Religious Studies 1994, along with Alston's
response.
The
Overall Argument of Alston's Perceiving God
Alston's
overall aim in Perceiving God is to show that we are rationally
justified in believing that our apparent direct perceptions of God's presence (called
"M-experiences") are reliable and thus for the most part veridical,
the objective, existentially-committed beliefs based on these experiences
thereby being prima facie justified, subject to defeat by certain overriders
supplied by some background religion. It is argued that our rational
justification for believing this is of both an epistemic and pragmatic (or
practical) sort, in which an epistemic reason for believing a proposition is
truth conducive, rendering the proposition probable, while a pragmatic one
concerns the benefits which accrue from belief. We will begin by considering
the pragmatic justification, since the case he makes out for epistemic
justification is built on its back.
What
distinguishes Alston's pragmatic defense from those of numerous predecessors,
like James, is that whereas they are retail pragmatists offering piecemeal
pragmatic justifications for specific individuals taking as veridical their
different M-experiences, Alston is a wholesaler seeking to pragmatically
justify engagement in and acceptance of the reliability of the entire doxastic
practice (hereafter DP) of appealing to an M-experience as giving prima facie
justification, subject to defeat by overriders, for the belief that God exists
and is as he appears to be, which DP he calls "MP." The upshot of
Alston's DP approach is that it makes it essential for the mystic to be a
member, however loosely this is interpreted, of an organized religion or a
religious tradition, which some might see as a needed supplement to James's
anti-institutional glorification of the freelance or, if you prefer, lone
gunman mystic.
I
have always been suspicious of people who said they could get it for me
wholesale, and Alston is no exception. For it is important that we do not
neglect the need for retail pragmatism, since in many cases what matters to us
is that there is success in the individual case rather than just success for
the most part in such cases. It matters to the members of the firm whether
Jones absconded with the funds rather than whether Jones or most people in
general are law-abiding or to a person whether her lover is true and not just
whether most lovers are true. Similarly, it could matter vitally to a mystic
whether her specific M-experience is veridical, not whether M-experiences for
the most part are veridical, for her whole way of life could depend upon what
she believes about this specific case. In all these cases there is too big a
gap for the existentially rooted person between the wholesale and retail
levels. Nothing that Alston's says precludes a retail supplement to his DP
approach. At places in the final chapter he even seems to invite it, especially
on pages 303-4.
Not
only does retail pragmatism find a wholesale DP-based pragmatism insufficient,
it also might find it to be unnecessary. What matters on the individual level
is whether that specific mystical experience is veridical, and for this
to be the case the experience does not even have to qualify as a perception and
thereby an instance of an Alston MP. Therefore, if Alston's wholesale business
should go bankrupt, there still could still be a thriving retail business.
While
the consequence of Alston's DP approach is to give us a rational justification
for believing that God exists and is as He presents himself, and even
underwriting claims to know this (284-5), he denies at several places that it
constitutes an argument for His existence. (3, 222 and 284) Herein Alston seems
to be upholding an eccentrically severe standard for a good argument. An argument
must "establish" (71) or "demonstratively prove" (289) its
conclusion. Mere bestowal of a high degree of probability upon the conclusion
would not appear to be enough, as seen in his claim that "If you've just
won the Heisman Trophy, that doesn't show that you have more ability
than I if I haven't done much to use what ability I have and there is no reason
to think that I couldn't develop into that good a football player." (134,
my italics) Certainly, Alston must know that the probability of any healthy person
of good size turning into a Heisman Trophy level football player, no matter how
much effort is expended, is extremely small. For the time being we will let
this issue pass as the trivial matter of linguistic usage that it appears to
be, though later on I will suggest a possible motive for his undue modesty in
characterizing what his overall argument is supposed to accomplish.
The
basic premise of his DP-based pragmatic justification is that any well
established social DP, i.e. a mechanism or function for forming existentially
committed, objective beliefs from a certain type of experiential input and
which has a background system of overriders, is to be considered reliable
unless shown to be otherwise. Although the argument is applied to one specific MP,
the Christian MP (called "CMP"), it is equally applicable to any one
of the other MPs, and I will consider the argument in its generalized form.
This argument does not proceed by applying this Reidian "innocent till
proven guilty" principle directly to CMP, or MPs in general, but instead
applies it first to the DP of forming objective, existentially committed
beliefs about our physical environment from our sensory experiences (called
"SP").
