Donald Davidson, Anomalous Monism and the Study of Religion

Donald Davidson’s concept of “anomalous monism” is not nearly as well known as his related attack on the idea of “conceptual schemes,” though they are closely related. This concept, I shall argue, has several important implications for the study of religion. In particular, it implies that, as an account of mind and language, “cognitive science” is going to be of limited interest. Moreover, and that approaches to the study of religion based on models drawn from cognitive science are likely to be “degenerate research programmes.” If this is so, then we can reasonably marginalize such programmes to the extent that they compete with more promising projects