Hostname: page-component-7bb8b95d7b-wpx69 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-09-18T18:51:54.926Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The epistemic benefits of religious disagreement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 February 2019

KATHERINE DORMANDY Open the ORCID record for KATHERINE DORMANDY [Opens in a new window]
KATHERINE DORMANDY*
Affiliation:
Department of Christian Philosophy, Karl-Rahner Platz 1, 6020Innsbruck, Austria
*
e-mail: katherine.dormandy@uibk.ac.at
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Scientific researchers welcome disagreement as a way of furthering epistemic aims. Religious communities, by contrast, tend to regard it as a potential threat to their beliefs. But I argue that religious disagreement can help achieve religious epistemic aims. I do not argue this by comparing science and religion, however. For scientific hypotheses are ideally held with a scholarly neutrality, and my aim is to persuade those who are committed to religious beliefs that religious disagreement can be epistemically beneficial for them too.

Type
Original Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 56 , Issue 3 , September 2020 , pp. 390 - 408
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alston, William (1991) Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press).Google Scholar
Anderson, Elizabeth (1995) ‘Knowledge, human interests, and objectivity in feminist epistemology’, Philosophical Topics, 23.2, 27–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Antony, Louise (2016) ‘Reflections on Saulish skepticism’, in Brownstein, Michael & Saul, Jennifer (eds) Implicit Bias and Philosophy, I: Metaphysics and Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 157–190.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Basinger, David (2002) Religious Diversity: A Philosophical Assessment (London: Routledge).Google Scholar
Bishop, John (2007) Believing by Faith: An Essay in the Epistemology and Ethics of Religious Belief (Oxford: Oxford: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boudry, Maarten (2013) ‘The hypothesis that saves the day: ad hoc reasoning in pseudoscience’, Logique et Analyse, 223, 245–258.Google Scholar
Brownstein, Michael & Saul, Jennifer (eds) (2016) Implicit Bias and Philosophy, I: Metaphysics and Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Chabris, Christopher & Simons, Daniel (2011) The Invisible Gorilla and Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us (New York: Crown).Google Scholar
Conee, Earl & Feldman, Richard (2004) Evidentialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Cruz, Helen & De Smedt, Johan (2013) ‘The value of epistemic disagreement in scientific practice: the case of Homo floresiensis’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 44, 169–177.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dougherty, Trent (2014) ‘Faith, trust, and testimony: an evidentialist account’, in Callahan, Laura Frances & O'Connor, Timothy (eds) Religious Faith and Intellectual Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 98–124.Google Scholar
Dormandy, Katherine (2018a) ‘Disagreement from the religious margins’, Res Philosophica, 95, 371–395.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dormandy, Katherine (2018b) ‘Resolving religious disagreements: evidence and bias’, Faith and Philosophy, 35, 56–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dormandy, Katherine (2018c) ‘Does epistemic humility threaten religious beliefs?’, Journal of Psychology and Theology, 46, 292–304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feldman, Richard (2007) ‘Reasonable religious disagreement’, in Antony, Louise (ed.) Philosophers without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 194–214.Google Scholar
Fricker, Miranda (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gellman, Jerome (2000) ‘In defense of a contented religious exclusivism’, Religious Studies, 36, 401–417.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gigerenzer, Gerd, Todd, Peter M. & The ABC Research Group (2000) Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Goldberg, Sanford C. (2014) ‘Does externalist epistemology rationalize religious commitment?’, in Callahan, Laura Frances & O'Connor, Timothy (eds) Religious Faith and Intellectual Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 279–298.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hogg, Michael A., & Vaughan, Graham M. (2014) Social Psychology (Harlow: Pearson Education).Google Scholar
Howson, Colin & Urbach, Peter (1993) Scientific Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach, 2nd edn (La Salle IL: Open Court).Google Scholar
Hundleby, Catherine (2016) ‘Implicit bias and fallacies of argumentation’, in Brownstein, Michael & Saul, Jennifer (eds) Implicit Bias and Philosophy, I: Metaphysics and Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 238–264.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
James, William (1921) The Will to Believe, Human Immortality, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, on Human Immortality (New York & London: Longmans, Green, & Co.).Google Scholar
Janis, Irving L. (1982) Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, 2nd edn (New York: Houghton Mifflin).Google Scholar
Kahneman, Daniel (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux).Google Scholar
King, Nathan (2012) ‘Disagreement: what's the problem? Or a good peer is hard to find’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 85, 249–272.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kitcher, P. (1993) The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Longino, Helen (1990) Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (Princeton: Princeton University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Longino, Helen (2002) The Fate of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mack, Arien & Rock, Irvin (1998) Inattentional Blindness (Cambridge MA: MIT Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, Michael (1990) Atheism: A Philosophical Justification (Philadelphia: Temple University Press).Google Scholar
Mcgrew, Lydia (2014) ‘On not counting the cost: ad hocness and disconfirmation’, Acta Analytica, 29, 491–505.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McKim, Robert (2001) Religious Ambiguity and Religious Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McKim, Robert (2012) On Religious Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mills, Charles (2007) ‘White ignorance’, in Sullivan, Shannon & Tuana, Nancy (eds) Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (Albany: State University of New York Press), 13–38.Google Scholar
Moroney, Stephen K. (1999) The Noetic Effects of Sin: An Historical and Contemporary Exploration of How Sin Affects Our Thinking (Lanham: Lexington Books).Google Scholar
Philipse, Herman (2014) God in the Age of Science? (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Plantinga, Alvin (2000a) ‘Pluralism: a defense of exclusivism’, in Meeker, Kevin & Quinn, Philip L. (eds) The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 172–192.Google Scholar
Plantinga, Alvin (2000b) Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saul, Jennifer (2012) ‘Ranking exercises in philosophy and implicit bias’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 43, 256–273.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schellenberg, John (2007) The Wisdom to Doubt: A Justification of Religious Skepticism (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press).Google Scholar
Solomon, Sheldon, Greenberg, Jeff, & Pyszczynski, Tom (1991) ‘A terror management theory of social behavior: the psychological functions of self-esteem and cultural worldviews’, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 24, 93–159.Google Scholar
Solomon, Miriam (2001) Social Empiricism (Cambridge MA: MIT Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wynn, Mark (2017) ‘Tradition’, in Abraham, William J. & Aquino, Frederick D. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 126–140.Google Scholar
Zagzebski, Linda (2017) ‘Authority in religious communities’, in Abraham, William J. & Aquino, Frederick D. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 97–110.Google Scholar
Zeimbekis, John & Raftopoulos, Athanassios (eds) (2015) The Cognitive Penetrability of Perception: New Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar