Int J Philos Relig (2012) 72:243–247

DOI 10.1007/s11153-012-9375-0

BOOK REVIEW

G. Scott Davis: Believing and acting: the pragmatic turn

in comparative religion and ethics
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012, 234 pp., $55.00 (hb)

Stephen S. Bush

Received: 24 September 2012 / Accepted: 28 September 2012 / Published online: 14 October 2012
© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012

In Believing and Acting: The Pragmatic Turn in Comparative Religion and Ethics,
G. Scott Davis aims to inject a dose of common sense into contemporary methodolog-
ical discussions in religious studies. The study of religion, he claims, is not altogether
unlike what we do in navigating our everyday social environment. In fact, it involves
some of the exact same skills. When we use a subway system, or attempt to under-
stand other people so occupied, we attribute beliefs and desires to them in order to
make sense of what they do. If a person is going down the escalator to the A train, we
attribute to her the belief that her destination is proximate to one of the stations along
that route and the desire to journey there. We understand her beliefs as reasons the
commuter has for getting on the escalator. Much of the time, we are accustomed to the
patterns of behavior around us, and we make these belief attributions implicitly, if at
all. But if we are struggling to understand unfamiliar behavior, or if we are responding
to the curious questions of the uninitiated, attributing beliefs and counting them as
reasons for the believer to act is what we do.
Studying religion has complexities peculiar to it, but it is at heart a similar under-
taking. When confronted by the rituals, utterances, and texts of practitioners, we are
trying to figure out what beliefs to attribute to them in order to make the most sense
of their behavior. This requires explicit and sustained attention to their social and
historical context, whereas typically we take that context for granted in our everyday
social life. Historians and ethnographers are trained experts in this sort of attention to
context. Thus, Davis can recommend, “Understanding religion requires nothing more
than the sensitive and imaginative reading of human phenomena informed by the best
available ethnography set in the best available historical narrative” (p. 3).

S. S. Bush (B)
Department of Religious Studies, Brown University, 59 George Street,
Box 1927, Providence, RI 02912, USA
e-mail: stephen_bush@brown.edu

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To say that understanding religion is continuous with our everyday practices is not
to say that it is a simple matter. Attributing beliefs, intentions, and desires to people
can be complex and difficult. Sometimes it is hard to get a grasp on why people do
what they do. Often, a given action lends itself to more than one interpretation. So what
we need are habits of inquiry that are fallibilist and sensitive to evidence, allowing the
investigator to sort out various competing explanations of others’ behavior to arrive
at the best account. This sort of inquiry presupposes a commitment to truth, because
the investigator recognizes that she cannot adopt both of two contradictory accounts
of the behavior in question.
In developing this account of scholarly methodology, Davis draws primarily from
C. S. Peirce, Donald Davidson, and Richard Rorty, and he has chapters devoted to
each. Peirce supplies the account of inquiry that Davis recommends for students of
religion. Peirce rejects Cartesian claims to possess immediate authority over one’s
own mental states. Even self-knowledge is fallible, so the student of human behavior
can approach subjects’ assertions about their own beliefs, experiences, and intentions
without granting absolute authority to the subjects. The investigator takes into con-
sideration the subjects’ own account of their behavior, but can follow the evidence
about what people are thinking, experiencing, and doing wherever it leads. Peirce also
encourages us unabashedly to regard truth as the goal of inquiry, without fretting over
whether truth can be adequately theorized. Here Davis rounds out Peirce’s notion of
truth with an appeal to Arthur Fine’s “natural ontological attitude,” the idea that we
have a “common sense … everyday” notion of truth (p. 45) that allows us to bank on
certain propositions, as the best thing to believe given the available evidence, without
taking them as unrevisable. Reading Rorty instructs one to reject “scientistic foun-
dationalism,” which would treat some sorts of observations as incorrigible and fit to
serve as the secure and certain basis from which all other knowledge derives. Rorty
also helps us embrace methodological pluralism (pp. 87, 96). Further, according to
Rorty, the observations of both scholars and those they study are “theory-laden,” and
so knowledge is always expressed in historically particular ways. The particularity
of knowledge raises the specter of relativism, and here Davidson’s contribution is to
assure us that if we are able to recognize someone’s utterances and actions as mean-
ingful, it is because we share a great many beliefs with them. We need not worry that
conceptual schemes are so relativistic as to preclude translation.
Others have applied these pragmatist insights to the study of religion productively
before, but Davis’ contribution is still consequential. Davis gives us an extensive,
book-length treatment of the topics, and Believing and Acting serves as a program-
matic advancement of the pragmatist perspective in religious studies. It is espe-
cially valuable because it applies the pragmatist insights to three major contemporary
approaches to religious studies: post-colonial and poststructuralist approaches that are
oriented toward power and materiality; cognitive scientific and evolutionary psycho-
logical approaches; and comparative studies in religion and religious ethics.
Davis has harsh words for the first two. In “the wide-eyed naiveté of cognitive stud-
ies and the postmodern hermeneutics of suspicion—there’s not enough [worthwhile
theory] to bother and both should probably be uprooted altogether” (p. 4). The prob-
lem with the poststructuralists and postcolonialists is that they regard the very attempt
to assess non-Western people’s behavior as a reproduction of colonial domination

