Van Huyssteen J.W. (editor) Encyclopedia of Science and Religion

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COMPUTER

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Waldrop, M. Mitchell. Complexity: The Emerging Science

at the Edge of Order and Chaos. New York: Simon

and Schuster, 1992.

Wicken, J. S. Evolution, Information, and Thermodynam-

ics: Extending the Darwinian Paradigm. New York:

Oxford University Press, 1987.

Wiener, Norbert God and Golem Inc.: A Comment on Cer-

tain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion.

1964. Reprint, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1990.

Wimsatt, William C. “Complexity and Organization.” In

Topics in the Philosophy of Biology, eds. Marjorie

Grene and Everett Mendelsohn. Dordrecht, Nether-

lands: Kluwer, 1986.

NIELS HENRIK GREGERSEN

COMPUTER

See INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

CONFLICT

See MODELS; SCIENCE AND RELIGION, MODELS AND

RELATIONS; SCIENCE AND RELIGION,

ETHODOLOGIES

CONFUCIANISM

See CHINESE RELIGIONS, CONFUCIANISM AND SCIENCE

CHINA

CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES

Consciousness studies is a new, rapidly evolving,

highly interdisciplinary field that includes psychol-

ogy, philosophy, physics, sociology, religion, dy-

namic systems, mathematics, computer science,

neuroscience, art, biology, cognitive science, an-

thropology, and linguistics. In the early 1990s,

most scientists considered consciousness taboo,

but by the early 2000s many considered it the most

important unsolved problem in science. Con-

sciousness is also a key issue in the ongoing dia-

logue between science and religion. The dominant

view of consciousness in the hard sciences is ma-

terialist and reductionist. This view has had impor-

tant successes, but it also faces important unre-

solved problems. For example, biologist Francis

Crick to wrote of his audience, “You’re nothing but

a pack of neurons” in parody of Lewis Carroll. But

most people, including those in consciousness

studies, and even in neuroscience, think there is

much more to human life than can be seen at the

level of neurons.

Notions of consciousness are important in

many religions. The term God consciousness fig-

ures in the Protestant theology of Friedrich

Schleiermacher and his followers, and Christ con-

sciousness is used in some Christian and New Age

religions, sometimes in a dubious way. Cosmic

consciousness is important in Hinduism, especially

Vedanta, and pure consciousness is important in

the Buddhist school called Dzogchen in Tibetan

and Maha Ati or Mahasandhi in Sanskrit. Con-

sciousness is also a common theme in the Tantric

traditions. Reports of meditation experience are

taken more seriously in consciousness studies than

in the hard sciences, where researchers often dis-

miss such data as mere subjective experience. On

the other hand, due to close connections with var-

ious religions, some writers on consciousness have

hidden (or not so hidden) agendas, so that caution

is called for when approaching some literature on

consciousness studies.

In general, the hard sciences tend to reduce

consciousness to the material, while religions are

more concerned with mental or spiritual aspects.

This reflects the heritage of mind-body separation

associated with the seventeenth-century French

philosopher René Descartes. Although there is no

single dominant view of consciousness, nor even

any generally accepted definition, consciousness

studies has made significant progress.

Shape of the field

At of the turn of the twenty-first century, con-

sciousness studies has a professional society, the

Association for the Scientific Study of Conscious-

ness (ASSC); one highly interdisciplinary journal,

the Journal of Consciousness Studies (JCS); and

three journals devoted mainly to scientific and

philosophical studies, Consciousness and Cogni-

tion, Consciousness and Emotion, and Psyche, the

latter being an electronic journal. JCS sponsors a

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popular online discussion group. Many other jour-

nals, such as Behavioral and Brain Sciences and

Mind, publish articles on consciousness. The Uni-

versity of Arizona in Tucson hosts a research cen-

ter on consciousness studies and has organized an

important biannual conference series since 1994.

