Collective Intentionality and the Study of Religion

Front matter

COLLECTIVE INTENTIONALITY AND THE STUDY OF RELIGION

Andrea Rota

Expanding Philosophy of Religion Series Editors:

Contents

List of Illustrations viii Preface ix Acknowledgements x 1 General Introduction 1 Part I 2 Introduction to the Theoretical Framework 17 3 John Searle—Collective Intentionality in Individual Minds 29 4 Raimo Tuomela—Non Mihi, Non Tibi, Sed Nobis 41 5 Margaret Gilbert—Plural Subjects and Joint Commitment 57 6 Collective Intentionality and Empirical Research 71 Part II

Empirical Orientation—The Jehovah's Witnesses 85

Collective Beliefs—The Domestication of New Media 127 10 Collective Emotions—The Collective Excitement of Conventions 153 11 Collective Aesthetic Experiences—The Feeling of the Bible 187 12 Conclusion 219 Primary Sources 229 Notes 231 References 235 Index 257 vii

Preface

At the origin of this study are a book and a phone call. The book is John Searle's (1996) The Construction of Social Reality. Jens Schlieter recommended that I read it in the summer of 2013, when I was preparing a paper for the biennial Conference of the German Society for the Study of Religion (DVRW). Drawing on an article by Ansgar Jodicke (2010), I wanted to discuss the theoretical premises that allow scholars to identify a “religious community.’ While my paper centered around the adjective “religious,” Searle’s social ontology drew my attention to the challenges of grasping the collective dimension of religion encapsulated in the noun “community.” In particular, his reference to the idea of “collective intentionality’—a concept completely new to me at the time—prompted me to further probe this matter. In the following years, I discovered the works of philosophers such as Raimo Tuomela, Margaret Gilbert, and Michael Bratman and became immensely fascinated with the way these authors think. I also grew increasingly convinced that the study of religion could benefit from their insights. The theoretical endeavor of this book is to suggest how to make their philosophical reflections fruitful for empirical research on religion.

The phone call occurred a year earlier. From my lonely postdoc apartment in Bayreuth, I called Oliver Kriiger at the University of Fribourg. My contract in Germany was about to end, and I wanted to pitch him a few rough ideas I had for a research project. On the phone, they amounted to little more than “something or other, media, and religious communities.” Back in Switzerland, a three-month writing grant from the University of Fribourg allowed me to further develop these first intuitions. Thanks to Oliver's support and expertise, that “something or other” became the SNSF-research project Die Dynamik von Mediennutzung und den Formen religiöser Vergemeinschaftung, which I had the pleasure of carrying out with Oliver, Fabian Huber, and Evelyne Felder from 2014 to 2018. The bulk of the empirical data discussed in this study comes from the fieldwork that we conducted as a part of our inquiry among Jehovah's Witnesses in Switzerland and Germany.

From 2016 onward, theoretical reflection and empirical research slowly merged. However, most of the first manuscript’s chapters were written between spring 2018 and summer 2019. That manuscript was submitted to the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Bern in October 2019 and was accepted in April 2020 as a habilitation thesis in the science of religion. The need to adapt the original manuscript to a book format has required me to drastically abridge most sections and to simplify the presentation of some rather complex topics. However, I am confident that these changes have in fact improved the overall clarity of my argument and contributed to a more pleasant reading experience.

ix

Acknowledgements

For their help and guidance, I want to express my gratitude to my teachers, mentors, and advisors (in chronological order): Giuseppe Fossati, Richard Friedli, Ansgar Jödicke, Oliver Krüger, Christoph Bochinger, Jens Schlieter, and Karénina Kollmar- Paulenz. For their comments and suggestions, I am also grateful to the further members of my habilitation committee in Bern, Claus Beisbart and Crispin Thurlow.

This study owes a huge debt to friends and colleagues at the Universities of Bern and Fribourg, who may recognize their names in the numerous thought experiments that serve to illustrate this or that philosophical idea. These clins doeil are meant as signs of my esteem and thankfulness (and as a way to lighten the writing process with a few inside jokes). Special thanks go to Fabian Huber and Evelyne Felder, who have been precious traveling companions.