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(p. 9), and so “we seem to be warned against making any critical judgments with
regard to our subject matter,” a stricture that Davis regards as authoritarianism on the
part of the postcolonialists. Furthermore, their analyses may be so preoccupied with
issues of power that they miss other types of accounts of what is transpiring (p. 143).
As for the cognitive scientific approaches to religion, Davis has two primary con-
cerns. First, he has general objections to any attempt to understand human behavior
using the model of the physical sciences, and he thinks that cognitive science is one
way of attempting to do this. Second, he argues that cognitive scientific approaches to
religion presuppose that there is some sort of universal mental language or language-
like symbolic system of thought. Here Davis employs Davidson’s arguments against
the language of thought. Language aptitude is universal, but language use is a socially
acquired, historically particular skill.
Finally, Davis turns his attention to comparison, showing that the pragmatism he
endorses can make sense of what many regard with suspicion: the study of two distinct
religious traditions or texts with the aim of issuing judgments about the similarities
and differences between the two. Pragmatism makes possible a “new sort of com-
parison” that is a significant advance over the two “old” kinds of comparison. One
of the old kinds is the “these guys say this, those guys say that” approach and the
other is the approach that presupposes that there is some universal element of human
experience that is the essence of religion and that can serve as the basis for compar-
ing different religions (p. 4). Both of these are rightly maligned nowadays, so Davis’
efforts to preserve the comparative study of religions by situating it on a different con-
ceptual basis are important and welcome. In his methodology, comparison involves
three steps: first, to secure the “best possible account of why someone or some group
said, wrote, or did what was said, written, or done.” Second, to investigate the issues
that arise “when the practices of one group intersect with those of another group”
(p. 5). And third is the option to embrace or advocate some belief or value of the reli-
gious group under investigation. Davis applies these methods informatively to debates
about the moral permissibility of abortion, drawing from Buddhist ethics, Jewish eth-
ics, Christian ethics, and U.S. political culture. One key contribution of pragmatism
to these debates is to preclude appeal to a priori considerations as final authorities.
Davis’ thoughts on comparison should inspire confidence that the comparative study
of religion, regarded by many as suspect because of its associations with mid-twenti-
eth-century phenomenology of religion, can proceed with self-confidence when done
carefully.
There is much to admire and appreciate in Believing and Acting, and the book is
a timely and important contribution to methodological discussions in religious stud-
ies. An influential current in religious studies is suspicious of categories like “belief”
and everything mental, regarding them as entirely or mostly ideological. Davis’ book
should dissuade people so inclined. He makes a convincing case, with Davidson’s
help, that one can attend to mental things like beliefs, intentions, and such without
falling prey to Cartesianism, which would bifurcate the mental from the public world
that is the domain of scholarly investigation. Indeed we must. Our ordinary, everyday
practices constantly attribute beliefs and intentions to others, so scholars should not
shrink from doing the same. Davis’ constant reminders that much of scholarship is
continuous with everyday life are a much-needed corrective to worries that scholars

