Religious Hinges: Some Historical Precursors

Abstract

Recently, hinge epistemologists have applied Wittgenstein’s metaphor of hinges to religious belief. The most prominent proposal in this context is Pritchard’s “quasi-fideism”. This paper examines some historical precursors of the notion of religious hinges, with the aim of shedding more light on it. After outlining the framework of hinge epistemology and its application to religious belief, I briefly examine the views of Thomas Reid and John Henry Newman as acknowledged forerunners of this framework (or cognate views). Next, I turn to two hitherto unacknowledged forerunners, the pragmatists William James and Charles S. Peirce. I then focus on some insights that the pragmatists offer. On this basis, I conclude that religious beliefs are a special class of hinges. As such, while they can be defended through hinge epistemology, they cannot constitute a model through which we can interpret the nature of hinges in general.

1 Introduction

The epistemic status of religious belief has often puzzled philosophers (both believers and non-believers) and has been characterized in various ways.¹ Religious beliefs, especially the deepest and most basic convictions that shape one’s religion, seem to constitute a foundation for a believer’s life. And yet, they also seem to lack a rational foundation outside faith itself. Religious beliefs in this sense are “groundless grounds” for the believer. Because of these features, in contemporary epistemology a comparison is sometimes drawn between religious beliefs and what the later Wittgenstein called “hinges”, that is, ungrounded presuppositions that ground and shape our epistemic (and non-epistemic) practices. The most prominent proposal in this context is Pritchard’s “quasi-fideism” (Pritchard 2018). Pritchard distinguishes between the most fundamental religious beliefs, that for more clarity he calls religious convictions (e.g., “God exists”), and ordinary religious beliefs (e.g., “Judas betrayed Jesus”): the former ground the latter but are themselves groundless.² This parallels Wittgenstein’s distinction between hinges and ordinary empirical beliefs, and it allows Pritchard to put forth a novel position in religious epistemology that avoids the shortcomings of both fideism and evidentialism. On this view, religious convictions are framed as hinge commitments: they themselves are groundless and arational, but are nevertheless legitimate grounds for religious beliefs and for a religious person’s life generally. This paper examines some historical precursors of this idea. I touch on Thomas Reid, whose position has been appealed to by the proponents of reformed epistemology (a perspective that bears similarities with quasi-fideism), and John Henry Newman, whose affinities with the Wittgensteinian perspective and quasi-fideism have already been highlighted. I then turn to the pragmatists William James and Charles S. Peirce. I claim that both thinkers anticipated the notion of religious hinges. However, they did so in a distinctive way, one that is marked by an ethics of faith as self-experimentation. The pragmatists emphasize that religious beliefs are a (special kind of) hypothesis. This insight will allow us to highlight some important features of religious hinges that set them apart from basic and commonsensical hinges. On this basis, I conclude that religious beliefs are a special class of hinges. As such, while they can be defended through hinge epistemology, they cannot constitute a model through which we can interpret the nature of hinges in general.

2 Hinge Epistemology and Religious Convictions: A Preliminary Assessment

Hinge epistemology, as outlined in Coliva (2015), Coliva and Moyal-Sharrock (2016), and Pritchard (2016), is roughly a family of positions in epistemology, which all share the acknowledgment of the pivotal role of what the later Wittgenstein called “hinges”, that is, basic common-sense certainties, background assumptions, presuppositions, or commitments that accompany empirical judgments and ground their validity. Here is the key metaphor:

[...T]he questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn.

That is to say, it belongs to the logic of our scientific investigations that certain things are indeed not doubted.

But it isn’t that the situation is like this: We just can’t investigate everything, and for that reason we are forced to rest content with assumption. If I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put (Wittgenstein 1966, hereafter OC, pp. 341-43³).

Examples of hinges are that there is an external world, that my name is so-and-so, that I am a human being, that the Earth has existed for a very long time, and the like. What is peculiar about these certainties is that they constitute the taken-for-granted background of ordinary knowledge claims, and so they are not, cannot, and need not be themselves grounded in anything more basic or proved by empirical means. Hinge epistemology emerged from a few decades of debate and reflection on this notion, a reflection nurtured by works such as McGinn (1989), Stroll (1994), Wright (2004), Moyal-Sharrock (2005), and Coliva (2010), among others. The main focus of hinge epistemology has been mostly on the possibility of making use of this Wittgenstein-inspired framework to refute or dissolve the skeptical challenge. But this field of research also fosters new reflection on the very nature of hinges and their relationship with ordinary propositions and beliefs, and thus brings to the fore their centrality in our epistemic practices and in our lives generally. Moreover, hinge epistemology is recently expanding its reach towards a broader array of topics (Moyal-Sharrock and Sandis 2022; Coliva forthcoming). It is within this wider scope that the comparison between hinges and religious convictions proves fruitful.

