Religion as a "Bifurcated Essentially Contested Concept": Part II

In a comment on my last post, about the “bifurcated essential contestability” of religion, Burk wrote: “So what’s the point? The fact that some concepts are slippery enough to be re-defined to one’s taste, or one’s argumentative predilection, hardly speaks well of the original referent, does it?”

This betrays a misunderstanding, insofar as essential contestability is not merely a matter of a concept being slippery enough to allow one to define it as one pleases or to serve one's argumentative agenda. But I suspect the misunderstanding here is likely to be sufficiently widespread that I want to have another go at the idea of essential contestability. However, so as to avoid having to repeat what I’ve already said, I invite you to read or reread the previous post—as well as my clarifying comments offered as comments to it—before digging into this one.

First of all, essential contestability does offer parameters for the proper use of a term (one can’t simply define it however one pleases). But these parameters are looser than those offered by a strict definition in terms of genus and difference. The purpose of that looseness is to facilitate an ongoing normative dispute--to prevent those who, say, want to apply the term "terrorism" to domestic battery from being shut down by "definitional fiat", without having the chance to make their case for why domestic battery deserves to receive the same sort of condemnation that we attach to, say, the Oklahoma City bombing.

The worry here is this. Suppose someone tries to make the point that domestic battery is a species of terrorism, and thereby argue that the public moral outcry against terrorism (and concomitant political capital and economic resources devoted to its prevention) should extend with equal force to domestic battery, inspiring a comparable devotion of public resources. The worry is that this essentially moral argument will be unfairly silenced by essentially ad hoc definitional conventions. Someone will say, “That’s not terrorism, so shut up and go back to your NOW meeting.” The essential contestability of “terrorism” aims to prevent the invocation of such conversation-stoppers.

Some concepts have a precisely defined set of referents. Some admit of grey areas ("vague concepts")--and as I've argued elsewhere (in an article on the essential contestability of "rape"), essential contestability offers a useful way of understanding what can make a concept vague. Whether a concept has a precise meaning or is vague/contested tells us something about the function that the concept serves in the language. If the function is to regulate a certain kind of descriptive project, then it will have a precise meaning. If its function is to regulate an ongoing normative dispute, then it will be essentially contested.

But here's the thing. There would be little point in making linguistic space for normative disagreement if normativity were conceived reductionistically in terms of nothing but subjective attitudes. If the distinctive wrong of rape were just a matter of taste or nothing but a projection of psychological predilitions ("a rorsach blot," as Burk puts it in his comment), then there'd really be nothing to disagree about between those who say that a husband's cavalier disregard for his wife's disinclination to have sex makes his act rape (even though she's been socialized to quietly submit to his demands), and those who deny this. There'd be no disagreement between them because the former would be simply saying something about their tastes (they just happen to have a certain kind of distaste towards the husband’s behavior) and the latter would be simply saying something about their tastes (they lack the relevant negative attitude). But varied tastes towards the same phenomenon do not constitute disagreement. A disagreement is possible only if both parties mean to say something about the husband's behavior--the former is asserting something about it that the latter denies.

In short, real normative disagreement is possible only if there is more to the normative status of activities, projects, etc., than just the diverse attitudinal projections of different individuals.

It follows that, in order for the essential contestability of concepts to serve the function it is supposed to serve, there must be something more to normative discourse than just expressions of taste and projections of preferences onto the range of entities to which the contested concept actually or potentially refers.

The precise character of the "something more" is going to be a matter of some debate, but at the very least it will require that normative judgments be such that it is possible to offer legitimate reasons in their favor--legitimate in the sense of rendering it rationally fitting for someone to change their mind in the light of it.

Since I am convinced that there is something more to normative judgments than mere expressions of subjective preference, I am likewise convinced that essentially contested concepts serve an important linguistic function.

I am less convinced, however, that the bifurcation of an essentially contested concept--of the sort I see occuring in the case of "religion"--is helpful. Rather, while I think it may be inescapable, it creates problems for clear communication and divides the normative discourse into two communities who then have difficulty communicating their respective normative insights to the other community without being consistently misunderstood.

So, with respect to such concepts, the task is to understand how they operate so that we can better transcend the impediments.

In sum, I think the essential contestability of the concept “religion” has value, but I think that the bifurcation of it limits that value by preventing the normative insights achieved in one linguistic community (which focuses on religion’s paradigms in a purely negative way so as to identify what it is about them that justifies the negative normative judgment) from being effectively communicated to the other linguistic community (which focuses on religion’s paradigms in a purely positive way so as to identify what it is about them that justifies the positive normative judgment).