Abstract
This paper argues for a view described as risk-limited indulgent permissivism. This term may be new to the epistemology of disagreement literature, but the general position denoted has many examples. The paper argues for the need for an epistemology for domains of controversial views (morals, philosophy, politics, and religion), and for the advantages of endorsing a risk-limited indulgent permissivism across these domains. It takes a double-edge approach in articulating for the advantages of interpersonal belief permissivism that is yet risk-limited: Advantages are apparent both in comparison with impermissivist epistemologies of disagreement, which make little allowance for the many distinct features of these domains, as well as in comparison with defenses of permissivism which confuse it with dogmatism, potentially making a virtue of the latter. In an appropriately critical form of interpersonal belief permissivism, the close connections between epistemic risk-taking and our doxastic responsibilities become focal concerns.
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Notes
Nothing much will rest on my description of the account as “pragmatist,” but William James dedicated Pragmatism to J.S. Mill, “from whom I first learned the pragmatic openness of mind and whom my fancy likes to picture as our leader were he alive today” (18). Another and more specific reason for my description is that Rowland and Simpson (2021) distinguish indulgent practical pluralism from indulgent epistemic pluralism and show that the former position is not committed to the latter position (one which this paper also need not endorse). Epistemic pluralism in turn is sometimes connected with epistemic relativism (though I would argue it is not), But in any case, neither of these is of direct concern here.
While there are numerous senses of “pluralism” in the literature, my aim is restricted to defending indulgent practical pluralism somewhat as Rowland and Simpson do, and as I see Peels and Booth (2014) doing also. The sense of pluralism developed here and applied to religious cognition is not the metaphysical sort associated with John Hick. The several distinct senses of pluralism which William James recognized is also a different matter, largely unrelated to my present concerns, but for James scholars, Axtell (2013) and Pihlstrom (2013) offer fuller treatments.
Note that for Rawls, however, pluralism (until paired with “reasonable”) is primarily descriptive. That people in fact “won’t all converge upon a single worldview or life plan” seems to be a psychological or descriptive claim, and Rawls’ sense of the term “pluralism” is often interpreted as primarily descriptive in this way. I have trouble with Rawls’s use of “pluralism”; “plurality” appears descriptive, but no “ism” is, on my account. So, I will prefer to speak of reasonable contrariety or plurality. But we could have skipped over this as Rowland and Simpson do, since “permissivism” not “pluralism” is our primary focus.
Rowland and Simpson rightly point out that “One can have a pluralistic ethos without being a relativist” (113, note 1), and they this discuss the importance of the practical/epistemic distinction in this regard. An “arbitrariness objection” often attends attempts to support permissivism, but the authors argue that we shouldn’t let this purported “arbitrariness of being an epistemic indulgent pluralist infect our thinking about indulgent pluralism” (120), at least where the extent options have a practical character or dimension. We can be “more tolerant of arbitrariness” in practical domains. I agree, but would distinguish domains in terms more of disciplines, since moral, political, and religious domains each clearly has aspects of both practical and epistemic commitment. See Kelly (2014) and White (2014), and see Simpson (2017) for a more detailed discussion of the arbitrariness objection, and responses to it by permissivists.
This technical concept is usually described as the synchronic evidential fit of an agent’s propositional attitude in respect to a target proposition, to logical support that the agent’s evidence has, bearing upon that proposition (Conee & Feldman, 2004).
Carter 2018, p. 1358.
I again have in mind here the evidentialist epistemology of Conee and Feldman (2004), which I have elsewhere critiqued along with its attendant evidentialist ethic of belief. But some qualifiers are in order since Bayesian approaches might be considered evidentialist as well, yet may have more resources for acknowledging the risk sensitivity of actual agents. But Salow and Campbell-Moore (2021) argue that Bayesian approaches to belief revision are flawed when they conceive its justification simply as adoption of the optimal means towards the epistemic end of accurate credences. “These attempts, however, presuppose that means should be evaluated according to classical expected utility theory; and there is a long tradition maintaining that expected utility theory is too restrictive as a theory of means–end rationality, ruling out too many natural ways of taking risk into account” (1). To better accommodate agents’ risk-sensitivity and its connections with accuracy-theoretic considerations, Bayesians, the authors argue, we should replace expected accuracy with risk-weighted expected accuracy, and “think of risk sensitivity not as a matter of how valuable the outcomes are, but as a matter of how their value determines the choice worthiness of the means” (5, emphasis added).
