Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Analytic social epistemology
- Common sense versus collective memory
- Consensus versus dissent
- Criticism
- Disciplinarity versus interdisciplinarity
- Epistemic justice
- Evolution
- Expertise
- Explaining the cognitive content of science
- Explaining the normative structure of science
- Feminism
- Folk epistemology
- Free enquiry
- Historiography
- Information science
- Knowledge management
- Knowledge policy
- Knowledge society
- Kuhn, Popper and logical positivism
- Mass media
- Multiculturalism
- Naturalism
- Normativity
- Philosophy versus sociology
- Postmodernism
- Progress
- Rationality
- Relativism versus constructivism
- Religion
- Rhetoric
- Science and technology studies
- Science as a social movement
- Science wars
- Social capital versus public good
- Social constructivism
- Social epistemology
- Social science
- Sociology of knowledge
- Translation
- Truth, reliability and the ends of knowledge
- Universalism versus relativism
- University
- Bibliography
- Index
Religion
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Analytic social epistemology
- Common sense versus collective memory
- Consensus versus dissent
- Criticism
- Disciplinarity versus interdisciplinarity
- Epistemic justice
- Evolution
- Expertise
- Explaining the cognitive content of science
- Explaining the normative structure of science
- Feminism
- Folk epistemology
- Free enquiry
- Historiography
- Information science
- Knowledge management
- Knowledge policy
- Knowledge society
- Kuhn, Popper and logical positivism
- Mass media
- Multiculturalism
- Naturalism
- Normativity
- Philosophy versus sociology
- Postmodernism
- Progress
- Rationality
- Relativism versus constructivism
- Religion
- Rhetoric
- Science and technology studies
- Science as a social movement
- Science wars
- Social capital versus public good
- Social constructivism
- Social epistemology
- Social science
- Sociology of knowledge
- Translation
- Truth, reliability and the ends of knowledge
- Universalism versus relativism
- University
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
It is difficult to characterize “religion” as a form of knowledge because the set of practices with which the term is normally associated share little more than the capacity to maintain complex social relations over large chunks of space and time without a need for the modern nation state. In this respect, religions are the original non-governmental organizations (NGOs). As for the existence of some unique religious experience, William James had already put paid to that idea in 1902 by demonstrating that suitably “numinous” experience could be reliably induced by pharmaceutical means. (Given the cross-cultural prevalence of drug use, the so-called “world religions” would then seem to cover social practices that valorize the drug-free induction of numinous experience.) As for a belief in God, some religions, like Buddhism, are formally atheistic, while others, like Hinduism, treat God and nature as coextensive. (See naturalism.)
Not surprisingly, then, the canonical list of world religions came into being in the second half of the nineteenth century, as sociologists and anthropologists sought criteria to mark the transition from traditional to modern society. Perhaps the least prejudicial definition of religion – one that neither demeans nor mystifies its cognitive character – is that it is the systematic social embodiment of a metaphysical worldview. In this respect, any set of beliefs becomes a religion once they constitute the medium through which people live their lives.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Knowledge BookKey Concepts in Philosophy, Science and Culture, pp. 143 - 145Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2007