggling with demons and needed to be delivered from
them. The exorcisms did not work and eventually she was hospitalized, where she
was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Sarahs (non-evangelical) family blamed her
depression on being born again. Although her family and her (non-charismatic
Christian) therapist disagreed with her, Sarah continued to pray in tongues, which
she construed as a manifestation of the presence of the Holy Spirit, and to have
physical sensations that she construed as demons.
These seasoned practitioners learned to pay attention to certain feelings and
sensations (learned salience), which they viewed as potentially significant and
construed (appraised) as unseen presences, both positive and negative, in accord
with the teachings of their charismatic congregation. Moreover, some among
these more seasoned practitioners worried that they might be going crazy. Within
the congregation, there was general agreement that positive and negative entities
were present, but there were disagreements over how particular feelings and
sensations should be interpreted (appraised). Others (Sarahs family, her Christian
therapist, and the hospital personnel) did not think that Sarahs feelings and
sensations should be construed as presences, whether positive or negative, and
viewed her churchs cultivation of spiritual presences as making her more vulnerable
to hardship and misfortune rather than less. A probabilistic approach to perception
allows us to consider why people perceive certain feelings and sensations as salient,
and how interpretive frameworks embedded in practices enhance the probability that
salient perceptions will be appraised as more or less significant.
In conclusion, Barretts article has deep underlying problems. First, he appropriates Nevilles axiological philosophy simplistically, asserting its conclusions and
attempting to find a psychology that fits them. Second, he appropriates ecological
psychology uncritically with little or no attention to the debates that have swirled
around it, because it seems to fit with Nevilles conclusions. Had he worked with the
complexities and nuances in Nevilles philosophy, drawn out Nevilles presuppositions and caveats, and done the same with experimental psychologies, ecological and
cognitive, he could have constructed bridges between Nevilles philosophy and a
166
A. Taves
range of experimental research in psychology. These bridges most likely would have
been only partial, but they would have furthered the conversation in a more
illuminating way.
Notes
1.
Neville (1981, pp. 160!163, emphasis added) makes a parallel distinction when he
discusses, first, synthesis in imagination, which analyzes how more basic elements are
synthesized in imagination, and, then, the value of synthesis, in which he asks, why
there is such a synthesis? He answers the latter question in several ways, depending on
how the question is understood.
Insofar as the question asks for purpose served by imaginative integration in experience, the
answer is in terms of evolutionary adaptability leading to more successful reproduction of
the species. Insofar as it asks what value is accomplished in imagination, the answer . . . is
that it preserves some of the values in the world and reproduces them in a new
experience. . . . Insofar as the question asks for the value peculiar to imagination as
synthesis, the answer is beauty (p. 163).
2.
In appropriating Nevilles philosophy, Barrett does not distinguish between these various
questions. Instead he presupposes Nevilles conclusion that experience begins in beauty
(Neville, 1981, p. 163), which Neville acknowledges must be justified, and Nevilles view
that religion has chiefly to do with world construction and, therefore, that religious
experience is rooted in world-building through imagination (Neville, 1981, p. 170).
Neville is open to both the possibility that religious apprehension merely grasps
the natural beginning of human experience and the possibility that in doing so, the
ontological foundation of reality is revealed (Neville, 1981, p. 173). I am more
comfortable with the more modest claim that some apprehensions (that some people
deem religious) might grasp (or focus on or describe in their own way) the natural
beginning of human experience, i.e. the way that experience is constructed out of more
basic elements.
This paragraph is taken with slight modifications from Taves (in press).
References
Chemeno, A. (2009). Radical embodied cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gallagher, S. (2008). Direct perception in the intersubjective context. Consciousness and Cognition, 17,
535!543.
Goldstein, E.B. (2009). Ecological approach and direct perception. In Encyclopedia of Perception
(Vols. 1!2, pp. 1:366!370, 1:375!80). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
Heft, H. (2001). Ecological psychology in context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the legacy of William
James. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Luhrmann, T.M. (2012). When God talks back: Understanding the American evangelical relationship with
God. New York: Knopf.
Neville, R.C. (1981). The reconstruction of thinking. Albany: SUNY Press.
Paloutzian, R.F., & Park, C. (2013). Recent progress and core issues in the science of the psychology of
religion and spirituality. In R.F. Paloutzian & C. Park (Eds.), Handbook of psychology of religion and
spirituality (2nd ed.) (pp. 3!22). New York: Guilford.