See Coliva and Pedersen (eds.) (2017) for recent research on epistemic pluralism. In their discussion of epistemic pluralism (seen earlier in contrast to practical pluralism) the editors explain why it should be conceptually differentiated from epistemic monism on the one hand, and from epistemic relativism, including “standards relativism” on the other (11). The similarities and differences between these views needs to be studied and debated, but these initial, broad distinctions need to be made in order that we do not beg (as many of the “collapse” objections to pluralism seem to) some quite central questions in epistemology and metaphysics.
Indeed, in real life the proponents of metaphysical absolutisms or social ideologies on closer examination often show them themselves committed to relativistic ethics and epistemology, and arguably undermine themselves to from the get go.
There is thus a deep tension in the application of permissivist epistemology to religious belief among many contemporary hyphenated philosophers, as I argue elsewhere. Religious philosophers may utilize permissivist arguments as an apologetic appeal, in order to secure the reasonableness of faith, yet identify authentic faith with exclusivist beliefs and attitudes that actually cast off the Rawlsian burdens of judgment. Pointing out this tension, which is part of my task here, makes it far more difficult (or so I argue) to be both a permissivist philosophically, and endorse a model of faith where the blameworthiness of religious outsiders for their unbelief is an unexamined dogma.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer who suggested the terminology of risk-sensitive instead of risk-limited. As the reviewer also pointed out, a recent literature is emerging on normative uncertainty/the ethics of risks-taking (Podgorski, 2020), and theologians and religious philosophers have contributed to it. See for example Lara Buchak’s Risk and Rationality (2013), and her further application of risk-related concerns to the special recalcitrance of faith-based beliefs to counter-evidence (2017). See Axtell (2022a, forthcoming) for a fuller examination of Buchak’s philosophical theology, and development of the implications of luck and risk-related factors for religious epistemics. Below, I discuss Lightfoot’s (1997) work on risk-taking in identity-formation.
“Contrariety” is a term I find broader and more descriptive than “disagreement,” because it doesn’t beg questions of the truth-aptness of discourse, which may vary by domain. It is psychographic contrariety that is normal and expected, and is in this sense reasonable or respectable, within limits. Its skewed presentation as disagreement, may not be, since the reduction of contraries to contradictories is a basic logical flaw. My asserting an especial need for an epistemology for domains of controversial views highlights that discourse in these domains is rarely uniformly truth-apt, or as black-and-white as engaged disputants often take it to be. Hence, UT’s application to these domains needs to be shown, and not merely presupposed by an ideal theory that treats all psychographic contrariety as propositional disagreement in a manner assuming bivalence.
According to Booth and Peels, the Permissivist Thesis holds that “responsible belief is permissible rather than obliged belief. On the Unique Thesis (UT), our evidence is always such that there is a unique doxastic attitude that we are obliged to have given that evidence, whereas the Permissibility Thesis (PT) denies this.” There are also positions in the epistemology of disagreement that are self-described as dogmatist. In our analysis, these views are perhaps better described as maintaining mutualist impermissivism, than permissivism, since one is not free to deviate from tradition/orthodoxy.
Rawls, Political Liberalism, 249.
Theological and civil tolerance/intolerance are not fully separable, since the former subtly affects real attitudes towards others, and theological intolerance undermines proper humility and reciprocity. James reflects this as well, even if he often writes primarily of personal faith ventures, and as if unconcerned with collective and social-political effects. “We ought… delicately and profoundly to respect one another’s mental freedom [and]… live and let live, in speculative as well as in practical things” (1979a, p. 234). And in a famous passage from Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson had earlier written, “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg” (Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVII). This expression of indulgent permissivism is one generally shared by other figures discussed here, Locke, Mill, James, and Rawls. It is widely shared by many clergy, theologians, and humanistic thinkers, both secular and religious. But of course, the claim made by Jefferson is no less qualified, or hedged, than it is by these other authors: Jefferson, like John Locke before him and John Rawls after him, was writing with primary concern for dangers of coercive use of state power, or religious establishment.
James, “The Will to Believe,” 234.
