Technically, as Stanley Fish puts it HERE : There are no such thing as “secular reasons.”
Once the world is no longer assumed to be informed by some presiding meaning or spirit there is no way to look at it and answer normative questions.
BUT we do it anyway, by smuggling in notions that are formally inadmissible and cannot be openly acknowledged or adverted to.
Liberalism only allows for secular reason to "count" in the public sphere, claiming it to be neutral and accessible to all.
But there is no such thing as an unbiased, neutral, objective standpoint. What people call 'reason' is based on a set of prior commitments. It is based on a belief system.
And what counts as knowledge is not neutrally determined, but constituted within networks of power— social, political, and economic.
SO, if the fundamentalist secularist get to bring in their fundamental beliefs and commitments and pretend that they are rational and objective, then why can’t religious ?
BUT the question is really, why don't secular people SEE religious reasons AS reasons at all ?
Because they have their own communal practices that inculcate a certain way things mean, and what counts as "justified" reasoning, that trains their imagination in certain secular ways to make sense of the world.
In his important book After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre famously says, “I cannot answer the question, ‘What ought I to do?’ unless I first answer the question, ‘Of which story am I a part?”
The Secular and the religious belong to different symbolic "kingdoms" each with its own unique "space of reasons."
Now, I'm far from endorsing the excesses of Wittgenstein, Bramdom, and Rorty, but I do think they can help us see that both religion and secularity is a form of life, learned in community practices, and that theology or materialistic instrumental rationality just makes explicit what is implicit in ritual practice, otherwise its just disincarnate philosophy.... In that sense reasoning is "relative" to the community.
It may be further observed that faith is actually a presupposition of reason, which implies that the notion and system of ‘secular reason’ is self-referentially absurd. For if there are no absolute foundations based in faith then argument between different positions is precluded and pragmatically absurd.
Beyond the level of formal logic there is no single ‘reason’ without presuppositions, there are only many different, complexly overlapping traditions of reason.
James KA Smith has explored this, the following are taken from his book Who's Afraid of Relativism :
Knowledge, as Foucault demonstrated, or what counts as knowledge, is not neutrally determined. Instead, what counts as knowledge is constituted within networks of power— social, political, and economic.
As Wittgenstein avers,
“all human knowledge is conceptually mediated and can be and usually is influenced by particular and contingent sociocultural factors such as material interests, group structures, linguistic categories, technological development, and the like—such that what people believe to be real is significantly shaped not only by objective reality but also by their sociocultural contexts..
For Wittgenstein, meaning is use.
Our knowing the “real” is bound up with—and inextricably linked to—the social fabric(s) into which we are woven. Community is the condition of possibility for meaning, even for “reality,” in a sense.
And much of our ability to know the world is more a kind of know-how, a bearing we bring to the world, a feel for the world that we have learned from others. Just to know the world is to be indebted to a community of practice. Our knowing is dependent upon—and relative to—those communities of practice.
Your knowledge is already relative to relatives!...And secular persons have different relatives.
“Meaning as use” just means that meaning is always indexed to an end, a telos; and we (only) become oriented to a telos through our immersion in a social body, a community of practice that teaches us how to use the world.
Brandom teaches that objectivity is a social accomplishment.
"Rationality", and “objective” are just honorific names we give to those positions that enjoy widespread consensus.
We make our way in the world by means of a know-how for which we are indebted to—and dependent upon—a community of meaning making.
Those who are Christians take as true and objective that God became incarnate, and not just true “for them,” but true to our account, as“the way things are.” But this claim is made from a social location and is, in fact, dependent upon “trainings” received from a community of practice.
To construe the cosmos as created by the Triune God is to have learned to see it that way, which is to have been inculcated into a contingent community of practice. In Wittgensteinian terms, one is“trained”to know this because one has been gifted by a community that “talks this way,” thus enabling us to see that way, to know the cosmos as such. (And we talk this way bc of revelation, encountering Christ etc, this revelation is now part of the public obduracy of reality we all must cope with)
The Christian faith is still the most rational response to these features, (material, historical, cultural) environment that we inhabit, even though it will also concede that this account only “makes sense” when one is inculcated into the community of practice that is the church.
