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Self-Evident Experience: A Challenge to the Empirical Study of Religion

100%

Renner W.

Open Theology

2014

vol. 1

issue 1

Empirical psychology’s philosophy of science traditionally orients by Popper’s Critical Rationalism. This paradigm has been successful with observable behavior and some aspects of emotion and cognition. Still, phenomena like spirituality, empathy, or love have been neglected because they can neither be easily communicated nor instantly replicated. I propose to enlarge the scope of empiricism by accepting Self-Evident Experience (SEE) as a source of “soft” empirical data, as long as they (a) can be interpreted within a rationalist framework and (b) are supported by cumulative experiences by others in the course of time. Applying this approach to SEE of a spiritual or religious nature, the theological system of the individual’s denominational affiliation serves as the rational framework (a), and experiences similar to others serve as the accumulated “database” (b), both supporting the validity of the experience. In the sense of Critical Rationalism, apart from arguments (a) and (b), criteria for “falsifying” SEE are suggested: Experiences which are in line with an individual’s or society’s expectations and which lack an impact on the individual’s further course of life will be attributed less validity than experiences which put the individual at risk in today’s climate of skepticism and which substantially influence his or her life.

Fallibilismus als Anwalt der Opfer Der kritische Schlüssel René Girards und seine Parallelen im kritischen Rationalismus

38%

Paulin M.

Studia Gdańskie

2013

issue 32

15-38

Die mimetische Theorie René Girards mit ihrem Instrumentar zur Opferkritik einerseits und die von Karl Popper entwickelte Methodologie des kritischen Rationalismus, welche im heutigen wissenschaftstheoretischen und erkenntnistheoretischen Diskurs fak tisch als allgemein akzeptiert gelten kann, andererseits weisen eine große systematische Affinität zueinander auf. Dies weist dieser Beitrag zunächst mit einer Analyse des Girard’schen Wissenschaftsverständnisses nach. Da nach werden typische Missverständnisse und Engführungen der beiden Ansätze in ihrer Analogie betrachtet und ihr Zustandekommen aus der mimetischen Perspektive heraus erklärt. Dabei zeigt sich, dass auch die Mimetische Theorie einen – recht verstandenen – Fallibilismus impliziert, der theoretisch wie auch ethisch‑praktisch motiviert ist.

Providing a critical instrument to identify structures of victimization, René Girard’s program is in fact very affine to Critical Rationalism methodology as developed by Charles Popper and widely assented in contemporary epistemology. In order to proof this thesis, in a first step, Girard’s understanding of epistemology is reconstructed. His occasionally very strict objection to any form of relativism thereby is shown to be due to an obviously polemic context. In claiming his theory to be scientific, Girard indeed knows very well that it is the specification of science to approach things not apodicti cally, but hypothetically, and he clearly assents this principle. In a second step, typical misunderstandings of both the Mimetic Theory and Poppers fallibilism are analysed and parallelized. They properly consist in an exaggeration of some aspects, while com plementary aspects are suppressed. With the Mimetic Theory, just this uneven exag geration can be explained as happening precisely in constellations of rivalry, as among the „hostile brothers”, and yet as happening unintentionally and therefore being so hard to detect. Therefore, the claim of showing this connection, as raised by the Mimetic Theory, itself cannot be presented in an apodictic manner because it so would force the counterpart into rivalry about the alleged truth, which would so again deform it, NB on both sides of the disputation. Besides this rather „ethical” reason, there also is a strongly „epistemic” reason why Mimetic Theory and the uncovering of scapegoat mechanism should consider themselves to be hypothetical and fallible: Without a continuous rising of this self‑critical attitude, the self‑vindicatory and self‑enclosing spell of myth would have never been broken.

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Self-Evident Experience: A Challenge to the Empirical Study of Religion

Fallibilismus als Anwalt der Opfer Der kritische Schlüssel René Girards und seine Parallelen im kritischen Rationalismus