Consciousness and Cognition and Psyche are offi-

cial journals of ASSC, which also organizes a bian-

nual conference. Well known universities offering

courses on consciousness include New York Uni-

versity in New York City, Bryn Mawr College in

Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt University in Nashville,

the University of Colorado in Boulder, the Univer-

sity of Virginia in Charlottesville, and the University

of Arizona in Tuscon. Advanced degrees in con-

sciousness studies are offered by the University of

Skoevde in Sweden, Greenwich University in Aus-

tralia, and Birla Institute of Technology and Sci-

ence in India, among others. John F. Kennedy Uni-

versity in Orinda, California, has a Department of

Consciousness Studies, and Brunel University in

London offers an MSc degree in Cognition and

Consciousness. In addition, there are many spe-

cialized conferences, and the emergence of the

specialized journal Consciousness and Emotion in

2000 is a sign that the field is maturing.

Issues, paradigms, and results

It is difficult to single out any small set of key is-

sues, not only because of the rapid growth of the

field, but also because each of its many paradigms

defines different sets of issues as central, second-

ary, marginal, and meaningless. Nonetheless, the

following are some issues, paradigms, and results

that seem most important in the literature.

The most obvious issue is how to study con-

sciousness. Despite the fact that the advocates of

various approaches are in constant, sometimes ac-

rimonious, dialogue, no approach has been com-

pletely discredited, except perhaps that of medi-

ums, spiritualists, and the like. This is why the

editorial policy of JCS calls for a wide diversity of

views, and aims to promote dialogue among them,

and why the Tucson conference follows a similarly

liberal policy. As the distinguished philosopher

John Searle famously noted: At our present state of

the investigation of consciousness, we don’t know

how it works, and we need to try all kinds of dif-

ferent ideas. Nevertheless, journals and confer-

ences devoted to specific aspects of consciousness

studies can be valuable.

Mind and body relation. The relation between

mind and body is another major issue. Are mind

and body the same kind of thing, or are they dif-

ferent? Or perhaps the same thing but differently

perceived? Monism says there is just one kind of

thing, and material monism (also called physical-

ism) says that all things are material, while mental

monism (also called idealism) says that all things

are mental. The dualism associated with Descartes

says that both material and mental things exist.

There are many variants of these and many other

positions. Philosophical interpretations of con-

sciousness wedded to reductionist scientific ap-

proaches like neuroscience and experimental psy-

chology tend to be material monist. The

philosopher David Chalmers is a kind of dualist,

who argues that in addition to matter, information

is a second fundamental world constituent. The

philosopher Paul Churchland is an “eliminative

materialist” monist, who argues that there is really

no such thing as consciousness. Searle is an

“emergent materialist” monist, who argues that

consciousness is a distinct level of phenomena,

emerging out of lower level brain activity, which

only exists when it is experienced.

It is difficult to find adherents of either dualism

or mental monism among eminent scientists. The

most prominent acception is the Nobel Prize win-

ning physiologist John Eccles, who advocated a

form of interaction dualism similar to that of

Descartes. Bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753)

was the last major Western philosopher to advocate

mental monism. On the other hand, dualism is the

most common position in Christianity, as is mental

monism in South and East Asian religions. For ex-

ample, the Buddhist school of Yogacara posits a

form of mental monism and is considered founda-

tional for Buddhist Tantra. Traditions in Hinduism

and Taoism can also be considered mental monist.

In “Conversations with Zombies,” Todd Moddy

investigates an amusing development in the de-

bate among these positions: The possibility (or im-

possibility) of “philosophical zombies,” creatures

having exactly the same physical structure as ordi-

nary humans, but without consciousness. Meta-

physical debates about basic world substances

seem to contribute little to the understanding of

consciousness. Reconceptualizing the two main

views as the scientific and phenomenological

methods, instead of reifying them as world sub-

stances, leads to more fruitful projects such as the

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refinement of these views and their combination in

productive syntheses.