A preliminary caveat before proceeding. There are different versions of hinge epistemology, and each has its own set of distinctive claims. What I am interested in here is not adjudicating between these versions, but offering a broad characterization of hinge epistemology, one that hopefully encompasses all variants and enables us to draw meaningful historical connections. In this sense, I see hinge epistemology as a position characterized by the acknowledgment of the unwarrantability and groundlessness of certain basic presuppositions, not only inevitably laying at the basis of our epistemic practices, but also allowing for the very rationality of such practices. Therefore, the central claim shared by all hinge epistemologists, I submit, is that hinges are prerequisites for rational epistemic practices.

With this in mind, let us turn to the more specific scope of the paper, that is, religious hinges. There is something prima facie analogous between the ungrounded yet grounding role of hinges with respect to our empirical beliefs, judgments, and actions, and the ungrounded yet grounding role of fundamental religious beliefs with respect to a believer’s life on the whole. Just like hinges, fundamental religious beliefs cannot be proven by appealing to evidence, and at the same time they constitute the very bases and criteria of the believer’s judgment, conduct, and overall attitude toward life. In this sense, a proposition like “God exists” is (for the believer) broadly similar in its epistemological status to a proposition like “there is an external world” (cf. Pritchard 2000): neither can be proven precisely because they are a constitutive part of our frame of reference for judgment and behavior.

This view of religious belief has allowed scholars to oppose the idea, widespread until not long ago among both philosophers of religion and Wittgenstein commentators, that Wittgenstein should be considered a fideist (Nielsen 1967; Nielsen and Phillips 2005; see Mulhall 2011; Graham 2014 for alternative views). According to fideism, faith is, roughly put, independent of reason; faith is its own justification, and it is superior to reason in the pursuit of religious truth. Proponents of the fideist reading of Wittgenstein often cite Wittgenstein’s lectures on religious belief, where one can find remarks such as the following:

Suppose someone were a believer and said: “I believe in a Last Judgement,” and I said: “Well, I’m not so sure. Possibly.” You would say that there is an enormous gulf between us. (...) These controversies look quite different from any normal controversies. Reasons look entirely different from normal reasons.

They are, in a way, quite inconclusive.

We don’t talk about hypothesis, or about high probability. Nor about knowing. In a religious discourse we use such expressions as : “I believe that so and so will happen,” and use them differently to the way in which we use them in science.

If I even vaguely remember what I was taught about God, I might say: “Whatever believing in God may be, it can’t be believing in something we can test, or find means of testing” (LC, 53, 56, 57, 60).

These notes describe religious belief as something that cannot be tested, proven or disproven, held or withheld in the same way as ordinary empirical beliefs can. They describe religious controversies as well as the discussions between a believer and a non-believer as being beyond rational argumentation. This also entails that since religion is a sort of self-contained form of life governed by its own grammar, fundamental religious beliefs are not subject to rational criticism, and religious disagreements are rationally unresolvable.

However, Wittgenstein’s view of religion is more sophisticated than this reading suggests, and his account of the epistemic status of religious belief is more subtle. According to Pritchard (2018, 2022), the analogy with hinges allows us to see that the most fundamental religious beliefs, or religious “convictions,” are not beliefs as epistemologists usually characterizes them; they are, rather, the grounds for beliefs. Ordinary religious beliefs—such as “Judas betrayed Jesus,” or (for Catholics) “the Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ”—are grounded, and rationally so, in the basic religious conviction, and this works just like a basic hinge commitment. Since, just like a hinge, religious conviction is not strictly speaking a belief, it does not need to be grounded or evidentially supported. Such groundlessness does not make it irrational, however. Indeed, the analogy with hinges allows for a sort of “parity argument”: there is nothing particularly troublesome or peculiar in the epistemic status of religious convictions, because all hinges, not only religious ones, are “essentially brute and arational in nature” (Pritchard 2018, 60). We can now characterize what Pritchard calls “quasi-fideism.” Like fideism, this view acknowledges that religious convictions are arational (not irrational); unlike fideism, and much like hinge epistemology, it does not set them apart from other non-religious commitments. On the contrary, quasi-fideism claims that what applies to hinges in general also applies to religious hinges—that is, it is possible to defend religious convictions and religious beliefs from the charge of irrationality by appealing to the fact that all rational believing presupposes and requires basic arational hinge commitments.⁴

We have seen how present-day hinge epistemology can be applied to religious convictions. Let us now turn to some precursors of this framework.

