RELIGION AND THE CONTEXTUALIZATION OF CRITERIA 11

JOHN J. SHEPHERD*

The distinction between truth and rationality is r/or always recognised or observed. The need for so doing is emphasised by A. MacIntyre: " A man who uses the best canons available to him may behave rationally in believing what is false, and a man Who pays no heed to the rules of evidence may behave irrationally in believing what is true. The parochialism of the liberal historians of the late Victorian Age lay in their treating as one of the criteria of rationality assent to the truth of certain propositions which they themselves affirmed; false belief they took to be a symptom of irrationality. In taking this to be the case, they certainly believed what is false and they were perhaps irrational in so doing". 23 In judging a belief to be rational therefore one may be doing something quite other than judging it with respect to truth or falsity may be but not necessarily. As MacIntyre goes on to point out: "Truth and rationality are both conceptually and empirically related. For to advance reasons is always to advance reasons for holding that a belief is true or false; and rational procedures are in fact those which yield us the only truths of which we can be assured". 24
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In the light of this it may be seen that the distifiction between truth and rationality does not allow any one person to judge a given belief held by himself to be both rational and false. If he believes that he holds the belief rationally it must be because as far as he can tell his reasons for believing are good; but by the same token he must believe that the belief is either true or more probably true than false. Conversely, the claim by any given person that any given belief, held by him or anyone else, present or past, is or was irrational, entails the claim that holders of that belief have or had no right to claim it to be true. Again where there is agreement among a group as to the rationality of their common beliefs and thus agreement about what count as good reasons for their beliefs (for where there is disagreement as to the proper grounds of a common belief any agreement about its rationality must be apparent only - - one party ought in the end to judge that as held by the *University of Lancaster, England.
23 Against the Selflmages o~ the Age, p. 248.

24 Ibid., p. 249.

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other party the belief is irrational) there must also be agreement about criteria of truth. On the other hand agreement about criteria of truth is not straightforwardly the same as agreement about what count as good reasons - - compare the difference between agreement about consistency as a criterion and agreement about what counts as consistency. Nevertheless agreement about what count as good reasons presupposes agreement about criteria o~ truth. The transition from debate about rationality to debate about truth is thus entirely natural, and it may be seen that there are in fact two further Wittgensteinian theses to be considered. On the one hand there is the thesis that criteria of truth are context-dependent; and on the other hand that what counts as a good reason is contextdependent. The latter does not presuppose the former. Nevertheless it is appropriate at least to begin by considering the former first, though as they are closely related and as they merit similar responses they may afterwards be allowed to merge. Indeed if the distinction between them were successfully impugned it would be unnecessary to alter anything essential in what follows. With regard to the alleged context-dependence of criteria of truth, certainly judgments of the truth or falsity Qf a belief do have to come from within, and to some extent under the influence of, some context or form of life. In this sense context-dependence is inevitable. Yet this is quite different from and in no way entails or even implies the view that criteria of truth should not be allowed to transcend the boundaries between forms of life - - that persons in one form of life with one set of criteria cannot with any propriety assess the beliefs of persons in another form of life by those criteria. On the contrary, not only may they do so but they are obliged to do so. For the truth-claims which they propound are intended not as claims merely about what is true for them but as claims about what is, simply, true. This holds equally for, say, the claims of Western society and the claims of the Azande or the .claims of Christians and those of non-Christians. In either case the conflict between the two groups should lead not to mutual acknowledgement of the validity of their respective truth-claims in their respective forms of life but to mutual condemnation of each other's truth-claims quite simply because their beliefs about what is the case conflict sharply. Forms of life then, such is the implication, are not compartmentalised (whether sharply or otherwise - - Winch does speak of "the overlapping character of different modes of 'social life") in the way that would be needed if the Winchian thesis were true. 25 Moreover, if it were judged to be true, would not the judgment itself depend essentially on the form of life from within which it were made? If not, why not? If so, what would that form of life be - ~ The Idea of a Social Science, p. 101.