We receive revelation from God - noncontingent and absolute, who we confess is "God the Father Almighty" And yet one needs to "learn" to receive it as such, and the Spirit has elected to effect such "training" (in a Wittgensteinian sense) through the community of practice that is the body of Christ." Everything we know and confess as Christians is relative to this (contingent, historical) revelation, and our reception of this as revelation is dependent upon our inculcation in the community of social practice that is the church. There is now no revelation outside the church because there is no meaning that is not "use."
The secular person has his own "secular liturgies" that inculcate a certain way things mean, and what counts as "justified" reasoning. They are citizens of a kingdom part of specific secular conceptual understanding.
So even our conceptual life requires the absorption of a know-how, and we effectively become citizens of this kingdom of conceptual understanding when we are able and willing to take responsibility for what we say.
What this means, quite baldly, is that in some significant sense “rationality” is relative because the rules governing good inference are also relative: to material conditions and to a community of discursive practice.
We are entitled to those claims that are accepted as good material inferences within a community of practice. What counts as “rational,” then, depends on the rules and norms of a discursive community.
Concepts are relative to a community of practice.
What counts as a “true” claim (a good inferential move) is relative to the implicit rules of a discursive community; but it is also relative to a situation, a state of affairs in which the community will “let me get away with”saying it. So while“propositional contents stand in inferential relations,” at the same time “they have truth conditions”
The game of giving and asking for reasons is an essentially social practice. Indeed, it seems to me that conceptual content is inferentially articulated because it is socially articulated:
To play the conceptual game is to“get” the rules of inference, and those rules are inherited and absorbed from a community of practice. “Understanding or grasping such a propositional content isa kind of know-how—practical mastery of the game of giving and asking for reasons, being able to tell what is a reason for what, distinguish good reasons from bad”
Justification, on this model, is a social practice: "the intraper-sonal, intercontent inheritance of entitlement to commitments" (AR, 165). My claims are about things, but they are made within the social "space of reasons" and discursive practice. While my claims are responsive to—and made within—environmental conditions, it is the discursive community that accepts, endorses, and authorizes "good" inferences.
To play the conceptual game is to“get” the rules of inference, and those rules are inherited and absorbed from a community of practice. “Understanding or grasping such a propositional content isa kind of know-how—practical mastery of the game of giving and asking for reasons, being able to tell what is a reason for what, distinguish good reasons from bad”
Justification, on this model, is a social practice: "the intraper-sonal, intercontent inheritance of entitlement to commitments" (AR, 165). My claims are about things, but they are made within the social "space of reasons" and discursive practice. While my claims are responsive to—and made within—environmental conditions, it is the discursive community that accepts, endorses, and authorizes "good" inferences.
The "assessment of what people are talking and thinking about, rather than what they are saying about it, is a feature of the essentially social context of communication. Talk about representation is talk about what it is to secure communication by being able to use one another's judgments as reasons, as premises in our own inferences". Your claims will "score" as representations just to the extent that others ("we") are able to take them up and successfully employ them as premises in further inferences. What you give as a reason I can take as one and take up as a premise in other successful inferences; then your claim is true.
When you are unable to give such reasons, or when your reasons don’t accord with the environmental conditions that we share—when your claims don’t seem to be“about” the state of affairs in front of us—then your claim is not going to be justified or authorized.
One can get a sense of how Brandom thus accounts for "objectivity." Instead of rooting objectivity in some magical "correspondence" between inside and outside, the picture is one of a certain kind of "convertability": those claims are "objective" that can be taken up and successfully employed by others in good inferences. "The social dimension of inference involved in the communication to others of claims that must he available as reasons both to the speaker and to the audience, in spite of differences in collateral commitments, is what underlies the representational dimension of discourse" .
This explain how propositional contents can be "objective in the sense of swinging free of the attitudes of the linguistic practitioners who deploy them in assertions" . A claim is"objective" in this sense if it is not idiosyncratically tethered to subjective impressions; that is, an "objective" claim is one that can he shared because it doesn't depend on the attitudes of specific linguistic practitioners. However, that doesn't mean that it doesn't depend on other factors and conditions.