3 Acknowledged Forerunners: Reid and Newman

Hinge epistemology is not a new perspective: it is a new systematic account of a perspective that has historical predecessors. While reflection on the groundlessness of fundamental certainties is, of course, rooted in the skeptical tradition, which, through David Hume, can be traced back to Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus, the specific acknowledgment of the role played by hinges in our epistemic practices has also been highlighted by some modern philosophers, though under different labels and with different aims.

Thomas Reid, to name one, famously responded to the skeptical challenge by claiming that doubting common sense amounts to being in conflict with human nature (1997, 2002). In his view, it is by our natural constitution that we instinctively adhere to the principles of common sense. On these grounds, there is no need to confute the skeptic: it is the skeptic, by advancing a position plainly against common sense, who must meet the burden of proof. In the domain of common sense, alongside grammatical, logical, and mathematical truths, as well as the axioms of morality and aesthetics, Reid also included beliefs such as the following: that which is directly perceived does in fact exist: and that which we remember did effectively happen. Indeed, one of his first principles is that “the natural faculties, by which we distinguish truth from error, are not fallacious”; he explains: “In every instance of assent, whether upon intuitive, demonstrative, or probable evidence, the truth of our faculties is taken for granted, and is, as it were, one of the premises on which our assent is grounded” (Reid 2002, 480, 481).

From this perspective, taking commonsense principles for granted is a prerequisite for rational thinking itself. This shows an undoubtedly strong affinity with hinge epistemology. Needless to say, there are also important differences between the Reidian appeal to common sense and hinge epistemology. Besides Reid’s claim that common sense is a “gift of heaven” and his attempt to list the principles of common sense (contrary to the Wittgensteinian understanding of hinges), one may note that among Reid’s first principles there are a number of claims that appear to be quite theoretical and, in any case, not so self-evident and obvious as Reid thinks of them (see Reid 2002, Essay 6 on Judgment). Think for instance of the metaphysical principles that he includes among the first principles of necessary truths, such as that “anything that begins to exist must have a cause that produced it”, or “If something shows marks or signs of design and intelligence, we can infer with certainty that there was design and intelligence in its cause”. Additionally, Reid affirms that although they cannot be proven, first principles can be confirmed by certain ways of reasoning. They may, for instance, admit of a proof ad absurdum, and the rejection of a first principle may admit of a valid argument ad hominem against it. But providing arguments for or against hinges makes little sense from a Wittgensteinian standpoint. And yet, the vindication of the inevitability and legitimacy of unproven presuppositions of rational thinking, is, I believe, a sufficient reason to consider Reid among the forerunners of hinge epistemology (in the loose sense described above). Some of his first principles indeed do sound like hinges; think, for instance, of “Things that we clearly perceive by our senses really exist and really are what we perceive them to be”, “The natural faculties by which we distinguish truth from error are not deceptive”, or “There is life and thought in our fellow-men [sic] with whom we converse”.

Regarding religious hinges, while hinge epistemologists do not draw connections with Reid’s thought, proponents of reformed epistemology do appeal to Reid’s work on the principles of common sense (e.g., Plantinga and Wolterstorff 1984). Besides highlighting the anti-foundational and anti-Cartesian project embodied in Reid’s perspective, indeed, they attempt to extend it to the religious domain. Reformed epistemology claims that religious belief (in particular belief in God) is basic and does not need to be either inferred from or justified by other truths, because it is based on a sort of perceptual religious faculty. Reformed epistemologists thus oppose evidentialism, just like quasi-fideism. But they do so by positing a religious faculty, which quasi-fideism does not need to do.⁵ William Alston (1991), one of the main proponents of reformed epistemology, for instance, claims that God can be directly perceived. He exploits the analogy between sense perception and the perception of God, and notes that in both cases the justification of perceptual belief inevitably rests on “established doxastic practices” (1991, chap. 4). He builds on both Reid and the later Wittgenstein⁶ and claims that established doxastic practices (what Reid called “the grounds for belief”, or “general principles of human constitution”) are “acceptable as innocent until proven guilty” (153). By this he means that we use established doxastic practices before we reflect on them, and that they are partly innate and partly social and learned (164–65).⁷ Since on his view it is rational to suppose that established doxastic practices are reliable, and mystical perception is (just like ordinary sensory perception) an established doxastic practice, he concludes that the belief-forming practice based on mystical experience satisfies the conditions for rational acceptance. Alvin Plantinga (1993, 2000), another proponent of reformed epistemology, combines a Reidian epistemological framework with insights from Aquinas and Calvin. Similar to Alston, Plantinga posits a faculty of religious perception, the sensus divinitatis—a disposition to form theistic beliefs in certain circumstances. Such a disposition resembles perception, memory, and a priori belief (2000, 175). Unlike inference and argument, it allows one to know God in an immediate way. The sensus divinitatis indeed “can produce theistic belief which is (1) taken in the basic way and (2), so taken, can indeed have warrant, and warrant sufficient for knowledge” (2000, 186).