‘The empirical research upon which this study relies would not have been possible without the help of the Public Information Department of the Watch Tower Society’s branch office in Selters (Germany) and the cooperation of the many Jehovah's Witnesses who opened the doors of their homes and Kingdom Halls to me and my colleagues. I am thankful to them. Preliminary versions of several ideas contained in this work have been presented at conferences and workshops in Switzerland and abroad. I thank profusely all those who have provided valuable comments and input on those occasions. I also thank the editors of ONLINE—Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet for allowing me to use, in Chapter 9, some sections previously published in the article “Religion, Media, and Commitment. Jehovah's Witnesses as a ‘Plural Subject” (Rota 2019).

I owe a heartfelt thank-you to Nicole Edwards and Emma S. for proofreading my English in large portions of the original thesis, and to Graeme Currie for his editorial work on the book manuscript. I am also very thankful to the “Expanding Philosophy of Religion” series editors, Kevin Schilbrack and J. Aaron Simmons, and to Colleen Coalter at Bloomsbury Academic, for their assistance and commitment all along the publishing process.

I am especially grateful to my parents, Monique and Renzo, my late grandmother, Lidia, and my family and friends who have supported and encouraged me every step of the way. I am devoutly thankful to my wife, Sandra, che sa tutti i perché.

The open access version of this publication was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

1.1 The Religious “We” in the Age of the Ego

Throughout the twentieth century, one of the most discussed social phenomena has been the perceived loosening of the social ties that bind people to one another and the progressive disappearance of collective forms of social life. As Robert Putnam (2000) phrased it in a famous study, people are increasingly “bowling alone.’ Likewise, the dwindling of collective religious practices is a well-established trend in numerous Western countries, while individual religious beliefs do not seem to fade as quickly (see, e.g., Campiche and Dubach 1992; Davie 1994). Although the loss of community is an old topos, a growing number of scholars concur in regarding the 1960s and 1970s as a watershed moment in the social and religious history of the West, marked by the rise of a new form of individualism. According to Ronald Inglehart (1977), in those decades several Western countries experienced a “silent revolution,’ during which individual priorities shifted away from the search for material security to the quest for personal self-fulfillment. Similarly, Charles Taylor (2007) speaks of the beginning of a new “Age of Authenticity,’ in which each individual is called on to find and express his or her true self in a continuous pursuit of personal happiness, including in the domain of religion. Stolz and his colleagues (2014) have dubbed this context, in which the individual is able, as never before, to make an incredible number of autonomous decisions, an “Ich- Gesellschaft” (a “me-society”).

‘The present study is not an investigation into such macro-sociological trends, and it is not my intention to challenge these analyses. Rather, I regard them as a foil against which to develop a specific conceptual reflection. My aim is to redress what I consider to be a certain imbalance that they may have introduced into the study of religion. I believe that the “discovery” of the “Age of the Ego” (Stolz et al. 2015) has redirected the attention of most scholars toward the individual, which has become not only the main object of empirical research but also the focal point of the theoretical reflection on contemporary religion. Consequently, much less effort has been put into the systematic analysis of collective forms of religion. To put it bluntly, we have many resources to analyze individual religious trajectories and preferences but, with some notable exceptions, we have few instruments to conceptualize the actions, beliefs, emotions, and aesthetic experiences of religious collectivities, that is, of collective religious agents.’

This imbalance also follows from a methodological—or ontological—skepticism about religious groups as intentional agents. However, this idea is not so bizarre. Indeed, in political discussions at both the national and the international level, the issue of religious communities as the subjects of collective rights has gained increasing relevance in recent years (Jodicke 2010). Moreover, despite—or perhaps because of— the increasing interest in the individual, unreflective references to religious groups holding certain beliefs, carrying out certain rituals, or experiencing certain emotions abound in academic publications. The fact of the matter is that the appeal to such collective agents usually provides vivid descriptions of social reality and oftentimes has considerable explanatory power. Nevertheless, much of this potential remains untapped in the absence of an appropriate framework that would allow us to speak about religious groups without dissolving their collective character into the sum of their members attitudes or, conversely, reifying it as a dubious metaphysical reality. In this study, I will argue that recent philosophical inquiries into the phenomenon of “collective intentionality” can provide fruitful resources for thinking about the nature of religious groups, that is, for analyzing religion in the “we”-form.