Cognitivism. A once dominant approach in de-

cline well before the end of the twentieth century

is that of early cognitive science and artificial intel-

ligence, often called cognitivism. This paradigm’s

model of the mind identifies cognition with com-

putation, and the brain as the hardware on which

it runs. The lineage of cognitivism traces back to

pioneering work of Norbert Wiener on cybernetics,

and to the Macy Conferences, organized since 1947

by anthropologists Margaret Mead, Gregory Bate-

son, and others, introducing systems theory to a

key cross-disciplinary group. But cognitivists often

ignore these antecedents and instead cite linguist

Noam Chomsky’s scalding review of psychologist

B. F. Skinner’s 1957 book Verbal Behavior. Skinner

advocated behaviorism, a psychological theory that

tried to ignore internal mental states. Chomsky ar-

gued that such states are needed to process even

simple syntax. Another seminal cognitivist work,

Plans and the Structure of Behavior (1960) by

George Miller, Eugene Galanter, and Karl Pribram,

proposed that human plans have the same struc-

ture as a certain simple kind of computer program.

This tradition generally relies on formal logical rep-

resentations of knowledge about the world. The

cognitivist paradigm flourished beginning in the

1960s, partly fueled by large military funding for

artificial intelligence.

Cognitivism has been much criticized. A fa-

mous early attack was Searle’s Chinese room argu-

ment, which challenged the idea that a program

running on a machine could be conscious. Another

serious challenge came from James Gibson’s work

on affordances, showing that many cognitive tasks

are greatly simplified by relying on information al-

ready in the world, instead of complex internal

representations. Work in cognitive linguistics, as

represented by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s

Metaphors We Live By (1980), showed that many

basic metaphors rely on innate sensory-motor

schemas. The sociologist Lucy Suchman showed

that human plans as actually used can have struc-

ture and execution very different from that postu-

lated by Miller, Galanter, and Pribram.

Biologist Francisco Varela, philosopher Evan

Thompson, and psychologist Eleanor Rosch (all

Buddhists) used empirical evidence in The Em-

bodied Mind (1991) to argue that cognition is nec-

essarily embodied, rather than disembodied like a

computer. They also drew on Buddhist philosophy

to show how cognition is possible without a “self.”

This book is a brilliant synthesis of cognitive sci-

ence and religion. Rodney Brooks of the Massa-

chusetts Institute of Technology has built robots

which demonstrate that logical representation of

knowledge is not necessary for the embodied ac-

tion of locomotion. The anthropologist Edwin

Hutchins argued that real world cognition is often

distributed over individuals, rather than localized

in a single individual, one example being naviga-

tion on large ships. There is also a growing body of

work, such as that by Jaak Panskeep, showing that

cognition is not entirely rational and disembodied

because emotion plays a central role. All these de-

velopments are deeply inconsistent with cogni-

tivism, though the significance of the work done

before 1900 was not then generally appreciated.

Phenomenology. Phenomenology is an area of

philosophy with important implications for con-

sciousness. Phenomenology seeks to ground

everything in the actual experience of human be-

ings; in other words it takes a “first person” expe-

riential perspective, rather than “third person” sci-

entific perspective. Important exponents include

Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice

Merleau-Ponty. Heidegger considered implications

of embodiment, including finitude and temporality,

noting that humans are historical beings, bounded

in time, space, and ability. Many of these themes

also appear in the anti-cognitivist movement. An-

other such theme, with origins in Heidegger and

especially Merleau-Ponty, but developed by Hu-

bert Dreyfus, is the phenomenological critique of

representation, which draws on human experience

with routine activities to argue that representations

are not necessary for embodied action. The work

of Merleau-Ponty predates Gibson and Brooks, but

is non-empirical, while Dreyfus makes compelling

use of work by Walter Freeman connecting brain

dynamics with chaos theory.

