The perception of religious meaning and value: an ecological approach

Abstract

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

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 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. 221–223). 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.

2. 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. 99–100).

3. 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).

4. 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.

5. Taves' methodology includes studies of the “interactive” dimension of religious experience, but this seems largely confined to social processes of meaning attribution.

6. 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).

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. As explained in the following section, because of the coupling of perception and action, the “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” dynamics of perception are interdependent.

10. 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.

11. 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.