Although proponents of reformed epistemology see their views as coherent with a Reidian approach and treat religious belief on the model of Reid’s anti-foundational epistemology, as has been highlighted (Nichols and Callengård 2011), Reid himself did not do so. In dealing with religious belief, he did not highlight aspects that characterize the principles of common sense, such as universality, consent of ages and nations, and being held independently of education and acculturation. He did not posit a religious belief-forming faculty, nor did he refer to the perception or apprehension of God. Reformed epistemologists, therefore, in their use of Reid, risk “cherry-picking” (Nichols and Callengård 2011). More generally, for our purposes, though Reid anticipated a number of tenets of hinge epistemology with respect to his views on common sense (with the differences highlighted above), he did not interpret religious belief in this framework.

Someone who did make this connection explicit is John Henry Newman.

Wittgenstein cites Newman in the very first remark of OC, where he writes:

If you do know that here is one hand, we’ll grant you all the rest.

When one says that such and such a proposition can’t be proved, of course that does not mean that it can’t be derived from other propositions; any proposition can be derived from other ones. But they may be no more certain than it is itself. (On this a curious remark by H. Newman.) (OC § 1).

While “here is one hand” is a reference to G. E. Moore, and Wittgenstein’s indebtedness to Moore is widely studied, the literature on the relevance that John Henry Newman might have had in the development of the later Wittgenstein’s ideas is relatively scarce.⁸ According to Kienzler (2006), the “curious [komische] remark” mentioned by Wittgenstein could be a passage from A Grammar of Assent in which Newman (1870: 291) reflects on a practical inference drawn from one concrete fact to another concrete fact. In this kind of inference, he argues, to apply a logical syllogism would result in obscurity. In order to prove the proposition: “We shall have a European war, for Greece is audaciously defying Turkey,” he explains, it is pointless to appeal to the logical argument “All audacious defiance of Turkey on the part of Greece must end in a European war; these present acts of Greece are such; ergo…”, because its major premise is actually more difficult to accept than the conclusion. Newman’s aim here is to point to the role of “illative sense” in our understanding and reasoning. Illative sense is a natural human faculty, also shaped by social and cultural upbringing, which allows closing the logical gaps in concrete reasoning, thus providing us with the practical certainty of everyday life.

Without expanding on this, even a quick look at Newman’s Grammar of Assent shows that there are a number of striking affinities between his and Wittgenstein’s perspectives. Newman for instance talks of “presumptions” (57 ff.) and “simple” or “spontaneous” assent (150 ff.), which characterizes the acceptance without reflection of propositions and “first principles” that are unconditionally taken to be true. This, he explains, is very common in everyday life. Examples are the beliefs that the earth is a globe, that there are cities called London, Florence, etc., that everyone has parents, that Britain is an island, that there is an external world (167–171). We take these beliefs for granted without the need to support them with further justification. Religious beliefs, according to Newman, are akin to these everyday beliefs to which we normally give our assent, and precisely like them, they do not need to be backed up or justified either by evidence or by reasoning (though, it must be added, the possibility is not ruled out by Newman).

While Newman and Reid have been acknowledged as either forerunners or inspirers of the idea of religious hinges (with the distinctions that we just noted), another philosophical tradition that has strong but unacknowledged connections with this perspective is American pragmatism, specifically the pragmatism of William James and Charles S. Peirce.⁹ This is the topic of the next two sections.

4 Unacknowledged Forerunners: The Pragmatists

William James mentions Newman in works such as “The Will to Believe” and The Varieties of Religious Experience, (James 1979: 19 and 1985: 343–344, 349, 362), and in spite of some criticism he has much in common with him (Ferreira 1988; Sands 2003). In particular, like Newman, James emphasized the empirical groundlessness of religious belief and pointed to “the unanalysability of warrant for fundamental and legitimate beliefs” (Ferreira’s 1988: 45), a theme on which both clearly anticipate Wittgenstein.