Park, C. (2005). Religion and meaning. In R.F. Paloutzian & C. Park (Eds.), Handbook of psychology of
religion and spirituality (pp. 295!314). New York: Guilford.
Park, C., & Folkman, S. (1997). Meaning in the context of stress and coping. Review of General
Psychology, 1, 115!215.
Speaks, J. (2011). Theories of meaning. In E.N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy online
(Summer 2011 Edition). Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/meaning
Taves, A. (2009). Religious experience reconsidered: A building-block approach to the study of religion and
other special things. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Taves, A. (2013). Building blocks of sacralities: A new basis for comparison across cultures and religions.
In R.F. Paloutzian & C. Park (Eds.), Handbook of psychology of religion and spirituality (2nd ed.),
(pp. 138!161). New York: Guilford.
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Taves, A. (in press). Non-ordinary powers: Charisma, special affordances and the study of religion. In
D. Xygalatas & L. McCorkle (Eds.), Mental culture: Classical social theory and the cognitive science of
religion. London: Acumen.
Taves, A. (under review). Reverse engineering complex cultural concepts: Identifying building blocks of
religion.
Vicente, K.J. (2003). Beyond the lens model and direct perception: Toward a broader ecological
psychology. Ecological Psychology, 15, 241!267.
Since I am not well acquainted with cognitive and neural theories of perception, I am
unable to assess the details of the model of perception that Barretts ecological
approach to religious experience entails. Instead, I want to raise and discuss some
points that are rather methodological and philosophical in nature.
First of all, I am sympathetic to the starting point of Barretts paper. As
I understand it, he argues that there is a flaw in the current cognitive approaches
to religious thinking and behavior; and the flaw explains why standard cognitive
theories are unable to take account of feelings and perceptions of meaning, as well
as value, in religious practice and life. The flaw is due to the inherent restrictions of
the standard cognitive science paradigm, which sees religious meaning and value as
something extrinsic to experience and perception*a kind of add-on based on the
subjects religious beliefs. On this view, the religious experience of meaning and
value is simply a mundane experience interpreted under the religious subjects
beliefs.
Such a view has two consequences. First, since beliefs are internal states of
the subject, they cannot be accessed from a third-person point of view. Thus, value
judgements that are inherent to religious experience become inaccessible to the
outsider. Second, the various phenomena under the heading of religious experience are understood in terms of beliefs and representations, and the role of sensory
input is systematically underplayed. This results in a kind of belief-based theory of
religious experience: that which makes an experience religious are the beliefs of the
subject, not the sensory input itself.
Barrett offers an ecological approach that reconstructs the idea of sensory input
and the perception of value and meaning in terms of the interaction between the
organism and its environment. On this view, meaning and value are something that
are already in the sensory input, since perceptions involve the discernment of
meaning and value in the contrasts of the environment. The benefit of the ecological
model would then be that it makes possible third-person access to the experience of
religious meaning. This is because the conditions of the experience are not simply in
the head of the experiencer (as beliefs would be). The scholar of religion can have a
*Email: aku.visala@helsinki.fi
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A. Visala
169
and has access. If this were not the case, the main benefit*the scholar having thirdperson access to at least some of the grounds of the religious subjects experience*
would be lost. The religious subject, an Evangelical Christian, for instance, will most
likely disagree with this assumption and hold that his or her religious experience of
value and meaning is tracking something else than the physical environment. This
something else is God, who is understood to be actually present and discerned in the
religious perception*present to the religious subject but inaccessible to the scholar
of religion. I am not saying that the two basic assumptions (a shared environment for
the religious subject and scholar alike, and there being nothing more than physical
properties of the environment) are unjustified. What is important, however, is that
they are neither stated nor defended by Barrett.
I welcome the core thrust of Nathaniel Barretts paper and his approach to the
religious perception of value in terms of Gibsons ecological, non-constructivist
theory of perception; I agree with Barrett that it is fruitful to apply Gibsons theory
to religious discernment. The paper is a very helpful start to what promises to be a
fruitful line of theorizing in the psychology of religion, and I hope the following
remarks will contribute to its further development.