Neuroscience. The decline of cognitivism has

inspired a return to naturalism, the study of cogni-

tion as it actually occurs in living human beings

and, in particular, a shift towards neuroscience and

evolutionary biology. Neuro-reductionism is per-

haps the dominant position at the beginning of the

twenty-first century. Certainly one can find neural

correlates of consciousness or patterns of neural

activity that correlate with various conscious expe-

riences, such as visual perception. But it remains

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unclear whether such correlates can ever explain

the nature of consciousness. A narrower version of

this challenge is to explicate qualia, which are the

qualitative aspects of consciousness, such as “how

it feels” when one is angry or when one sees the

blue of the sky. David Chalmers has introduced an

influential distinction between the “easy” and the

“hard” problems of consciousness studies:

The easy problems are those of finding

neural mechanisms and explaining cogni-

tive functions: the ability to discriminate

and categorize environmental stimuli, the

capacity to verbally report mental states,

the difference between waking and sleep-

ing. The hard problem is that of experi-

ence: why does all this processing give rise

to an experienced inner life at all? While

progress is being made on the easy prob-

lems, the hard problem remains perplex-

ing. (p. 200)

One approach to bridging this gap is to postu-

late that consciousness is some form of emergent

activity of the brain. A familiar example of an

emergent property is the liquidity of water, which

arises from a sufficiently large collection of water

molecules at an appropriate temperature.

Another problem facing neuroscience is the

binding problem, which is to determine how the

brain integrates sensory input from different times

and/or different modalities to create a coherent

seeming whole. Few doubt that this problem is

solvable within the neuro-reductionist paradigm,

though the complete answer will likely be complex.

Neuro-reductionism has been especially successful

in studying perception and this success has inspired

interesting speculations on consciousness. In Art

and the Brain (2000), Joseph Goguen demonstrates

the intriguing possibility that such research can help

people understand art. Critics have complained,

however, that the cultural aspects of art get short

changed by neuro-reductionist analyses.

Another problem is to determine the modular-

ity and plasticity of the brain and the mind. Studies

have found brain locations associated with many

mental functions, but other functions have been

shown to be non-local. Recent work has demon-

strated physical brain change associated with learn-

ing, even relatively late in life. There is strong sup-

port for the modularity of many unconscious

perceptual processes, and for the non-modularity

of many higher level conscious processes. Whether

there is a language module, as claimed by Noam

Chomsky, remains contentious. A growing consen-

sus is against his anti-evolutionary view of the ori-

gin of language, in which he claims that “there is no

substance to the view that human language is sim-

ply a more complex instance of something to be

found elsewhere is the animal world” (1972, p. 70).

On the interface between neurophysiology

and computer science is the issue of modeling

neurons, networks of neurons, and ultimately,

brains. In 1943 Warren McCullough and Walter

Pitts introduced the first such model, in which neu-

rons were either “on” or “off,” firing or not firing.

These neurons are similar to the logic gates of

computers, but are far simpler than real neurons.

Some key ideas introduced by psychologist Don-

ald Hebb include the following: connections be-

tween neurons become tighter the more they are

used; neurons act in groups called cell assemblies;

and cell assemblies are the basis of short term

memory, but not long term memory. Although

these only a rough approximation to the complex

functioning of real neurons (involving numerous

chemical reactions), they inspired a new genera-

tion of models having important engineering ap-

plications, such as character recognition. But be-

cause of its approximate character, many

researchers prefer to call their work parallel dis-

tributed processing or connectionism, rather than

neural net modeling.

Meanwhile, experimental neuroscience has un-

covered even more complexities, some of which

may have profound implications for conscious-

ness. Benjamin Libet found that voluntary acts are

preceded by a readiness potential (a gradual neg-

ative shift in electrical potential, as recorded at the

scalp) about 550 milliseconds before the action oc-

curs, and about 200 milliseconds before subjects

recorded a conscious intent to act. This research

has generated some controversy, including argu-

ments that it implies that consciousness is con-

structed well after the fact, and even that con-

sciousness may be unimportant. Mirror neurons

are another significant discovery. The Italian neu-

rophysiologist Giacomma Rizolatti found that cer-

tain cells in monkey frontal lobes respond to spe-

cific actions, not only in the subject, but also when

the subject observes another monkey perform that

same action. It has been suggested that this phe-

nomenon may help explain many puzzles, such as

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how people learn by imitation, or how they can