To start pondering how religion in the “we”-form (think, for instance, of “we pray”) may differ from religion in the I-form (“I pray”), we can first rely on a simple intuition: there is a difference between doing something individually and doing it together with other people—say, between, on the one hand, me wanting to eat ice cream and you wanting to eat ice cream, and, on the other hand, us wanting to eat ice cream together. Even so, clarifying this distinction is not as easy as it may first seem. To begin with, the adverb “together” appears to embrace various social situations that one might consider distinct. For instance, if I am dancing a tango with my wife, and, at the same time, you, by sheer coincidence, are dancing tango with your partner in the same ballroom, there is a sense in which an external observer may say that you, I, and our respective partners are all dancing a tango together. Nevertheless, the sense in which one may say you and I are dancing the tango together differs from the sense in which I am dancing the tango together with my wife. On an intuitive level, the difference may appear trivial. However, its detailed investigation, as I will show, may prove both challenging and exciting, and hold valuable insights for the social sciences.

Similar issues arise with the pronoun “we? When each person in my building individually decides to oppose the construction of a new garage on the front lawn, I can truthfully say of me and my neighbors that “we oppose the construction of the garage.” However, if the same sentence is pronounced, say, by the president of our residents’ committee at the closing of our monthly meeting, that “we” seems to entail something more for us residents than the first one does. What, for instance, if I am one of us but, in this case, I do not personally oppose the construction project?

To figure out what the differences in these situations are and what exactly they entail for the people involved (and why) is one of the tasks of the philosophical investigation into the topic of collective intentionality. In this study, I will argue that similar problems often emerge in the analysis of religious practices, beliefs, emotions, and aesthetic experiences. Consider another hypothetical situation. In a place of worship, people arrive one by one for a religious service. At the sound of a gong, each of them begins to perform a series of codified and repetitive gestures. Everyone there knows that the others are performing a certain ritual, and each person is known by the others to be performing such a ritual. When a second gong sounds, the movements stop and the place of worship slowly empties. Did the people gathered in the place of worship simply perform the same ritual gestures “in the company” of others or is there a deeper relationship between the movements of each individual and the collectivity performing the ritual? This question may be the object of speculations but social scientists may also want to know how to determine empirically which is the case.

These vignettes provide a first glimpse into the interrelated epistemic problems that I want to address in this study. The first issue concerns the distinction between various forms of sociality in order to identify what is proper to religious collectivities in contrast to mere aggregates of religious people. As I have indicated, I am convinced that the concept of collective intentionality provides the necessary resources for this task. However, the philosophical debate on this subject is highly complex and scholars disagree about the precise nature of collective intentions. For this reason, the first part of this study provides a systematic and comparative discussion of various approaches to collective intentionality. This discussion will lay the theoretical groundwork for my subsequent analysis.

The second issue concerns the practical utility of these philosophical deliberations for empirical analyses. Thus, in the second part of this book, I turn to a concrete case study, namely that of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In doing so, my aim is to develop a way to make the insights from philosophical debates fruitful for the analysis of various data collected through the standard methods of the social sciences: observations, interviews, and surveys. In this regard, I follow the old saying according to which the proof of the pudding is in the eating. By this, I mean that the value of my approach will be demonstrated by its capacity to illuminate how Jehovah's Witnesses constitute a religious collectivity, a “we, by means of their collective actions, beliefs, emotions, and aesthetic experiences—and to clarify what all this entails for them as individuals and as a group. Succinctly put, the question is not why one becomes a Jehovah's Witness, but what constitutes the Jehovah's Witnesses as a religious group as opposed to a collection of individuals who happen to be Jehovah's Witnesses. Still, the overall goal of this study is not so much to examine the case of the Jehovah's Witnesses for its own sake but rather to use it in order to push the envelope in the study of religion and foster the theoretical understanding of forms of religious life that do not rely primarily on the fulfillment of the “me” but find their expression through the pronoun “we.”

In the remainder of this introduction, I will provide a closer look at these twin issues—the conceptualization of collective religious agents and the transposition of such a conceptualization into an empirical framework—and at my approach to them. In the second section below, I will call attention to some problematic aspects of the classical and contemporary analyses of religious collectivities. As a corrective, I will introduce the idea of collective intentionality and sketch the origins and development of this philosophical field. In the third section, I will present my case study and further clarify the scope and goal of my empirical analysis. Finally, in the fourth section, I will show how my research is firmly anchored in the field of the academic study of religion and detail the plan of the book.

