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MacIntyre, Narrative Rationality and Faith
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
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This paper seeks to spell out the consequences of Alasdair MacIntyre's conception of rationality for the debate between faith and reason. In the modem period, commitment to authority came to be understood as a hindrance to the discovery of truth. Understanding rationality as tradition-constituted, however, puts that assumption into question. Traditions of enquiry are the bearers of rational resources; it is impossible for inquirers to perform rational work outside some tradition of enquiry. A tradition’s formative texts and its rational resources occupy a place of authority in the practice of critical reflection. The reintroduction of the notion that commitment to authority can be rational has important consequences for the debate between faith and reason: critical reasoning and acceptance of authority are not antithetical. Rather, reason depends on authority for resources to perform its task. This paper thus argues that the apparent conflict modem philosophers of religion attribute to committed faith and critical reflection dissolves once rationality is understood as tradition-constituted.
Understanding rationality as constituted by traditions of enquiry avoids the complaint that commitment to authority entails a pluralism that cannot rationally be eliminated. To see why this is so, it is necessary to attend to a particular feature of traditions of enquiry. Using their standards of rationality, traditions progress as they solve the problems that are inherent within their point of view.
If the adherents of a tradition cannot solve a problem using their rational resources, then the tradition lapses into a state of epistemological crisis. At this point, it is uncertain whether the epistemological crisis will be solved.
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- Copyright © 2001 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 The worry is that a return to authority would also entail a return to religious wars. I do not have the space to calm those anxieties, but showing that radical pluralism is not the necessary outcome of a return to authority, in my judgment, goes some distance.
2 MacIntyre, Alasdair, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 12Google Scholar. Emphasis added.
3 MacIntyre, Alasdair, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 1990), 116Google Scholar.
4 This possible occurrence through which a tradition may move from the first to the second phase presents its own set of complications. It has been argued by Donald Davidson and others that we could never know radically different or incommensurable conceptual schemes to exist, making contact with a rival community embodying an incommensurable tradition impossible. See Davidson, Donald, On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 47 (197374): 5–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar MacIntyre argues against Davidson's thesis, but I will not discuss the argument for lack of space. The crux of MacIntyre's argument is that translation is a two step process in which one must first learn the language of the rival tradition as a second first language and only then can areas of untranslatability be identified.
5 MacIntyre, Whose Justice? 355.
6 The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals report that farm animals in the United States produce 86,600 pounds of excrement every second, the equivalent of 130 times the entire population of the world.
7 MacIntyre is critical of Descartes and Kuhn on this point in that they both make the mistake of supposing that a person or a community can move through a complete revolution in thought such that all is new. See MacIntyre, , Epistemological Crisis, Dramatic Narrative, and the philosophy of Science, The Monist 60 (1977): 453–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 Nancey Murphy has noted the similarity between MacIntyre's conception of the development of traditions of enquiry and Imre Lakatos's conception of the development of scientific research programmes. Both conceptions incorporate the historical element of gowth by stages and both have criteria for what progress might amount to. See Murphy, Nancey, Anglo‐American Postmodernity: Philosophical Perspectives on Science, Religion and Ethics (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997)Google Scholar, chap. 3.
9 It is possible that a response will at some future point come to be understood as having created more trouble than it was worth. Such a conclusion, however, can only be arrived at through hindsight.
10 MacIntyre, Whose Justice? 362–363. Examples are plentiful. MacIntyre mentions that John Henry Newman provided a paradigmatic example of the first centuries of theological thought, which resulted in the doctrine of the Trinity. The epistemological crisis solved by Niels Bohr's theory of the internal structure of the atom would be an example from physics. Within science, each of the changes from Aristotelian to Newtonian to Einsteinian science was brought about by an epistemological crisis. Marxism faced an epistemological crisis as its predictions concerning the plight of the working class in a capitalist society were not fulfilled. The transition into modernity could be understood as a response to an epistemological crisis.
11 MacIntyre, Whose Justice ? 363.
12 MacIntyre, Whose Justice? 327.
13 Taylor, Charles, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)Google Scholar. See especially Explanation and Practical Reason, pp. 34–60.
14 Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 44.
15 Examples are plentiful. MacIntyre mentions that John Henry Newman provided a paradigmatic example of the first centuries of theological thought, which resulted in the doctrine of the Trinity. The epistemological crisis solved by Niels Bohr's theory of the internal structure of the atom would be an example from physics. Within science, each of the changes from Aristotelian to Newtonian to Einsteinian science was brought about by an epistemological crisis. Marxism faced an epistemological crisis as its predictions concerning the plight of the working class in a capitalist society were not fulfilled. The transition into modernity could be understood as a response to an epistemological crisis