This
indirection raises some thorny questions about the extent to which his argument
is based on an analogy with SP, being of the form:
1. MP (or CMP) is analogous to SP
in that both are well established social DPs replete with a system of
overriders and are free of any sort of massive inconsistencies;
2. we consider ourselves justified
on these grounds to take SP to be a reliable cognitive practice in that sense
experiences bestow a prima facie justification, subject to being defeated by
one of the background overriders, for believing the physical object propositions
based upon them; therefore,
3. we must consider ourselves
justified in conferring a like epistemic status on MP on pain of inconsistently
operating with a double standard.
In response to my objections to his
earlier articles that MP is disanalogous to SP in cognitively crucial respects,
he initially denies that his overall argument is analogical, though he admits
that some of the rear-guard "double standard" arguments by which he
responds to critics are. (223) Supposedly, his initial argument for the rationality
of SP serves only an illustrative, didactic function that aids us in following
the parallel argument that he subsequently gives for the rationality of MP.
To
be sure, the above analogical argument does not appear explicitly in the
text; however, a good case can be made out from both what he says and the
rhetorical seductiveness of his dialectical manner of presenting the Reidian
argument for the rationality of MP immediately after having applied it with
apparent success to SP that the reader is being invited, even encouraged, to
treat the former argument as an enthymemic analogical argument. In explaining
why he takes this circuitous route he writes:
There are several reasons for
taking this oblique approach. First, sense perception is a much more familiar,
intelligible, and well-studied topic. We all constantly form perceptual beliefs
on the basis of sense experience, and, in practice, we all take this to be
highly reliable. Whatever results we attain here may throw light on the more
obscure and controversial area of theistic perception. (102)
Alston's
argument for the rationality of MP, like any argument, is directed at a certain
person(s) for the purpose of winning their consent to its conclusion. Since
Alston explicitly directs his argument at persons who accept premise 2 of the
above analogical argument, it should not come as a surprise to him if they fill
out his argument in the above analogical manner. Furthermore, since he claims
that SP is a paradigm of a rational practice, unlike MP, which is "more
obscure and controversial," he seems to be requiring that an MP be
sufficiently similar to SP for the Reidian argument to be extendable to it.
Thus, by showing cognitively relevant disanalogies between SP and MP the critic
renders it dubious that this argument, which seemed to work so well in behalf
of SP, can be extended to MP. Another way of bringing out the analogical nature
of the argument for MP is to perform the thought experiment of imagining how
much the force of this argument would be diminished if it were applied directly
to MP without first being applied to SP. I think it would lose a good deal of
its persuasiveness, because we would no longer begin our consideration of it
with the belief that it works for SP and MP is quite similar to SP.
These
are controversial issues having to do with how a text is to be interpreted, and
thus there remains considerable room for honest disagreement. Fortunately,
Alston does not think that whether his argument is implicitly analogical is a
crucial issue, since he claims that the disanalogies pointed out by his critics
can be rendered harmless by showing that they arise from differences between
the categoreal natures of the apparent objects of mystical and sense
experiences. (224) A lot more will be said about this in the next section.
With
these preliminaries out of the way, we can get down to the main task of
critically evaluating his overall argument, be that an analogical one or only
comprised of a pair of parallel arguments. We will follow his dialectical order
of presentation by beginning with the attempt to show that we are pragmatically
rationally justified in accepting SP as cognitive and then go on to consider
how his argument can be deployed in behalf of MP. His first order of business
is to determine whether we can show that we have epistemic rational
justification for accepting SP as cognitive, as generally having true outputs
for which we have a prima facie justification. His discussion is a tour de
force, exceeding in thoroughness and depth any that I know of in the extant
literature. He makes out a very convincing case that we do not and could not
have such a justification. Of special interest is the cause of the failure to
justify SP by appeal to its success in helping us to predict events and get
around successfully in the world. Echoing Hume's response to the attempt to
justify inductive reasoning by employing an inductive argument, he charges this
attempt with falling prey to "epistemic circularity," which is the
employment of the conclusion of an argument to justify some of its premises.
Herein the conclusion is that we are epistemically justifed in using SP, but we
must appeal to this very proposition in order to justify the premisses that
speak to the success in predicting and controlling that has been realized by
the use of SP.
