an ecological approach

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Religion, Brain & Behavior, 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2013.816339

TARGET ARTICLE The perception of religious meaning and value: an ecological approach Nathaniel F. Barrett*

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Institute for Culture and Society, University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain The perception of value is one of the most important dimensions of religious experience, and yet the cognitive science of religion has so far had little to say about it. This neglect may be the result of a widespread assumption that value is constructed, that is, a special quality added to sensory input by the mind. However, such a view not only divorces value from meaning, but it also cannot register the ways in which value is discovered and enriched through skillful engagement. Accordingly, it is proposed that the experience of value is better understood in ecological terms, as the richness of meaningful interaction between a skilled perceiver and a suitably complex environment. An ecological approach opens up new opportunities for the investigation of the environmental conditions of value-rich religious experience. For example, it may be possible to determine how the experience of divine presence is supported by the structural features of music used in religious settings. Keywords: ecological psychology; James Gibson; perception; religious experience; value

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: [email protected] # 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 insider’s 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 (190479), 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 organism’s 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. 2. Meaning and value in ecological perspective1 In contrast to 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. In other words, a significant contrast is the determination of what Gregory Bateson would call a ‘‘difference that makes a difference’’ (as cited in Bateson, 1972, p. 453). A significant contrast is a relational event, as it signifies by determining organism behavior in relation to some feature of the environment.2 Moreover, this relational character is irreducible by virtue of the fact that the determination of contrast is a circular process: through the discrimination of contrast, an organism determines how it is determined by its environment. 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. Take, for example, a bacterium: the bacterium’s discrimination of a glucose gradient constitutes a simple but important contrast. By determining this contrast, the bacterium not only discriminates but also values some particular difference as being important for the regulation of its behavior (see Kauffman, 2000, p. 111). Every determination of contrast*and thus every determination of meaning*is an implicit valuing of difference. Value defined in this way is clearly value for the organism in the sense of what matters to its way of life.3 Indeed, one could say that its way of life is defined by the environmental differences that it values as contrasts of primary importance. These fundamental contrasts can be termed primary values. All forms of life are oriented by primary values, but only animals with complex nervous systems seek out values of a higher order through sensorimotor activity. These secondary values are more or less optimal ways of engaging the environment, and the value they have is largely cognitive. Although secondary values encompass the entire range of perceptual phenomena, they differ from primary values only in their degree of complexity and variability. What distinguishes secondary values is their role in fine-tuned adjustments of behavior: they are complex contrasts that integrate diverse features, structuring engagement in a particular way. For example, the ability to register the difference between play fighting and genuine aggression requires a complex contrast that integrates diverse behavioral and situational meanings. The value of such a complex contrast is a function of both its basic importance*its primary value*and the skill that it affords as a way of dealing with this primary value. Humans, and perhaps a few other species, enjoy experiences marked by extraordinarily vivid and richly textured contrasts. These experiences are marked

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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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remembered. Value is therefore essential to how the world shows up in experience. Accordingly, while there is no need to insist on a clear distinction between imagination and perception, insofar as religious experience is perceptual, it takes on value-character. The preceding statements are highly vague and as such are not directly testable, at least not in any simple way. The purpose of the following argument is to articulate the main features of the ecological approach*often by means of contrasts with constructivism*while drawing out theoretical and methodological implications relevant to the perception of religious meaning and value. Perhaps the most important of these is the proposal that sources of religious meaning and value can be located outside the head; namely in the environment of the practitioner, instantiated by natural properties, and thus accessible to outsiders. The distinctive empirical orientation of the ecological approach can thus be used to design new forms of ethnographic research, perhaps opening up new inroads into the subtleties of religious experience. Some of these opportunities are pointed out in Section 6 below. But first sections 3, 4, and 5 articulate the distinctive features of the ecological approach, including phenomenological claims about the perception of meaning and value, and also psychological claims about its neural and environmental conditions. Finally, to show how the ecological approach might be applied even to apparently non-ecological kinds of religious experience, in Section 7 I consider the evangelical experiences described by T.H. Luhrmann (2012) in her recent work entitled When God Talks Back. 3. Comparison with Anne Taves’ ‘‘building-block’’ approach Some of the preceding claims can be sharpened by briefly comparing them to a particularly sophisticated and noteworthy constructivist approach to the perception of religious meaning: the ‘‘building-block’’ approach of Anne Taves (2009). Taves would not likely call her own theory ‘‘constructivist’’ because, like many scholars of religion, she uses that term to distinguish a family of theories that emphasize the cultural determination of religious experience. However, insofar as Taves subscribes to the more general thesis that both meaning and value are added to sense data, her building-block approach belongs to the larger family of constructivist perceptual theory, broadly defined (Epstein, 1993). Like the present approach, Taves’ theory is designed to improve third-person access to the elusive value-dimension of religiosity. Taves is similarly dissatisfied with theories that explain this dimension as if it were determined solely by belief; she argues that we should ‘‘abandon the constructivist axiom that beliefs and attitudes are always formative of, rather than consequent to, experience in any very strong sense’’ (Taves, 2009, p. 93). An important reason for her dissatisfaction is phenomenological: what she calls constructivist theories*those that emphasize cultural determination*cannot register the way in which religious practitioners experience value as something discovered (Taves, 2009, pp. 4041, 100). But without calling into question the more general premise of constructivism that meaning and value are added to experience*how can Taves account for this experience of discovery? What Taves proposes is a hierarchical, ‘‘two-tier’’ model of experience divided between ‘‘highly culturally sensitive experiences involving extensive top-down

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processing’’ and ‘‘relatively culturally insensitive experiences processed largely from the bottom up’’ (Taves, 2009, p. 98). This model accounts for the feeling of discovery by positing a ‘‘lower’’ layer of unconscious neural mechanisms that are responsible for manufacturing the basic qualities of experience, including whatever qualities distinguish religious experiences as ‘‘special.’’ Because the ‘‘bottom-up’’ processes that give rise to these qualities are beyond our awareness and control, special qualities of religious experience can have the appearance of being discovered when in fact they are ascribed (Taves, 2009, pp. 4041). Taves’ approach presents a sophisticated strategy for finessing the gap between insider and outsider experiences of religious meaning and value, and the kinds of investigations she proposes are well worth undertaking. As with most constructivist theories, however, Taves’ approach aims mostly at processes that, at least in theory, can be located inside the head.5 While this brain-centered approach fits well with mainstream cognitive science, it also has limitations. Here I focus on the premise that value is, at bottom, a simple quality of ‘‘specialness’’ that is ascribed to certain things. The advantage of this approach is that it circumvents religious interpretations in order to get to the ‘‘experiential raw material’’ of religious experience. The drawback is that it gains this access by the dubious notion of experiential ‘‘building blocks.’’ 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. 4849). 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. In principle, this special quality can show up all at once, at any time or place. As a result, Taves’ theory directs attention away from the ecological conditions of religious experience: environmental properties are conspicuously absent from the various kinds of data that Taves (2009, p. 69) lists as relevant to studies of religious experience.6 In contrast, the meaning and value of perceptual experiences for the ecological approach are neither ascribed nor attributed to things. Instead, they are specified by processes of interaction that depend on both perceptual skills and environmental structures.7 The specialness that sets apart experiences of intrinsic value is a function of the intricacy and depth of our involvement with certain objects or events. For the ecological approach, then, value-rich experiences cannot be accounted for by any simple quality that can show up all at once. Objects and events of intrinsic value must be minimally complex in a dynamic, temporally extended, and coherently meaningful sense: they must be richly determinable in a way that is revealed only through interaction. Because they have depths of meaning that cannot be grasped all at once, value-rich experiences are entered into and explored, rather than simply had. I propose that this abundance of meaning, always exceeding what is grasped, is essential to the experience of value as something discovered. Of course, these phenomenological claims must be verified from a first-person standpoint. However, they also have neurological implications: the determinable character of value-rich experience strongly detracts from the picture of perception as a serial hierarchical process. But perhaps most importantly, these claims suggest new opportunities for investigating the environmental conditions of religious experience.

