The Many Face of Religious Truth : Developing Hilary Putnam's Pragmatic Pluralism into an Alternative for Religious Realism and Antirealism

Abstract

The question this study addresses is whether, on a conceptual level, religious propositions can have truth-value. It reflects on this question from a philosophy of religion perspective that stands in philosophy of language and mind. It analyzes paradigmatic religious realist and antirealist perspectives on this question, and establishes that their underlying notions of truth and experience have significant limitations. It develops an alternative perspective on the basis of a critical analysis of contemporary pragmatist and (post-) analytic philosopher Hilary Putnam’s notions of truth and experience. The analysis of Putnam’s notion of truth and experience shows that he manages to evade fundamental difficulties of both the realist and antirealist view. In his pragmatic pluralist perspective, truth is an interactional notion. It is akin to a realist view because truth ultimately depends on reality, but it holds that what the notion of truth comes down to depends on the practice of which a particular proposition is part. Conceptual and practical abilities are interdependent. Furthermore, experience is a transactional notion: experiences (i.e., those of which we are aware) are direct and simultaneously conceptualized. This allows them to play a cognitive role, and for us to come to true propositions on the basis of them. Putnam’s perspective evades important difficulties of the realist and antirealist views, but it has its own limitations too. It runs the risk of taking the truth of at least some propositions to be relative to a particular community (relativism), and of presuming on beforehand that some experiences cannot be real (reductionism). In developing a religious pragmatic pluralist perspective, then, the research goes in against some of Putnam’s own viewpoints on the truth-value of moral and religious propositions by amending his views on the basis of a Jamesian understanding of religious experiences as pertaining to religious aspects of reality which are irreducible to other, non-religious aspects of reality. This amends Putnam’s pragmatic pluralist perspective on truth-value so that it evades the risks of relativism and reductionism. Religious pragmatic pluralism takes Putnam’s views that truth is interactional and that experience is transactional to be applicable to all areas of human reasoning. This means that (meaningful) religious propositions too have truth-value. The truth of religious propositions ultimately depends on the way the world is, because our religious practices are interactions with reality. Religious and non-religious propositions can and do conflict, since similar notions of truth-value can be at play in between the various practices, and since the various practices all pertain to reality. As immediate and conceptualized transactions between ourselves and our environment, religious experiences are potentially veridical, and can therefore in principle serve as bases for true religious propositions. The religious pragmatic pluralist perspective on the truth-value of religious propositions does justice to the diversity of religious practices as well as to the notion that religious propositions do not rest on mere conventional beliefs but ultimately depend for their truth-value on reality. As such, it provides a promising answer to the question of the truth-value of religious propositions.