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cannot or should not aspire to make objective claims about the desires and beliefs of
religious practitioners.
Three themes in Believing and Acting go underdeveloped, leaving me wanting to
hear more from Davis. The first concerns the status and definition of theory. Davis
says that he is advocating “an end to the pursuit of ‘theory’ in the study of religion”
(p. 3). If one is good at ethnography and history, he claims, one has all the resources one
needs to study religion. Theory is wastefully extraneous. One claim that Davis makes
in support of his rejection of theory is sensible enough; indeed, it will strike many as
uncontroversial: “We’re never going to get anything like a theory of human behavior in
the physicists’ sense” (p. 21). However, most people who talk about theory in religious
studies don’t mean that by ‘theory.’ So we need a more precise account of what theory
is to know what exactly it is that Davis is rejecting. In part, we need such an account of
theorization because without one it is hard to see how Davis can justify much of what
is of value in his own book. Davis says that “understanding religion requires nothing
more than the sensitive and imaginative reading of human phenomena informed by
the best available ethnography set in the best historical narrative” (p. 3). It is true that
Davis has sensitively read ethnographic and historical texts; indeed, one strength of
Believing and Acting is the way it integrates ethnography and history with method-
ological reflection. But Davis is doing more than sensitively reading ethnographies
and histories. He is bringing philosophers’ complex accounts of human knowledge,
truth, language, and the relation between language and non-linguistic reality into the
conversation. If this isn’t theory, I’m not sure what is. The way I understand ‘theory’
in religious studies, the term means something like this: the key concepts implicitly or
explicitly employed in the study of religion and an understanding of the appropriate
way to go about studying religion. If that is a viable understanding of what theory of
religion is, then not only does Davis fail to eschew theory, he’s a leading practitioner
of it. I would have preferred a statement to the effect that theory is a vital and necessary
discipline, but one that should attend carefully to the sort of evidence-based, fallibilist
interpretation of human behavior that ethnography and history at their best exemplify.
Second, I would have liked to hear more about Davis’ take on the analysis of power
in religious studies. Many approaches today, informed by Michel Foucault, feminists,
and postcolonialists, are preoccupied with discerning the way that power operates in
religious communities and in scholarship on religion. The substantial body of liter-
ature this approach has generated demonstrates that power analysis is an essential
task for religious studies, though we should not think of it as the only task. At times,
Davis seems too dismissive of power approaches, as when he says that postmodern
hermeneutics of suspicion should be “uprooted altogether” (p. 4). Elsewhere, though,
he speaks highly of Edward Said, Michel Foucault, and Robert Sharf (pp. 21–22, 173),
all of whom are postmodernly suspicious in important ways.
Finally, while Davis’ treatment of cognitive science of religion helpfully brings
Davidson’s criticism of the language of thought into conversation with cognitive sci-
entists’ reliance upon some notion of mental representation, it is not clear that cognitive
scientific approaches need to posit a problematic language of thought. Davis wants
us to stick whenever possible to the “common invocation of intentions and desires”
(p. 107). But could our evolved cognitive capacities involve propensities to form cer-
tain types of intentions and desires over others in certain situations? And would such

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propensities necessarily involve a language of thought? These issues are far from
settled, and so we should want the cognitive science of religion to continue its inves-
tigations, with careful attention to these sorts of questions.
Even if Davis does not resolve the issues, he helpfully initiates a dialogue between
pragmatism and power approaches and cognitive scientific approaches, and surely
these will be topics that others influenced by pragmatism will increasingly take up.
We can be grateful to Davis for his contribution to those discussions and for Believing
and Acting in general.

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