James’ best-known argument for the justification of religious belief is in “The Will to Believe”, where (just like Newman and Reid) he notices that not only in religion, but also in many other parts of our life, ordinary beliefs are not based on evidence. In matters of fact, James acknowledges, it would be obviously silly to claim that we can believe at will, regardless of the evidence (1979: 17). But there are countless cases that we just cannot and ordinarily do not decide based on evidence. For instance, in beliefs concerning “molecules and the conservation of energy, democracy and necessary progress, or Protestant Christianity” (18), we ordinarily give in to our “willing nature”, that is, we give in to “fear and hope, prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship”, as well as the “passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up” (19). Therefore, more often than not, when belief is concerned free will is much more than a “fifth wheel to the coach” (18).

The influence of our passionate nature on our beliefs and opinions, James adds while reaching the core of his argumentation, is in some cases “both inevitable and a lawful determinant of our choice” (25). This is what happens when we do not have evidence either in favor or against a certain belief, but must make a decision and opt either for believing or for not believing. Religious belief is a case in point, but the same holds in the domains of interpersonal relations, institutional facts, and also in the practice of science, when the scientist believes a new hypothesis ahead of the evidence. In some instances—and this is perhaps the most controversial claim that James makes—our willing decision to trust can contribute to create the facts themselves (28–9). In the case of religious faith, indeed, it is only by choosing to believe that we can find religious truth. If we did not, we would not allow ourselves to benefit from this possible truth.

Considering that religions differ enormously “in their accidents”, in order to investigate the nature of religious belief in general, James attempts to identify the core of religion in its broadest terms, and he proposes that the religious hypothesis can be summed up in two claims:

• 1. Perfection is eternal.

• 2. We are better off even now if we believe her first affirmation to be true. (29–30)

Given the nature of these two interlaced claims, in which belief itself is a constitutive part, the following step for James is observing that the believing attitude can make the difference for us, because it allows us, so to speak, to meet the religious hypothesis halfway. That is why we are perfectly justified in our faith. Conversely, we would be irrational should we choose not to believe (32). In other words, in religious matters we are justified, albeit not by evidence, in taking a “leap in the dark” towards the believing attitude. Only by believing can one expect the truth to be disclosed to them. Interestingly, James is here treating religion as a hypothesis, one that the believing attitude can help make true.¹⁰ Belief in this sense is a prerequisite for the religious hypothesis to work.

To conclude our discussion on James, it is important to also consider his Varieties of Religious Experiences (James 1985), in which he deals with religious experiences and attitudes. Two aspects are of special relevance here for the concept of belief. On the one hand, by paying attention to subjective experiences, James is inclined to accept a larger definition of what counts as evidence for the believer; on the other hand, by dismissing a conception of religion as based on a given body of propositional beliefs, he favors a looser conception of belief intended as a personal conviction, approach, stance, or view. As Kober (2005) underlines, the same attitude also characterizes Wittgenstein in OC; note also that Pritchard himself proposed a “nonbelief” reading of OC (2016: 90–91).

The other pragmatist that I would like to examine is Charles S. Peirce, whose views on common sense beliefs are indebted to Reid (see below), but who was also familiar with Newman (Moore 2008; Nubiola 2012).

Just like Reid before him and Wittgenstein after him, Peirce rejected the “paper doubt” of skepticism and acknowledged the existence of unshakable beliefs that inevitably shape our epistemic practices. In his “critical common-sensism” (CP 5.438–525¹¹), he called such beliefs “indubitables”. Indubitables are not grounded in any external evidence, and yet they are practically and epistemically fundamental. Moreover, although impossible to doubt, they are not absolutely infallible (which coheres with one of the central tenets of pragmatism, namely, fallibilism). He distinguished three kinds of indubitables: perceptual judgments, acritical inferences (i.e., the general principles of reasoning one applies without normally being aware of them), and “original beliefs of a general and recurrent kind”. Original beliefs are indubitable in the sense that they are “uncriticized”, instinctive, and common to all human beings, even if some of them can slowly change through time with the evolution of the species. A couple of examples of indubitables are the belief that fire burns, and the belief in the criminality of incest (CP 5.445). The latter, interestingly, is what might be considered a moral belief, but it is not a belief that comes from reasoning; rather, it has an instinctiveness that shows in the “conviction of horrible guilt [that] cannot be shaken off”. Other moral beliefs, such as that suicide should be considered a murder, are instead (or maybe have become) dubitable and, after being held as certainties in the past (interestingly: because the early Church required so), have been declared false by reason (ibid.). Thus it looks like there are some moral beliefs or convictions that are to be considered indubitables for Peirce, and others that at a certain point in history may shift or change their epistemic status.

