Many have observed that human societies are incurably religious. William Downes, however, proposes specifically that this commonality is bound up with our natural language capacities, arguing that when human minds process the phenomena and experiences of their world, fundamental categories such as the supernatural, the normative, and abstract concepts of the divine and of religious experience are the inevitable results. This volume brings cognitive psychological theory into league with linguistics, offering a “form of cognitive pragmatics” (3) that sees religion as an essential, even useful and compelling derivative of that which makes us human.

Downes characterizes religion as a “cultural ensemble” of four central concepts: the supernatural, religious normativity, rationalized contents (e.g. truth, justice), and religious affect and motivation (see pp.14ff). He advances the first of these in Ch. 2, suggesting that the concept of the supernatural is essential to a human mind governed by principles of relevance. The mind has a concept of agency, he says, so when a specific agent cannot be identified the concept of the supernatural is construed to fill the void. Ch. 3 investigates how such cognitively-based “realities” disseminate as cultural norms, gaining the status of holy and authoritative for an entire society. This third chapter is close to the interests of many of us who study the roles of religious texts in faith communities.

Ch. 4 considers how rational minds can be viewed through a lens of a cognitive epistemology that explains their propensity for mysteries. Ch. 5 explores the concept of authority and how it becomes an essential category of human cognition. Ch. 6 queries how conceptual innovation (i.e. not mere linguistic change, but alteration of categories and perceptions) occurs, and brings to the table theories of change relating to forces internal and external to the human mind. Customary sociolinguistic themes abound here, as they had in the third chapter.

One might infer from the book title that this is a sociology of religion or a traditional sociolinguistic study, but this is hardly so. The author interacts with philosophers and pragmatic theorists, psychologists, as well as syntacticians. Densely written and targeting a select and specialized readership, it modulates between epistemological apologetic, cognitive theory, linguistic study, and philosophical argument. Noteworthy to this writer is the fact that Downes lays a groundwork that could have construed religion merely as irrelevant fiction, yet he resists any “theory of religion that eliminatively reduces the whole cultural complex; or [which] proposes that the majority of human beings have lived their mental lives in a way that is too easily dismissed as illusory or pernicious” (5). What he asserts at the outset continues throughout the monograph—an insistence that the ubiquity of “the religion complex” points to its “fruitfulness in achieving relevance for the species-mind” (263). With a bar set at that level, one can expect a dense network of theoretical discussion that will appeal to the most theoretical of psycholinguistic interests.