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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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4. ‘‘Perceptual learning: differentiation or enrichment?’’ How do insiders gain access to religious experience? The ecological approach elaborated here strongly resonates with Luhrmann’s (2012) recent claim that the perception of religious meaning and value is a skill that can be learned. But where things get interesting is at the level that specifies how perceptual learning occurs. In the terms to be developed in this section, it is not clear to what extent Luhrmann thinks of perceptual learning as differentiation rather than enrichment. It is likely that she finds evidence for both in her subjects’ reports. Still, it is helpful at least to consider the distinction: ‘‘Is perception a creative process or is it a discriminative process? Is learning a matter of enriching previously meager sensations or is it a matter of differentiating previously vague impressions?’’ (Gibson & Gibson, 1955, p. 34).8 Here, I focus on parts of Luhrmann’s research that suggest that a process of differentiation is at work among her evangelical subjects. In this regard, her observation that learning to feel God’s presence is comparable to learning how to appreciate wine is especially telling. This comparison seems to have been suggested by the reports of subjects, who claim that they learn to pick out signs of God’s presence from ‘‘what they had previously experienced as a fuzzy mental blur’’ (Luhrmann, 2012, p. 82). The description of a transition from vagueness to specificity, or indistinctness to sharp contrast, indicates a process of differentiation. Here is Luhrmann’s own description of differential perceptual learning in the case of wine tasting: I remember the first time I made a distinction between kinds of wine. I knew, of course, that some wines are better than other wines, and that there are different kinds of wines, but this was pretty abstract knowledge . . . Then I was invited to a wine tasting and drank wines against each other, and for the first time I could really taste the peppery spice of syrah. I still remember the moment, the sudden recognition of difference. When you begin to learn about wine, you learn to distinguish the taste of the grapes. You learn to recognize the fruit, the spice, and the vanillins created when the wine is aged in oak barrels . . . Learning to taste wine is all about training perception . . . Most people, given enough training, get good enough to identify the grape. They do so by developing a discrimination system that allows them to draw contrasts between tastes: peppery versus smooth, cherry versus peach, flabby versus taut. Each expert’s system is different. One taster’s ‘‘angular’’ is another’s ‘‘masculine.’’ . . . But the categories work. (Luhrmann, 2012, p. 82)

This description is intended to exhibit a number of suggestive parallels with the process by which religious practitioners*or at least some of them*learn to perceive religious meaning. Principal among these, and the focus of this section, is the emphasis on discrimination or ‘‘discernment’’ (Luhrmann, 2012, p. 83). While discrimination may be a highly selective and interpretive process, it is not constructive in the sense of adding meaning to sensory data, nor is it receptive in the sense of gaining access to new kinds of data. Perception as discrimination does away with the idea of simple sense data altogether. This may seem like a rather fine point, but it has implications that bear upon theories of religious perception. For example, William Alston’s (1991) much

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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 God’s presence includes the appearance of some intrinsically distinct quality*a ‘‘God percept’’*that is entirely unavailable to someone who does not perceive God’s 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 God’s presence: none of them claim that God’s presence is announced by new feelings. On the contrary, Luhrmann (2012, p. 114) stresses that her subjects learned to pick out God’s presence from everyday experience: ‘‘God’s voice is like a fuzzy radio station . . . that needs more tuning. You’re picking up the song, and it’s 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)

As a result, the constructivist theory regards perceptual learning as something that develops ‘‘in decreasing correspondence with stimulation . . . . Perceptual learning, thus conceived, necessarily consists of experience becoming more imaginary, more assumptive, or more inferential’’ (Gibson & Gibson, 1955, p. 34, original emphasis). Gibson and Gibson propose a radically different premise, namely, that all the information needed for perception is available, or at least can be made available, in the flux of sensory stimulation. Indeed, for the ecological approach, the information available in the sensory array is ‘‘inexhaustible’’ (Gibson, 1979, p. 243). Learning is therefore a process of selectively differentiating variables and regularities of interest from this over-abundant supply. For the differentiation or ‘‘specificity’’ theory: perception gets richer in differential responses, not in images. It is progressively in greater correspondence with stimulation, not in less. Instead of becoming more imaginary, it becomes more discriminating. Perceptual learning, then, consists of responding to variables of physical stimulation not previously responded to. (Gibson & Gibson, 1955, p. 34)

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. Gibson’s 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. 119120). 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. 149169). 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. 255256). 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.

5. The environmental conditions of perception Notwithstanding the importance of this last point, what distinguishes an ecological approach to the study of religious perception is its focus on environmental conditions. However, while the interactive ‘mutuality’ of the ecological approach directs our attention to the environment, it also makes it difficult to tease apart the environmental conditions of especially complex perceptual experiences so that they can be independently verified. To separate environmental structures from their involvement in highly culturally specific (not to mention personal) forms of perception, as if to describe them in purely objective terms, would seem to violate the relational tenet of interaction that gives the ecological approach its name. Thus, the mutuality of the ecological approach poses special challenges that threaten to undermine its value for studies of religious practice. Simply put, if the value of a religious practice is relationally constituted (which is not to say merely relative), it would seem to be inaccessible to outsiders who cannot relate to it in the same way. I believe, however, that this obstacle can be overcome: insofar as environmental structures permit more than one kind of interaction, they can be investigated without developing the perceptual skills of the subject for which they are sources of special value. To clarify this point, let us examine what is meant by perceptual ‘‘interaction.’’ The ways in which the organism ‘‘acts in order to perceive’’ and ‘‘perceives in order to act’’ are a well-known focus of the ecological approach. Indeed, insofar as ‘‘interactive’’ describes the basic stance of the ecological approach, its roots can be traced to John Dewey’s famous argument against the ‘‘reflex arc’’ or S-R model of cognition and perception: Upon analysis, we find that we begin not with a sensory stimulus, but with a sensorimotor co-ordination . . . and that in a certain sense it is the movement which is primary, and the sensation which is secondary, the movement of body, head and eye muscles determining the quality of what is experienced. In other words, the real beginning is with the act of seeing; it is looking, and not a sensation of light. (Dewey, 1896/1972, p. 97)

Consider how we perceive a surface through tactile interaction. A momentary touch is not enough: it is the dynamic pattern of a surface’s response to our touch that specifies its texture and shape. But we are missing a crucial point if we think that shape and texture are constructed out of a sequence of discrete touches. Making a clean break with the traditional ‘‘sense-data’’ picture of stimulation, Gibson argued that interaction produces flows of stimulation, the dynamic patterns of which specify

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a wealth of meanings that are not easily found in assemblages of discrete stimuli (Reed & Jones, 1982, pp. 333349, 376378). 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 organism’s 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 James’s 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. 3137). 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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can develop an objective*in the sense of intersubjective*account of its distinctive structures. As for value, I propose that wherever the enjoyment of value-rich experience is a priority, as it is in many overtly religious ‘‘behavior settings,’’ we should expect the following: not only are perceptual skills adapted to meaningful features of particular environments, but also environments are adapted to common perceptual abilities, both species-general and culturally specific, so that opportunities for meaningful and thus value-rich experience are maximized (Heft, 2001). This optimization of an environment’s meaningful complexity is a very high-order characteristic that can be assessed only through investigations of how structures at various timescales are meaningfully engaged by particular subjects of interest. But once these structures are more or less comprehensively described, we should expect to find that environments that have served historically as rich sources of meaning and value exhibit a common pattern of structural complexity: they should be more fully packed with meaning. As we will see in the following section, an ecological approach can be applied to investigations of classic works of art or music as special sources of perceptual meaning and value. Analogously, it is possible to pursue an ecological understanding of time-honored religious practices, events, and settings as ‘‘classics’’ in their own right. In both cases, the reported experiences of connoisseurs (in the religious case, seasoned practitioners) must be relied upon for guidance. Only from these reports is it possible to develop a fairly comprehensive account of the range and depth of meanings that a particular ‘‘classic’’ provides. Then, through some other means of engagement (e.g., musicological analysis), it may be possible to examine and describe the distinctive structures that support the classic’s depth of meaning. In other words, an ecological approach depends on both insiders and outsiders, or at least multiple forms of interaction, to determine the environmental conditions of a particular kind of religious experience. 6. Musical sources of meaning and value The preceding discussion has been highly abstract, and where concrete examples have been introduced they have not dealt with complex meanings such as those encountered in religious practice. In this section, using the work of musicologist Eric F. Clarke (2005), I discuss how the ecological approach can be applied even to the most complex kinds of musical meaning. This in turn can serve as an important indication of its promise for investigations of religious meanings of comparable complexity. Moreover, Clarke’s discussion of ‘‘virtual’’ motion constitutes a fairly concrete example for the investigation of musical sources of religious meaning. However, it is first important to clarify the sense in which, for the ecological approach, musical meanings exist ‘‘out there’’ in distributed patterns of sound. An important distinction must be made between structures that specify meaning and structures that encode meaning. Encoded meanings are pre-specified by their instantiating structures (together with the rules for their decoding), whereas most musical meanings are more or less constrained by structures of sound, and are specified only through a minimally extended process of interaction with a particular subject. For example, when Clarke (2005, pp. 4861) describes Jimi Hendrix’s famous rendition of the ‘‘Star-Spangled Banner’’ as a rich source of various culturally specific meanings (e.g., American jingoism, the Vietnam War, etc.), Clarke is not

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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 Clarke’s 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 Hendrix’s 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, Hendrix’s 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. 5960). 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. 189204) cautiously advances the claim that common patterns of musical structure do constrain our listening experiences in objectively detectable ways. In the most basic sense, Clarke’s claim is fairly uncontroversial: regardless of cultural background and experience, a musical piece that is usually heard as tranquil