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AND

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CONTEXTUALIZATION

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CRITERIA

II

who would be in it and who outside it? Certainly if there were people outside it, then by virtue of the content of the thesis itself the judgment of its truth would appear to be self-stultifying (and in any event, so it will be urged, precipitates radical scepticism). Yet it might be argued that there would be (are) no people outside it because it would be (is) made from within a universal form of life. Now in fact the notion of a universal form of life is worth adopting - - but not at all for use: in this way. Rather does it emphatically reinforce the anti-Winchian thesis that forms of life are not compartmentalised in the way that Winch's view requires. It may be said that beneath the diversity of forms of life there is one foTm of life to which everyone ineluctably belongs simply by virtue of being human. It is the form of life constituted by us as human explorers of the world's contents - - "world" here not being confined to the physical world but covering the totality of what is and constituting that "independent something" belief about the existence tbut not the features) of which is common to all cultures. Everyone from a baby to a particle-physicist or a witch-doctor is such an explorer. T.hus this form o~ life cuts across the boundaries of all other forms of life, and judgments about what is the case in the world - - about whether it contains such and such a feature, either river or tribe or country or supernatural entity or force - are intended in principle, simply by virtue of being judgments of that kind, to be accepted by all people of all contexts and cultures. They are judgments propounded by one group of explorers-of-theworld's-contents for consumption and acceptance by all explorers-ofthe-world's-contents. Now the necessity, as a condition of the possibility of anthropology of a bridgehead of true assertions about a shared realist means that there must in any case be some criteria of truth which transcend cultural boundaries, criteria concerned with correspondence with reality or, as it might be put, criteria of (crude'b empirical verification or falsification. Yet what is implied in the explorers-of-the-world's-contents thesis is that all proper criteria of truth should transcend all cultural boundaries. That is the ideal towards which one-should strive. Alternatively expressed, cultural conflict or conflict between forms of life concerning criteria of truth is logically akin to conflict within a given culture or form of life about criteria of truth, for example conflict within Christianity about criteria for determining whether or not a miracle has occurred, or indeed conflict between advocates of natural theology and revelationists. What happens in internal debates of this kind is that attention is drawn to other beliefs and criteria held within the form of life: and what should happen in debate between two given cultures or forms of life is precisely that attention should be drawn to other beliefs and criteria held in both and a sustained attempt made to reach a common assessment of criteria of truth. Even if agreement

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is not reached, the attempt must be made and the key to possible success is sensitivity to the whole range of relevant beliefs and criteria available. Similar remarks apply to the thesis that what counts as a good reason is culture-bound. Certainly what is taken to count as a good reason is to some extent necessarily context-dependent. It does not follow however either that this dependence is complete or that a putative good reason in one context has no pretensions to the allegiance of enquirers based in another context. The Winchian thesis here appears to identify what is taken to count as a good reason with what does count as a good reason and then infers the total culturedependence of the latter from the partial culture-dependence of the former, or it eliminates the notion of what does, "really", count as a good reason. However this notion is neither invalidated nor rendered irrelevant by the fact that there is no context-independent test of proof of "really". It is not invalidated because it can remain an ideal which acts as a focal point for our efforts at judgment - compare the distinction between "true (really or absolutely or from the standpoint of a hypothetical omniscient observer)" and "true (as gar as we: can tell)"; our ideal for the latter is the former. It is not rendered irrelevant partly by virtue of its role as an i d e a l and partly, because if cross-cultural agreement were reached, this would legitimately (as far as we can tell) be a sign even if not a proof of the discovery of what "really" count as good reasons. That such agreement is in principle impossible is an unwarranted dogma. That it should be striven for is implicit in the aspirations to universal acceptance which inhere in the very notion of a "good reason" as in the truth-claims which such reasons are intended to support. Consider again the Azande and modern Western scientific culture. The difficulties arising from the differences there as to which criteria to adopt, and as to what count as good reasons, clearly mean that initially the Azande have to disagree with Western assessment of the judgments they themselves make and the reasons they advance. Moreover, on the present view, they have every right to disagree - and would find it perfectly natural to do so unless by some means they had become Wittgensteinians. Indeed, they may have every right to argue that the Western investigator has simply not understood them properly - - may have, but not necessarily, for Winch himself for example does not deny that Evans-Pritchard has understood the Azande magic-culture. Yet,although in the initial stages of debate at least, the Azande would be acting perfectly rationally in disagreeing with external criticism, they would nevertheless be at a serious disadvantage for they would lack the benefit of full comparison between their cultural beliefs and Western scientific beliefs. Despite the difficulties of understanding with which the anthropologist is faced, it could not sensibly be denied that it is easier for him to grasp the complexities of Azande society than for a Zande to grasp