Barrett makes a distinction between two dimensions of religious meaning, one
being the content of religious belief and experience that can be articulated to
outsiders, the other being the more richly textured and dynamic dimensions of
religious meaning that emerges when it is really felt. It is an important distinction,
although it seems to me that the former is important for insiders as well as outsiders,
and that among insiders in the religious life, there is a rich to and fro between
articulate and felt meanings.
I suggest that it would be helpful to connect the distinction between different kinds
of religious meaning to general cognitive theories that have distinguished between two
different levels or systems*a distinction that corresponds roughly to the everyday
concepts of head and heart in religion. I have suggested elsewhere that the head
and heart in religion can be mapped onto the distinction between propositional and
implicational meanings, respectively (see Watts, 2013, pp. 139!173). Religion seems to
be a domain in which felt meanings are especially important, and many religious
practices seem designed to focus on them.
Barretts formulation of value is crucial to his Gibsonian approach to religion. I
have no problem with his basic suggestion that value is based on contrast. However,
values are very heterogeneous, and Barrett handles this heterogeneity by distinguishing
*Email: fnw1001@cam.ac.uk
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F. Watts
three levels of value. The moral and religious values that are especially important in
human life seem to come under what he calls tertiary values. For a convincing
ecological approach to religion, I think we need a fuller analysis of how tertiary values
operate. For example, tertiary values may involve both the cognitive systems
mentioned above (i.e., both head and heart; in contrast, primary and secondary
values can probably operate with only one of those cognitive systems. Watts (in press)
has suggested that having two cognitive systems is the distinguishing feature of
humans, and what makes religion and cultural life possible.
There is a longer history to the application of Gibsonian theory to religion than
Barrett acknowledges, and it goes back at least to the 1970s, at which time the focus
was on the meditational practices of Hinduism and Buddhism (see Watts & Williams,
1988, pp. 64!68). For instance, in a lengthy and rich application of Gibsonian theory
to Indian religious practices, Daniel Brown (1977, 1986) suggested that training
in Buddhist yoga teaches people to dissolve the normal unity of perception and
cognition in what he calls gross cognition. Terry Halwes (1974) made a somewhat
similar point in suggesting that Buddhist meditation teaches a skill analogous to that
acquired by people engaged in a scanning task that can be done most efficiently by
not forming a conscious representation of the material being scanned.
Although Brown and Halwes concede that much of perception operates in a
constructivist way, they suggest that religious practices may work to establish a less
constructivist mode of perception than people often employ. Brown makes the further
point that Gibsonian theory accords better with accounts of meditational experience to
be found in the Hindu tradition, whereas the Buddhist tradition is more constructivist
in its assumptions. If he is right about that, it is fascinating to find a counterpart to the
current theoretical debate about perception in these ancient traditions.
It is another noteworthy feature of this literature that, rather than debating which
is the correct theory of perception in general, it suggests that there are different ways
of doing perception*one better elucidated by Gibsonian theory, the other better
elucidated by constructivist theory. That leads to an exploration of what determines
which of the two is used in any particular culture and context. On this view, religion
may not just involve a discernment of value that can be understood in Gibsonian
terms, for religious practices might actually shift perceptual style in a direction that
accords more closely to Gibsons approach.
Another spiritual tradition that would particularly repay analysis from an
ecological perspective is the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. While many
religious traditions, including the American evangelical tradition studied by
Luhrmann, seem to involve implicit cognitive training, the Ignatian tradition does
so in an unusually explicit way, with a central focus on the examination of ordinary
experience. This has already been the subject of thorough psychological commentary
from a psychoanalytic perspective (Meissner, 1999). However, the Ignatian tradition
would lend itself very well to a study, from the perspective of ecological psychology,
of how religious perceptual training is accomplished.
References
Brown, D.P. (1977). A model for the levels of concentration meditation. International Journal of Clinical
and Experimental Hypnosis, 25, 266!273.
Brown, D.P. (1986). The stages of meditation in cross-cultural perspective. In K. Wilber, J. Engler &
D.P. Brown (Eds.), Transformations of consciousness: Conventional and contemplative perspectives on
development (pp. 17!52). Boston, MA: New Science Library.
171
Halwes, T. (1974). Structural realism, coalitions and relationship of Gibsonian, constructivist and
Buddhist theories of perception. In W.B. Weimer & D.S. Palermo (Eds.), Cognition and the symbolic
processes (pp. 367!383). New York: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Meissner, W.W. (1999). To the greater glory: A psychological study of Ignatian spirituality. Milwaukee, WI:
Marquette University Press.