put themselves in the place of another in order to

outsmart them should be added to this list the ca-

pacity for compassion, the ability to empathize

with others. Blind sight is another intriguing phe-

nomenon, in which, for example, a subject reports

inability to see an object, but can still guess its lo-

cation with reasonable accuracy (Weiskrantz). This

dissociation between perception and awareness

raises questions about the relation between con-

scious and unconscious processes.

Quantum mechanics. Physicists have not been

shy to speculate about the relevance of quantum

mechanics to consciousness. This is unsurprising,

since the two have long been linked by the

“Copenhagen interpretation” of Niels Bohr (and as

augmented by John von Neumann), which says

that, when an experiment is performed, the con-

sciousness of an observer is needed to “collapse”

the state probability distribution associated to the

wave function down to a single state. This was al-

ways controversial, but it remains respectable de-

spite difficulties with quantum coherence. Physicist

Roger Penrose, instead of explaining quantum me-

chanics with consciousness, seeks to explain con-

sciousness with quantum mechanics. The results

seem stimulating but disappointing because his

major conclusion is that some as yet nonexistent

physics (quantum gravity) is needed. Penrose also

argues against cognitivism, though he relies on a

Platonist philosophy of mathematics, in which ab-

stract mathematical objects are as real as chairs,

trees, and people. David Bohm is another physicist

who has written about consciousness, particularly

in relation to the non-sectarian spiritual teachings

of Jiddu Krishnamurthy, which helped inspire

novel versions of quantum mechanics having

philosophical interpretations that involve informa-

tion and consciousness.

God and consciousness. Attempts to prove the

objective existence of God have a long and impor-

tant history. Although every such attempt has

failed, the dialectic of refutation and refinement

has been surprisingly productive, especially in cer-

tain areas of formal logic. This is relevant to con-

sciousness studies because if the traditional Christ-

ian God exists in a separate realm of spirit,

intervening in the material world, then dualism is

true, the mind-body problem is solved, and the

hard problem of consciousness takes on a very dif-

ferent, more theological, character. Using modern

tools from information theory, William Dembski

has attempted a sophisticated revival of an ancient

proof that an intelligent designer is needed to ac-

count for the regularities of the universe. Demb-

ski’s work has been greeted with skepticism, and

even hostility, by the scientific community, in part

because his an anti-Darwinism has been embraced

by fundamentalist Christians, who advocate teach-

ing creation science in the schools, and in part be-

cause of technical difficulties in his argument.

A very different God is discussed by Anthony

Freeman, motivated by the idea of treating con-

scious states as emergent properties of brain states.

Freeman views both God and the soul as emergent

from individuals and communities, claiming that

this view is neutral between dualism and reductive

materialist monism. He draws on work of Schleier-

macher, Searle, and recent advocates of a more so-

cial approach to biology, such as Raphael Nuñez.

A simpler approach than that of Dembski or Free-

man may be to avoid ontological questions by

placing the existence of God in the category of

first person experience, rather than third person

fact; one often sees this in contemporary exposi-

tions of the Buddhist tantra.

Emerging trends

Biologists are applying sociobiology and evolution

to consciousness, though most results are rather

speculative—e.g., work about the possible co-evo-

lution of language and consciousness. Some less

speculative work is being done in ethics, as illus-

trated in a brilliant series of essays edited by

Leonard Katz and published in 2000 in JCS.

There have been proposals to merge phenom-

enology and science (such as the neurophenome-

nology of Francisco Varela), and even proposals to

reformulate science based on phenomenology.

