There is a growing recognition that most religious communities do not write out explicit doctrines, they do not ask their members to publicly recite a confession of faith, and they do not police orthodoxy. To describe a religion as “a set of beliefs” is therefore misleading. Perhaps some religions consist of cultic practices without belief; perhaps the category of belief can be dropped altogether. Jacob Mackey’s Belief and Cult addresses exactly this question. With an eye to the theoretical question about the role of belief in religions in general, Mackey draws on cognitive science to argue that one cannot understand practice-centered religions like ancient Roman cults without the category of belief. This panel responds to Mackey’s defense of belief from four perspectives: the practice turn in social theory, pragmatist philosophy, the Ontological Turn in anthropology, and philosophy of mind and cognitive neurosciences.
The academic study of religion and social theory in general are in the midst of what has been called “the practice turn,” that is, a shift of focus in theorizing human behavior that treats embodied social practices as the matrix from which all meaning and subjectivity grow. My aim is to argue that the practice turn is best served by a philosophy of mind that avoids dualism but nevertheless retains the category of beliefs, understanding them as conditioned by and emergent from the actions of material entities. In this paper, I use the defense of the category of belief in Jacob Mackey’s Belief and Cult -- and in particular, the “dual process” or “dual system” distinction he uses between two types of belief, one non-reflective or spontaneous, the other reflective or deliberate -- to make this case.
In Belief and Cult (Princeton UP, 2002), Jacob Mackey provides a wide-ranging, interdisciplinarily grounded defense of the category of belief in general and a robust representational and intentional version of the notion in particular. In my contribution to this panel, I examine Mackey’s treatment of the notion of belief, primarily in Part I of the book, mainly as it engages in contemporary debates and live issues in the philosophy of mind and cognitive neurosciences. In particular, I examine the import of theories of belief coming from contemporary philosophy of mind that seek to downplay belief’s more strictly representational aspects and ground it more directly in action, habit, and experience, perhaps the dissolving the very foundational dichotomy between “belief” and “practice/ritual” that has come to organize the study of Roman religion and its presumed contrast with Christianity as Mackey tells it.
Mackey (2022) argues for a theory of religion that incorporates a concept of belief as an “Intentional state,” and as a condition of possibility for religious emotion, practice, and collective action. I connect his thesis to insights from pragmatism and critical realism, traditions which have been gaining attention in social theory but are absent from Mackey’s discussion and could help advance religion scholarship that recognizes practice and belief go hand-in-hand. Specifically, I discuss what Mackey’s project might gain from engaging with Peircean theories that entail the reality of belief and of intersubjective knowledge, as well as critical realist metatheory, to which Mackey’s project already bears a resemblance.
My paper places Jacob Mackey’s argument about belief in conversation with anthropologists of the Ontological Turn like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Martin Holbraad, and Peter Skafish who problematize the way that ethnocentrism persists in the form of tacit positivisms in the study of human difference. These anthropologists have advanced a methodological “perspectivism” which problematizes precisely the language of “representation,” “perspective,” and even “world” and “its object” upon which Mackey relies to defend “belief” as a universal form of cognition. As a means of reform, these anthropologists suggest replacing talk of multiple views with talk of multiple worlds. I will show how Mackey’s work can be in constructive conversation with the Ontological Turn, particularly in the context of the latter’s challenge to a representationalist account of belief and the “worldview” model of difference it underwrites.
| Jacob Makcey, Occidental College | jmackey@oxy.edu | View |