Watts, F. (2013). Dual system theories of religious cognition. In F. Watts & G. Dumbreck (Eds.), Head and
heart: Perspectives from religion and psychology (pp. 139!173). West Conshohoken, PA: Templeton Press.
Watts, F. (in press). Religion and the emergence of differentiated cognition. In F. Watts & L. Turner (Eds.),
Evolution, religion and cognitive science: Critical inquiries. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Watts, F., & Williams, M. (1988). The psychology of religious knowing. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
RESPONSE
Perceptualization and the enjoyment of religious practice: a response to
commentators
Nathaniel F. Barrett*
Institute for Culture and Society, University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain
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N.F. Barrett
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history of man shows however that man takes his enjoyment neat, and at as short range
as possible. (Dewey, 1958, p. 78)
I have quoted this passage in full because it indicates the kind of aesthetic or
axiological turn, exemplified by Deweys (1958, 1980) theory of experience
(Alexander, 1987), that has inspired my approach to religious experience. Despite
the recent revival of interest in Dewey, however, the available options for understanding our experience of value are currently so limited that proposals like mine
must make an extra effort to avoid being misunderstood. That is, when value cannot
be considered as a natural property without reducing it to something else, the very
idea that we should develop a scientific understanding of its direct enjoyment will
seem wrongheaded from all sides. Thus my proposal appears to Aku Visala as an
attempt to understand how religious values supervene on value-less physical
properties, thereby undermining the possibility of genuine value; while to Geertz it
appears as an attempt to advance a disembodied notion of experience that ignores
the constraints of neurobiology and panders to religious sensitivities.
As different as these responses may seem, they both point toward a widespread
failure to understand the place of value in nature (cf. Deacon, 2011). Visalas concern
about the reduction of value to something merely physical and Geertzs concern about
its evaporation into something disembodied both raise difficult questions*indeed,
metaphysical questions*about value. Metaphysics as I intend it is not concerned
with something extra-experiential; rather it deals with the broadest assumptions that
frame our approach to various aspects of experience. The argument of the original
paper and the clarifications that I offer here do not aspire to metaphysical generality
and should not be taken as metaphysical. However, I do think it is important to
consider the possibility that our default broad-scale assumptions are inadequate to our
experience of value and have contributed to the widespread neglect of this experience
by cognitive science.
Indeed, the major exceptions to the scientific neglect of value serve only to
accentuate its pervasiveness. Within psychology, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyis studies
of optimum experience or flow (Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2005) are a wellknown example of research devoted to the phenomenon of intrinsic motivation, as
well as one of the main inspirations for my approach. Yet after 40 years, flow
research has not made much headway outside of qualitative psychology, perhaps
because it does not fit well with the computational paradigm of cognitive science. We
do not have a solid neurobiological model of flow, and even areas of research devoted
to attention and effort have yet to fully account for it (see Bruya, 2010). Perhaps one
of the limitations of flow research has been its tendency to focus on the subjective
side of what is clearly an interactive phenomenon. Although the kind of religious
experience that interests me is not just flow, I do think that an ecological approach to
the perception of value could both contribute to and benefit from studies of flow.
Perhaps the paper would have been more effective in making a case for the
experience of value if it had not tied this experience to the problem of presence and
more specifically to the experiences of personal presence studied by T.H. Luhrmann
(2012). This connection seems to have given*especially to Geertz*the impression
that my argument was custom-designed to account for these latter experiences
and, moreover, to account for them as non-constructed in the sense of being
undetermined by culture and as really felt in some especially justificatory sense.
This view of my intentions misconstrues what I mean by interactive as opposed to
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salience, more or less richness and depth. Perhaps what Csikszentmihalyi calls
optimal experience is simply the maximal enrichment of the very same valuecharacter that distinguishes perceptual experience from other kinds of experience.
Moreover, I suggest that the same trajectory of value-character might be used to
distinguish conscious experience as a whole. Importantly, value-character seems to be
closely related to the various measurements of complexity that neuroscientists Giulio
Tononi, Gerald Edelman, Olaf Sporns and others have developed to distinguish the
neural dynamics underlying consciousness (Sporns, 2011; Tononi, 2008; Tononi &
Edelman, 1998). I find especially intriguing the indication that these same measures
of complexity can also be used to show how neural dynamics change in response to
stimuli whose statistical structures fit with the intrinsic activity patterns of the
perceiving system*what Tononi and others call matching complexity (Tononi,
Sporns, & Edelman, 1996). These differences of complexity seem to parallel the
trajectory of value-character that I believe defines the sphere of perceptual
experience as well as the experience of intrinsic value. Could such measures be
used to develop and test a neurobiological theory of value-rich experience?
