Pluralism and Religious Epistemology

Posted on June 23, 2010
Filed Under Philosophy, Religion | 6 Comments

This post was prompted by a very interesting blog post over at the Huffington Post. (Not the normal place for this sort of discussion) They brought up the following oft noted issue in epistemology. You can have a collection of beliefs, each one you believe and yet also believe that at least some of the beliefs are wrong. This happens all the time in science, for instance. It’s labeled the Paradox of the Preface since it seems like it leads to believing that a belief is false, which seems contradictory. But this ignores certain unique features of the nature of belief so I’m not sure it counts as a true paradox as I understand it.

The original post suggested this was a great way to deal with religious beliefs and the issue of certainty. After all a religious person can be confident of their beliefs while recognizing that at least a few of them are probably wrong.

Quoting from the original post:

You can simultaneously be certain that Christianity is true and everything conflicting with it is false, and yet acknowledge that you may be wrong without taking away your certainty. You can thus keep your certainties without having to claim that you are, in fact, and grossly implausibly, infallible.

This is, of course, something people get annoyed with regarding Mormons. Mormons tend to say they know the Church is true and that they are certain about the gospel. This can be offensive to non-Mormons since it entails that they are wrong.

Will this approach work however? I’m not sure it will. After all I think most religious people recognize their fallibility. However what is really at issue among completing religious views (including atheism here) is that there are a set of claims about many things. Even if we acknowledge some might be false the real controversy is over whether the majority or at least the important ones are true. So, for instance, telling an atheism one might be wrong about some of ones beliefs isn’t really helpful since the main issue is over an interventionist God who answers prayers.

Still, there is something to be said for considering religious claims of certainty or near certainty as they interact with claims of fallibility. How to resolve all this isn’t entirely clear but it is certainly worth inquiring about.

Related posts:

  1. The Impossibility of Religious Freedom?
  2. Philosophy and Religion
  3. Respect Part II
  4. Knowledge: Why Do You Draw the Line?
  5. Religious Belief & Reformed Epistemology
  6. Russell on Damon Linker’s Religious Test

Comments

6 Responses to “Pluralism and Religious Epistemology”
1 Michael Dorfman on June 24th, 2010 3:48 am

It seems to me that the “Paradox of the Preface” is redefining the term “certainty” to mean “near-certainty”, and to be honest, I don’t see how that moves the conversation forward.

Yeah, that’s an other way of making my objection. If they are near certainty then the vast majority will still be right but that doesn’t exactly bring about a real pluralism. I think pluralism has to be founded in a respect for the Other and their intellectual progress.

3 Rich Knapton on June 24th, 2010 5:47 pm

“And also, the Paradox of the Preface is the key to universal religious harmony and world peace.”

“My thought here is that the folks who go this route — convinced of their infallibility — are generally the troublemakers.”

I think Henry Pessin’s comments display a naivety about the origins of violence. He provides a rather rational solution to what is an emotional problem.

It’s interesting that you both have problems with the use of the word certainty in the Huff Post article. This was also the word that led much of the (new) atheist blogosphere astray. While I am not sure it really strains the use of certainty (there are levels of certainty, as philosophers have shown, and one can in fact be certain without being certain that one is certain), several philosophers, including Brandon over at Siris, have pointed out that the paradox doesn’t rely on or even require the use of the word certainty. In fact, when I read about the paradox several years ago, I don’t think the word certainty was used at all.

(Here’s Brandon on the Paradox of the Preface) Brandon puts the paradox as “to assert contradictory things is irrational.”

You’re right that appealing to certainty doesn’t resolve the logical problem. However rationality is more (or perhaps in an other way, much less) than deductive logic. So to focus on certainty is really to recognize that it simply isn’t irrational to assert contradictory things if asserting is understood more broadly than the paradox demands. To me the easiest way to describe this is to talk about certainty precisely because we intuitively recognize that it simply isn’t irrational to assert contradictory thing if we aren’t certain.

Once again one can’t merely sum probabilities because assertions aren’t necessarily even akin to the way Bayesians would maintain.

I should add that there are those philosophers who think the law of the excluded middle is tied up with all this. (And effectively Brandon’s reduction of the paradox is merely the restatement of the law of the excluded middle) I don’t remotely have the time to discuss that though. Still, some of the discussons of dialetheism are really worth reading in this connection. (I think the movement unfortunately gets unduly tarred at times) Effectively this is why I think people intuitively move towards the word “certainty.” While certainty isn’t what the paradox is about people intuitively recognize that when you aren’t certain the law of the excluded middle simply doesn’t apply. The problem is that most people aren’t able to put this into words.

I should add that I think it is precisely in epistemology that the paradox is so interesting. To me epistemology is all about a certain kind of “reasons giving” that inherently has problems. That is epistemology is about finding the conditions for where we should or should not believe. Reasons giving are thus about when we should or shouldn’t believe. But the paradox inherently shows this to be problematic precisely because you can have a contradiction between the reasons for the set of justified beliefs and the reasons for each particular justified beliefs. I think this leads to some inherent problems for epistemology, as traditionally done.

Now Brandon favors an avoidance of this issue whereas I tend to embrace the paradox precisely because I think most approaches to epistemology end up depending upon a logic I find problematic for all circumstances.

I should also note that technically one should distinguish the law of the excluded middle from the law of contradiction. So before someone takes me to task, I recognize the difference. As for my own position, I tend to follow C. S. Peirce.

…anything is general in so far as the principle of excluded middle does not apply to it and is vague in so far as the principle of contradiction does not apply to it. (5.448)

Talk about certainty, as I use it, is effectively talk about vagueness and generality in pragmatic terms.

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