LANGUAGE, THEOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE, AND THE
POSTMODERN PARADIGM
INTRODUCTION
It has become commonplace among conservative Christians to hear that the modernist (read: Enlightenment) picture of theological knowledge, as well as its justification, is badly flawed and ought to be discarded in favor of a post-modern, holistic alternative. The attacks usually focus on Cartesian foundationalism, a view about how beliefs are justified, characterized in such a way that our foundational beliefs require one-hundred-percent certainty. It is upon such indubitable foundations that the “edifice” of knowledge, theological and otherwise, is erected. And, as Nancey Murphy points out, that foundation for conservative Christians has been authoritative, inerrant Scripture.1
Though many postconservative, postmodern Christians (e.g., Murphy, Stanley Grenz, and John Franke) hold to this view of foundationalism, J. P. Moreland and Garrett DeWeese have dealt with it adequately in the previous chapter as the caricature it is. But that is not the only argument against foundational knowledge, for Murphy’s main point is that even for “chastened” foundationalists (who do not require certainty in the foundations), the foun-dations end up “hanging from the balcony.”2 What does she mean by this? Basically, she means that no beliefs (or observations, for that matter) are exempt from the influence of theories. There simply is no theory-neutral observation or belief. So the so-called foundational beliefs end up being partly supported by higher-level theoretical beliefs after all. If that is the case, then the foundationalist picture of how justification proceeds, from bottom to top, from foundational beliefs to levels of inferred beliefs, simply is misguided and misleading.
Like Murphy, Brad Kallenberg—an evangelical philosophical theologian, defender of Stanley Hauerwas, and former student of Murphy’s at Fuller—also maintains this position that we cannot have epistemic access to the real world. Arguably, Hauerwas himself draws this same conclusion. So do Grenz and Franke, as well as another highly influential philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre. What is it that stands between the “real” world and us? It is language, such that, as Grenz and Franke say, “we do not inhabit the ‘world-in-itself’; instead, we live in a linguistic world of our own making.”3
This view of the relation of language and world underlies Murphy’s second argument against foundationalism, and I think it is the central contention driving the postmodern thought of these postconservative authors. Foundationalism presupposes what postmodernists deny, namely, an ability to know things as they really are, apart from language use. Murphy explains that there have been two types of foundationalism among Protestants: universal experience for liberals; and universal, enscripturated truth for conser-vatives. Both appeal to universal truths that we may know, but these authors deny the ability to know such truths.
This stance has led to certain apparent rhetorical advantages. If foundationalism is in dire disrepair, and if it does require certainty, then the post-conservative, postmodern stance does not force us to have to prove (with certainty) our theological beliefs. If we cannot know things as they really are, then this position leads to a certain “humility of knowledge,” and in the post-modern climate in much of academia, not to mention in witnessing, this is an attractive position to take. In short, the postconservative view reduces the pressure of having to prove to challengers that our theological claims (such as that Scripture is inerrant) are certain. We still can maintain our beliefs, but we do not have to prove them.
It therefore becomes crucial that we examine this postmodernist claim that we are inside language and cannot get outside of it to know reality (i.e.,the world as it really is, independently of how we talk about it). To do this, I will bring into the “conversation” the postmodernists’ “voices,” so that we may carefully see just what they believe. Then I will evaluate their views to see if we should accept their position. After that, I will draw out a few hope-fully illuminating implications of our findings, (1) by revisiting this second challenge to foundationalism; and (2) by applying their view of the language-world relationship to several essential Christian doctrines.
THE INTERNAL RELATION OF LANGUAGE AND WORLD
To approach the view of the postmodernists, I will begin with Nancey Murphy’s alternative to foundationalism, which she calls epistemological holism. I will draw Alasdair MacIntyre into the conversation to show how Murphy uses his epistemological and linguistic views. After that, I will inter-weave selections from Kallenberg, Hauerwas, and Grenz and Franke to illustrate this overall view.4
Murphy and MacIntyre
For Murphy, foundationalism should be replaced by a postmodern holist view of epistemic justification. She draws upon W. V. O. Quine’s “image of knowledge as a web or net,” such that “there are no sharp distinctions between basic (foundational) beliefs and nonbasic beliefs.”5 Not only do the beliefs in the web reinforce each other in a variety of kinds of connections among themselves as well as to the whole, they also work in a top-down manner. For example, in philosophy of science, there are no data that are simply given; rather, all “facts” are made “by means of their interpretation” in light of other theoretical assumptions.6
Yet Quine provides too circumspect a view of what counts as knowledge to allow for how we can justify claims of other disciplines in which Murphy is interested, such as theology and ethics. And there could be competing webs of beliefs, which raises the specter of relativism. So, Imre Lakatos allows Murphy to unpack her own views of philosophy of science and later apply them to theology and ethics when considered as sciences in their own right.7 For our purposes, we will focus on her appeal to the holist views of Alasdair MacIntyre. This move will allow her to develop an account of theological and ethical knowledge, as well as a broader theory of rationality.