Another important qualification that is not well explained in the original paper is
that although value-character is essential to the experience of intrinsic value, it is not
the sole determinant of our experience of value. If value-character alone were
responsible for the perception of value, then the perception of religious value would
depend only on perceptualization, which does not seem to be the case. We have a wide
range of experiences of value, and many of them do not feel like the normal
perception of ordinary things (as perhaps some religious visions do). Nevertheless, if
we adopt a graded scale of perceptualization, and grant that perceptualization is
linked to value-character, it is possible to understand perceptualization as one of the
principal means of value enrichment in religious practice without making the
attainment of full-blown perceptual veridicality a condition for the perception of
value.
For instance, the fact that certain religious practices use music to perceptualize
personal presence does not necessarily entail that this presence is perceived with
all of the vivid detail that characterizes perception of an ordinary person. Yet it
does count as a kind of perceptual experience, as I think Eric Clarkes (2005)
explanation of virtual motion and agency is intended to show. Thus, insofar as
virtual motion is an approximation of real motion, the use of musical features that
specify motion is an example of perceptualization, and moreover it is a prime
example of perceptualization that is not exclusively inner.
In any case, the enrichment of value-character that is tied to perceptualization is
what interests me most. In particular, the use of environmental (as opposed to
bodily) interactants to enhance the experience of religious value through perceptualization is the aspect of religious practice that my proposed ecological theory is
specially designed to target. I now see that articulating this relatively narrow focus
requires some discussion of the wider field of value experience: that is, I need to show
how the perceptualized dimension of value experience relates to other, less perceptual
dimensions such as emotional valence and cognitive appraisal. This distinction is
slippery, because these dimensions are closely interrelated and overlap to some
degree. Nevertheless, it is possible to point out the difference in experience and
to make some suggestions about the kinds of processes that might underlie this
difference.
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N.F. Barrett
177
From the phenomenological point of view, there is a tendency to view this optimal
grip as a matter of bodily adjustment. Again, quoting Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 250):
my body is geared onto the world when my perception presents me with a spectacle
as varied and as clearly articulated as possible. Without intending to downplay the
obvious importance of the bodily side, by taking up an ecological approach I am
trying to focus attention on adjustments that we can make to the environmental side.
It is evident that in everyday life we constantly make such adjustments for the sake of
various kinds of value-enhancement: to sharpen contrasts we juxtapose objects, to
warm up a social gathering we put on some music, and so on.
What interests me is how religious practitioners, deliberately or not, make similar
adjustments within their religious environments or milieus, including both their
physical surroundings as well as enacted patterns of behavior (e.g., rituals), so as to
enrich the value-character of their experience in that environment. But to understand
how they do this, it is also important to appreciate why.
Practitioners participate in religious activities for all kinds of reasons and with a
wide variety of moods and expectations. But I think it is fairly uncontroversial to
suppose that many if not most practitioners enter into such activities hungry for
religious meaning and value. They do not want merely to participate in something
from which religious meaning can be derived; they want to see, hear, touch, smell,
and taste meaning as directly and abundantly as possible. In other words, religious
practitioners want to feast on religious meaning (which is not to say that they do not
often go away hungry). For this, they seek to encounter religious meaning in some
materialized form, which for me is another way of describing the perceptualization of religious meaning.
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N.F. Barrett
179
180
2.
3.
4.
N.F. Barrett
Functional explanations are indispensable to religious studies and I have no intention of
displacing them. My point is that religious practice is one of the many spheres of human
life that can be intrinsically motivated, and it needs to be studied as such.
In fact it does preclude some kinds of justification, namely the claim that the experiences
of supernatural presence count as prima facie evidence for the existence of a supernatural
being (Barrett & Wildman, 2009).
I started using this term before I found out that it is already used in psychology to apply
to a similar, though involuntary, phenomenon among schizophrenics. I do not mean to
claim any particular connection to schizophrenia, but the coincidence does raise some
interesting questions, especially for Luhrmanns current research.
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