Religious Disagreement, Mystical Experience, and Doxastic Minimalism: Critical Notice of John Pittard’s Disagreement, Deference, and Religious Commitment

In his recent book, Disagreement, Deference, and Religious Commitment, John Pittard challenges J.L. Schellenberg’s rejection of mystical experience as worthy of enjoying presumptive doxastic trust for two main reasons. First, Pittard holds that Schellenberg wrongly focuses only on avoiding error while placing no emphasis on gaining truth. I argue that, contra Pittard, Schellenberg’s account nicely balances the competing epistemic goals of gaining truth and avoiding error. Second, Pittard thinks that Schellenberg’s criteria for presumptive trust in that of universality and unavoidability are arbitrary. I counter that Schellenberg’s criteria are not arbitrary since they are the best way of achieving these goals. I conclude that despite not enjoying presumptive doxastic trust, this in itself does not entail that mystical experiences are never trustworthy.

Contemplating One’s Nagel

This critical notice of Nagel’s The View from Nowhere argues that Nagel runs two distinct conceptions of objectivity together, in a way that unsettles many of the main conclusions of his book. The ‘Hegelian conception’ involves stepping back from our view of the world to a new conception about the relation between that view and the world so viewed. The ‘absolute conception’ requires us to eliminate from our view of the world any element which can be seen as a product of one’s own perspective. If one tries to combine these two conceptions, the result is likely to be unstable.

Critical notice of Words and Contents, by Richard Vallée

Section I gives an overview of the contents of “Words and Contents”, and lays out the plan for this Critical Notice. Section II expounds Vallée’s Perry-inspired Pluri-Propositional semantic framework, and Section III is an in-depth case study, focused on complex demonstratives. In Sections IV-V we develop some criticisms, and in Section VI we suggest a solution to these difficulties, which builds on Vallée’s innovative work.