But
all might not be lost, for there still remains the practical or pragmatic sense
of "rational justification." It is here that Alston wages his battle
for the rationality of SP. He asks us to consider "what alternative is
there to employing the practices we find ourselves using, to which we find
ourselves firmly committed." (150) The issue here is "practical, not
a theoretical one" since it involves "what sort of activity to engage
in, not a choice as to whether some proposition is true or false." (154)
He then points out that for an extremely well entrenched DP, of which SP is a
prime example, "there are no alternatives that commend themselves to
rational reflection as superior" (168) and that "even if it were
possible to abandon or alter them, it would be a very arduous task." (169)
This
practical justification is too thin, because it says nothing about the human
purposes that are served by engagement in the well established DPs. Why, after
all, are they so well established. If they served no important purpose, there
would be no loss in giving them up, and thus no need to replace them with some
alternative DPs. Fortunately, this gap in his practical justification for
engaging in a well established DP gets filled in later when Alston points out
that each DP serves some special purpose. "The basic function of SP in our
lives is to provide a 'map' of the physical world and social environment and
thereby enable us to find our way around in it, to anticipate the course of
events and to adjust our behavior to what we encounter so as to satisfy our
needs and achieve our ends," while an MP has the analogous function of
"providing a 'map' of the 'divine environment,' providing guidance for our
interaction with God." (250) The up-shot of this is that on a cost-benefit
basis we are practically well advised to stick with our well entrenched DPs,
especially one as basic as SP, the playing of which seems essential to our very
living, no less our living well.
This
can serve as the basis for the following pragmatic (practical) argument or
justification for our engaging in SP.
4. Engaging in SP has vital
benefits in helping us to get around successfully in the physical and social
world which are not realizable equally well by any alternative available to us.
Therefore,
C1. It is pragmatically
(or practically) rational for us to engage in SP.
This is not a William James
"will to believe" type pragmatic argument for engaging in an action,
since not to perform the action is not a live possibility for us. You might say
that whether or not we accept this argument is a difference that makes no
difference, at least in respect to our behavior. I will call this a
"philosopher's pragmatic argument" and a James-style one an
"existential pragmatic argument." This distinction will be put to an
important use later.
It
could be objected to 4, as well as the classification of the argument as a
philosopher's pragmatic argument, that there is available to us an alternative
to SP that realizes its benefits equally well, namely a practice, call it
"JP" after John Dewey, that is exactly like SP except that it does
not have a belief as an output but only an accepting of a proposition as a
working hypothesis, this consisting in acting as if it is true. JP is not a DP,
but so what. Alston, who does not consider this objection, might respond that
JP does not serve our purposes as well as SP does since there are many
situations in which a person's success depends upon their having the sort of
confidence and conviction that require real belief rather than the thin Deweyan
substitute. For those who are not convinced by this reply we could replace 4
with
4'. Engaging in SP has vital
benefits in helping us to get around successfully in the physical and social
world which are not better realized by any alternative available to us.
As
for the problem of whether the argument fits the definition of a
"philosopher's pragmatic argument," it is not clear that any
alteration in the definition is required, since persons would act in exactly the same way whether
they were engaged in SP or JP, except for a trivial difference in linguistic
behavior consisting in the participants in SP responding to questions about
what they believe differently than do the participants in JP. For those who
think there still is a problem, the definition could be changed to "a
pragmatic argument for engaging in an action which is such that it is not a
live possibility for us to refrain from performing either this action or some
alternative that realizes the same purpose.
This argument
faces a serious problem having to do with our need to rely on SP in justifying
premise 4, a fact of which Alston is well aware. For example, in regard to
establishing that a certain DP, such as SP, is firmly established, and thus not
to be given up without paying a dear price, he asks "how else would we
learn that these practices are deeply rooted socially" except by making
"use of what we may call the 'standard package' of SP, introspection,
memory, rational intuition, and various forms of reasoning to determine the
social establishment of the practices..." (176. see also 227-8) The same
considerations hold for our way of determining that our engagement in SP
successfully realizes its purpose of helping us to predict and control. (173)
The question that naturally arises is whether our rational justification for
using SP in establishing 4 is pragmatic or epistemic. If we say it is
pragmatic, we immediately fall prey to epistemic circularity because we are using
our conclusion, C1, to justify acceptance of premise 4 in our
argument for C1. But, if we say, as it seems we must, that it is
epistemic, we still face problems.