1.2 Conceptualizing Religious Collectivity

1.2.1 Religious collectivities as a sociological topic

In the sociological discussion on religious collectivities, the concept of “community” often serves as an explicit or implicit ideal reference and thus constitutes a good starting point for our discussion (see Ltiddeckens and Walthert 2018; Rota and Krüger 2019). Against the backdrop of accelerating industrialization and urbanization, the concept of Gemeinschaft—and its dynamic reinterpretation as a process of Vergemeinschaftung, or “communalization’—provided the early sociologists with a foil for reflecting on the evolving forms of collective life in a societal context (Gesellschaft; Vergesellschaftung).

Despite their different theoretical frameworks, the likes of Ferdinand Tonnies, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim endeavored to explain the progressive transformation of human coexistence from an idealized time in which human interactions were devoid of utilitarian considerations and based on personal contacts toward a social condition characterized by the rise of impersonal, calculated exchanges (see Liiddeckens and Walthert 2010: 21-23). Because of the close entanglement of religion and the social form of the community in their works, the process of Vergesellschaftung—driven by its core dynamics of rationalization and differentiation—became a fundamental element in the constitution of the secularization paradigm, which predicted the progressive fading of religion within modern societies (Tschannen 1991).

After the Second World War, the crisis of the traditional churches convinced sociologists across Europe that even rational social forms of religious organization were not immune to the corrosive effects of a rising modernity (see Schlamelcher 2018). It is within this context that Thomas Luckmann published his influential essay ‘The Invisible Religion (1967). In it, Luckmann scolds the so-called church sociologists for their unilateral focus on the faith of traditional churches and insists on the possibility—and even the necessity—of dissociating religious life from both the traditional form of the community and the modern institutional organizations of the churches. According to Luckmann, in contemporary society, religion becomes a “private affair” and a matter of subjective choices that individuals can make within a pluralized field of religious suppliers. In the wake of this critique, much research has focused on how individuals construct their religiosity through their “peregrinations” across the religious field (Hervieu-Léger 1999; Bochinger, Engelbrecht, and Gebhardt 2009) and on non-institutional forms of spirituality (Heelas and Woodhead 2005; Knoblauch 2009; Hero 2010).

For several decades, most of the scholars working on religious collectives were concerned with so-called new religious movements. In this domain, sociologists operated mostly from a macro-sociological perspective and aimed at classifying the various religious groups according to Weber's distinction between churches and sects (see Beckford 1973). As social tensions surrounding these groups grew (Beckford 1985; Introvigne and Melton 1996), scholars also addressed the question of how the choice to join such a movement was compatible with the individual freedom of rational agents (Barker 1984).

Since the 1990s, however, a number of sociologists have argued that the increasing individualization of Western societies creates, almost in dialectical fashion, the conditions for new forms of community. In their opinion, the transition from modernity toward a new “reflexive” (Beck 1986) or “liquid” (Bauman 2000) late modernity confronts each person with an ambivalent situation. On the one hand, the individual experiences a newfound sense of freedom and autonomy; on the other, the acceleration of social change threatens his or her sense of security (see Soeffner 2010). The creation of new “tribes” (Maffesoli 1996) constitutes a way to alleviate the negative effects of these transformations and to find a place of safety (Hitzler and Pfadenhauer 1998; Bauman 2001).

Nevertheless, these contemporary forms of sociality differ from traditional communities, in particular because of their voluntary, transient, and noncommittal character, hence the label, “post-traditional communities” (Hitzler 1998; Hitzler, Honer, and Pfadenhauer 2008). As new social forms, they find their expression in events— such as the Catholic World Youth Days (Hepp and Krénert 2009) and the Burning Man festival (Gauthier 2014)—during which like-minded individuals gather more or less anonymously for short periods of intense, shared emotional experience and part ways thereafter without establishing any lasting relationships with one another (Gebhardt 2010).