More such proposals can be expected, in part be-

cause experience provides phenomena that de-

mand explanation, including the following aspects

of consciousness: it is ineffable, open, fluid, non-

local, temporally thick, and involves qualia and a

sense of self. Can it be mere coincidence that sim-

ilar properties are often attributed to God? Reports

from experienced meditators suggest additional

phenomena, such as certain states of conscious-

ness in which there are no thoughts. Moreover, the

emphasis on time in phenomenology resonates

well with many issues and results in neuroscience.

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Another approach, sometimes called second

person, is to relate consciousness to society rather

than to individuals. One example is the cultural-

historical approach, in the tradition of philosophers

Giambattista Vico, Wilhelm Dilthey (who built on

Schleiermacher), and John Stuart Mill, and of the

Russian activity theory of Lev Vygotsky, Alexander

Luria, and others. The second person approach is

also related to distributed cognition and to the

actor-network theory of Bruno Latour and others.

The area of sociology called ethnomethodology

also seems promising. The hope of second person

approaches is to transcend the problematic rela-

tionship between mind and body; debates here

often parallel those in consciousness studies and

emerging syntheses like the cultural psychology of

Michael Cole could likely illuminate several issues

in consciousness.

Moving away from the social sciences, PET

and fMRI techniques will certainly continue to

yield provocative results about brain function.

Also, dynamical systems and chaos theories seem

promising. Perhaps semiotics can also make a

contribution. Ideas from ecology, feminism, and

literature should also play a role. Definitely, there

will be more fermentation, discussion, and

progress.

See also ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE; BEHAVIORISM;

OPENHAGEN INTERPRETATION; EMERGENCE;

XPERIENCE, RELIGIOUS:COGNITIVE AND

NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECTS; EXPERIENCE,

ELIGIOUS: PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS; MIND-BODY

THEORIES; MIND-BRAIN INTERACTION; MONISM;

EUROSCIENCES; PHYSICALISM, REDUCTIVE AND

NONREDUCTIVE; PHYSICS, QUANTUM

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Chomsky, Noam. Language and Mind, enlarged edition.

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Chomsky, Noam. Interview with Bridgette Stemmer. Brain

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Churchland, Paul. A Neurocomputational Perspective: The

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Cole, Michael. Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future

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Crick, Francis. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific

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Dembski, William. Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between

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Freeman, Anthony. “God as an Emergent Property.” Jour-

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Goguen, Joseph, ed. Art and the Brain. Thorventon, UK:

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Suchman, Lucy. Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem

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JOSEPH A. GOGUEN

CONSONANCE

See MODELS; SCIENCE AND RELIGION,

ETHODOLOGIES; SCIENCE AND RELIGION,

ODELS AND RELATIONS

CONSTRUCTIVISM

The term constructivism denotes a heterogeneous

set of theoretical approaches currently stemming

from areas so diverse as biology, neurophysiology,

philosophy, sociology, cybernetics, cognitive psy-

chology, rhetoric, and literary studies. In all their

variety they share the basic idea that knowledge

cannot be based on some kind of correspondence

to or representation of actual reality but only on

the active cognitive constructions or cognitive op-

erations of an observer. Any possible “objects” of

experience and knowledge are embedded in cog-

nitive and social processes.

Historically speaking the roots of construc-

tivism begin in ancient skeptical philosophy, pass

through the enlightenment philosophy of Im-

manuel Kant (1724–1804), the philosophy of lan-

guage, and eventually to pragmatism. The most re-

cent versions are radical constructivism and

operational constructivism, where the term con-

struction refers (1) to the construction of reality,

(2) the construction of knowledge, and (3) the con-

struction of tools and skills for human cognition.

Important impulses for radical constructivism

were provided by Heinz von Foerster (1911– ) due

to his insights into the epistemological implications

of the unspecified coding of external stimuli in the

brain. The world as human beings know it, by

means of their sense organs, is the product of in-

ternal mental activity. In this respect modern ver-

sions of constructivism draw on the concept of au-

topoiesis as it was introduced by the theoretical

biologist Humberto Maturana (1928– ) into episte-

mological discourse. According to the principle of

autopoiesis every cognitive system operates on the

basis of operative closure, that is to say, without di-

rect input from its environment. Any stimulus from

the environment can only stimulate the system to

recursively produce its own elements and react to

its own inner states. Hence any kind of knowledge

or insight is an internal construction. However, this

neither leads to relativism nor to the denial of an

external reality. Constructivism should not be con-

flated with strong forms of idealism or antirealism.

