Between Veritas and Communitas: Epistemic Switching in the Reading of Academic and Sacred History

Abstract

We compared how 8 religious believers (historians and clergy) and 8 skeptics (historians and scientists) read a series of documents on 2 topics: the Biblical Exodus and the origins of the first (American) Thanksgiving. Readings by religiously committed historians differed from those of their non-religious peers. Navigating between the competing commitments of their faith communities on the one hand and an academic guild on the other, religious historians engaged in epistemic switching, varying epistemological criteria to align with the allegiances triggered by the document under review. To explain these findings, we propose that historical understanding be conceived not as a unitary construct but as a form of coordination between multiple axes: a vertical axis of increasing intellectual sophistication as defined by the discipline; and a horizontal axis of identification and commitment, along which individuals move between a variety of allegiances and affiliations as they engage the epistemological criteria of sacred history. Implications for future research in the learning sciences are discussed.

Acknowledgments

This study was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship awarded by the Mandel Foundation to Eli Gottlieb. We thank Miriam Friedman, Tal Nitzan, and Rachel Stroumsa for their help in refining and testing the coding scheme; and Sivan Zakai, who collaborated with us early on in this research. We thank as well Hanan Alexander, Ethan Hutt, Debby Kerdeman, Lauren Resnick, Peter Seixas, Jack Schneider, and five anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. Special thanks to Yehuda Ben-Dor for helping us track down the rabbinic sources referenced by Rabbi K in Figure 3.

Notes

¹ Newsweek, Beliefwatch, January 22, 2007, p. 7; John Schmalzbauer, December 15, 2006, Wall Street Journal, “Harvard Loses Its Edge: Nixing a Religion Requirement Will Hurt the University.” Retrieved from http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110009391

²Researchers use a bewildering variety of phrases to describe people's evolving conceptions of knowledge—epistemological understanding (Kuhn et al., 2000), epistemological beliefs (Schommer & Walker, 1995), epistemological theories (Hofer & Pintrich, 1997), epistemic development (Hallett et al., 2002), epistemic metacognition (Kitchener, 1983), reflective judgment (King & Kitchener, 1994), personal epistemology (Hofer & Pintrich, 2002), and ways of knowing (Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986), to mention only the most common. It is becoming increasingly popular among psychologists to refer to a person's conception of knowledge as his or her personal epistemology. Yet researchers differ considerably in their definitions of what a personal epistemology is. Some limit the term to a person's beliefs about the nature of knowledge; others include also beliefs about the process of learning (Hofer, 2004; Hofer & Pintrich, 1997). Some operational definitions limit personal epistemology to people's explicit statements about knowledge; others also include conceptions of knowledge implicit in practical activities such as creating, seeking, evaluating, and justifying knowledge (cf. E. Gottlieb, 2002; Sandoval, 2005). Some would even go so far as to argue that the very term personal epistemology is misleading, because it mistakenly locates epistemology in individual persons rather than in the practices of discourse communities (cf. E. Gottlieb, 2007). Our notion of epistemology includes both procedural and declarative elements (cf. E. Gottlieb, 2002, pp. 301–305), and our study examines both what people say about knowledge and what they do with regard to knowledge. Thus, our research sits in neither of Sandoval's (2005) “formal” and “practical” camps; rather, it conceives of epistemologies as comprising both beliefs and practices.

³We do this to emphasize that such processes—particularly processes of change such as “epistemic switching” and “epistemic development”—are often piecemeal and unconscious rather than comprehensive and fully articulated. Epistemological literally means “regarding a theory of knowledge,” whereas epistemic means “regarding knowledge.”

⁴Although some theorists have argued that women and men have different “ways of knowing,” empirical support for this claim is drawn from a very small number of qualitative studies of women's epistemological beliefs (e.g., Belenky et al., 1986). A much larger body of empirical research, conducted with samples that included both male and female participants, has produced no compelling evidence of significant gender differences either in epistemological beliefs or in the trajectories by which these beliefs develop (see, e.g., E. Gottlieb, 2007; Hofer & Pintrich, 1997; King & Kitchener, 1994; Kuhn, 1991). In the present study, no significant gender differences were observed with respect to any of the beliefs or strategies investigated.

⁵Hebrew transliteration follows the system of the American Library Association/Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/hebrew.pdf).

⁶Detailed coding rules are available on request.

⁷Six of eight historians explicitly referred to deism or secularism in their comments. Readers can contact us for further examples and quotations from the protocols.

⁸As noted in the Method section, comments made after the think-aloud were not coded. We cite this comment by Professor C only because it illustrates so succinctly the strategy of coordination he used throughout his reading. Because this particular comment was not produced “online,” we did not code it or include it in our quantitative analyses.

⁹Rabbi K again drew on a well-known midrash (Lamentations Rabba 32) that records the tradition that each year on the ninth day of the month of Av, the Israelites would dig their own graves, lie down in them, and find on awaking the next morning that 15,000 of them had perished during the night.

¹⁰Even models that depict historical consciousness in a non-hierarchical matrix tend to fall back on schemes with vertical progressions characterized by increasing sophistication and rational explanation. For example, Jörn Rüsen's (1993) highly influential model (cf. Megill, 1994), drawn in circular form and depicting a set of influences interacting nonlinearly, has a vertical accompaniment that moves progressively toward its apex in increasing levels of intellectual sophistication. Peter Seixas (2005) has presciently asked whether Rüsen's “progressive” stage model actually describes “different types, not necessarily more or less ‘advanced' types” of historical thinking (p. 157).