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by one group of listeners is not likely to be heard as agitated by another. However, what about more subtle and complex meanings? The extent to which musical experience is regularly constrained by structural patterns is an important empirical question that an ecological approach is better prepared to investigate. To that end, I would like to add another hypothesis: detailed investigations of the structural patterns that specify musical meaning should reveal common higher-order characteristics of works and performances that are widely regarded as classics. For the sake of argument, let us again consider Hendrix’s performance of the ‘‘StarSpangled Banner’’ as an example. In Clarke’s analysis, while the structural features of Hendrix’s performance specify instability or disruption, his main concern is to show how these meanings are specified by features of varying complexity and duration. Yet, by the same token, Clarke convincingly shows that Hendrix’s performance has a nested structural complexity that gives it an especially rich texture of meaning. Indeed, notwithstanding its conveyance of instability and disruption, Hendrix’s performance is remarkably well integrated across multiple timescales and dimensions of sound. Exactly how this structural complexity is perceived depends on the listener. Still, perhaps this trait of complexity is a common feature of diverse listening experiences, and can be detected through ecological investigation as a condition of value-richness. Thus, if widely undertaken, ecological investigations might accumulate a body of evidence from which a number of general conclusions about the perception of musical meaning and value can be drawn. Again, as stated in the previous section, these investigations necessarily involve comparisons of perspective: accounts of listeners’ experiences (i.e., what meanings are perceived) and analyses of the structural features of a musical performance (what is there to specify meaning). In some cases, both perspectives might be obtained through different ways of listening, while in other cases the analysis of structural features might be obtained by other empirical methods (see Clarke & Cook, 2004). For investigations of music as a source of religious meaning, one of the most promising kinds of musical meaning is what Clarke calls ‘‘virtual’’ motion and agency. According to Clarke, many theorists distinguish ‘‘musical motion’’ from motion specified by non-musical sounds (e.g., scraping, thumping, knocking, etc.), because the former is only ‘‘metaphorical.’’ Of course, this distinction does not hold up very well when one considers the fact that musical and non-musical sounds are both produced by physical motion. But what about the more abstract ‘‘motion’’ of a melody? For example, consider the famous first and second themes of the first movement in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (see Clarke, 2005, p. 64). How should we understand their characteristic and starkly contrasting movements? And who or what is moving? Clarke argues that the motion specified by music (and related meanings of gesture, agency, space, etc.) should be considered virtual rather than metaphorical. Virtual movements are not imaginary but rather perceptual phenomena, specified by patterns of sound in approximately the same way that normal motion is specified. In other words, music exploits the motion-specifying properties of sound to create virtual kinds of movement and agency, even virtual environments. This is not an especially subtle kind of musical meaning: even basic rhythms played on a drum have been found to specify distinctive motions (Gabrielsson, 1973). Thus,

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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. 2526, 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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‘‘neo-Pentecostal’’ evangelicals (see Luhrmann, 2012). The experience of personal presence inside the mind would seem to present a distinctly non-ecological variety of religious experience: does it constitute an important ‘‘wedge case’’ that the ecological approach must concede to constructivism? Without moving too far into speculations about the psychological basis of inwardly felt presence, two simple observations can help us make sense of the phenomenon from an ecological point of view. The first is that the experience of God’s presence in the feelings and thoughts of evangelical practitioners only approximates the experience of ordinary personal presence. We know this because it is extremely rare to experience God’s presence as the presence of an ordinary person*for instance, when God’s voice is heard coming from a particular location outside the head*and such experiences are not paradigmatic (Luhrmann, 2012, pp. 173, 263). Most of the experiences of God’s presence that Luhrmann describes are somewhat ambiguous with respect to the boundaries of self and other. The inwardly felt presence of God is thus noticeably distinct from the presence of things and persons encountered in the world. The second observation is that although Luhrmann is not always consistent about the perceptual character of these experiences,11 much of the evidence she provides suggests that, insofar as these experiences are perceptual, they are characterized by a significant degree of interaction, even ‘‘flow’’ (Luhrmann, 2012, pp. 146, 157158, 160, 200, 298). This interaction may not be as detailed, deep, or coherent as that which is afforded by the environment. Nevertheless, insofar as the inwardly felt presence of God is an interactive presence, perhaps it constitutes the exception that proves the rule of ecological theory: perceptual experience is constituted as such by the ecological conditions of interaction, however these conditions are achieved. In the case of evangelicals who are capable of intense absorption and highly practiced in the use of mental imagery during prayer, some region of the subject’s own experience seems to function as a kind of ‘‘virtual’’ environment, supporting a kind of ‘‘internal’’ interaction that approximates a direct personal encounter. Considering our capacity to indulge in extended inner dialogue, this is not such a stretch. What makes these experiences exceptional is their especially vivid sense of otherness. I have claimed that an important mark of otherness*what marks perceptual experience as such*is value-character. Moreover, it seems that my account of value-character fits well with Luhrmann’s (2012, p. 239) observation that experiences of presence are marked by effortless, even spontaneous, access to a high degree of detail. What the ecological approach adds is the further claim that valuecharacter is dependent on extended interaction; it cannot be constructed. How such an interaction could be achieved apart from engagement with the environment is a matter for neurological investigation. What about the special value that such experiences have? This is a question that the ecological approach is better prepared to answer. I suggest that religious experiences of personal presence should be considered in light of the wider phenomenon of personification as a form of engagement. This is the experience of non-human objects and events as manifesting person-like intentionality, and includes what goes by the name of ‘‘animism’’ in many studies of hunter-gatherer cultures. As argued by the anthropologist Tim Ingold (2000, 2011), animism is not so much a belief system as a set of techniques for skillful interaction with the non-human

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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 Luhrmann’s (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 God’s presence is to feel more fully alive, and to feel themselves and the world as worthy of God’s love (Luhrmann, 2012, p. 342). Thus, what needs to be appreciated in Luhrmann’s 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 God’s 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

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3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

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of Robert C. Neville (see 1981, 1989, 1995), although no attempt at metaphysical generality is made here. Elsewhere in psychology, Sigmund Koch (1999) is notable for his defense of intrinsic ‘‘value properties,’’ but despite his appreciation for the work of Gibson he remained tied to a constructivist framework (see Koch, 1999, pp. 221223). As an interactive theory of value-rich experience, the well-known ‘‘flow’’ theory of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (see Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2005) is perhaps closer to the view presented here. Thus the discrimination of contrast exhibits the triadic pattern of semiosis as described by Charles Peirce: a contrast (or sign) determines a habit of organism behavior (or interpretant) in relation to some feature of the environment (or object) (see Buchler, 1955, pp. 99100). On the other hand, the value of a contrast is objective insofar as the discriminated feature really is (or is not) important in the respects signified by the contrast as a determinant of behavior. An evaluation of this objective value usually requires reference to a wider context of purposeful activity (e.g., in the case of the bacterium, the search for nourishment). By ‘‘value-character’’ I mean richness and depth of contrast, which I believe is ubiquitous in human perceptual experience and may or may not be enjoyed as valuable, while experiences of intrinsic value are, by definition, enjoyed as such. Taves’ methodology includes studies of the ‘‘interactive’’ dimension of religious experience, but this seems largely confined to social processes of meaning attribution. Environmental structures and the like would fit under her second type of data, which Taves entitles ‘‘observable data.’’ But she defines this as ‘‘verbal and other expressive behavior in real time,’’ that is, in terms of the subject’s response (Taves, 2009, p. 69). The attribution of religious meaning is of course an important factor in religious experience broadly defined. But it is not a component of perceptual experience as I am describing it here. The charismatic evangelical experiences that Luhrmann chose to study are especially hard to nail down in this respect because they make such extensive use of mental imagery. Indeed, because of this ‘‘internal’’ emphasis, Luhrmann’s study poses a special challenge to the ecological approach that I will take up in a later section. As explained in the following section, because of the coupling of perception and action, the ‘‘intrinsic’’ and ‘‘extrinsic’’ dynamics of perception are interdependent. Clarke (2005, p. 16) points out some fairly compelling evidence that we directly perceive complex or ‘‘high-level’’ features of music such as the way we so readily identify a song or genre from a snippet heard on the radio*but these examples are not conclusive. For instance, when Luhrmann (2012, p. 63) describes the direct experience of God as the ability to ‘‘authentically experience what feels like inner thought as God-generated,’’ she seems to be wavering between interpretation and something more direct and perceptual.

References Abram, D. (1996). The spell of the sensuous: Perception and language in a more-than-human world. New York: Pantheon Books. Alexander, T. (1985). John Dewey’s theory of art, experience, and nature: The horizons of feeling. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Alston, W.P. (1991). Perceiving God: The epistemology of religious experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Alston, W.P. (1993). The reliability of sense perception. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Barrett, N.F. (forthcoming). Skillful engagement and the ‘effort after meaning and value’: An axiological theory of the origins of religion. In F. Watts & L. Turner (Eds.), Cognitive approaches to the evolution of religion: Critical perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press. Barrett, N.F., & Wildman, W. (2009). Seeing is believing? How reinterpreting perception as dynamic engagement alters the justificatory force of religious experience. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 66, 7186. Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. New York: Ballantine Books. Buchler, J. (Ed.). (1955). Philosophical writings of Peirce. New York: Dover Publications.