For MacIntyre, rationality is found only within traditions, which are historically extended, socially embodied arguments about the nature of the good.8 Traditions critically involve a historical dimension, and they are tied to communities or forms of life. MacIntyre thinks there are no theory-independent facts, for “facts . . . were a seventeenth-century invention.”9 Also, standards of rationality “emerge from and are part of a history in which they are vindicated by the way in which they transcend the limitations of and provide remedies for the defects of their predecessors within the history of that same tradition.”10
According to Murphy, MacIntyre claims that specific types of claims (e.g., theological or scientific) make sense only in terms of historical reason.11 This is what Murphy calls diachronic justification, or how we justify modifications within a tradition. A second aspect of justification is synchronic, and here we can see how MacIntyre provides a means to rationally assess why one tradition is rationally superior to a rival, even though rational standards are internal to a tradition. This involves the comparison of traditions’ languages, such that “a tradition is vindicated by the fact that it has managed to solve its own major problems, while its competitor has failed to do so, and by the fact that it can give a better account of its rival’s failures than can the rival itself.”12
Seeing the rational superiority of one tradition over another depends upon people in one tradition learning the language of another as a second first language.13 This can be done only by participation within that alien tradition, so that they learn the grammar of that language. In this way, they can see the epistemic resources available in another tradition to help solve the problems internal to their own.
Traditions provide the context within which we “see” the world. We can think and perceive only by means of the categories and stories found in traditions, for there is no independent reality against which we may compare a text.14 Nor can we compare reality with our favored conceptual scheme, for we do not have “some sort of direct insight into the nature of reality.”15
So Murphy advocates a shift away from foundationalism to an epistemological holism. A second shift for her involves language. For Murphy,10 Ibid., 7. modern views of language, which are representational or expressivist, also are reductionistic because, first, they focus on “atomic” propositions apart from their narrative context. Second, they focus on the individual and what he or she intended by a certain expression, rather than the “move” that person made in the context of a social setting.
In sharp contrast, she argues that these modern views of language are seriously flawed. Liberal Protestant theology makes use of expressivist religious language, and such language describes an inner state of the speaker. But Murphy contends that this view requires too sharp a separation between the cognitive and expressive functions of language. Consider the doctrine of creation. If this is just an expression of one’s sense of dependence upon God, what is the importance of such a statement if one is not in fact dependent upon God in a propositional sense? Furthermore, if theological statements are just expressions of inner states of a speaker, why should that description be of interest to anyone else?16
Per Murphy, conservative Protestant theology, with its use of scriptural foundationalism and propositional, referential language, also faces severe problems. First, the language of scriptural foundationalism cannot secure the connection between these propositions and a reality beyond our experience. Second, this view of “religious language needs to be criticized for its neglect of the self-involving character of religious discourse.”17
Instead, Murphy embraces the holism found in the later Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin. Holism in this sense is found in at least two ways. For her, sentences have their meaning in their narrative context. Translation of a proposition into any other language simply will not preserve its meaning, for meanings are not universal. Also, meanings are not a matter of a first-person awareness or intention; rather, meaning is a matter of use in a linguistically shaped form of life, the whole in which words have their meaning. Such uses are a matter of publicly observable behaviors, both verbal and nonverbal.
Murphy is right to point out, like Austin, how we do certain things as speakers with our uses of various utterances and not just make true (or false) statements as representations of reality. Since speech acts “are more complex than modern philosophers imagined, the array of criteria for assessing them must be more complex than the single criterion of truth or falsity.”18 Some other criteria for the assessment include “conventional appropriateness or inappropriateness, ingenuousness or its opposite, accuracy or inaccuracy, fairness or unfairness.”19 So representation and expression are essential, but by no means the only, dimensions of what we do with language.20 If meaning is a matter of use and not of a person’s intention (construed as a private mental awareness), it is no wonder that ostension, which has been used in traditional accounts of meaning, simply becomes relatively unimportant.
