Context: For many people, religion and/or spiritual experiences are an important part of their daily lives - shaping their thinking and actions. Studying these experiences relies on qualitative religious studies (RS) research that engages respondents on a deeply personal level. Problem: Researchers are unable to provide an apolitical, value-free approach to research. There lacks a rigorous methodological approach to qualitative RS research that addresses this epistemological obstacle. This is particularly relevant when studying a cohort with radically different beliefs from the researcher. Method: Researcher coupling is presented as a topic that defines the researcher and her participants as a systemic entity. By demonstrating how the researcher’s worldview is tied to her research, an argument for personalised and relational observer-dependent research is presented. Five reflexive questions are proposed as a starting point for personalised research to demonstrate the relational and intersubjective nature of this activity. Results: By linking the researcher to her research and changing the goal of research from independent and objective research to one that is relational and contextual, the scholar can report on her research in an ethical and socially just manner by linking her worldview to her research. Implications: The traditional research activity is redefined as one that should embrace the scholar’s worldview instead of attempting to hide it. The scientific ideals of independence and objectivity are replaced by interdependence and hence a proposal is made for personalised research that embraces the intersubjective nature of this activity. This proposal is meant to alleviate some of the epistemological weaknesses in RS. This paradigm shift promotes rigour as a qualifier for methodology including changes to how research is categorised. Constructivist content: Margaret Mead’s ideas of observer dependence in anthropological research and how the observer constructs her research findings are discussed. The circularity that exists in this relational context is analysed according to Bradford Keeney’s ideas on recursion and resultant future behavioural correction. Ranulph Glanville’s ideas of intersubjectivity and his concept of “in the between” are used as a foundation for the researcher-participant relationship. Ross Ashby’s notion of experimenter coupling is used as a basis for researcher coupling.

Key words: Epistemology, ethics, personalised and relational research, religious studies, rigour, research methodology, worldview.

Between 1984 and his death in 1998, German sociologist Niklas Luhmann developed a comprehensive theory of what he called autopoietic or self-referential systems. He worked out this approach both at the level of a social system as a whole and at the level of various social subsystems, such as state, economy, science, religion, education, art, family, and – the concern of the present article – law. My particular topics in this critical introduction to Luhmann’s theory are (a) its relation to more standard legal theory, (b) foundational or self-referential problems in law, and (c) the problem of law’s relation to other social spheres, especially politics and the economy.

Key words: luhmann, autopoiesis, social systems, self-reference.

Excerpt: The construction of new knowledge takes place at a construction site consisting of existing structures standing on a foundation. In other words, construction takes place in a context – a cultural context created by, for example, social and economic class, religion, geographical location, ethnicity, and language. This chapter begins by setting the concept of contextual constructivism within the historical development of constructivist theory and then examining the types of questions suggested by contextual constructivism. Those questions are then placed in the context of an anthropological world view theory. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the necessity of qualitative research techniques for contextual constructivist research.

Faith is a concept that straddles both spiritual and practical domains. We learn to expect things on the basis of experience. Learning involves moving from the known towards the unknown. Faith is always about something we have learned and it is like probability in that we may feel certain about some things and less sure of other things. However, current models of learning show how some of the things we learn may only have quite temporary viability: some of what we learn can be false. In addition, people differ manifestly in terms of both their personal confidence and their comfort with uncertainty concerning events. Further, faith differs in the roles it plays in science and in religion. This paper concurs with the view that some highly publicised attacks on religious faith are based on mistaken views of religion and faith. Relevance: Faith plays a central role in religion and faith also plays a role in science. This paper takes the position that faith needs to be examined carefully before it is put in place to justify beliefs so as to understand its role. In other words we need to move beyond “blind faith.”

Key words: Faith, science, religion

Open peer commentary on the article “Religion: A Radical-Constructivist Perspective” by Andreas Quale. Upshot: Quale offers a way of categorizing religious discourse based on radical constructivism. This commentary raises questions about the inter-relation of cognitive and non-cognitive knowledge, the role of testimony in learning about religion, and whether knowledge and belief have different roles in cognitive and non-cognitive knowledge, and suggests that Quale’s analysis opens a tolerant perspective on religious discourse.

Thinking and spirituality each evoke many interpretations. Constructivist thinking focusses on a systemic and rational approach that includes an analysis of meaning in terms of constituent operations. Central features of religious thinking depend on an absence of agreed mechanisms to establish consensus. Insight, novelty and humour however, depend on flexibility in making meaning. Zen provides a perspective facilitating a flexible orientation to cognitive categories allowing access to systemic properties of the person-experience interface.

