Religious hinge commitments: Developing Wittgensteinian quasi-fideism (original) (raw)
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WITTGENSTEIN, RELIGIOUS BELIEF, AND HINGE EPISTEMOLOGY
Sképsis, 2021
Some hinge epistemologists have recently argued that the striking similitudes between hinge commitments and religious belief help supporting a parity argument to the end that religious beliefs are not less reasonable than ordinary ones. I will argue that both hinges and religious beliefs are able to gain a rational standing, but that their rationality stems from much deeper sources than in previous accounts. It is not, however, as if hinge epistemologists had to shed light through hinges to religious belief. It is rather the opposite-as if religious trust were instrumental to making sense of how trust in hinges might be ultimately rational.
Quasi-Fideism and Religious Conviction
European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 2018
It is argued that standard accounts of the epistemology of religious commitment fail to be properly sensitive to certain important features of the nature of religious conviction. Once one takes these features of religious conviction seriously, then it becomes clear that we are not to conceive of the epistemology of religious conviction along completely rational lines. But the moral to extract from this is not fideism, or even a more moderate proposal (such as reformed epistemology) that casts the epistemic standing of basic religious beliefs along non-rational lines. Rather, one needs to recognise that in an important sense religious convictions are not beliefs at all, but that this is compatible with the idea that many other religious commitments are beliefs. This picture of the nature of religious commitment is shown to fit snugly with the Wittgensteinian account of hinge commitments, such that all rational belief essentially presupposes certain basic arational hinge commitments, along lines originally suggested by John Henry Newman. We are thus able to marshal a parity-style argument in defence of religious commitment. Although religious belief presupposes basic arational religious convictions, it is not on this score epistemically amiss since all belief presupposes basic arational convictions, or hinge commitments. The resulting view of the epistemology of religious commitment is a position I call quasi-fideism. "None of us can think or act without the acceptance of truths, not intuitive, not demonstrated, yet sovereign."
Wittgenstein and the Duty to Believe
Topoi 41 (5), 2022
It is generally assumed that hinge-commitments are deprived of an epistemically normative structure, and yet, that although groundless, the acceptance of Wittgensteinian certainties is still rational. The problem comes from the intellectualist view of hinge-approvals which many recent proposals advance-one that falls short of the necessities and impossibilities pertaining to what would be the right description of how it is like to approve of hinges. I will raise the Newman-inspired worry as how to cash the abstract acceptance of principles of enquiry into real assent, as well as the question about how to extend normativity all the way back to foundations. It is my aim here to argue that ethical normativity is the only kind of normativity capable to ground the rationality of hinges. In defence of this, I will draw some consequences from Ernest Sosa's claim that hinges about the external world are logically related to the cogito.
Wittgenstein and the 'Factorization Model' of Religious Belief
Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, 2015
The myths surrounding Wittgenstein's conception of religious belief are tenacious and enduring. In the contemporary literature, for example, Wittgenstein has variously been labelled a fideist (Nielsen 2005), a non-cognitivist ) and a relativist of sorts (Kusch 2011). The underlying motivation for many of these attributions seems to be the thought that the content of a belief can clearly be separated from the attitude taken towards it. Such a 'factorization model' which construes religious beliefs as consisting of two independent 'factors' -the belief's content and the belief-attitudeappears to be behind the idea that one could, for example, have the religious attitude alone (fideism, non-cognitivism) or that religious content will remain broadly unaffected by a fundamental change in attitude (Kusch). In the present contribution I will argue that such a model faces insuperable philosophical and exegetical difficulties, and, consequently, that the conceptions that spring from it are mistaken.
The Significance of Wittgenstein's Remarks on Religious Belief
Philosophia, 2021
This article aims to show that Wittgenstein's remarks on religious belief and religious statements can be understood in modest philosophical terms, consistent with the thought that they are neither intended as serving to justify or undermine religious beliefs, nor as the expression of any theorizing about the nature of religious belief or the meaning of religious language. Instead, their philosophical significance is held to consist in their functioning to remind us of what we already know about the latter: such things as in what circumstances one utters religious statements, what the consequences of accepting or rejecting religious beliefs are, and so on. His position is that all attempts to say something more than this are either a mark of philosophical arrogance or a manifestation of one's own personal commitment to adopting a stance of religious belief or non-belief. As such, they do not furnish us with genuine philosophical insights. I argue that such an interpretation possess two principal merits. Firstly, it demonstrates that there is no tension between Wittgenstein's remarks on the nature of philosophy and his remarks on religious belief and religious statements. Secondly, it shows that it is possible to philosophize about religion in a manner that does not assume that this has to consist either in presenting an apology for or critique of religion or in formulating philosophical theories regarding the nature of religious belief and the meaning of religious language.
