Religious Belief & Reformed Epistemology

Posted on February 1, 2010
Filed Under Peirce, Philosophy, Religion | 3 Comments

One thing that many religious thinkers have appealed to in religious epistemology is the idea of reformed epistemology. This is roughly the idea that you can be justified in a belief without having the conditions of your justification before you. That is you can know without being able to give reasons for your knowledge. Now I’m amazingly skeptical of this approach, whether the form by Alston or Plantinga. I know some Mormon thinkers have at times embraced this. (I seem to recall Dennis Potter talking about this back in the 90′s, for instance)

The problem I have with this is that it seems to avoid the central issue of giving reasons. I think we can salvage the general principle though. In this month’s philosopher’s carnival Chris Hallquist has up a nice discussion of reformed epistemology and moral realism. I particularly like this passage:

…instead of trying to start with nothing and passing everything through strict standards of epistemic legitimacy, we just take whatever seems obvious to us as working assumptions until given reason to think a given assumption is mistaken. This isn’t license to go on merrily believing whatever we happened to believe freshmen year; the idea is we have to think about what we can infer from the most obvious truths about the world, and more importantly think about what contradictions there might be in our starting assumptions, and put in the effort figuring out which assumption to jettison when we do find contradictions.

I think this ends up being, more or less, the approach G. E. Moore takes. However just as I’m not satisfied with Alston or Plantinga’s attempt to “sneak in justification” I ultimately find Moore rather unpersuasive as well. (Probably the main reason why I never pursued philosophical ethics much) The problem is that “obviousness” seems a remarkably problematic category. Looking for contradictions is helpful, but isn’t intense enough investigation as I see it to count as justification.

The solution I think is C. S. Peirce’s approach to epistemology. Peirce famously introduced fallibilism into philosophy at a time when more Cartesian senses of certainty were still dominant. However his other views on epistemology never quite caught on for various reasons. (In my opinion largely due to his being unable to find an university position for various political reasons – thus most of his writings only became widely available in the late 20th century)

Peirce would have us not only embrace the fallibilism that Chris mentions but demands that we pursue continued inquiry. This inquiry can’t merely consist of looking for contradictions. Rather it is investigating ethical thinking in a much wider range. (Say looking at evolution and so forth) Now Peirce rejecting Cartesian doubt as “paper doubt.” That is we really can’t control our beliefs and doubts so to talk about doubt as a process like Descartes did is silly. Our beliefs are simply beyond our direct control. However we can inquire and whatever survives our continued inquiry we take as de facto knowledge. (Recognizing human fallibility)

Put an other way, epistemology is ultimately grounded in ethics. It is about what we ought believe. Peirce switches the discuss from grounding knowledge ethically in terms of formal reason giving to the ethics of having done ones duty in terms of inquiring sufficiently. In addition rather than the more Cartesian focus on the individual knower Peirce tended to look at knowledge and inquiry as a community effort. (This probably arose due to his background as a physicist and his recognition that scientific knowledge was a communal effort)

I think this lets us provide “reasons – giving” for epistemology. But the reasons we give will be our attempts at inquiry and how the community beliefs survive such inquiry. What then becomes the focus of contention is whether appropriate inquiry has indeed taken place.

Comments

3 Responses to “Religious Belief & Reformed Epistemology”

1 Rich Knapton on February 3rd, 2010 12:40 am

Clark: “I think we can salvage the general principle though.”

I don’t understand what general principle you are talking about here. You seem to be referring to reformed epistemology. But if reformed epistemology states the belief in god is a basic belief, i.e. it’s foundational, this would imply that even Pierce’s approach to justification would fail. Can one justify a foundational belief? I thought not. Otherwise it would not be foundational. But I may be confused again.

Rich

2 Clark on February 4th, 2010 11:31 am

It’s foundational but not “before” ones consciousness necessarily. That’s the whole advantage of reformed epistemology and how it ends up related to externalism in epistemology.

3 Ben S on February 17th, 2010 10:13 am

Hey Clark, I just dropped you an email, but I’m not sure if the address is still valid. If you don’t get something from me immanently, drop me a line. Thanks

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