By IHE Graduate Fellow Jason Paone
The anxious mystique that surrounds ‘big words’ is usually just a function of their unfamiliarity. We tend to call a word ‘big’ not because it is long or profound but most often because it is rare. By contrast, when a term is current enough that we encounter it often, we become comfortable with it, and it ceases to intimidate us even though we may still lack a clear or definite idea of what it means. A long history of heavy use can make a word register like a cliché in a language community where its familiarity lends a misleading sense of comprehension that forestalls reflection. The verb ‘believe’ appears to have suffered such a fate in contemporary English. Native English speakers evidently hear themselves using the word so often that its ambiguity and polyvalence usually go unnoticed.
The Oxford ethnologist Rodney Needham (1923–2006) observed the thoughtless self-confidence with which his peers used the word in ascribing beliefs to remote, indigenous peoples. “They appear to take it for granted,” he remarked, “that ‘belief’ is a word of as little ambiguity as ‘spear’ or ‘cow.’” [1] In his study of the religious beliefs of the Penan people of Borneo, however, he found himself doubting that he had a right to ascribe beliefs to them. First, their language seemed to lack any term equivalent to ‘believe.’ Second and more importantly‚ he recognized that he was not sure just what he was ascribing to them in speaking of their beliefs.
His fascinating book Belief, Language, and Experience probes the literature of ethnology, linguistics, and philosophy in search of the fundamental psychological phenomenon beneath the diversity of concepts and characteristics implicit in our talk about beliefs and believing. Finally, Needham arrives at the astonishing conclusion that much of the psychological phenomena we associate with belief is really a mirage produced by the structure of language. “Belief,” he argues, “is not a discernable experience,” much less a kind of mental activity or behavior.[2]
More valuable than Needham’s skeptical conclusion about belief is his penetrating study of the problem of its ambiguity in an era that he shows to be all but obsessed with it. His book and the discourse it elicited surely demand the attention of Christian philosophers and theologians, given how essential belief is to Christian life and identity. Furthermore, it invites the rest of us to think twice about this word and our confidence in wielding it. ‘Believe’ is, perhaps, a bigger word than we realize.
[1]. Rodney Needham, Belief, Language, and Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 4.
[2]. Needham, 188.