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Chemero, A. (2009). Radical embodied cognitive science. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Clarke, E. (2005). Ways of listening: An ecological approach to the perception of musical meaning. New York: Oxford University Press. Clarke, E., & Cook, N. (Eds.). (2004). Empirical musicology: Aims, methods, prospects. New York: Oxford University Press. Cosmelli, D., Lachaux, J., & Thompson, E. (2007). Neurodynamical approaches to consciousness. In P. Zelazo, M. Moscovitch, & E. Thompson (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of consciousness (pp. 731 772). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Crane, T. (2010, September 5). Mystery and evidence. New York Times. Retrieved from http://opinionator. blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/mystery-and-evidence DeNora, T. (1999). Music as a technology of the self. Poetics, 27, 3156. Dewey, J. (1958). Experience and nature. New York: Dover Publications. (Original work published 1929) Dewey, J. (1972). The reflex arc concept in psychology. In J. Boydston (Ed.), The early works of John Dewey 18821898, Volume 5: 18951898 (pp. 96109). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. (Original work published 1896) Dewey, J. (1980). Art as experience. New York: Perigee Books. (Original work published 1934) Engelke, M. (2007). A problem of presence: Beyond scripture in an African church. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Epstein, W. (1993). The representational framework in perceptual theory. Perception and Psychophysics, 53, 704709. Freeman, W.J. (1999). How brains make up their minds. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Gabrielsson, A. (1973). Adjective ratings and dimension analyses of auditory rhythm patterns. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 14, 244260. Gibson, J.J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Gibson, J.J., & Gibson, E.J. (1955). Perceptual learning: Differentiation or enrichment? Psychological Review, 62, 3241. Heft, H. (2001). Ecological psychology in context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the legacy of William James’s radical empiricism. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Ingold, T. (2000). The perception of the environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling, and skill. New York: Routledge. Ingold, T. (2011). Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge, and description. New York: Routledge. James, W. (1982). The varieties of religious experience. New York: Penguin Books. (Original work published 1902) Kauffman, S. (2000). Investigations. New York: Oxford University Press. Kelso, J.A.S. (1995). Dynamic patterns: The self-organization of brain and behavior. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 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 human context: Essays in dissidence and reconstruction (pp. 192230). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lee, D.N., & Reddish, P.E. (1981). Plummeting gannets: A paradigm of ecological optics. Nature, 293, 293294. Luhrmann, T.M. (2012). When God talks back: Understanding the evangelical relationship with God. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Marr, D. (1982). Vision. San Francisco, CA: W.H. Freeman. McDermott, J.J. (Ed.). (1977). The writings of William James: A comprehensive edition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Nakamura, J., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2005). The concept of flow. In C.R. Snyder & S.J. Lopez (Eds.), Handbook of positive psychology (pp. 89105). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Neville, R.C. (1981). Reconstruction of thinking. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Neville, R.C. (1989). Recovery of the measure. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Neville, R.C. (1995). Normative cultures. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Neville, R.C. (2009). Realism in religion: A pragmatist’s perspective. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Noe¨, A. (2009). Out of our heads: Why you are not your brain, and other lessons from the biology of consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang. Reed, E.S. (1996). Encountering the world: Toward an ecological psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reed, E.S., & Jones, R. (Eds.). (1982). Reasons for realism: Selected essays of James J. Gibson. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Sporns, O. (2011). Networks of the brain. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Taves, A. (2009). Religious experience reconsidered: A building-block approach to the study of religion and other special things. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Watt, R.J., & Ash, R.L. (1998). A psychological investigation of meaning in music. Musicae Scientiae, 2, 3354. Whitehead, A.N. (1979). Process and reality. New York: The Free Press. (Original work published 1929)

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COMMENTARIES The value of affordances Luis H. Favela and Anthony Chemero*

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Departments of Philosophy and Psychology, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA

Ecological psychology (see Gibson, 1979) is generally thought of as comprising two main claims. The first is that perception is direct insofar as it is not the result of information added to sensory representations. The second is that perception is comprised of affordances (at least most of the time) or opportunities for action that exist in the environment. Barrett explores the possibility of giving an objective account of perceiving religious meaning and value by means of ecological psychology. The attempt to utilize ecological psychology to account for values is not without precedent, however. Jayawickreme and Chemero (2008), for instance, used the ecological concept of ‘‘affordance’’ to sketch an account of both virtues and morally relevant situations. Surprisingly, Barrett never mentions this central ecological concept, choosing instead to focus solely on the directness of perception. We believe that this constricts his ecological account of religious value. While we agree with Barrett that the cognitive science of religion treats presence as an insider’s experience, such that religious experience is a ‘‘black box’’ phenomenon, intractable, and mysterious, and that ecological theory might provide an account of values, we are not convinced by his particular attempt at an ecological account of religious meaning. Barrett begins by claiming that there are two dimensions to religious meaning. The first is the accessible dimension, labeled as such because it refers to the aspect of religious meaning that can be articulated and reported. The second is the inaccessible dimension, labeled as such because it refers to the aspect of religious meaning that is first person in nature and is ‘‘really felt’’ by the practitioner. This dimension can also be referred to as felt ‘‘presence.’’ Barrett claims that the motivation for which religious practitioners want to feel this presence is actually a motivation to search for religious value. According to Barrett, presence is the perceptual experience of meaning and religious value comes from presence as a perceptual experience. Perceptual experiences come in various forms such as participation in religious ceremonies and rituals. These ceremonies and rituals give rise to religious meaning. Thus, when a religious practitioner carries out a ritual, meaning emerges from the interaction of the agent acting in the environment of the ritual itself, and this experience, in toto, constitutes religious value. Barrett’s ecological theory is intended to account for the outsider’s perspective of the religious experience. Ecological theory is readily capable of addressing religious experience because, as Barrett describes it, ‘‘the ecological approach views meaning as a basic property of the interactive relationship between an organism and its environment.’’ It is the ecological approach’s emphasis on meaning as a directly perceived environmental property, not a private creation of the computational mind, *Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

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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. Barrett’s 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 animalenvironment 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 animal’s 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, animalenvironment 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 Barrett’s, 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

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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, 181195. 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). Gibson’s affordances. Psychological Review, 101, 336342. Jayawickreme, E., & Chemero, A. (2008). Ecological moral realism: An alternative theoretical framework for studying moral psychology. Review of General Psychology, 12, 118126. Jayawickreme, E., & Di Stefano, P. (2012). How can we study heroism? Integrating persons, situations and communities. Political Psychology, 33, 165178. Jones, K.S. (2003). What is an affordance? Ecological Psychology, 15, 107114. Lee, D.N. (1976). A theory of visual control of braking based on information about time-to-collision. Perception, 5, 437459. Stoffregen, T.A. (2003). Affordances are enough: Reply to Chemero et al. (2003). Ecological Psychology, 15, 2936. Turvey, M.T. (1992). Affordances and prospective control: An outline of the ontology. Ecological Psychology, 4, 173187. van Rooij, I., Bongers, R.M., & Haselager, W.F.G. (2002). A non-representational approach to imagined action. Cognitive Science, 26, 345375. Warren, Jr., W.H. (1984). Perceiving affordances: Visual guidance of stair climbing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 10, 683703. 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, 371383.

Who or what is doing the flowing? On the apparent metaphysics of N.F. Barrett’s ecological approach Armin W. Geertz* Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

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: [email protected]

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mentalistic metaphor of cognition. In respect to the latter, Barrett’s article is a welcome addition to the criticisms that have been raised against CSR over the last decade. It is a pity that Barrett has not drawn on that critical literature. He could have found Merlin Donald, Michael Tomasello, and Terence Deacon useful, but there is also a whole new generation of CSR scholars who are following those same lines, such as the CERC group in Vancouver, the RCC group in Aarhus, the team led by Joseph Bulbulia in New Zealand, and the LEVYNA group in Brno, among others. This is not to mention the literature on extended cognition, situated cognition, distributed cognition, anchored cognition, and so on. Barrett’s exposition of the ecological approach is carefully presented. He is concise in his distinctions, except when dealing with the approach that he criticizes. I found it impossible to judge the value of his approach in relation to the constructivist approach because he nowhere specifies who he is referring to or what particular theories he is criticizing. Barrett’s criticism of the constructivist approach is based more on a caricature than on a critique of actual scholars and theories. In fact, with the positive exceptions of Tanya Luhrmann and Ann Taves, he does not refer to any CSR scientists. So, I wonder: who might his intended audience be? Moreover, Barrett does not discuss the science of religion literature. So, his claim that ‘‘the most important’’ implication of the ecological approach is ‘‘the proposal that sources of religious meaning and value can be located outside the head; namely in the environment of the practitioner, instantiated by natural properties, and thus accessible to outsiders’’ is about 40 years behind the analytical study of religion. I applaud Barrett’s attempts to show how human cognition is intrinsically embedded in body and environment, and how both perception and meaning are emergent phenomena. This realization, which I have argued in several publications (cf. Geertz, 2010), stands in sharp contrast to the standard CSR emphasis on mental representations. My colleague Uffe Schjoedt (2007) has also presented a model of religious cognition based on homeostasis that closely parallels Barrett’s argument, but without the metaphysics. Thus, I do not support Barrett’s disembodied understanding of the neurobiology of perception. The fact that he draws on a ‘‘radical alternative’’ to such issues raises warning signals for me. Is this another attempt to ignore basic neurology in the search for God, so rampant in the USA and now evidently spreading to Europe? Recently my colleagues at the RCC presented a neurocognitive model of religious behavior based on current brain science (Schjoedt et al., 2013). We claim that psychological hypotheses and speculations are difficult to justify without knowledge of the possible neural correlates of cognition. The reason I am bringing this up is because Barrett ignores the brain and what it does. He conjures up the source of value and meaning as happening outside the brain. This approach fits well with phenomenological philosophy but not with neurology. In his eagerness to dissociate himself from constructivism, he avoids the fact (and the issue) that we do not have direct access to the natural environment, the social environment, or even the somatic environment. We only have access to what our brain perceives and constructs. Our brain perceives through its models of its environments, and thus a significant amount of perceptual information is provided by the brain itself. This is incontestable and cannot be explained by the ecological approach. In fact, it negates the extreme version represented by Barrett.