RELIGION AND THE CONTEXTUALIZATIONOF CRITERIA II the complexities of Western scientific culture. The anthropologist has the benefit of drawing on a vastly greater range of experience and education. Moreover, as B. Wilson points out, "his wider tolerance, his intellectual curiosity, and his willingness to criticise his own procedures are his initial advantages over men in other cultures. Other societies to them - - but not to h i m - are bizarre, laughable and 'un-understandable'. ''2~ Thus it is not cultural arrogance to say that the Western investigator is in something of a privileged position compared with members of primitive societies. Moreover it is not necessarily cultural arrogance if the Westener remains committed to his scientific outlook and in the light of this commitment rejects Azande beliefs as false (which incidentally in no way involve~ the claim, rightly abhorrent to Winch, that "the check of the independently real is . . . peculiar to science"). The point is that with the benefit of full comparison he finds the Azande beliefs in magic and witchcraft to be quite simply a practically and theoretically, or intellectually less fruitful, way of proceeding: they do not lead, let us say, to advanced medicine, and they answer far fewer questions about the world which we want to ask. Nor can this latter contention be undermined by arguing that what counts as a good or sensible question to ask is itself culturedependent, for once again appeal may be made to man's activity of exploring the world, and it may be further argued that the asking of questions springs from a basic human drive for intelligibility which is logically prior to the cultural channels in which it happens to find expression and which contains an in-built tendency to divest itself of contingent cultural limitations, Yet, perhaps in order to be fully satisfied with his judgment of the falsity of the Azande system of witchcraft, the Western observer would want to initiate a Zande witch-doctor, say, in the intricacies of Western scientific culture, drawing his attention to the salient beliefs and criteria embedded in it. Certainly without such a process of initiation he would claim that the Zande had not fully understood the grounds of his rejection of their system, and the argument here is further that such a process would furnish a proper basis for cross-cultural judgments of truth and falsity. Moreover this is, surely, what happens - - and in a way that vindicates the Western investigator's judgment. For it is a fact that in general beliefs in magic and witchcraft diminish as a wider range of putatively rational explanations of, or good reasons for, certain events become available to believers in magic, whereas in general commitment to the scientific outlook does not diminish as a wider range of purportedly good reasons, in copnection with a variety of non-scientific beliefs, becomes available to Westerners. This does not prove that the scientific outlook is right or even 2~ Bryan R. Wilson, "A Sociologist's Introduction", Rationality, p. xi.

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more nearly right than unscientific rivals. No proof and certainly no context-independent proof is possible. Yet it is an indication and a weighty one. It is naturally conceivable that a Zande.witch-doctor should fully understand Western scientific culture and reject it in favour of his own "primitive" outlook. Yet this disagreement between him and Westerners almost certainly would be, and there is no reason why it ought not to be, totally un-Winchian in character. For the inability to concur in each other's truth-claims in no way implies that the witch-doctor has no right to reject the Western system as false, in no way implies, much less entails, the impropriety of context-conditioned judgment as exercised on beliefs held in other forms of life. There is always a question of the extent to which one is culture-conditioned in one's commitment to certain criteria and in one's judgment both about truth and about rationality. Yet, at the end of the day one has to rely on one's informed judgment, however warped it may in fact still be, simply because there is nothing better on which to rely. And if it is informed then one has fulfilled one's obligation to oneself as an explorer of the world's contents. For cultural conditioning is an obstacle calling to be surmounted, not a force to be submitted to. The fact that it cannot finally be overcome does not mean that the attempt should not be made or that actual attempts do not meet with significantly greater or lesser degrees of success. As explorers of the world's contents we are all, irrespective of the contingencies of our environmental conditioning, committed to seeking nothing less than the maximum degree of
Success.