Peirce presents his view as a development of, and at the same time a friendly criticism to, Reid’s views on common sense. We saw that Reid did not apply his epistemology of belief to religious beliefs. Did Peirce? Yes, to a certain extent, which is interesting for the notion of religious hinges. Peirce’s starting point indeed sounds very Wittgensteinian, and also in line with Pritchard’s understanding of hinges. Peirce says, for instance:

I have not pretended to have any other ground for my belief [...] than the assumption, which each of us does make, that my own intellectual disposition is normal (CP 6.484)¹².

Indubitables for Peirce, as we saw, have an instinctive and evolutionary nature. The same holds for belief in God, as well as for abductive inference. This is at least a way in which it is possible to read his “Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” (CP 6.452–493¹³), a late writing which is also partly a response to James’ “The Will to Believe”. This piece by Peirce is usually criticized (or just ignored) because, as an argument for the reality of God, it is unconvincing. Peirce in fact seems to propose, basically, that the hypothesis of the reality of God as a necessary being arises naturally in anyone’s mind if one allows the mind to be freely led by what he calls “Musement”. Musement will naturally suggest to the thinker that there is purposiveness in everything. The hypothesis of a God will suggest itself and gain more and more plausibility until it becomes somewhat inevitable. Now, even granting that such a hypothesis may naturally arise and seem convincing, it does not follow—so the criticism goes—that God is real or exists. However, a more charitable and attentive reading of Peirce’s Neglected Argument, going beyond Peirce’s own title, will consider it as an argument in defense of the rational acceptability of the belief in God—not an argument aimed at proving that God is real (Atkins 2016). More specifically, in this article, Peirce is describing a line of thought that leads some people to the belief in God, and he’s claiming that such a line of thought is rationally acceptable (ibid., 86). Interpreted this way, Peirce’s piece is also, like James’, a defense of religious belief, although it differs from James’ in important ways. To go a little deeper here, Peirce argues that belief in God (just like perceptual belief, on his view) has the same structure of the conclusion of an abduction: given some surprising observations, it is reasonable to suspect that God is real, because this would explain such observations. Additionally, this hypothesis—that God is real—is at the same time “instinctive” and susceptible to testing. It is instinctive because, according to Peirce, it comes naturally to most human beings; and it is testable because the belief in God produces testable consequences in one’s conduct.

Let us set aside the claim that believing in God would explain some surprising observations (a claim that is only properly understandable within the wider framework of Peirce’s tripartite system and his synechism, which cannot be examined here), and the claim that belief in God is testable by examining its potential and actual consequences in conduct (which is not so distant from James’ own take on the usefulness of religious belief; more on this soon). Instead, let us focus on the claim that belief in God is instinctive. It is a belief that most people arrive at naturally, Peirce claims, because it is part of the human tendency to generalize and use abductive inferences, even without being aware of them. In this sense, it is safe to conclude that the belief that God is real is on a par with other instinctive convictions that Peirce classifies as indubitables, such as that incest is wrong and that fire burns. If it seems too much of a stretch, consider that Peirce is not referring here to a fully-fledged, explicitly endorsed, and completely articulated belief (though belief in God can also assume this form for some believers), but to a sort of reflex and vague trust in the existence of a mind or an evolving organization that would explain the general rationality and purposiveness one can perceive in the universe.

While James holds that religious belief is justified because one’s choice to believe or not cannot be decided “on intellectual grounds”, Peirce claims that it is rationally acceptable precisely because it has the structure of an abduction—hence it does have full intellectual respectability (Atkins 2016, 137). Indeed, having the very same nature of an abduction, it is part of the instinctive mechanism with which we think: thinking itself is made possible by means of these instinctive habits. However, instead of lingering on the differences between James and Peirce (an often-abused exercise in the pragmatist community!), I would like to focus on what they have in common, as I think this sheds some light on the nature of religious hinges.

5 Religious Hinges: Insights from Pragmatism

The pragmatist way to religious hinges, in both its Jamesian and Peircean variants, puts the emphasis on the future. Belief in God has a hypothetical nature, and it can be tested. It is not precisely the same kind of test of a scientific hypothesis, because there is no standard method for verification and, strictly, there are no measurable results. However, there is something that resembles the testing of a scientific hypothesis in both James and Peirce. The former highlights that scientists (like religious believers) give credit to the hypothesis ahead of evidence, and it is only in virtue of that somewhat risky and unsupported belief that they decide to set up experiments and methods for measuring the results.¹⁴ The latter claims that science (like belief in God) works through abduction, that is, through hypothesizing something that could explain surprising data. Such a hypothesis can be tested, because whether it does explain and predict surprising data or not can be verified empirically. The religious hypothesis, similarly, is susceptible to testing, because whether it explains and correctly predicts otherwise surprising data can be verified in the future, although such verification is not a standard empirical verification.