First,
it might seem odd to attempt a pragmatic justification for engaging in a
practice when we already take it to be a reliable one, for how can it fail to
be pragmatically useful to employ a DP which is reliable? But reliability and
pragmatic usefulness can fall apart, and thus it is not pointless to ask about
a DP's usefulness after we admit that it is reliable. For example, it is
conceivable that the most reliable practice for forming true beliefs about the pasts of persons is by administering
some horrible "past-recalling" drug that leaves them a vegetable.
Herein we have a reliable but pragmatically undesirable DP. Contrariwise, we
can imagine a situation in which it is pragmatically desirable to engage in an
unreliable DP--one whose outputs are inconsistent with those of better
established DPs. Some (mistakenly) think that SP is this vis a vis science.
A
far more serious problem is that, assuming Alston established that we cannot
show that SP is reliable, any argument which must employ SP to warrant one of
its premises is infected with what I will call "epistemic
nonwarrantedness," which is just as fatal as epistemic circularity because
in both cases the argument fails to supply a justification for accepting its
conclusion. The problem of epistemic nonwarrantedness concerns the epistemic
order of being able to justify a proposition, not the ontological order of a
proposition's being objectively justified. Thus, a proposition p could
be objectively justified by a premise q if q be true, even though
we would not be able to justify p by appeal to q since we are
unable to justify q. Alston does not consider this problem, and I do not
know of any strategy for getting around it, but I will suggests one for meeting
this problem as it pertains to the parallel argument for MP.
Alston
next employs C1 for the purpose of establishing:
C2. It is pragmatically
rational for us to belief that SP is reliable.
in which a DP is reliable if most
of its belief outputs are true. His derivation is subtle and appeals to the
principle that
P. "I cannot hold that X is
rational and coherently deny (or abstain from judging) that Y is rational,
where accepting (engaging in) X commits me to accepting Y." (179)
Doing X can commit one to Y either
because Y is causally necessary for realizing X or because doing X
pragmatically implies accepting Y in the way in which asserting a proposition
pragmatically implies and thereby commits one to its being the case that one
believes it.
(180) "To engage in a certain
DP and to accept the beliefs one thereby generates is to commit oneself to
those beliefs being true...and hence to commit oneself to the practice's being
reliable." (179) From this we can extract the additional premises needed
for the derivation of C2, namely:
5. Engaging in SP commits one to
accepting as true the beliefs that one thereby derives.
6. If one accepts as true the
beliefs derived from engagement in a DP, one thereby accepts the DP as
reliable, i.e. as producing beliefs that are for the most part true.
From the premises C1, P,
5, and 6 it can be deduced that
C2. It is pragmatically
rational for us to believe that SP is reliable.
While
this argument is valid, its premises P and 6 are dubious. P faces the
counter-example of the person who asserts a proposition without believing it.
Herein a conversational implicature that licenses a pragmatic implication is
violated, but it is not a case of this person not being rational but rather not
being sincere. To act deviously, unfortunately, can be quite rational in
certain circumstances. The problem with 6 is that it is possible for a person,
such as some of our students in an introduction to logic course (and I mean at
the end of the term!) not to realize that truth is agglomerative or collective
with respect to a conjunction and thus to believe of every output proposition
of a DP that it is true but not believe that all or even most of these
propositions are true and that the practice thereby is reliable. Or a person might believe that though all of
its outputs so far are true in the future all of its outputs will be false,
thereby rendering the DP in the long run nonreliable. Thus the "hence to
commit oneself to the practice's being reliable" component of 6 must be
rejected.
Maybe
the argument for C2 is a case of misplaced subtlety. Why isn't it
enough to simply assert that a person would be irrational if they believed that
they had a pragmatic justification for engaging in a DP but not for believing
that it is reliable. This seems acceptable to me.
This
completes my brief sketch of Alston's pragmatic argument for C1 and
C2, and we can now go on to determine how it fares when deployed in
behalf of MP. It should come as a heartening surprise to Alston to learn that
it fares better than its SP cousin. It has already been seen that the purpose
of engaging in MP is to gain guidance in how to enter into a loving communion
with God and as a result realize a sanctifying spiritual and moral growth. This
can serve as the basis of the following pragmatic argument.