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Thus, a model of the neurocognition of religious behavior, including feelings of sensed presence, must be based on the way that the brain works. And the way the brain that works is a threefold process: expectation formation, predictive coding, and error monitoring (see Bar, 2007, 2009; Frith, 2007). Briefly, the brain continuously generates predictions and monitors those predictions for errors by comparing its models of the environment (internal, social, and natural) with incoming information. The more errors, the better, because errors help the brain improve its models. Thus, the brain is proactive and constructive. This kind of neuroconstructivism, I would hold, is not entirely incompatible with an ecological approach. In fact, I would argue that Barrett’s dichotomy between constructivism and the ecological approach is false. Claiming, as he does, that the people under study in Luhrmann’s work (with their massively constructed and socialized worlds) have non-constructed access to God is, in my view, incredulous to say the least. Although Barrett is trying to explain the ‘‘really felt’’ dimension of religious meaning, his approach comes nowhere near it. Deeley’s (2004) work on the neurology of belief and the neurochemistry of religious behavior is much more viable. As for the ‘‘problem of presence,’’ there is a whole literature on confabulation, credulity, illusions, delusions, and hallucinations that one could think of that are far more relevant. My final concern is with Barrett’s intimated agenda in promoting the ecological approach. I argue that he makes leaps of logic because of it. His agenda is succinctly stated in the conclusion: ‘‘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.’’ He evidently thinks that all other approaches discount the meaning and value of such experiences, but that is not my concern here. Basically, I claim that Barrett’s agenda is a metaphysical or even religious one that has little to do with scientific methodology. He seems to indicate this in several places. First, the general assumption that there are structures in the environment that can produce certain kinds of perceptual values and meanings paves the way for Barrett’s leap in logic by which he claims that there may be structures in the environment that lead to the experience of divine presence. Second, Barrett himself argues that his approach marks a metaphysical turn ‘‘from theories of perception based on atomistic sense-data.’’ Third, he argues that when religious experience is perceptual in his sense of the term, it is based on the ‘‘presence of something encountered rather than imagined or remembered.’’ Fourth, although he does not completely agree with Alston’s ‘‘theory of appearing,’’ his disagreement is not with the possibility of an intrinsic ‘‘God percept’’ quality that is experienced by a person, but with the claim that this percept is only available to some people and not to others. Fifth, in drawing on Clarke’s speculations on music, Barrett claims that religious music creates virtual kinds of movement and agency. In referencing Watt and Ash (1998), who claim that listeners are prone to hear ‘‘person-like’’ qualities in music, Barrett claims that this may allow investigations of patterns by which music is used to cultivate experiences of supernatural agency. This latter approach, he argues, in no way dismisses the possibility that religious experiences are in fact actual encounters with divine presence. This leads to the sixth point, namely, Barrett’s notion that a sophisticated, pragmatic evaluation of the ‘‘truth of religious experience’’ is possible. And finally, seventh, Barrett makes the full move from perceptual processes in the environment to the ‘‘inwardly felt presence of God’’ as constituting the same kind of interactive

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processes. How this happens, he claims, ‘‘is a matter for neurological investigation.’’ I would be very interested in seeing the design of such a neurological investigation! At any rate, Barrett rejects that the experience of divine presence may be a ‘‘feel-good’’ trick. On the contrary, such experience, he claims, could confirm religious belief. Thus, Barrett’s concern with religious sensitivities and truths ultimately comes in through the back door of his methodology. In my opinion, this ploy significantly reduces the persuasiveness and usefulness of Barrett’s project. The study of religion has been plagued for centuries by metaphysical, phenomenological, and religious approaches more interested in celebrating religion than studying it. The only thing that is new here is that Barrett specifically rejects the privileged access claims often found in religious studies, but I fear that his alternative is hardly any better. References Bar, M. (2007). The proactive brain: Using analogies and associations to generate predictions. TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 280289. Bar, M. (2009). Predictions: A universal principle in the operation of the human brain. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 364, 11811182. Deeley, P.Q. (2004). The religious brain: Turning ideas into convictions. Anthropology & Medicine, 11, 245267. Frith, C. (2007). Making up the mind: How the brain creates our mental world. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Geertz, A.W. (2010). Brain, body and culture: A biocultural theory of religion. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 22, 304321. Schjoedt, U. (2007). Homeostasis and religious behavior. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 7, 313340. Schjoedt, U., Sørensen, J., Nielbo, K.L., Xygalatas, D., Mitkidis, P., & Bulbulia, J. (2013). Cognitive resource depletion in religious interactions. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 3, 3955. Watt, R.J., & Ash, R.L. (1998). A psychological investigation of meaning in music. Musicae Scientiae, 2, 3354.

Ecological psychology and religious meaning: strange bedfellows? Harry Heft* Department of Psychology, Denison University, Granville, OH, USA

Professor Barrett’s 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 Gibson’s intellectual lineage. I have argued elsewhere that several of the most central qualities of ecological psychology can be traced to William James’s 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 one’s

*Email: [email protected]

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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 individual’s ‘‘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 Barrett’s 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 (18481910) and James Gibson (190379) are to be found mostly in the work of Edwin B. Holt (18751948), who was James’s student and one of Gibson’s graduate school mentors. One of Holt’s 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 organism’s 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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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 one’s 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 James’s radical empiricism. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Heft, H. (2011). E.B. Holt’s 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. 191219). Piscataway, NJ: Transactions Publishing. Holt, E.B. (1915). Response and cognition. Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, 7, 365373, 393409, (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. 192230). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Religion, environment and milieu Gabe Ignatowa* and Elizabeth Gabhartb Department of Sociology, 1155 Union Circle #31157, Denton, TX 76203; bDepartment of Sociology, 1155 Union Circle #31157, Denton, TX 76203

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As sociologists with long-standing interests in cognition, embodiment, and religion, we find ourselves agreeing with most of the main points of Barrett’s essay. In our view, his position that religious value is sustained not only by belief but also by something more direct and experiential is correct. Barrett’s position is also supported by recent sociological research on bodily dimensions of experiences in organizations and institutions, including those that are religious (Pagis, 2009; Winchester, 2008) and otherwise (Lande, 2007; Wacquant, 2003). Much like Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) notion of mental and social ‘‘structuring structures,’’ the ecological approach claims that ‘‘intrinsic’’ dynamics are coupled with ‘‘extrinsic’’ dynamics of commensurate complexity. However, something is missing from Barrett’s position. In our view, it is the social element of religious meaning*that is, the social dimension of the religious practitioner’s ‘‘environment,’’ which might be more appropriately called the practitioner’s ‘‘milieu’’ (see Rose, 2013). Although Barrett discusses the individual in his or her physical and musical environment, his examples are mostly social rituals*‘‘a Hindu festival, a Shinto shrine, a Taoist funeral, and a Jewish celebration of Sukkot.’’ The absence of any theoretical consideration of the practitioner’s social milieu is therefore conspicuous. Practitioners derive meaning from even the most solitary religious practices, such as prayer, not only because they occur in environments of sensory richness and complexity, but also because they are laden with social meaning. To illustrate, consider two recent sociological studies of prayer. First, Wuthnow (2008) found that church service attendees remembered congregational prayers for others more than less social forms of prayer. Second, MacGregor (2008) examined nineteenth-century children’s prayer books and found that as children were taught to pray, they were simultaneously taught to obey their parents and God. Both Wuthnow and MacGregor find prayer to be centered on the home, family, and congregation, rather than the individual per se. A second issue that arises from Barrett’s analysis is how religion can mold the personal and social identities of believers. People find value in religion not only because it is good at creating an environmentally rich experience, but also because it allows them to ‘‘find’’ value in themselves within the religion. This identity element in religious practice is the focus of two recent studies on religiously devout women* namely, a group of American Jewish women who sequester themselves each month (Avishai, 2008), and a group of Muslim women in Switzerland (Beyeler, 2012). Both groups use their religious practices to create a symbolic moral boundary between themselves and women outside their faith group. In describing how her religious practice made her a ‘‘good Jew,’’ one woman in Avishai’s (2008, p. 422) study *Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

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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 Barrett’s 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 Barrett’s 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, 409433. Beyeler, S. (2012). ‘‘Islam provides for women a dignified and honorable position’’: Strategies of Ahmadi Muslims in differentiating processes in Switzerland. Women’s Studies, 41, 660681. 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, 95108. MacGregor, C.A. (2008). Religious socialization and children’s prayer as cultural object: Boundary work in children’s 19th century Sunday school books. Poetics, 36, 435449. Pagis, M. (2009). Embodied self-reflexivity. Social Psychology Quarterly, 72, 265283. Rose, N. (2013). The human sciences in a biological age. Theory, Culture & Society, 30, 324. Vaisey, S. (2009). Motivation and justification: A dual-process model of culture in action. American Journal of Sociology, 114, 16751715. 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, 17531780. Wuthnow, R. (2008). Teach us to pray: The cognitive power of domain violations. Poetics, 36, 493506.

Religious perception and the education of attention Tim Ingold* Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK

As a long-time advocate of the ecological approach to perception, and an implacable opponent of cognitivism in all its forms (Ingold, 2000), I am much in sympathy with the argument of this paper. I agree that the cognitive science of religion, with its stress on explaining the tenacity of apparently irrational beliefs (Boyer, 2000), completely misses the point. For in sourcing religion to compendia of beliefs about the world, and about what may or may not exist in it, cognitive theorists interpose an

*Email: [email protected]

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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. 3040) 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 Gibson’s (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 Gibson’s 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 world’s cominginto-being that it is also imaginative, rather than opposed to imagination as Gibson thought (Ingold, 2012, pp. 67). And while we may endorse Gibson’s 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.