‘These fleeting assemblies are not the only places in which sociologists are looking for collective forms of religion in contemporary societies. During the last 30 years, scholars have also paid increasing attention to more established forms of voluntary religious organizations, namely parishes and other congregations, which many would regard as “[T]he Maginot line in defending religion’s core functions against the onslaught of larger, more impersonal, and more secular forces in increasingly complex societies” (Demerath and Farnsley 2007: 193). This new wave of so-called congregation studies originated in the USA (e.g., Ammerman 1997; Warner and Winter 1998) and has only recently reached Europe (Monnot and Stolz 2018a). Two main lines of inquiry drive these studies (see Ammerman 2018: vii-xii). The first is an ecological perspective, through which scholars study how congregations change and adapt to local context, for instance, in diasporas (e.g., Baumann 2009). The second perspective regards a congregation as an organizational unit (DiMaggio and Powell 1991; Wind and Lewis 1994; Demerath et al. 1998).

‘The latter approach insists on the congregation as the focus of collective religious life (Monnot 2013: 32). In an influential book assessing how religious collectivities contribute to structuring the religious field and how they impact public life, Chaves (2004: 9) argues that the frequent and regular production of collective religious events is the raison détre of most congregations. However, congregation studies seem to have little to say about what is actually “collective” in these events besides the fact that the participants “gather physically for the ritual” (Monnot and Stolz 2018b: 17). Certainly, their analyses demonstrate how the participants in each congregation tend to share certain social traits, such as class or ethnicity, and how these factors affect, for instance, the style of worship (e.g., Chaves 2004: 134-143). However, they do not really clarify the sense in which the people in a congregation “believe together” (see Monnot 2013: 15).

In sum, a large part of the ongoing research into contemporary religion in the West is concerned with individualized forms of religion. Religious collectivities appear to be marginal in the study of religion. Congregations are mostly conceived of within an organizational perspective and discussed in macro-sociological terms that frame them as producers of religious goods in competition over social power and individual “customers” —religious organizations are thus still a proxy to speak about individuals and their preferences. New forms of community, by contrast, are mainly addressed through the perspective of an idyllic past characterized as “warm, “soothing,” and “intimate” (Gebhardt 1999) but which appears to have been lost forever and which may, at best, be revived through fleeting personal experiences. Accordingly, such analysis offers important insights into the way that people and scholars alike envision “community” but is less useful for grasping the idea of a religious collective as a social reality beyond the imagination of more or less isolated individuals. Instead, the analysis that I am pushing for is one that would elucidate the mode of existence of religious collectives on the basis of the collective intentions that they involve. Let me clarify this point in the next section.

1.2.2 A framework for collective intentionality

The topic of collective intentionality constitutes a central issue in the broader philosophical investigation of the ontology of the social world. At the core of this field of research, there is the question of how humans construct the social reality in which they live. One of the central tenets of this inquiry is that,

Every social institution, relation, practice, or interaction rests upon the capacity of groups of individuals to engage in various forms of collective intentional behavior. A fundamental understanding of the social requires an understanding of the nature of collective agency and of how the various aspects of the social world are grounded in it. (Ludwig 2016: 2)

In the present study, I will stop short of discussing the ramifications of a full-blown social ontology for the study of religion—although I have not resisted the temptation to sketch some ideas elsewhere (see Rota 2016). Instead, my goal is to reflect on how the framework of collective intentionality can help us clarify a certain sense in which people “do” religion together and thus constitute a religious collective of a particular type. To grasp intuitively how this issue is related to the problem of social ontology, we can turn to our everyday use of language.

In our conversations, we often ascribe intentions and attitudes to (religious) groups, but what does it mean when we say that a religious community opposes certain rights, say, regarding abortion; that an assembly is ecstatic; or that a church has revised its beliefs? Does it mean that each and every member opposes abortion rights, that the majority of the congregation is in awe, or that a few church leaders have introduced a new doctrine? Or none of the above? In the end, do these statements refer to a concrete social reality, or are they merely figures of speech?

On the one hand, an instrumentalist point of view (see Tollefsen 2004) would suggest that our language is in fact metaphorical and that our ascriptions are, strictly speaking, false. This standpoint would deny that there is anything genuinely “collective” about a group of individuals sharing a goal or a belief. Conversely, a strictly anti-reductionist approach to group agency and group thinking would postulate a form of collective consciousness that transcends the sum of the individuals. As Schweikard and Schmid (2013) note, these two somewhat caricaturized positions constitute “the Scylla and the Charybdis of the analysis of collective intentionality; between which a number of philosophers have endeavored to find a safe route.