7. Engaging in MP has the vital
benefit of helping certain persons in their quest for sanctimony which is not
realizable equally well by any alternative available to them.
Therefore,
C3. It is pragmatically
rational for these persons to engage in MP.
Whereas premise 4 in the argument
for C1 faced the problem of an alternative practice to SP, the JP of acting as
if, which some might see as equally viable, premise 7 of this argument faces no
such problem, for obviously one cannot realize the benefits which accrue from
participation in MP without actually believing in God's existence, the reason
being that one conceptually cannot think of themselves as experiencing a loving
communion with a being with whom they communicate in various ways unless they
believe that this being exists. The derivation of
C4. It is pragmatically
rational for those who engage in MP to believe that MP is reliable.
from C3 proceeds exactly
as does the above derivation of C2 from C1, with
"MP" replacing"SP" throughout, and all of the above
criticisms apply mutatis mutandis.
It
was found that the pragmatic argument for C1 escaped the problem of
epistemic circularity but fell prey to epistemic nonwarrantedness. How does the
argument for C3 fare in these respects? Obviously premise 7 can be
justified by us only by the use of SP, for how else could we learn that those
who have M-experiences usually grow in sanctimony except by appeal to the
deliverances of sense experience. While this may, as we shall shortly see,
create a problem of epistemic nonwarrantedness, it does not thereby create a
problem of epistemic circularity. Alston, in his typically thorough and honest
manner, worries that we must rely on the outputs of MP to justify 7, the reason
being that what counts as sanctimony is itself determined by reliance on what
is vouchsafed by earlier M-experiences within a given religious tradition. If
so, we then face the Hobson's choice of whether we have a pragmatic or
epistemic warrant for engaging in and thereby accepting the outputs of MP. If
we give the former answer our argument falls into epistemic circularity, while
the latter answer renders it epistemically nonwarranted, since we have yet to
epistemically justify MP as reliable. And, Alston would add, there is no way to
do this without falling into epistemic circularity. I do not think that the
reliance on past M-experiences is necessary for the confirmation of 7, and,
thus, the only problem of epistemic nonwarrantedness that I shall consider is
the one that is due to the reliance on SP. The thought that ultimately all of
our DPs suffer from epistemic nonwarrantedness would not sit well with Alston
who definitely does not want to follow the traditional fideist in going from
"nothing works" to "anything goes." He treads the narrow
path between internalism and externalism. I will suggest a way in which Alston
might get out of this difficulty.
This
way begins by noting a disanalogy between the arguments for C3 and C4
and those for C1 and C2 in that the latter are
universally quantified among persons while the former are restricted to persons
in special circumstances, C3 to those who seek sanctity and C4
to those who are already engaged in MP. Such relativization is necessary
because not everyone has the aim of seeking sanctification and thereby not
everyone is actually engaged in an MP.
This
restriction in C3, in my opinion, creates both a liability and
opportunity. The liability, which is ably explored by Alston, is that it shows
that MP is not as well established a DP as SP, since while everyone engages in
and must engage in SP or some surrogate that realizes the same purposes, only a
relatively few engage in MP and even they could avoid or extricate themselves
from this engagement, possibly by subjecting themselves to a deprogramming sort
of brainwashing. Because of this significant difference in degree of
entrenchment, it might be thought that the Reidian argument, which was applied
with some success in behalf of SP, has significantly less plausibility when
applied to MP. Alston counters that a mere difference in numbers cuts no
epistemic ice, since there are DPs, such as wine-tasting, that we take to be
cognitive even though they are severely restricted in their number of
participants. (198) Certainly a mere difference in numbers cuts no pragmatic
ice, since pragmatic arguments need not have everyone as their target, but only
those that meet certain special conditions.