Yet any correspondence or mirror-theory of knowl-

edge and truth is rejected because nothing corre-

sponds to the internal categories, structures, and

elements. Instead, categories of “compatibility,”

“fitting,” or “viability” are of ultimate importance

for constructivism since the external reality dis-

criminates among the human constructions in

favor of acceptable and fitting knowledge, as-

sumptions, and cognitive skills. In addition, the

self-referential and recursive operations inside the

cognitive system produce stable states that tend to

be taken as “givens” and can furthermore be so-

cially stabilized in a broader culture.

In Niklas Luhmann’s (1927–1998) operative

constructivism, any production of explicit knowl-

edge is “second-order-observation” since it is not

data but other observations that are observed. This

second order observation can see the distinction

between the analyzed observation and its contin-

gent and constructed character, yet without simul-

taneously being able to see the contingency of its

own observation. What is observed are contingent

constructions, but the “own” observation is—due to

the blind spot within every observation—assumed

to be “realistic.” In modern society, where every so-

cial subsystem observes “the world” in its own way,

this hybrid combination of constructivism and real-

ism leads to a polycontextual ontology.

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CONTEXTUALISM

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Due to the strong and widely held realistic as-

sumptions within science and theology, construc-

tivism so far has not attracted very much attention

in the dialogue between religion and science. Con-

structivism does however argue for a nonfounda-

tionalist view of knowledge that opens up new av-

enues for this dialogue. Moreover, based on the

idea of autopoiesis in cognitive systems and its

pragmatic orientation, constructivism vividly rejects

any notion of reductionism between various cog-

nitive approaches that seek to cope with “reality.”

Instead it emphasizes the limitedness and frag-

mentary nature of all human knowing. In addition,

constructivism highlights the intimate bond be-

tween knowledge and ethics. Unexplored is the

contribution of more socially oriented forms of

constructivism in answering the question of the

way in which, for example, the Christian faith ex-

ercises a subtle yet crucial influence on the nonre-

ligious constructions of the wider culture. How-

ever, in order to fully embrace constructivism as

religious epistemology, theology would have to ac-

cept the objectionable claim of God being a human

construction for coping with life. And yet construc-

tivism reflects at least one aspect of a central reli-

gious insight: Religious knowledge cannot secure

its own stability, adequacy, and truth unless God

makes Godself present in human understanding

and knowing—a process often called revelation.

See also AUTOPOIESIS; CONTEXTUALISM; DUALISM;

UNCTIONALISM; NONFOUNDATIONALISM;

RAGMATISM

Bibliography

Foerster, Heinz von. Observing Systems, 2nd edition. Sea-

side, Calif.: Intersystems, 1984.

Glasersfeld, Ernst von. Radical Constructivism. A Way of

Knowing and Learning. Washington, D.C.: Falmer

Press, 1995.

Luhmann, Niklas. “The Cognitive Program of Construc-

tivism and a Reality that Remains Unknown.” In Self

organization: Portrait of a Scientific Revolution, eds.

Wolfgang Krohn and Günter Küppers. Dordrecht,

Netherlands: Kluwer, 1990.

Luhmann, Niklas. Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft. Frank-

furt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1990.

Maturana, Humberto R., and Varela, Francisco J. Au-

topoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living.

Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel, 1980.

Maturana, Humberto R., and Varela, Francisco J. The Tree

of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Under-

standing, rev. edition. Boston and London: Shamb-

hala, 1992.