Certainly, the discussion of this issue has had a long career in the history of ideas and, indeed, scholars working on collective intentionality acknowledge overlaps between certain aspects of their work and the insights of authors such as Rousseau, Hume, Durkheim, and Simmel—though the same scholars are also quick to point out the differences (e.g., Searle 2006). One of the main appeals of a collective intentionality framework for the study of religious (and other social) collectives is that it offers a number of novel and highly systematized instruments to analyze how human agents are able to join forces toward the realization of a collective project and come together to act, believe, and feel as a group. This capacity is regarded as being rooted in the fundamental intentionality of human minds.

What is the intentionality of human minds? As the philosopher John R. Searle puts it, “Intentionality’ is a fancy philosopher’s term for that capacity of the mind by which it is directed at, or about, objects and states of affairs in the world, typically independent of itself” (Searle 2010: 25). For instance, my belief that it is raining, my fear of my neighbor's dog, and my desire to eat chocolate are all intentional states of my mind. Despite the possible linguistic confusion (in English), my intention to do something, say, to exercise more, is simply one type of intentional state among others (see Searle 1983: 1). Accordingly, collective intentionality can be minimally defined as “the power of minds to be jointly directed at objects, matters of fact, states of affairs, goals, or values” (Schweikard and Schmid 2013, my emphasis). What lies behind this idea, however, is a matter of debate. Indeed, as Searle (2010: 49) notes, “[W]hen it comes to ‘collective intentionality, there is no commonly used notion corresponding to this expression.”

In the first half of the twentieth century, a number of German phenomenologists and existentialist philosophers, such as Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Gerda Walther, and Dietrich von Hildebrand were already pondering the question of the collective dimension of intentionality (see Schmid 2012). Their reflections, however, have found only a limited reception in the current philosophical debate on this topic, which, with some notable exceptions (Schmid 2005), is confined to the so-called analytic tradition. The work of the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars in the late 1960s and early 1970s is sometimes mentioned as the starting point of the current discussions. However, it was only during the 1980s that the field of collective intentionality was progressively established as a specific field of philosophical inquiry.

The use of “collective intentionality” as an umbrella term to designate a certain phenomenon (or set of phenomena) and its philosophical investigation is probably due to Searle. Searle first presented his views on collective intentionality in 1990 in an influential article entitled “Collective Intentions and Actions.” Together with the works of Margaret Gilbert, Raimo Tuomela, and Michael Bratman, this article belongs to the

“first wave” of analytic investigations into this subject. Margaret Gilbert's dissertation On Social Facts (1978), revised, expanded, and published with the same title a decade later (Gilbert 1989), was possibly the first monographic work in this domain. In 1984, Raimo Tuomela published his book A Theory of Social Action, which was aimed at extending the purposive-causal theory of individual action that he had previously developed to multi-agent cases. Finally, in the early 1990s, Michael Bratman published a number of articles—later collected under the title Faces of Intention (1999a)—in which he demonstrated the relevance of his planning theory of action for explaining basic forms of shared action.

Since the turn of the millennium, the philosophical research on collective intentionality has become increasingly institutionalized and diversified, thanks to new scholars joining the debate. The volume Kollektive Intentionalitat (Schmid and Schweikard 2009) presents an anthology of classic and recent articles, while the recently published Routledge Handbook of Collective Intentionality (Jankovic and Ludwig 2018) provides a structured overview of the current discussions in this dynamic field.

Despite these ongoing developments, in this study I will focus on three of the major authors mentioned above: Searle, Tuomela, and Gilbert, and touch upon the work of the fourth, Bratman. I have good reasons for doing so, the main one being that most of the contributions published by other scholars in the last three decades directly or indirectly deal with a number of crucial questions put forward by these authors; likewise, most philosophical disagreements can be traced back to differences in these authors’ positions. The shorter treatment of Bratman’s framework is dictated by pragmatic reasons related to my goal of devising a theoretical framework allowing for a practical implementation of fundamental philosophical insights. For reasons that I will detail in the next chapter, I consider Bratman’s approach to collective intentionality less suited to this goal than those of his colleagues. Nevertheless, an overview of his core ideas will provide an important foil to situate those ideas that I regard as most useful for the social sciences.