But
what opportunity does the entrenchment disanalogy between 4 and 7 give us for
showing how the argument for C3, unlike that for C1, can avoid the problem of
epistemic nonwarrantedness due to the reliance on SP. Whereas engagement in SP
or some surrogate that realized the same ends was both universal and necessary,
it is neither with respect to MP because it is a live option to refrain from
engagement in MP or any surrogate that achieves the same goals. It is exactly
for this reason that the argument for C1 qualified as a
"philosopher's pragmatic argument" while the one for C3
was an "existential pragmatic argument." Acceptance of the latter,
unlike the former, makes a difference in our conduct. Just as I distinguished
between a philosophical and existential pragmatic argument on the basis of
whether any behavioral difference results from accepting the argument, I want
to distinguish between a "philosopher's doubt or question" and an
"existential doubt or question." The difference between them is that
how we answer the latter makes a difference to our conduct whereas answers to
the former are behaviorally idle. This does not mean that they are thereby
meaningless. Like Alston, I do not want to accept a verifiability theory of
meaningfulness.
We
are now in a position to see why the problem of epistemic nonwarrantedness
applies differentially to the arguments for C1 and C3.
The seminal question or doubt to which the argument for C1 is a
response, whether SP is reliable, is a philosopher's one, and thus the argument
begs this question when it falls into epistemic circularity by using SP to
justify its premise 4. The argument for C3, on the other hand, is
addressed exclusively to an existential question, whether MP is reliable, and
thus it is not debarred from using SP in warranting its premise 7. It is not
subject to the same dialectical restraints as is the argument for C1,
since it does not have the aim of answering the philosopher's doubt about the
reliability of SP, which it was the business of the argument for C1
to answer. Because the arguments have different dialectical backgrounds, they
are not subject to the same rules. The basic principle is this: an
existential pragmatic argument does not suffer from epistemic nonwarrantedness
if it assumes a proposition which is subject only to a philosopher's doubt.
Alston
is not satisfied to have shown only that the participants in MP are pragmatically
justified in believing it to be reliable. He wants to show that they, along
with everyone else, have an epistemic justification for this belief. At
some places in the final two chapters he claims to have already shown just
this, judging by the following remarks. "It should be clear from the above
that even though I hold that a Christian is epistemically justified (at
least prima facie) on the basis of mystical perception in holding certain
Christian beliefs about God, I do not take this to imply that the proper
procedure for the Christian...is to shut herself up within the boundaries of
her own community and ignore the rest of the world." (278) And on the next
page he adds that none of these considerations (concerning inconsistencies in
CMP, etc.) are fatal to the epistemic
claims we have made for CMP." And on p. 286 he speaks of having
already given "epistemic support of religious belief." I could find
no prior explicit justification or argument for these claims, and I would like
to try and supply one.
I
begin with two quotations which suggest that the epistemic justification for
believing in a DP's reliability is to be based upon the pragmatic justification
for engagement in it, the very sort of evidence that warranted C3.
"It is a reasonable supposition that a practice would not have persisted
over large segments of the population unless it was putting people into
effective touch with some aspect(s) of reality and proving itself by its
fruits" (170) and "It is...not irrelevant to our basic aim at
believing the true and abstaining from believing the false, that SP and other
established DPs, constitute the most reasonable procedures to use, so far as we
can judge, when trying to realize that aim." (180) Basically, he is saying
that
8. It is epistemically rational for
anyone to believe that any established DP that has enabled its participants to
successfully realize DP's special purpose is reliable.
It will be recalled that the
special purpose of MP is to aid its participants in their quest for sanctity,
and supposedly they have been successful by and large over a significant period
of time in this endeavor. Thus, we have this close cousin of 7:
9. MP is an established DP that has
enabled its participants to successfully realize MP's special purpose;
which, in conjunction with 8,
entails
C5. It is epistemically
rational for anyone to believe that MP is reliable.
Notice that C5, unlike C3
and C4, does not have to be restricted to participants in MP; for,
whereas it is epistemically rational for everyone to believe a proposition if
it is epistemically rational for some one person(s) to do so, the corresponding
universalizability principle does not hold for what it is pragmatically
rational to believe (or do).
When
the critic objects that the success of MP admits only of internal
determination, since it is necessary to appeal to the outputs based on
M-experiences and background religious doctrines that underly the MP and supply
some of the overriders, Alston makes use of his double-standard reply.
"You take SP to be reliable even though its success in realizing its
special purpose of helping us to predict and control can be determined only
internally by appeal to the outputs of SP and the overriders which are internal
to it, so why should you not accord the same epistemic rights and privileges to
MP." The critic's response is that MP is disanalogous to SP in ways that
render it less worthy of epistemic respect, the most important of which is
that, whereas there is a multiplicity of established rival MPs having
incompatible overriders and creeds which are epistemically on all fours, there
is a single SP in which everyone participates.