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Thus, rather than the world’s 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. 105108). 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 author’s 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, 195214. 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. 18). 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, 4353. Serres, M. (1995). The natural contract (E. MacArthur & W. Paulson, Trans.). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

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What an ecological approach can teach us T.M. Luhrmann*

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Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

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. Barrett’s 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. Barrett’s 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 Barrett’s paper I did not realize how important the difference between the ecological and the

*Email: [email protected]

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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. Barrett’s 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

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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 Barrett’s paper helps me to name the phenomenon that I think I see. Were that all the papers one reads so fruitful!

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Parsing meaning and value in relation to experience Ann Taves* Department of Religious Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

Drawing on Neville’s axiological metaphysics, Barrett proposes an ecological approach to the perception of religious meaning and value, such that ‘‘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.’’ Religious practices have value ‘‘when its meanings [the meanings of practices] come to life* that is, when the meanings of religious practices are perceived.’’ In other words, he says: ‘‘value is an essential aspect of what distinguishes the religious insider’s experience of meaning as a perceptual experience.’’ We need, he argues, ‘‘a testable theory of how the experience of meaning changes under this and other conditions so as to provide access to value.’’ He offers Gibson’s ecological psychology with its ‘‘insistence on the essentially interactive nature of perceptual experience’’ as the basis for ‘‘an ecological approach to religious meaning and value’’ that starts from ‘‘the perceptual experiences of seasoned practitioners engaged in highly structured and overtly religious activities.’’ If I understand Barrett correctly, he is proposing that we sidestep definitional problems surrounding ‘‘religion’’ by focusing on ‘‘seasoned practitioners’’ engaged in activities widely recognized as religious in order to ask why they perceive what they are doing as valuable when outsiders (and perhaps also less seasoned practitioners) do not. He wants to suggest that they perceive their actions as valuable because the meanings of the practices have ‘‘come to life’’ in the interactive context of the religious activities. When the meanings of practices do not ‘‘come to life,’’ as they presumably do not for outsiders, then they presumably have less value*their value is not ‘‘rich and abiding . . . [nor] impervious to hardship and misfortune.’’ Does this mean that outsiders perceive no meaning in the practices, as Barrett seems to suggest, or that they simply perceive different meanings? This is a crucial question. If outsiders simply perceive different meanings, then Barrett’s key sentence should read: religious practice has value ‘‘when its meanings [the meanings of practices] come to life*that is, when the meanings of religious practices are perceived [as valuable].’’ This seemingly minor

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shift in wording goes to the heart of my difficulty with Barrett’s 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 Barrett’s 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 organism’s 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

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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 doesn’t 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. 4849). 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.

I shall make several points in response. With respect to ‘‘the phenomenological claim that it can show up without relation to the manner in which experience unfolds in time,’’ I did not make this claim. It is, however, the sort of claim that Bill Barnard, whose experience I analyze, might make. Indeed, it is this sort of claim to have had a seemingly spontaneous

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experience with little or no relation to any ‘‘ecological conditions’’ that I wanted to see if I could explain using an attributional approach. In chapter three, I analyze Barnard’s experience over time and in context insofar as I could reconstruct it. My analysis of Bradley’s evangelical experience, which was urged upon him by his peers and unfolded over the course of several years, was thoroughly (and much more easily) analyzed as it unfolded over time and in context, because he was aware of and invested in documenting its emergence. Barrett finds the concepts of ‘‘specialness’’ too abstract and I have to concede I have been using it less in more recent work because it*like meaning*allows us to gloss over important distinctions. As with ‘‘meaning,’’ we use special to signify both something that is set apart from other things in its class (and, thus, salient) and something that has particular value (significant). Both ‘‘meaning’’ and ‘‘special’’ are useful terms to watch for ‘‘on the ground,’’ so to speak, where they highlight features of interest; but both can obscure the distinction between salience and significance, if we do not analyze the manner in which they (‘‘meaning’’ and ‘‘special’’) are used carefully. In my recent writings (Taves, 2013, under review), I have elaborated on the building-block approach, distinguishing between three interactive processes that people draw upon to generate phenomena that they sometimes characterize in religion-like terms. I refer to these as perceiving salience, appraising significance, and imagining hypotheticals. In light of this further work, I would not say*as Barrett suggests*that ‘‘value is, at bottom, a simple quality of ‘specialness’ that is ascribed to certain things.’’ I would say that things that are salient stand out from things in their class and are therefore perceived as special (insofar as we want to use that term), in the sense of being non-ordinary. Stimuli may be salient, that is, grab our attention, for many different reasons, all of which involve potential value, including potential survival value (evolved salience), potential cultural value (learned salience), or simply because they are unfamiliar (novel salience) and their potential value is unknown. But salient stimuli have to be appraised in relation to the environment (context), past experience, and the goals of the organism in order for the organism to determine their significance. In my own appropriation of ecological psychology (Taves, in press), I have found the ecological emphasis of affordances particularly useful, as it provides a crucial link between animals and environments. There are, however, a number of claims associated with the concept and with ecological psychology more generally that are not necessarily entailed by the concept and to which we need not subscribe in adopting it. The most controversial issue has to do with how perception couples the animal and the environment. Gibson and his followers have traditionally argued for direct coupling. This claim, understood as a form of ‘‘direct realism,’’ is premised on a particular understanding of perception grounded in the ability to scrutinize the ‘‘flowing stimulus array’’ that is derived from James and Dewey (Heft, 2001), which Barrett seems to endorse. It stands in contrast to the representational view prevalent in the cognitive sciences more generally, in which it is assumed that perception is based on probabilistic cues (for an overview, see Goldstein, 2009), which Barrett rejects. Ecologically oriented psychologists have offered different responses to these critiques (e.g., Chemeno, 2009, pp. 105134; Gallagher, 2008; Vicente, 2003). The key point, as Vicente (2003, p. 256) stresses, is that the concept of affordances does not necessarily entail either view and, indeed, the animal and the environment may be

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coupled perceptually in more than one way, depending on the circumstances and the amount of information available.2 If we return to Barrett’s opening question in light of a more qualified appropriation of Gibson’s 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. 254266) 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. 260265). 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. Sarah’s (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 (Sarah’s family, her Christian therapist, and the hospital personnel) did not think that Sarah’s feelings and sensations should be construed as presences, whether positive or negative, and viewed her church’s 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, Barrett’s article has deep underlying problems. First, he appropriates Neville’s 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 Neville’s conclusions. Had he worked with the complexities and nuances in Neville’s philosophy, drawn out Neville’s presuppositions and caveats, and done the same with experimental psychologies, ecological and cognitive, he could have constructed bridges between Neville’s philosophy and a

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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

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1.

Neville (1981, pp. 160163, 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 Neville’s philosophy, Barrett does not distinguish between these various questions. Instead he presupposes Neville’s conclusion that ‘‘experience begins in beauty’’ (Neville, 1981, p. 163), which Neville acknowledges must be justified, and Neville’s 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, 535543. Goldstein, E.B. (2009). ‘‘Ecological approach’’ and ‘‘direct perception’’. In Encyclopedia of Perception (Vols. 12, pp. 1:366370, 1:37580). 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. 322). New York: Guilford. Park, C. (2005). Religion and meaning. In R.F. Paloutzian & C. Park (Eds.), Handbook of psychology of religion and spirituality (pp. 295314). New York: Guilford. Park, C., & Folkman, S. (1997). Meaning in the context of stress and coping. Review of General Psychology, 1, 115215. 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. 138161). 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, 241267.

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Religious experience and the metaphysics of meaning and value Aku Visala* Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton, NJ, USA

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 Barrett’s 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 Barrett’s 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 subject’s religious beliefs. On this view, the religious experience of meaning and value is simply a mundane experience interpreted under the religious subject’s 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: [email protected]

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third-person access to religious meaning through the environmental conditions that ground the experience of meaning for the religious subject. I am not sure about Barrett’s ecological approach as a whole, but I do think that he has put his finger on something important. Cognitive approaches do seem to have a blind spot in terms of religious experience. This was especially salient in the early cognitive science of religion research (i.e., prior to 2005). Fortunately, there has been recent work that has tried to overcome this (e.g., Ann Taves, who Barrett discusses). Further, Barrett’s proposal points to a new direction, away from the standard computational/functionalistic account of the mind, and towards a more extended/ embodied approach to the mind that takes into account the role of the environment in cognitive processing. Since I have my doubts about standard computationalism, I do sympathize with Barrett’s attempt to come up with an alternative to the standard cognitive account. Now, let me raise a few more metaphysical points about naturalism, meaning, and value. It seems to me that Barrett’s ecological approach makes several assumptions about the metaphysics of meaning and value that are neither explicated nor defended. Barrett states that his model is naturalistic but he does not give us any clue as to what he means by this. It seems to me that his model is actually rather strongly naturalistic, not just in terms of methodology but ontology as well. First, one of the basic assumptions is that meaning and value are something that we perceive in our environment. And since the model seems to take perception (at least for the most part) to entail a direct relationship to the environment, it seems that the grounds for our value judgments are in our perceived physical environment. Value perception is thus nothing more than sensory perception of certain physical properties of our environment. This raises the more general question as to the objectivity of value and meaning. Does the ecological model entail that there are such things as mind-independent meaning and value? Both negative and positive answers are metaphysical assumptions that require some argument to be plausible. Barrett seems to assume here that there is indeed something like meaning and value in nature, but they are supervenient on some physical properties. Second, there is the question of veridicality with respect to the experiences of meaning and value. Given the ecological approach, does it make any sense to ask whether some perception of value or meaning is true or false (accurate or inaccurate)? In the wine-tasting example, as well as in the case of Jimmy Hendrix and Beethoven, the traditional philosophical argument would maintain that there is inherent objective meaning in these works of art. It is unclear whether Barrett thinks along these lines. He does seem to think that the wine or the works of art at least constrain the kinds of meanings that we can perceive in them. Does this mean that there is some inherent value in the objects of perception, or does the value somehow emerge or get constructed in our act of perceiving such objects? Moreover, what are we to think about the value and meaning of things that are not human products? Barrett seems to maintain that there are almost unlimited possibilities of meaningfully perceiving the world. Does this mean that all value and meaning perceptions are ultimately all equally true (or false)? Third, the ecological model seems to assume that the grounds of the experience of religious meaning and value supervene on the physical properties of the subject’s environment. I can detect no argument for this assumption in the article. Barrett simply assumes that the environment that the religious subject perceives as religiously meaningful is the very same environment to that which the scholar of religion shares

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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 subject’s 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.