See James (1979b) for his critique of religious rationalism. Their denials of the mood of faith among skeptical and religious rationalists are indeed among the riskiest of dialectical moves, since it can become the first step from friendly to unfriendly relations. For neither religious nor skeptical rationalists understand how moderate fideism constrains fanaticism: it allows those living “one god,” “no god,” “twenty gods” metaphysical ventures to genuinely respect each another’s doxastic responsibility in the free exercise of their religious identity. Both instead try to conceal or deny what James called the “mood of faith” in one’s metaphysical convictions, whether one calls them hopes or beliefs, and whether one calls them known truths or intuitions.
Thanks to an anonymous Reviewer for suggesting commonalities between my own discussion of Rawls, and Morton White’s holistic pragmatism. What White (2002) develops as “holistic pragmatism” helps substantiate further connections between pragmatism and confirmation holism. White develops his holism as a normative view about how philosophers should reason (184–185), and while holisms may be moderate or radical, the moderate of methodological versions are commensurate with the view developed here. More specifically, White treats Rawls’ theory of justice as a form of holistic pragmatism based on the idea of reflective equilibrium, the mutual adjustment between substantive moral principles and particular judgments (170–177).
Among other contributors to the Religious Truth and Identity in an Age of Pluralism, Jonkers and Wiertz (2019, eds.) collection, I would note the relevance of Dirk-Martin Grube’s view that we should abandon the principle of bivalence in the religious realm, and take up instead a “justified religious difference approach.” Grube [see also his 2018] is not alone in rejecting bivalence as a general logical principle taken as holding indiscriminately across domains of inquiry. Many theologians and humanist thinkers reject bivalence, even if biblical literalists and skeptical evidentialists—those two sources of a Conflict model of reason and faith—assume it. So, Grube’s prescribed shift allows us to scrutinize doubtful assumptions of religious exclusivism that lead to claims that faith is incompatible with inclusivist attitudes and beliefs.
Kitcher (2011, p. 26) is correct to highlight the epistemic significance of the “symmetry” or “same basis” of belief-formation giving rise to divergent religious beliefs in alternative testimonial faith traditions. But to make these concerns more specific, I would try to show how alternative theologies can be predicted to arise when peoples’methods are symmetrical, but they begin in different cultures or sub-cultures steeped in alternative testimonial traditions. This in turn suggests that their alternative claims to religious truth and knowledge exacerbate problems of religious luck.
I will employ the term “inductive risk” since this connects my concerns with an existing literature that already includes practical in addition to theoretical reasoning, and recognizes connections between epistemic and moral risk-taking (see Elliot & Richards (eds.), 2017). Thanks to an anonymous Reviewer for suggesting a clarification that this term is not intended to exclude broader processes of abductive inference. The latter term is often taken as descriptive of inferences to the best explanation, or inferences all-things-considered. Peirce seems to understand abductive reasoning as the more basic classification, with inductive reason being a set of more formalized sub-type of abduction. Such a view may not be inconsistent with our use of “inductive risk.” It is of special concern to us not to define inductive risk too narrowly, since worldview beliefs and alternative metaphysical systems of thought are representations of people’s broadest attempts to explain or make sense of the entirety of their experience.
While there are many existing scales both for religious orientation and for fundamentalist orientation employed by social psychologists, I propose that epistemologists and philosophers, both secular and religious, can contribute to improving the scales for fundamentalist orientation by having it measure an agent’s propensity for epistemically risky judgments in the moral, metaphysical and religious domains. This new scale for fideistic religious orientation could draw upon self-report questions, and short reasoning tasks. The proposal is that researchers in CSR and religious studies can locate new research questions, and potentially fruitful overlap at points along this new, inductive risk-focused spectrum or scale for fideistic religious orientation.
Elsewhere (Axtell, 2020, 2022b, forthcoming) I apply these tools to the study of religious fundamentalism. Religious exclusivist soteriologies are theologically intolerant or non-accommodationist, and their claims to religion or sect-specific religious knowledge or truth-possession I would argue lean on luck, which is to say their claims to exclusive possession of religious truth or value can on examination be seen to exacerbate problems of religious, epistemic, or moral luck. These apologetic strategies, along with the radically-asymmetrical religious trait-attributions that they instantiate, I therefore suggest, are prime topics for risk-aware social epistemologists. While the literature on “religious luck” may be small, it is recognized and treated as an important area of application in the philosophy and psychology of luck. See the papers in Church and Simpson (2019) for an introduction to this literature.
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Axtell, G. Risk-limited indulgent permissivism. Synthese 200, 302 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03781-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03781-0