Key words: Zen, constructivism, systemic thinking, religion, cognition

A fundamental feature of radical constructivism is its insistence that Reality is unknowable. However, everyday decisions usually proceed on the basis that one has a firm grasp of Reality. We need certainty and we usually correct errors we make so it is hard not to believe what we know. However, while some decisions are decidable, others undecidable. We may not be aware that when we try to solve a new problem we may use risky shortcuts called heuristics. Also, we may accept testimony on face value too often either because it fits what we think we know or because we want to fit into our social group. A next step would be to extend this type of analysis to faith in beliefs in science, politics and religion.

Key words: constructivism, belief, identity, heuristics, testimony.

Context: Constructivism and mystical traditions each recognize human cognitive limits. However, the former puts its faith in its processes and the latter reveres the product. Problem: Individuals recursively construct their realities in and through their experiences. Often the reality constructed is updated, however this type of reconstructive reflection does not happen in the same way with religious experiences and beliefs. Ernst von Glasersfeld considered the rational and the mystical as two separate types of knowing, providing two different accounts of experience. An alternative approach is to examine the process of thinking to see if there may be synergies between so-called rational thinking and mystical experience, particularly when certain types of new ideas emerge. Method: I link constructivist ideas with accounts of mystical experience prioritizing wonder, insight and the process of coming-to-know. Constructivism is described mainly with reference to Ernst von Glasersfeld’s work, particularly emphasizing the impossibility of ontology and drawing attention to some references to mystical experience in the constructivist literature. Results: I note that there are grounds for regarding rational and mystical knowing as belonging in different domains. Radical constructivism maintains that any mind-independent reality is essentially unknowable. In this epistemological framework, gaps necessarily arise in understanding when existing concepts do not fit experience. Forms of wonder may arise from experience of such gaps leading to novel insights and more viable reality constructions. Finally, I suggest that there are grounds for considering such epiphanies sacred, and in addition, as in certain types of mystical experience, they may be related to personal development through recognizing harmony between experiences over time. Implications: There are moments during the construction of concepts when previous concepts do not work and new constructions have not emerged. Such moments have a potentially mystical quality and, if so, are known as epiphanies. So, when gaps occur in the process of knowledge construction it may be helpful to let the mind rest and contemplate. The origin of the ideas that emerge is mysterious, and the ideas may or may not be viable.

Key words: Bateson, cognition, constructivism, Dewey, harmony, mysticism, religion, von Glasersfeld

Replying to the variegated responses by theologian Langdon Gilkey, philosophers Richard McClelland and Robert Deltete, and biologist Rudolf B. Brun, I emphasize three elements of my theological use of autopoietic theory: (1) Autopoietic systems are less than self-constitutive, since they do not create themselves from scratch, but more than self-organizing, since they are capable of producing new elements inside the local system. Correspondingly, the theological importance of autopoietic theory is not found within the doctrine of a creation out of nothing but within the doctrine of nonuniform continuous creation. (2) Locating the concept of autopoiesis within third-generation systems theory, I underline the pluriform character of type-different systems; the possibility of giving a full causal account from the purview of any privileged single systems (including physics) is thus denied. (3) I distinguish between two complementary roles of theology in the dialogue between science and religion: whereas theology1 offers a participatory second-order description of the internal meaning of particular traditions of faith, theology2 provides a third-order inquiry into the external coherence between religious and nonreligious worlds of meaning. Theology2, however, always presupposes the internal descriptions of theology1. On this basis, my use of autopoietic theory is related to the theologies of creation and providence of Paul Tillich and Langdon Gilkey; likewise, I discuss various theological strategies for relating a theology of creation to standard interpretations of evolution.

Key words: Autopoiesis, Christian doctrine of creation, divine causality, evolution, general and particular providence, Langdon Gilkey, Niklas Luhmann, Paul Tillich, structuring causality, Alfred North Whitehead.

A critical assessment of current evolutionary-cognitive explanations of religious belief from the perspective of a constructivist-pragmatist epistemology. Smith argues that crucial aspects of belief – religious and other – that remain elusive or invisible under dominant rationalist and computational models are illuminated by views of human cognition that stress its dynamic, embodied, and interactive features. She also demonstrates how constructivist understandings of the formation and stabilization of knowledge – scientific and other – alert us to similarities in the springs of science and religion, which are elsewhere seen largely in terms of difference and contrast.