GÜNTER THOMAS

CONTEXTUALISM

Contextualism comes in stronger and weaker ver-

sions. What these versions all have in common is

the idea that the context, the situation, or the par-

ticularities are taken to be of outmost importance.

Contextualism is a reaction against the strong em-

phasis on universality and common human reason

characteristic of the Enlightenment tradition and

modernity. The catchwords are “Whose truth, ra-

tionality, science, religion, ethics, or gender?” For

instance, there are titles of book that read Whose

Justice? Which Rationality? (by Alasdair MacIntyre)

and Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (by Sandra

Harding). The idea is that it makes a crucial differ-

ence for the issues discussed whether one suc-

ceeds or fails to take the “whose” aspect or the

contextual aspect into account.

Exactly what it is that could or should be con-

textualized in this way (whether it is, for example,

theology, rationality, justice, or gender) varies from

contextualist to contextualist. What also differs is

the degree or depth of this contextualization. For

instance, is the argument that one cannot deter-

mine what it is rational to believe without specify-

ing who the agent is, including his or her particu-

lar historical and social context? Or is it that the

standards of rationality (and not merely the partic-

ular application of them) or even truth is context-

determined? If the latter, but not the former, is it

the case then that rationality or truth would vary

from one context (that is, culture, religion, gender,

etc.) to another?

In the science-religion dialogue there are those

who maintain that one cannot sensibly talk about

science and religion in some abstract, universal,

ahistorical, or gender-unrelated way. Instead one

must be specific about, for instance, which reli-

gion (or what religious tradition within that reli-

gion), which science (or part of science), which

historical period, which cultural setting, and the

like, one is dealing with. For instance, John Brooke

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CONTINGENCY

— 166—

and Geoffrey Cantor argue that neither religion nor

science is reducible to some timeless essence, but

must be understood in their historical particulari-

ties. Science and religion are inextricable from the

times in which they arise. But there are also those

who make different and perhaps more radical con-

textual claims. D. Z. Phillips, Peter Winch, and oth-

ers who have followed the Austrian-born philoso-

pher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) maintain

that there are no practice-transcending standards of

rationality, that is, science and religion do not have

any standard of rationality or criteria of intelligibil-

ity in common. Therefore, it makes no sense to

compare or relate them. Science and religion are

two autonomous practices with totally different

languages, functions, and standards of rationality.

Contextualism in many of its forms is a healthy

reaction against the tendency in Western tradition

to talk about, for example, “man,” “human nature,”

“science,” “religion,” “reason,” and “rationality” as

if these are universal categories unsullied by the

particularities of history, culture, traditions, gender,

and the like. It is an open question, however,

whether the strong emphasis of many contextual-

ists on the local, the contextual, or the particular is

just as questionable—if it is in fact to go from one

ditch of the road to the other.

See also CONSTRUCTIVISM; NONFOUNDATIONALISM;

RAGMATISM

Bibliography

Brooke, John and Geoffrey Cantor. Reconstructing Na-

ture: The Engagement of Science and Religion. New

York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Harding, Sandra. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?

Thinking from Women’s Lives. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell

University Press, 1991.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press,

1988.

Phillips, D. Z. Religion without Explanation. Oxford:

Blackwell, 1976.

Stenmark, Mikael. Rationality in Science, Religion, and

Everyday Life: A Critical Evaluation of Four Models of

Rationality. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre

Dame Press, 1995.

Winch, Peter. The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation

to Philosophy (1958). 2nd edition. London: Rout-

ledge, 1990.

MIKAEL STENMARK

CONTINGENCY

A proposition is necessary when there is no possi-

ble case in which it is false (“a vixen is a female

fox”). A proposition is contingent when it is true

in some cases and false in others (“it is raining

now”). By extension, a state of affairs is contingent

if it could have been other than it is. A state of af-

fairs is necessary if there is no possible alternative

to it. Most philosophers think that all physical

states are contingent. Some physicists argue that

the universe has to exist, whereas some theolo-

gians argue that God has to exist, but creates a

contingent universe.