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Thesis Alston’s parity argument fails because rival mystical practices contradict each other

Lars Eriksen Fellow
· 5 replies
Faith & reasonAnalyticIndianMedieval ChristianAdi ShankaraWilliam Alston#doxastic-practice#epistemic-circularity#perceiving-god#religious-diversity
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Where it stands

I want to defend a fairly standard objection, but coming from physics I want to state it carefully, because I think the usual version undersells Alston.

Alston's move in Perceiving God (1991) is clever. We cannot justify trusting sense perception without relying on sense perception somewhere along the way. Every calibration of an instrument uses other instruments, and eventually eyes. So circularity cannot by itself disqualify a belief-forming practice. Christian mystical practice, he argues, is socially established, has internal checks (an "overrider system" drawn from scripture, tradition and the lives of the saints), and produces beliefs that hang together. If circularity does not sink perception, it should not sink this.

I accept the circularity point completely. Physics lives with it.

Here is where I think the parity breaks. Sense perception is practised in Copenhagen and in Accra, by Buddhists and by Catholics, and the outputs agree to a remarkable degree. Everyone sees the same tree and measures roughly the same boiling point. Mystical practices, run in parallel, produce a personal God who acts and loves, an impersonal Brahman with which the self is identical, and an insight that there is no abiding self at all. These are not different descriptions of the same object. At most one is right.

So for any single practice, the base rate of reliability across practices that look structurally identical from the outside is low, and a participant has no non-circular way to show that theirs is the reliable one. That is a disanalogy with perception, not an analogy.

If I remember correctly, Alston himself treated religious diversity as the hardest problem for his view. I think it is fatal rather than merely hard. Who wants to argue it is not?

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5 replies

For the thesis 2

  1. Arjun Iyer

    For Fellow

    For, from an unexpected direction.

    As an Advaitin I would be very happy to say that the outputs only conflict at the level of interpretation, and that Teresa and a Zen monk and Shankara are pointing at the same thing badly described. But notice what that costs Alston. His whole case is that Christian mystical practice yields justified beliefs about a personal God who forgives and guides. If you rescue the practice by saying "they are all touching one reality", you have moved to Stace's common core and given up the specific beliefs Alston wanted to justify.

    So the diversity objection forces a choice: keep the content and accept the reliability problem, or keep reliability and lose the content.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Kenneth Lam Chi-ho

    For Fellow

    For. A detail people miss: the conflict is not only in doctrine but in reported phenomenology. Yogacara meditation manuals and Carmelite writing do not describe the same states with different labels; they describe different sequences of states, with different markers of progress and different warnings about what counts as a false experience.

    And the "internal checks" Alston relies on are drawn from the same scripture and tradition that generate the content. Within each practice the overrider system will reliably confirm that practice. That is not a test, it is a family resemblance.

Against the thesis 2

  1. Aoife Kilbride

    Against Fellow

    Against, though I take the force of it.

    Alston's reply, as I understand it, is to imagine rival perceptual practices: cultures that conceptualise what they see in radically different ways, say as Aristotelian substances, or as Whiteheadian events. If such a culture existed, would that make it irrational for us to keep forming perceptual beliefs our way? He thinks not. Absent a neutral way to adjudicate, it is reasonable to continue in an established practice that is working for you, though with somewhat less confidence.

    Your boiling-point convergence matters, but it is a convergence at the level of predictions. The rival metaphysical schemes in his thought experiment would agree on those too. So perhaps the right comparison is between practices that agree on the "practical" layer (humility, love of neighbour, detachment) and diverge on the theoretical.

    Helpful · 1
    1. Lars Eriksen

      Fellow

      Aoife, that's the best version of the reply and I've been chewing on it. My hesitation is that in physics the rival conceptual schemes are not really rivals; they make the same predictions, so we treat them as notational variants. If the mystical practices agree only on "practical" outputs, then by the same logic the theological content is idle. That supports Arjun's dilemma rather than escaping it.

      What would be the mystical analogue of a prediction that could fail?

      Helpful · 3
  2. Miriam Adler

    Against Fellow

    Against, though partly. The objection assumes mystical perception issues in propositions, so that the outputs can contradict one another. Maimonides would be uneasy with that whole picture: what you can say of God is mainly what God is not. If the reports are attempts at description of something that exceeds predicates, then apparent contradictions might be failures of description rather than of perception.

    I admit this moves towards the ineffability position, and Alston would not thank me for it, since a perception that supports no statable belief is a strange thing to call evidence.

    Helpful · 1