Epistemic virtue, religious experience, and belief

Faith and Philosophy

Volumn 22, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 469-481

  Montmarquet, James A ^a  

^a TENNESSEE STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 38949159517     PISSN: 07397046     EISSN: 21533393     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/faithphil200522455     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. For a fuller statement of my views on this matter, see my Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993);
2. and "An Internalist Theory of Epistemic Virtue," in Guy Axteil, ed., Knowledge, Belief, and Character (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).
3. I refer here, most prominently, to the views of Alvin Goldman, e.g., in such classic papers as "What is Reliable Belief?" in George Pappas, ed. Justification and Knowledge (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1979)
4. and Ernest Sosa's virtue-oriented reliabilism, e.g., in his classic, Knowledge in Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1991).
5. The source of Goldman's own virtue epistemology is "Epistemic Folkways and Scientific Epistemology," in Liaisons: Philosophy Meets the Social Sciences (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992)
6. In his famous "Ethics of Belief," essay, William Clifford writes: Tf a belief is not realized immediately in open deeds, it is stored for guidance of the future⋯. No real belief, however trifling and fragmentary it may seem, is ever truly insignificant; it prepares us for more of its like, confirms those which resembled it before, and weakens others; and so gradually it lays a stealthy train in our inmost thoughts which may some day explode into action and leave its stamp on our character forever/ This is reprinted (e.g.) in Louis Pojman, ed. The Theory of Knowledge (Belmont, Ca.: Wadsworth, 1993), p. 502). However, even if we suppose all of Clifford's contentions here to be true, this hardly shows that we must, regardless of what acts we are able to foresee, and for such purely general reasons as Clifford proposes, pay special regard to each and every belief that we may happen to form, lest we believe wrongly. Such a policy, besides being impossible to carry out, would in many cases be counter-productive. As Bloom meditates on some triviality, a trolley may run over his foot.
7. Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Barnes and Nobel, 2004), reprint of the 1902 version; page references to the former volume are inserted parenthetically.
8. William Hasker, "The Epistemic Value of Religious Experience," in Thomas Senor, ed., The Rationality of Belief and the Plurality of Faiths: Essays in Honor of William P. Alston (Ithaca: Cornell U.P, 1995), makes a helpful distinction between two types of epistemological appeal to "religious experience": construing it as a perception of religious objects; and construing it as something whose best explanation appeals to these same objects. In a sense, my own view inclines to the latter, but with this important reservation: I am not interested in this as a type of "argument from experience" so much as a description of what I will eventually defend as a "virtuous tendency" (to believe).
9. The Idea of the Holy, John Harvey tr. (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1950).
10. This, by the way, is not to suggest that only experiences describable as broadly 'mystical' or ' numinous' might qualify as religious. For quite an account of the range of this topic, see, for instance, Ann Taves, Fits, Trances and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1999).
11. Here perhaps "truth-seeking" should be distinguished from "investigative." The latter would be disruptive of religious experience, the former not. Linda Zagzebski has made a relevant distinction, here, between merely wishing to have a certain belief (what would be irresponsible, unvirtuous) and wishing that a certain thing be true (what need not be irresponsible at all). If I call to find out the result of a game on which I have bet my life savings, presumably I seek to know the true result - yet though I am hardly neutral on this outcome. I am not "merely investigating" but that does not make my conduct intellectually irresponsible. See her discussion in "Intellectual Motivation and the Good of Truth," in Zagzebski and M. DePaul, eds., Intellectual Virtue (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2003).
12. I suppose here, purely for the sake of argument, that such contemporary defenders of arguments from experience - see (e.g.) William Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca: Cornell LLP., 1991);
13. Carolyn Franks Davis, The Evidentiary Force of Religious Experience (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1989);
14. Keith Yandell, The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1993);
15. and Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1979) - have not made their case. I hold no brief against these authors, except to insist, for reasons I develop here, that the resources of experiential appeals are not limited to arguments.
16. This is not to say that there could not be such an argument. See in this regard Yandell, The Epistemology of Religious Experience.
17. Even such a thorough theistic philosopher as Robert C. Roberts offers an account of intellectual humility pitched entirely to rather mundane concerns like one's absence of excessive desires for professional status, and so forth. See Roberts and W. Jay Wood, "Humility and Intellectual Goods," in L. Zagzebski and M. DePaul, eds., Intellectual Virtue.
18. An interesting account of a graduate student's encounter with Feynman still child-like in old age is Leonard Mldinow's Feynman's Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life (New York: Warner Books, 2003). Another relevant subject, both here and regarding our earlier discussion of "humility" is G.E. Moore, whose child-like delight and interest in the objections of even the most inexperienced students to his most carefully drawn philosophical positions was legendary. Roberts and Wood, op. cit., p. 262, discuss Moore's humility.
19. Here it could be objected that even such common practices are "telling yourself you can do it" involve epistemic vice insofar as they temporarily, at least, focus only on the reasons on one side. But this, I think, loses sight of the larger point, which is that our notion of epistemic virtue must ultimately tie in with our intuitions governing morality and the long terms prospects of having true beliefs about the world. At the point that such first-person encouragement involves a degree of conviction that could lead one to take morally risky acts, then, I think, we must be concerned about its epistemic virtuousness or lack thereof. Likewise, at the point at which such affirmations threaten one's longer terms possession of true beliefs, we must be concerned. But neither of these is, in point of fact, threatened by such affirmations as "I will jump that wall" - especially when a tiger pursues. One might compare, in this connection, L.J. Cohen's distinction between "acceptance" and belief, properly so-called, "Belief and Acceptance," Mind 98 (1989), p. 368. My notion of "affirmation" would be equivalent, I suppose, to a kind of "act of acceptance," in Cohen's terms.