If this is true in an extreme case like cultural debate between Zande and Westerners, }lOW much truer is it in the case of the intracultural debate between Christian believers and non-theistic critics of Christianity? With regard to criteria of truth and to what count as good reasons, it is wholly unacceptable to suppose that there is here an in-principle unbridgeable gulf between theists and non-tbeists. By what would such a gulf he constituted? Presumably not by a failure on the part of non-theists to understand the criteria or the grounds of belief themselves. By failure then to see the way in which the grounds adduced count as good reasons, or by failure to accept the criteria ? Yet in numerous cases the non-theist both sees clearly the way in which a given ground is taken to count as a good reason not least because frequently he used to be a believer himself - and also is able to show to the satisfaction even of believers that there is something wrong about so counting it. This weighs very heavily against ruling out the very possibility of his locating or indeed having located similar genuine errors with respect to other grounds sincerely held by the believer to be sound. Moreover it is an act of circumspection, to put it no higher, not to exclude the
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RELIGION AND THE CONTEXTUALIZATIONOF CRITERIA II possibility of the theist's finding a way of circumventing difficulties raised by the non-theist, thereby repairing an apparently discredited reason, and indeed of his being able to convince the non-theist of the soundness of the refurbished justification. Again, one cannot with any plausibility rule out the very possibility of the non-theist's acknowledging that the theist is right to accept a given reason as a good reason for belief even though he himself cannot so accept it because they are using different criteria. Even after debate, let us suppose, they cannot agree about the propriety of a given criterion and so agree to differ about the worth of a putative justification. This seems perfectly feasible but it clearly presupposes that the non-theist understands the way in which the grounds adduced count as good reasons, as also o f course the right of either party to pronounce the other mistaken. Finally, disagreement about criteria could constitute a gulf unbridgeable even in principle only if the criteria used by the theist relied essentially on his prior theistic belief. In that case however he would be arguing in a circle which in the light of the preceding discussion should appear as vicious to him as to non-believers, for he would be relying on criteria peculiar to him as a believer rather than on criteria in-principle common to all as ex)~lorers of the world's contents. "Criteria have a history". 27 Taken as referring to criteria of truth MacIntyre's remark pin-points the great weakness of the Winchian thesis with regard to cultural differences and of Phillips' application of it to religion. The history may be personal or interpersonal, cultural or cross.cultural. The scope of application of criteria may broaden or narrow, they may spill over the boundaries of a given form of life into another or others or withdraw into one particular form of life according as, for various reasons, this comes to seem appropriate. The point is, however, that the legitimate range of their applicability, as also its manner (which covers the question of what count as good reasons), is settled and re-settled in an ongoing process of reasoned discrimination which in practice and in accord with its inner dynamism tends towards a transcending of the frontiers of cultures and forms of life. Thus it is that social practices change. Certain forms of life may, or all forms of life may partly, wither without being consciously rejected. Yet rejection on intellectual grounds and with full understanding of the form of life in question certainly occurs. Indeed not only is it not the case that all forms of life are necessarily immune to requests for justification, but without this supposition, as MacIntyre argues elsewhere, "certain actual historical transitions are made unintelligible; I refer to those transitions from one system of beliefs to another which are necessarily characterised by raising questions of the kind that Winch rejects. In seventeenth century Scotland, for example, the question could not but be raised, 'But are there witches?' If Winch asks, from within '-'7 MacIntyre, "Is Understanding Religion Compatible with Believing?" in Faith and the Philosophers, p. 120.