Alston
agrees that the existence of equally viable rival MPs presents the major
challenge to C5 and devotes an entire chapter to trying to
neutralize it, but with dubious success I believe. His chief strategy for lessening
the discreditation of MP's claim to epistemic respectability is based on the
wildly implausible intuition that since the rival MPs do not share a common
method for warranting or overriding claims based on M-experiences the
discreditation is far less than it would be if they shared the same method but
differed in their outputs. (271-2) Certainly persons holding rival beliefs
would be more seriously divided if they could not agree on a method for
resolving their disagreement than if they did; for in the latter case they can
at least argue with each other, unlike the former in which they can resort only
to non-epistemic means to resolve their difference. Furthermore, someone
impugns my epistemic soundness far more if they question the very method by which
I arrive at and warrant my beliefs than if they only question some of my
beliefs.
Another
form which his damage control takes is to level a charge of operating with a
double-standard against his critics who accept SP as reliable by showing that
there are actual and possible SP analogues to religious diversity. The example
of an actual case is the rivalry between psychoanalysis and behaviorism over
the proper method to use in the diagnosis and treatment of neurosis, but they
are not so radically incommensurable that in principle their differences could
not be mediated by appeal to facts about which method works best in curing
people, thereby showing that they share in common certain higher level
methodological principles. The example of a merely possible case is that in
which one-third of the human population sees material objects as ordinary
aristotelian substances, another third as Whiteheadian actual occasions and the
final third as a cartesian indefinitely extended medium. Not only do we have no
idea what the latter two groups see, the fact that there is such widespread
causal disorder due to the very same objects affecting biologically identical
organisms--members of the same species--in such radically different ways calls
into question the very objectivity of their experience. And for good measure it
can be added that in this counterfactual situation MP's epistemic credibility
is not enhanced but rather SP's is lowered to the vanishing point. The
condition of a patient suffering from a terminal illness is not improved if
someone else acquires the same affliction. Alston himself wisely backs off from
placing any weight on this counterfactual example.
While
many critics will see the yet to be neutralized challenge of religious
diversity as the shipwreck of Alston's theory, he is not about to join his
fellow passengers on the deck in a few heartfelt choruses of "Nearer My
God to Thee." But neither is he going to race around the deck singing
"Happy Days Are Here Again," for, after all is said and done, he does
admit that the diversity of incompatible MPs lessens the epistemic credentials
of MP------only not decisively.
I have been arguing that the
existence of a plurality of uneliminated interpractice competitors does not
damage the credibility of any one of them to nearly the same extent as a
plurality of uneliminated intrapractice competitors. Nevertheless, I do not
wish to deny that the situation does have significant adverse
consequences for the epistemic status of CMP and other forms of MP. (275. My italics)
But this candid admission of significant
epistemic discreditation is counterbalanced by (a euphemism for inconsistent
with) the claim that "although this diversity reduces somewhat the maximal
degree of epistemic justification derivable from CMP, it leaves the
practitioner sufficiently prima facie justified in M-beliefs that it is
rational for her to hold those beliefs, in the absence of specific
overriders." (279) Alston is saying, if I may take the liberty of
paraphrasing him, "This is Captain Bill speaking. We have just hit a
significant iceberg, but it is only a small one, and it has made only a small
hole, and we are listing only slightly. I suggest that those morbid chaps who
are singing hymns return to the gaming tables." I have no idea what basis
Alston has for his estimate of the degree to which the epistemic creditability
of MP is weakened by the diversity of rival MPs, nor does he.