A novel account of the rationality of religious belief is offered, called quasi- fideism. According to this proposal, we are neither to think of religious belief as completely immune to rational evaluation nor are we to deny that it involves fundamental commitments which are arational. Moreover, a parity argument is presented to the effect that religious belief is no different from ordinary rational belief in presupposing such fundamental arational commitments. This proposal is shown to be rooted in Wittgenstein’s remarks on hinge commitments in On Certainty, remarks which it is claimed were in turn influenced by John Henry Newman’s treatment of the rationality of religious belief in An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent.
The Life and Logic of our Beliefs
Ortega famously distinguished between "ideas" as explicitly entertained intellectual convictions and "beliefs" as lived convictions, rarely expressed and possibly inexpressible, that actually guide our conduct. He also notes in History as a System that while our convictions might fail to cohere as ideas, they must cohere as beliefs; they must cohere in their vital articulation, he writes, while they might fail to cohere in their logical articulation. This paper attempts to concretize the notion that our convictions might surface under two different aspects, ideas and beliefs, and that they must cohere under the latter aspect. I begin by turning to a similar idea often read into Wittgenstein's On Certainty: that there are hinge beliefs that guide us in action yet cannot be propositionally articulated. I argue that this reading fails both exegetically and substantially, revealing that we cannot distinguish between vital articulation and logical articulation, if we read logical articulation as propositional articulation; the way we live by our beliefs is their propositional articulation, and this is in fact simply the Wittgensteinian dictum that meaning is use. I then rehabilitate the Ortegian distinction as one between vital articulation and intellectual articulation of our beliefs, and elaborate this in terms of Wittgenstein's discussions of religious belief.
Wittgenstein on Religious Belief
Cambridge Elements Series, 2023
Wittgenstein published next to nothing on the philosophy of religion and yet his conception of religious belief has been both enormously influential and hotly contested. In the contemporary literature, Wittgenstein has variously been labelled a fideist, a non-cognitivist and a relativist of sorts. This Element shows that all of these readings are misguided and seriously at odds, not just with what Wittgenstein says about religious belief, but with his entire later philosophy. This Element also argues that Wittgenstein presents us with an important ‘third way’ of understanding religious belief – one that does not fall into the trap of either assimilating religious beliefs to ordinary empirical beliefs or seeking to reduce them to the expression of certain attitudes.
Wittgenstein and the ABC's of Religious Epistemics
This paper continues my development of philosophy of religion as multi-disciplinary comparative research. An earlier paper, “Wittgenstein and Contemporary Belief-Credence Dualism” compared Wittgensteinian reflections on religious discourse and praxis with B-C dualism as articulated by its leading proponents. While some strong commonalities were elaborated that might help to bridge Continental and Analytic approaches in philosophy of religion, Wittgenstein was found to be a corrective to B-C dualism especially as regards how the psychology and philosophy of epistemic luck/risk applies to doxastic faith ventures. This paper aims to further elaborate a basis for improved dialogue between philosophers, theologians, and scholars in special sciences which study religion. I call this basis the Triangulated model the ABC’s of religious epistemics in order to contrast it with the B-C dualist proposal
Belief and the Logic of Religious Commitment
The Rationality of Theism, 1999
Belief and Rationality In recent years deep questions have been raised not only about what constitutes rational justification for religious beliefs, but also about the relevance of standard notions of justification to the analysis of a believer's relation to her beliefs. Indeed, the net tendency of the Anglo-American discussion since (roughly) 1983 has been to say that religious persons can be entitled to believe a set of religious propositions, and to do so with strong subjective certainty, even while lacking the sort of intersubjective grounds that many philosophers in the past took to be necessary. One prominent expression of this tendency has been the claim that (some) religious beliefs are "properly basic," requiring no support beyond the disposition of a properly functioning mind to hold them. Another is the argument that there is a 1 "parity" among different perceptual practices, say between ocular perception (perceiving a tree) and religious perception (perceiving God). 2 Let's use the label Calvinists for those who maintain that religious truths can be among the basic deliverances of reason and therefore do not require the support of more general evidential considerations. 3 In one sense, the Calvinist approach is an instance of a broader strategy, which is to shift the burden of proof from those who hold religious beliefs to those who challenge the rationality of holding them. Thus D.Z. Phillips maintains that the only reasons that are required for a religious belief are those that are called for within a particular religious language game; to criticize it "from outside" is to ignore the role of religious beliefs as expressions of a unique form of life. Similarly, T.F. Torrance contends that one cannot 4 challenge religious beliefs for failing to live up to the standards of scientific evidence, since Christians, for example, use methods and criteria appropriate to their own particular object, the self-revealing God of the Christian tradition, which is all that the concept of science requires. 5 We might call this broader strategy the Separatist Strategy, since it divides the domain of religious belief off from other epistemic domains. Religious separatists may even agree with non-religious thinkers about what counts as evidence in other domains or even "in general." Yet they argue that, although