11 - Cognition and meaning

Summary

Introduction

There are two general views of religion shared by the greater part of the public in the modern world. The first is that, despite modernity, science, technology and so on, religion can be understood as something fundamentally human, social and meaningful although it may contain dubious claims to truths about the contents of the world. So conceived, religions are basically clusters of meaning, analogous to other forms of cultural expressions. The second view which is very prevalent in public discourse on the subject of religion is to think of religion along more psychological lines: “Religion and religiosity in particular, is a matter of feelings and conviction, a means of explaining existence or of orienting one's life.” Consequently, religion is understood either as “something” related to meaning on the one hand or as a psychological or mental phenomenon on the other (cf. e.g. Jensen 1999, 2004).

The following remarks are intended as a kind of road map to the difficulties of such trains of thought. The first problematic idea is that it is linguistically unacceptable to treat meaning as a mental phenomenon but that is not the sort of problem that disturbs the general public or violates popular epistemology. Linguists generally treat meaning as a non-mental phenomenon, and to understand this demands a certain degree of philosophical understanding, because “meaning is not in the head”, it is somewhere else.