The
concession of lessened epistemic creditability that he makes here is made at
many other places in the book in response to ways in which MP is SP's epistemic
inferior. For example, that MP lacks SP's agreement and prediction tests for
checking up on claims "shows that CMP is epistemically inferior to
SP" but it does not go so far as to show "that CMP is unreliable or
not rationally engaged in, or that its outputs are not prima facie
justified." (220) As a result "the degree of reliability it is
reasonable to assign to CMP is less than it is is reasonable to assign to
SP." (238) But "because we have no usable metric for degrees of
reliability...and there is no determinate answer to how much reliability is
required for rational participation" it is not clear that this degree is
so low that it destroys MP's claim to epistemic legitimacy. (238) And at another
place there is more of "This is Captain Bill speaking" stuff when he
admits that "CMP and other forms of MP are less firmly established, can
lay claim to a weaker degree of epistemic status, give rise to more critical
questions, and are subject to more doubt than...SP." (283) The worry I
have is that Alston might unwittingly be giving away the whole family farm acre
by acre, because when his several above admissions of slightly lessened
epistemic credibility for MP are added together it results in a strong cumulative
case against the epistemic credibility of MP, sort of the reverse of the
Swinburne style cumulative case for theism that Alston effectively presents in
Chapter 8. If there are enough small holes in your boat, it can sink. Again,
there is widespread room for differing intuitions, since we have no decision
procedure for hefting and adding up degrees of epistemic discreditation. Maybe
we just wind up going out the same door we came in. Thus, Alston's apologetics
can be seen as giving some reassurance to those already well launched along the
pathway of faith that their faith is not a completely unreasoned one, though
those who are not, in James's wonderful phrase, "among the saving
remnant" will have different intuitions about this. Maybe this is all Alston
can really hope to show. We can now appreciate why he was reticent to say that
his DP-based vindication of the reliability of MP is an argument. (To be
consistent he must retract his assertion on pp. 284-5 that it can underwrite
claims to know the propositional outputs of MP.)
It
is curious that Alston responds to the challenge of rival MPs only as it
pertains to C5, completely neglecting its bearing on C3
and C4. It will be shown that C3 and C4 emerge
unscathed from this challenge of rival MPs but this victory also is a sort of
defeat for Alston because the very reason for this success shows why they can
be of no avail in underwriting C5 or any claim to have epistemic
justification for taking MP to be reliable.
Pragmatic
arguments, unlike epistemic or truth-directed ones, have the peculiarity that
it is possible that there is a pair of incompatible propositions (or actions)
such that sound pragmatic arguments can be given for each of two differently
situated persons each believing (or doing) a different member of this pair.
Mary and Alice are to meet each other in the tennis finals. It is possible that
each is such that her chance of winning is increased if she has the
confidence-building belief that she will win if she makes the requisite effort.
Although the beliefs are incompatible, for each person there is a sound
pragmatic argument for her believing she will win if she makes the requisite
effort. Furthermore, both Mary and Alice can consistently give both of these
arguments. Exactly the same considerations hold regarding pragmatically
justifying differently situated persons engaging in MPs that are mutually
incompatible. A Hindu, like any one else, can consistently give two sound
pragmatic arguments, one justifying his participation in the Hindu MP on the
grounds of its good consequences and the other justifying a Muslim engaging in
the Muslim MP on similar grounds.
With
a pragmatic argument we must distinguish between the person who gives the
argument, the "Justifier," and the person(s) whose action or belief
is being justified, the Justifee(s). While a pragmatic argument is
universalizable among justifiers, as we have just seen, (i.e. If my pragmatic
argument for person X doing or accepting Y is sound, then anyone's presentation
of this argument is sound), it is not among justifees (It is possible that X be
pragmatically justified in doing or accepting Y but some other person not be).
It is this feature of pragmatic arguments that protects C3 and C4
from the challenge posed by equally viable rival MPs. But the price that must
be paid for this invulnerability is the it debars a pragmatic justification for
a person believing a proposition from bestowing any epistemic justification on
this belief (for it is possible that an equally good justification can be given
for some other person having an incompatible belief). Thus, C3 and C4
cannot be appealed to in support of C5. Alston must rely exclusively
on the above argument for C5, and that argument was found to be far
less than compelling. And don't ask "How far less is it?" since this
will just invite a fudgy announcement over the intercom from Captain Bill.[1]
Richard M. Gale
University of Pittsburgh
[1] The preceding discussion assumed that MP is an objective DP because its experiential inputs, M-experiences, are perceptual in nature. In my article, "Why Alston's Mystical Doxastic Practice Is Subjective," forthcoming in a book symposium on Alston's Perceiving God in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, I argue against this assumption by showing that M-experiences take only internal or cognate accusatives and, furthermore, fail to have evidential status because not subject to any tests. These failures preclude their being perceptual in nature.