Cognitive processes in religious discernment: a response to Nathaniel Barrett Fraser Watts* Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

I welcome the core thrust of Nathaniel Barrett’s paper and his approach to the religious perception of value in terms of Gibson’s ecological, non-constructivist theory of perception; I agree with Barrett that it is fruitful to apply Gibson’s 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. 139173). Religion seems to be a domain in which felt meanings are especially important, and many religious practices seem designed to focus on them. Barrett’s 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: [email protected]

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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. 6468). 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 Gibson’s 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, 266273. 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. 1752). Boston, MA: New Science Library.

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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. 367383). 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. 139173). 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 Barrett* Institute for Culture and Society, University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain

I would like to begin by expressing my gratitude to the commentators for their willingness to engage a theory that is still very much in the early stages of its development. I have learned enormously from their feedback, and I hope that some of the clarifications offered here might repay their efforts. Above all, I am thankful for the chance to improve on the arguments of the original paper. For although the commentators make a variety of criticisms and suggestions all worth considering, overall their responses indicate that the central topic of the paper, the perception of value, was difficult to grasp. Perhaps I should have defined this dimension of value experience in relation to others, especially cognitive appraisal and emotional valence. Whatever the reason, the difficulty of bringing the perceptual dimension of value experience into focus is evidently greater than I anticipated. I must point out that some of the fault lies with the complex (which is not to say cogent) nature of the argument, which advances multiple theses at various levels of generality: about the role of value in all perceptual experience as well as the perception of value as such, about the overall importance of learning to experience value in religious practice and the perception of value in overtly religious activities, and about the relation between the perception of presence and the perception of value. Connecting all of these theses is the theme of interaction, which also could use more articulation. On top of all this theoretical argumentation, the paper makes some fairly concrete suggestions for empirical studies of religious practice: it suggests, for instance, that we look for motion-specifying features in the musical sounds of specific religious rituals, and also look to see if these features are correlated in any regular way with experiences of what musicologist Eric Clarke (2005) has called ‘‘virtual’’ motion or agency. These suggestions can (and perhaps should) be considered independently of the theoretical claims. *Email: [email protected]

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Nevertheless, I continue to believe that something like the theoretical orientation that I develop in the paper*that is, an orientation toward the interactive conditions of experience*is important for understanding a central but neglected dimension of human religiosity: the perception of value or, simply put, enjoyment. I am not just calling for more attention to the environments or milieus of religious practice, but for specific attention to the role of environmental ‘‘interactants’’ in value-rich experience. What follows is an attempt to clarify and, in some places, revise the most crucial points of my argument. Specific issues raised by the commentators are addressed along the way.

The importance of direct enjoyment1 The paper opens with the general thesis that the experience of value is an important motivating and sustaining element of the religious life. I now see that I overstated this claim when I said that the ‘‘experience of rich and abiding value . . . is ultimately what sustains religious belief and the religious life as worthy of commitment.’’ I should have claimed that the experience of rich and abiding value is a principal religious motivation and left open the question of its attainment. Starting the paper as I did likely caused some commentators to regard my argument as a kind of apologetic, which I regret. The theory of value experience that I present is presumed to be naturalistic and is intended for consideration without prejudice as to the actually experienced value of any particular religious practice or of religious practice in general. Likewise, when I say in the conclusion that I am hoping to contribute to scientific understanding of the ‘‘special meaning and value that religious experiences can have,’’ I do not mean to carve out a sui generis domain of religious value. On the other hand, I suspect that cognitive science is not well equipped to handle the experience of value and as a result may be biased against its consideration as matter of scientific interest. Whatever the reason, it is evident that the experience of value has not attracted much attention in the cognitive science of religion (CSR). For instance, this experience is largely absent from Armin Geertz’s (2010) otherwise comprehensive biocultural theory of religion. I find it especially telling that Geertz (2010, p. 307) considers religious music only in light of its functional role in the manipulation of mental and bodily states. Surely if we were considering music outside of a religious context, the question of intrinsic value, that is, of the enjoyment of music for its own sake, could be raised as a matter of legitimate scientific interest. And yet the idea that religious music might be similarly enjoyed rarely if ever occurs to cognitive theorists. For CSR, by and large, the guiding assumption is that religion is practiced for the sake of something else.2 A similar blindness to the phenomenon of direct enjoyment was once observed by John Dewey: Human experience in the large, in its coarse and conspicuous features, has for one of its most striking features preoccupation with direct enjoyment, feasting and festivities; ornamentation, dance, song, dramatic pantomime, telling yarns and enacting stories. In comparison with intellectual and moral endeavor, this trait of experience has hardly received the attention from philosophers that it demands. Even philosophers who have conceived that pleasure is the sole motive of man and the attainment of happiness his whole aim, have given a curiously sober, drab, account of the working of pleasure and the search for happiness. Consider the utilitarians how they toiled, spun and wove, but who never saw man arrayed in joy as the lilies of the field. Happiness was to them a matter of calculation and effort, of industry guided by mathematical book-keeping. The

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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 Dewey’s (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). Visala’s concern about the reduction of value to something merely physical and Geertz’s 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 Csikszentmihalyi’s 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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‘‘constructed.’’ What is worse, it disregards my express intention to remain neutral on questions about the truth of religious belief and focus on the experience of value. This is ironic, as my decision to address these questions at all only came after an anonymous reviewer complained that my approach seems to falsify belief, or at least to preclude its justification.3 To be clear: questions about the truth of religious belief are beside the point of my main argument. In fact, originally I did not intend to address Luhrmann’s work or the kinds of experiences she describes. But it happened that I read When God Talks Back (Luhrmann, 2012) while I was working on the original paper, and was amazed to find a wealth of apparent commonalities with my approach*especially her view of religious experience as a learned skill and her observations of the phenomenon of perceptual differentiation. I am glad to see that Luhrmann confirms these connections and that she finds the distinction between differentiation and enrichment helpful for her continuing research. I must admit, however, that the ‘‘inner’’ experience of personal presence was an odd choice for illustrating the interactive nature of the perception of value, and probably it obscured the very points it was intended to clarify. Perceptualization and value-character On the other hand, I still believe that Luhrmann’s work is especially helpful in illustrating a central point: the connection between what could be termed the ‘‘perceptualization’’ of religious experience and the enrichment of value. Perceptualization encompasses all attempts to enhance non-perceptual experience*fantasy, memory, cogitation*so that it approximates the feel of normal perceptual experience.4 It includes visualization but also ‘‘auralization’’ and other ‘‘sensorizations’’ (touch, smell, and taste), as well as multi-modal combinations. In this broad sense, perceptualization is utilized by a wide range of religious traditions, from Ignatian prayer to Tibetan Buddhist meditation, and by an even wider range of nonreligious activities. For my purposes, it is especially important to note that the process of perceptualization can involve both environmental and bodily interactants*that is, it is not necessarily an exclusively ‘‘inner’’ process. I introduce the term ‘‘perceptualization’’ partly in response to Fraser Watts’s suggestion that I leave room for a graded spectrum between ‘‘articulate and felt meanings’’ and between ‘‘constructive’’ and ‘‘interactive’’ modes of religious experience. I want to concede this point, but I must insist on the essentially interactive nature of perceptual experience. Likewise, where Taves suggests a compromise between the ‘‘constructed’’ and ‘‘ecological’’ perception of meaning I must demur: if a meaning is perceived it is neither constructed nor inferred. But I do think that Watts and Taves are right to call for more attention to the many gradations between perceptual and non-perceptual experience. After all, we do think and perceive at the same time, and it is hard to say where one stops and the other begins. Accordingly, I shall use perceptualization to describe the trajectory of experience moving toward the interactive pole: the more richly interactive experience becomes, the more perceptual it feels, and vice versa. Now the crucial point of my argument is that the enrichment of value can follow this very same trajectory, because to move toward the perceptual feeling of some meaning is necessary to enrich the value-character of that feeling. This trajectory continues within perceptual experience through various gradations of more or less