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what way of social life, under what system of belief was this question asked, the only answer is that it was asked by men who confronted alternative systems and were able to draw out of what confronted them independent criteria of judgment. Many Africans today are in the same situation". 2s Many Christians too are in an essentially similar situation. This is not the place to embark on an analysis of actual criteria but reference to one is most apposite. Sceptics both inside and outside Christianity ~not to mention most other spheres of life) rely heavily on the principle of parsimony or Occam's razor. Indeed, even where there is a tendency, say on the part of rather dogmatic or unreflective believers, to be indulgent in its use with regard to the existence of God, it is not eschewed entirely. Thus no theologian postulates that God is four-in-one since he can get away with threein.one; and the traditional claim is that theologians only postulate three-in-one at all because of the exigencies of doing full justice to their data. This principle of parsimony may now be seen to have its roots in the very deepest level of rational thought. For it asserts that, particularly with regard to objects other than inescapable empirical ones, one should not believe that an entity exists without good reasons for the belief; and the giving of good reasons for such beliefs is, we have seen, an apparendy universal practice, certainly embracing all the types of human society of which we have any knowledge. There is every justification therefore for regarding it as an independent criterion (independent, that is, of restrictive cultural conditioning) to be employed in the task of determining the world's contents. Its universality may be seen as a sign of its necessity for man, and its reliability may be judged by its apparent success in practice. Debate across the boundary between theists and non-theists has already proved extremely fruitful in the negative sense that spurious grounds of belief trave been laid bare. There is perhaps some hope that it may prove equally fruitful in a positive sense by leading to the formulation of good grounds of belief i.e. of grounds which believer and non-believer alike can in principle agree to be good. Certainly nothing has been considered here in the Winchian-Wittgensteinian thesis advocated by Phillips that can legitimately count as a veto on the very possibility of such a hope's being fulfilled. Finally mention may be made of the possibility of debate between religions rather than between Christian and humanist sceptics. Despite its importance however this issue may be treated very briefly since nothing essentially novel is involved (though questions could be raised about what is to count as a form of life - presumably not religion as such but particular religions, though many of Phillips's remarks tend to suggest the contrary). Phillips
2s Maclntyre, "The Idea of a Social Science", in Rationality, p. 129.

RELIGION AND THE CONTEXTUALIZATIONOF CRITERIA II denies that philosophy has a role to play here and denies too that he has "guaranteed that any possible answer is favourable to religion by insisting that the criteria of intelligibility in religious matters are to be found within religion". " T o say that the criteria of truth and falsity in religion are to be found within religious traditions is to say nothing of the truth or falsity o/ the religion in question". 29 This is painfully inadequate however. A Confucian and a Christian for example are not going to limit themselves to discussing whether, in the context of Christianity, it is true that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son rather than only from the Father, irrespective of the truth or falsity of the claim that there is a Father for a Holy Spirit to proceed from. If there is to. be genuine inter-religious debate (as Phillips admits there may be) rather than preaching or unproductive polemic it must (and despite Phillips, may) contain putative justification, philosophical in character, of basic doctrinal claims such as "God exists". On the other hand, if the thesis about forms of life were applied consistently it would follow that someone could be a Christian, a Zoroastrian, a Buddhist and a Taoist, say, all at once. This is as unacceptable as it is unfeasible, though it is apparently in accord with the thesis of religious unity advocated by figures like Swami Vivekananda and S. Radhakrishnan and thus qualifies Phillips for a place in the doubtless select band of Welsh Hindus2 ~

2~ The Concept o/ Prayer, p. 27, italics added. Cf. "Philosophy, Theologyand the Reality of God", Faith and Philosophical Enqtdry, pp. 8-12. 3o Cf. Ninian Smart, The Yogi and the Devotee: The Interplay between the Upanishads and Catholic Theology (London: Allen and Unwin, 1968),

chapter 4.