Really, a secular person is simply committed to different presuppositions, neither more nor less rational than the religious.
As David Hart says,
So much of what we imagine to be the testimony of reason or the clear and unequivocal evidence of our senses is really only an interpretive reflex, determined by mental habits impressed in us by an intellectual and cultural history. Even our notion of what might constitute a “rational” or “realistic” view of things is largely a product not of a dispassionate attention to facts, but of an ideological legacy.”
All reasoning presumes premises or intuitions or ultimate convictions that cannot be proved by any foundations or facts more basic than themselves, and hence there are irreducible convictions present wherever one attempts to apply logic to experience. One always operates within boundaries established by one’s first principles, and asks only the questions that those principles permit....
Finally, I'll again insist, none of this ought to confuse these kinds of "relativism" with being arbitrary, or denying objectivity, merely certain versions of it.
James KA Smith puts this vision nicely,
"That's why the Triune God doesn't just send us an "objective" Word; he sends his Son who, upon his ascension, imparts the Spirit who gives birth to a community of practice to enable us to read his world. Our revealing Creator is not just incarnational; he is pentecostal. He doesn't just send us a message; he enfolds us into his body. And that body is the community of practice in which we learn to mean the world—the context in which we learn what the world is for. Our seeing the world as a gift to he used is relative to our immersion in the Story in which that makes sense.
When you are unable to give such reasons, or when your reasons don’t accord with the environmental conditions that we share—when your claims don’t seem to be“about” the state of affairs in front of us—then your claim is not going to be justified or authorized.
One can get a sense of how Brandom thus accounts for "objectivity." Instead of rooting objectivity in some magical "correspondence" between inside and outside, the picture is one of a certain kind of "convertability": those claims are "objective" that can be taken up and successfully employed by others in good inferences. "The social dimension of inference involved in the communication to others of claims that must he available as reasons both to the speaker and to the audience, in spite of differences in collateral commitments, is what underlies the representational dimension of discourse" .
This explain how propositional contents can be "objective in the sense of swinging free of the attitudes of the linguistic practitioners who deploy them in assertions" . A claim is"objective" in this sense if it is not idiosyncratically tethered to subjective impressions; that is, an "objective" claim is one that can he shared because it doesn't depend on the attitudes of specific linguistic practitioners. However, that doesn't mean that it doesn't depend on other factors and conditions.
Really, a secular person is simply committed to different presuppositions, neither more nor less rational than the religious.
As David Hart says,
So much of what we imagine to be the testimony of reason or the clear and unequivocal evidence of our senses is really only an interpretive reflex, determined by mental habits impressed in us by an intellectual and cultural history. Even our notion of what might constitute a “rational” or “realistic” view of things is largely a product not of a dispassionate attention to facts, but of an ideological legacy.”
All reasoning presumes premises or intuitions or ultimate convictions that cannot be proved by any foundations or facts more basic than themselves, and hence there are irreducible convictions present wherever one attempts to apply logic to experience. One always operates within boundaries established by one’s first principles, and asks only the questions that those principles permit....
Finally, I'll again insist, none of this ought to confuse these kinds of "relativism" with being arbitrary, or denying objectivity, merely certain versions of it.
"That's why the Triune God doesn't just send us an "objective" Word; he sends his Son who, upon his ascension, imparts the Spirit who gives birth to a community of practice to enable us to read his world. Our revealing Creator is not just incarnational; he is pentecostal. He doesn't just send us a message; he enfolds us into his body. And that body is the community of practice in which we learn to mean the world—the context in which we learn what the world is for. Our seeing the world as a gift to he used is relative to our immersion in the Story in which that makes sense.
The church is the language-game in which we learn to read the world aright. If there is no salvation outside the church, we might also say that there is no use/enjoyment distinction outside the church either. The church is that"conventional" community in which the Spirit trains us to know the real world.
But that immersion in the conventions of a community of practice is an essential feature of such a Spirited "realism," a realism without representation."
But that immersion in the conventions of a community of practice is an essential feature of such a Spirited "realism," a realism without representation."
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