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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 Clarke’s (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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Indeed, such a clarification is called for by Taves’s criticisms concerning my apparent conflation of meaning and value. ‘‘Meaning’’ and ‘‘value’’ are such vague and variable terms that we are in danger of circling each other’s position without ever determining the nature of our disagreement. Here is my best attempt to clarify the crux of the matter. I believe that Taves’s suggestion to reword my central proposal as follows*‘‘Religious practice has value ‘when its meanings . . . are perceived [as valuable]’’*signals an important but subtle difference in our respective approaches to value. I want to affirm Taves’s claim that we perceive things as valuable, but I believe that this rewording leans toward the dimension of value experience that is, strictly speaking, not perceptual, but rather the product of some kind of appraisal process. Perhaps the following example will clarify this important difference. Consider how a big piece of cake is experienced by a person who is completely famished. In this state, the perception of the cake is likely to be accompanied by a powerful feeling such that the cake is perceived as having a kind of value. That is, when famished, the cake is perceived as enticing and delicious. In such cases I think it is acceptable to separate meaning from value as Taves wishes to do, even though they are joined in experience: there is the perception of meaning (a piece of cake) and added to that is the value (enticing). This distinction is supported by the fact that we can construct a neurobiological account of the valuation process that runs through circuits of the nervous system that loop outside perceptual processes, so that the experience of value is the product of fairly distinct processes of appraisal. We might even say that these valuation processes are ‘‘triggered’’ by the perception of a certain meaning and then their outcome is fed back into perception (e.g., see Damasio, 2005). When cognitive scientists talk about value, they seem to have something like this multi-stage feedback process involving a distinct ‘‘value system’’ in mind (see Di Paolo, Rohde, & De Jaegher, 2011, pp. 4559), and I believe that Taves is similarly oriented in her conception of value experience. I am not denying that such processes exist and that they are important for our experience of value. But notice that this view does not account for what I call ‘‘value-character,’’ that is, richness and depth of contrast. Admittedly, my way of defining value-character is extremely vague and inclusive, such that value-character is intrinsic not only to perceptual experience, but to experience in general. Value in this sense is the sine qua non of experience*it always shows up, more or less. But if the enrichment of value-character really does distinguish the perceptual experience of value as such, we should be able to locate relative differences of value-character in experience. So let us return to the cake example. Granted that the initial experience of value is the result of an appraisal process that is ‘‘triggered’’ by the initial perception of meaning and the person’s appetitive state, let us consider how this valuation alters subsequent perceptual experience. If the person were completely full, they would not even want to look at the cake; they might even turn away in disgust. In the famished state, the person is likely to touch, smell, and taste*that is, eat*the cake. But suppose that the hungry person does not eat right away, and consider just their visual interaction with the cake. The person takes in the rich dark brown of the chocolate frosting, the delicate texture of the layers, the luscious red of a strawberry, and so on. In other words, the hungry person feasts on the cake with their eyes. The richness and depth of visual detail that we take in when we feast on something with our eyes is a manifestation of value-character. It is not a construction of our nervous system alone, nor is it simply given to us by the world; rather it is

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a product of our bodies interacting in a particular way with patterns of what James Gibson (1979) called ‘‘ambient energy’’. The environmental sources of these patterns could be objects or persons, enduring characters or momentary events. The ecological perspective insists that the enjoyment of value-character is always a twosided affair: a matter of attention and perceptual skill, on the one hand, and a matter of the available patterns of ambient energy and their sources in the environment, on the other. To emphasize that these two sides are determined in relation to each other, I refer to their relevant features as the ‘‘interactants’’ of experience (cf. Oyama, 2000). Again, value-character is not a quality added to perceptual experience, but the quality of perception itself: it is intimately related to the structured flow of information that is constituted by the interaction of body and environment (Sporns, 2011, pp. 319324). Although value-character is rarely the focus of our attention, we are constantly making slight adjustments so as to enhance value-character and thereby improve our perceptual grasp of a situation. It is therefore very close to what Herbert Dreyfus (2005, pp. 136138), drawing from phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, calls ‘‘optimal grip’’: For each object, as for each picture in an art gallery, there is an optimum distance from which it requires to be seen, a direction viewed from which it vouchsafes most of itself: at a shorter or greater distance we have merely a perception blurred through excess or deficiency. We therefore tend towards the maximum of visibility, and seek a better focus as with a microscope. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 302)

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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Why is perceptualization so important for religious satisfaction? One possible reason is that to perceptualize religious meaning is to allow it to ‘‘show up’’ or ‘‘come alive’’ in ways that can provide apparent confirmation for religious belief. Whether it actually does so or not is a complicated matter. In any case, I suspect that such apparent confirmations are very rare, and, moreover, that they are not the primary goal of perceptualization. The more important reason is that to perceptualize religious meaning is by definition to enrich value-character and thereby to enhance the overall value of religious experience (in conjunction with other means of enhancement). This enhancement can be, and likely is, intrinsically motivated: a value-rich experience is directly enjoyed for its own sake, no matter what other purposes it might also have. Responses to other commentaries In the space that I have left, I would like to address the commentaries that have been neglected so far. First, with regards to Gabe Ignatow and Elizabeth Gabhart’s concerns about the social dimensions of religious practice and the social meanings that are perceived therein, I am afraid that I have precious little to say, except to acknowledge that they are right about this gaping hole in my approach. I hope that all of the energy expended above in trying to clarify what I mean by the perception of value gives them a sense of why my discussion of religious experience is not nearly as comprehensive as it needs to be. Next, it is important to say something about the commentaries of those who are expert in ecological psychology: Harry Heft, Luis Favela and Anthony Chemero. It is very encouraging to know that this venture into their home territory is not entirely unwelcome. No doubt they have noticed ways in which my argument is more of an appropriation of ecological psychology than a straightforward application, and would need much refinement before it could be carried out as a program of research. I appreciate Heft’s remarks about ‘‘adience’’ and will try to incorporate this concept into my thinking about religious practice. Likewise, I am receptive to Favela and Chemero’s insistence that I find a place for the ecological concept of ‘‘affordances,’’ or possibilities for action. However, I believe that the concepts of adience and affordance are not quite adequate to our experience of value. At the heart of this experience is something directly enjoyed, something had, while adience and affordance both have a distinctly proleptic character. Adience is the intentional stretching forth of the perceiving subject, while affordance is the corresponding invitational character of perceived meanings. These are extremely important dimensions of experience, and no doubt they play a role in enjoyment, but taken by themselves they leave out what Dewey called the ‘‘consummatory’’ phase of experience. There is a curious tension between Favela and Chemero’s complaint that my theory makes too much of the inaccessibility of religious experience and Ingold’s complaint that my theory tries too hard to nail down its ‘‘furniture.’’ To Favela and Chemero, I would point out that I do not mean to insist on the inaccessibility of the experience of religious value. I merely wish to register that the perception of meaning and the perception of value are not quite the same, that both likely depend on religious ‘‘connoisseurship,’’ that is, the perceptual skill of seasoned practitioners; and that such mastery poses a methodological challenge that needs to be addressed. Before we can figure out how to detect and describe the environmental interactants

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of a religious experience, we have to get a sense of what is meaningful for practitioners. Thus I do not see how we can approach the value dimension of religious experience except through interviews and/or participation. Ingold’s suggestion that religious experience ‘‘lies in the perception of a world that is itself continually coming into being both around and along with the perceiver him- or herself’’ is characteristically thought-provoking. At least to a certain extent, I agree, and I see Ingold’s remarks as a welcome clarification of what it means for perception to be mutual and interactive. Nevertheless, I must defend the careful examination of the relatively stable ‘‘furniture’’ of the religious milieu, because my hope for developing a scientific understanding of religious experience as fully embodied*including bodies besides the practitioners*hangs on its success. Also, by focusing on the emergent and new in experience, I wonder if Ingold is at risk of neglecting the necessary role of recurrent features. Novelty does not stand out over and against what is recurrent in experience; rather, the becoming of something new, insofar as it can be experienced, is manifest as the animation of recurrent features to which our attention is already well trained. Therefore, I would like to insist that the quickening of religious experience usually depends, like the animation of Pygmalion’s statue, on the prior formation of an exquisitely detailed body of meaning. It pains me to bring these remarks to a close without having given much attention to the theme of interaction. Establishing the interactive nature of experience is essential to my argument, as it provides the grounds for investigating the environmental ‘‘interactants’’ of religious experience. I would like to point out, however, that a clear understanding of the meaning of causal interaction is highly elusive, as demonstrated by Susan Oyama’s (2000) rigorous examination of the issue in the context of developmental biology. In that work, Oyama shows how difficult it is to move beyond explanatory frameworks that surreptitiously presume a predefined source of organic form qua ‘‘information.’’ And as she well knows, the very same problem plagues cognitive science. Oyama’s work influenced my choice to use the term ‘‘interactive,’’ but I would not have learned much from her if I thought that this term alone could suffice to articulate important theoretical differences. It is crucial to clarify what constitutes a non-interactive account of experience. If ‘‘construction’’ is too variable a term to provide a suitable contrast, consider instead the word ‘‘trigger.’’ The word shows up everywhere in cognitive science. It seems to reflect a widespread habit of thinking about perceptual and cognitive processes as mechanisms that passively await the impetus of a particular stimulus, which, once it has ‘‘triggered’’ a process, plays no further role in the determination of its outcome. Perhaps many bodily processes are ‘‘triggered’’ in this sense. Yet I am determined to show that perception as we experience it cannot be ‘‘triggered,’’ and to show that the value-character of perceptual experience is a good part of the reason why. Notes 1.

Generally I prefer to speak of ‘‘value-rich experience’’ rather than ‘‘enjoyment’’ to avoid connotations of superficiality (‘‘having fun’’) and to include emotions besides joy. However, a good case can be made for the central importance of religious joy and even for playfulness and fun. Also, it is possible within certain contexts to ‘‘enjoy,’’ in a sense, negative emotions such as fear and sorrow.

54 2. 3.

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N. 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 Luhrmann’s current research.

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