Now, what kind of experiments and verifications do religious beliefs require? It has been suggested, rightly I think, that James’ “The Will to Believe” can be read as an argument for the ethics of self-experimentation, in which the researcher is not only the one who conducts research, but also the subject of the scientific inquiry (Welchman 2006). Although I am not sure this was James’ explicit intention, looking at his piece in this way opens up interesting insights. The researcher, in this interpretation, is someone who consents to conduct the research on themselves, that is, to verify the difference it makes to their life to believe or not to believe in God. James’ defense of the right to believe is in this sense an appeal to try out belief in God, based on the fact that the hypothesis makes sense and that only by believing it can one access a particular kind of truth, the truth of faith. This truth can be practically verified only by believing and living on the basis of that belief. This is, in fact, the level at which the religious hypothesis gets tested: the level of one’s life or conduct. Recall that the religious hypothesis is made of two interconnected claims: that perfection is eternal, and that we are better off in our life if we believe this to be true. This statement is made true through “verification” (James 1975a, 97, italics in the original), through the act that makes it true; if the making-true of the hypothesis works, if the belief does not let us down in our life, but rather enhances it—if it leads instead of misleads us—it is true, it is “made true by events” (ibid).

In Peirce’s case we do not have this praise of the power of the will. (We actually have a rebuttal of it, see CP 5.485.) But we do have the idea that religious belief is “a living, practical belief, logically justified in crossing the Rubicon with all the freightage of eternity” (CP 6.485). We also have the idea that “a certain peculiar confidence in a hypothesis, not to be confounded with rush cocksureness, has a very appreciable value as a sign of the truth of the hypothesis” (CP 6.477). Peirce’s Neglected Argument is made of three steps (CP 6.468 ff.; cf. Atkins p. 115). The first step, which he calls the “humble argument”, is the original instinctive suggestion of the Musement, and it is modeled on an abductive reasoning (here called “retroductive”); this is as instinctive as it is for a bird “to trust to its wings and leave the nest” (CP 6.476). The second step supports the humble argument by showing that such an instinctive line of thought tends to produce a definite belief, and it details, deductively, what consequences such belief has. The third stage ascertains how far these consequences accord with experience, through inductive reasoning. How is such a test to be performed? In Peirce’s own words:

[The pragmatist] will say that the [Neglected Argument] is the First Stage of a scientific inquiry, resulting in a hypothesis of the very highest Plausibility, whose ultimate test must lie in its value in the self-controlled growth of man’s conduct of life. (CP 6.481)

This strongly resonates with Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, and indeed Peirce goes on to offer one of his formulations of it, explaining that a living comprehension of a concept requires one to discover and recognize the habits of conduct that a belief in the truth of such a concept produces, where “conduct” is to be understood in a very broad sense (CP 6.481). The final stage of the argument, only sketched here, amounts for Peirce to a proof of the correctness of the pragmatic maxim itself (CP 6.485).

To sum up, for the pragmatists, 1. we are entitled to believe in God, as this is both instinctive and reasonable, 2. belief in God is a hypothesis that can be tested, and 3. such testing takes place at the level of the believer’s own life and conduct. Believing in God is a reasonable experiment one makes on oneself.

Can the pragmatist belief in God be considered a hinge in the Wittgensteinian sense?

There is something that obviously strikes any Wittgenstein scholar as deeply un-Wittgensteinian, namely, the idea that belief in God is subject to (a kind of) empirical testing. As previously noted, religious belief for Wittgenstein cannot be proven or disproven, and arguments for or against the existence of God cannot be decided on the grounds of empirical verification. However, it is equally obvious that Wittgenstein and the pragmatists here are not talking about empirical testing and about a scientific inquiry in the same way. Indeed, both James and Peirce are referring to the practical and potential differences a belief makes in one’s life as the proper test for the belief in God. They are not referring to ascertainable historical facts, as Wittgenstein does in his lectures on religious belief. Additionally, in a broad sense one might say that Wittgenstein also highlights how the religious conviction (or the lack thereof) impacts the whole life of a person, even if he does not talk of this in terms of a sort of test or verification. “Religious belief—he affirms for instance—could only be something like a passionate commitment to a frame of reference. Hence, although it’s belief, it’s really a way of living, or a way of assessing life” (CV 64).

A related but more challenging objection to the claim that religious belief, as the pragmatists see it, can be considered a hinge, is its hypothetical nature. Wittgenstein explicitly denied that religious belief has this character, and the same holds for his conception of hinges in general. However, again, when the pragmatists (especially Peirce) talk of hypotheses they are referring to something quite peculiar; religious belief might be a hypothesis, but it has the same nature of the bird’s trust in its wings. There’s no absolute certainty about it, and yet, the bird does trust its wings when it leaves the nest. In religious belief, the pragmatists emphasize, there is something similar, there is a trust or a faith in something that is not absolutely certain. Religious belief is a leap of faith, like the bird’s leap outside its nest. Different from the bird’s leap, however, we might add, the leap of faith is taken in the full awareness of the empty space under one’s feet (or wings).

To sum up, religious belief as the pragmatists see it is a groundless, instinctive, indubitable, and yet hypothetical (in the sense just described) belief or conviction, a belief that shapes one’s life and behavior. Does it match the features of religious hinges? And does it match the features of hinges in general? I believe the answer to the former is yes, and the answer to the latter is no. And this is the real point that the pragmatist view on religious hinges allows us to see.

The pragmatist take matches the features of religious hinges, as described in Pritchard’s quasi-fideism, because religious belief for the pragmatists is neither based on evidence (in a traditional sense) nor irrational. It therefore occupies the same middle ground between evidentialism and fideism where quasi-fideism lives (though I am not claiming that they are exactly the same). However, by insisting on the hypothetical nature of the leap of faith, the pragmatists highlight something important concerning religious hinges, that in my view quasi-fideism risks overlooking. In fact, the existence of a leap here, and the awareness of such leap, is something that we do not find in most of our basic and commonsensical hinges, such as that the external world exists, that we are not fundamentally mistaken in our beliefs, that the earth is round, that I am a human being, and that my name is so-and-so.¹⁵ In other words, religious hinges, but not other hinges, have to do with faith, and there is risk in faith (cf. LC p. 54). Religion requires believers to believe and to know that they believe by faith. On the other hand, nothing risky or hazardous is at play in hinge-certainty; in a sense, it is indeed the absence of a sense of risk that marks out a hinge as a hinge.¹⁶

It might be objected that the everlasting lesson of skepticism—and perhaps of hinge epistemology itself—is the opposite, namely, that our certainty that there is an external world is nothing but a belief based on a sort of faith, because nothing really warrants it. Yet it is one thing to admit that in certain circumstances a particular kind of epistemic anxiety or even epistemic angst might arise (Pritchard 2016: Chap. 7), and quite another to affirm that since our hinge assumptions are ungrounded, they are permanently held by faith.¹⁷ One of the take-home messages of hinge epistemology, as I see it, is that hinges are not ungrounded in the sense that they lack a warrant, but in the sense that they do not need a warrant.

Claiming that basic hinges are held by (something like) faith does not do justice to their obviousness; and conversely, claiming that faith has the same epistemic nature as these basic commonsensical certainties does not do justice to the exceptional nature of religious commitment.¹⁸

Because they emphasize the hypothetical nature of religious belief, the pragmatists allow us to see better what is distinctive about it. The insight one can get from this is that religious beliefs (convictions) constitute one particular class of hinges. While they can be interpreted on the model of hinges (with some specifications), the opposite move—interpreting hinges in general on the model of religious convictions—is therefore not feasible.¹⁹

6 Conclusion

In the recent literature on Wittgenstein’s On Certainty and on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion, a comparison is often drawn between the notion of hinges and religious convictions, based on both being groundless and yet not irrationally held. The project of quasi-fideism is aimed at defending religious convictions on these grounds. There are thinkers who forerun this idea, the most cited of whom in quasi-fideism and in the cognate project of reformed epistemology are Thomas Reid and John Henry Newman. This paper examined the issue further by focusing on two other thinkers that were familiar with Reid and Newman but developed their own defense of religious belief: the pragmatists William James and Charles S. Peirce. A fresh look at James’ controversial “The Will to Believe”, paired with an analysis of Peirce’s “Neglected Argument for the Reality of God”, provided some new insights into the nature of religious hinges that allowed us to see some specificities that set them apart from other, non-religious hinges. In particular, the pragmatists’ emphasis on the hypothetical nature of religious belief suggests that religious hinges, contrary to other hinges, require explicit commitment to faith, in full awareness of the leap one is taking. The claim that religious convictions are a class of hinges, and hence can be defended using hinge epistemology, remains intact. But an interpretation of hinges on the whole on the model of religious commitments, as if they were the typical case of hinges, is not feasible. It precludes from view the “goes-without-saying”, implicit, involuntary, and background nature of most basic and commonsensical non-religious hinges.