Just what is ostension, and why do postconservatives see it as being problematic? In the traditional account, ostensible definition involves our noticing and directing our attention to what we are aware of, e.g., a painful feeling, and then applying a term (“pain”) to refer to that feeling. The meaning of that term is fixed by an inner “pointing” (a directing of our awareness to that term and the feeling to which “pain” refers). But on Murphy’s postconservative account, as well as that of others that use the later Wittgenstein’s private language argument, an individual, private language user could be mistaken when using a term to refer to something, if meaning and proper use is a matter of one’s own private awarenesses. In order to tighten the connection between cognition and proper term usage, postconservatives think meaning needs to be fixed by language use in a social, linguistically formed community, where others can check up to see if we use terms properly.21
Her debt to Austin and the later Wittgenstein runs deeper still. Language and life (i.e., behavior) are inextricable,22 such that language is not about the world, as it would be if it were a reflection or representation of reality. Rather, language is in the world. She indicates that “the biblical narratives create a world, and it is within this world that believers are to live their lives and understand reality.”23
Kallenberg and Hauerwas
If we draw upon Brad J. Kallenberg, whom Murphy mentored at Fuller and whose book she highly recommends,24 we may see his use of Wittgenstein and how language is “in” the world. In his view, language and world are internally related. We do not somehow get outside language to know how things are from some supposedly neutral standpoint. Rather, “the connection between ‘language and reality’ is made by definition of words, and these belong to grammar, so that language remains self-contained and autonomous.”25 Accordingly, “it is in language that it is all done.”26 Or, in Kallenberg’s terms, “language does not represent reality, it constitutes reality.”27
Why does he think this? On Kallenberg’s view, it is the penchant in philosophy for theoretical explanations, which chiefly occurs in metaphysics, that leads to philosophical confusion, something from which Wittgenstein sought to cure us. According to Kallenberg, theorizing separates language and world, since theories offer an explanation of the world, expressed in language, which supposedly can refer to and stand apart from that world. But this is a confusion, for if “all explanations are framed in language, we have no extra-linguistic means for explaining, validating, or justifying the way we use language.”28
Kallenberg rejects the view that language can correspond to reality because
[t]here is no way to talk about what language gets compared with without talking about it; there is no criterion for knowing I’ve got the right “this”(this effect, this referent, this object, this sensation, this word) unless language is already in place. Therefore, the “meaning” of a word can only be determined by its place in the linguistic system.29
If we cannot transcend language and match up words with their objects as they really are in the real, extra-linguistic world, then to talk of such correspondence with reality is pernicious and misleading. Wittgenstein expresses the idea well when he remarks that “the connection between ‘language and reality’ is made by definition of words, and these belong to grammar, so that language remains self-contained and autonomous.”30
This does not mean that the way the world is has no bearing on how we talk, for on Kallenberg’s view, a community’s language is internally related to its world. But talking of the objective world would perpetuate the old con-fusion that somehow we can separate world and language. So, for instance, Murphy asserts consistently that “laws of nature are always statements of relations among variables within a closed or isolated system,”31 and that the “irreducibility of concepts [such as mental to physical] entails the irreducibility of laws.”32
In similar fashion, we may see how Hauerwas also accepts this internal relation of language and world. For Hauerwas, the Christian life is not just one of decision making, but more importantly, it is one of vision, of seeing the world “rightly,” or, as it ought to be perceived. How do we do this? We do not just go out and look at the world, for having vision requires that we accurately “see” the world, morals, us, and more. To do this requires having stories, which are ways of knowing.33 But most of all, to have vision, we must know a certain language:
The moral life is . . . not just the life of decision but the life of vision—that is, it involves how we see the world. Such “seeing” does not come from just perceiving “facts,” but rather we must learn how the world is to be properly “seen” or better known. Such learning takes place by learning the language that intends the world and our behavior as it ought to be that the good might be achieved.34
We cannot just go out and read “facts” of the world, for there are no facts (at least that we may know) independent of linguistic expression. So, how can we come to know the world? For Hauerwas, we cannot just go out and look, for “we come to know the world as we learn to use our language.”35 To see rightly requires being formed by a community’s language, which for believers is that of the Bible, or Gospels.
Such a language is always that of a community, for “we have to follow interpersonal rules in a public language.”36 Descriptions of our actions can-not be up to us as individuals, for “the beliefs and convictions we use to form and explain our behavior are not of our own making. To be a moral self is to be an inheritor of a language of a people.”37 Often in ethics we think of the actions of individual agents, but “action and agency by their very nature are socially dependent.”38 The meaningfulness of terms that are used to describe actions depends upon the language (or grammar) of the community. Further, verbal and non-verbal behaviors are primarily public, and they are meaningful if they “fall under some description which is socially recognizable as the description of an action.”39
If we always work within language, how do we know truth and reality? Hauerwas explains that “to know reality truthfully requires the ability to discriminate between true (good) and false (bad) stories.”40 We cannot achieve some neutral, language-independent, objective standpoint from which we may find a “story of stories.” Even so, truth can be realized, but now it is always from a particular standpoint, which is when people form their lives by a truthful narrative. The story of Jesus is the true story, and it enables Christians to see reality (the world, themselves, and situations) as they are.41
If we cannot achieve a vantage point outside of all languages, then we cannot adjudicate from any such standpoint between contending stories. If that is so, then “truth” and “truthfulness” do not have anything to do with correspondence between a proposition and a state of affairs in the world, for we cannot know any such thing. As Kallenberg puts it, “‘truthful’ names the community that is able to shape a people who, in Wittgenstein’s words, can ‘see the world rightly.’”42 The same follows for the behaviors that show the truthfulness of the Christian story. There is no “story of stories” (not even the gospel), no universal “meta-story” that stands outside all particularity that serves as a judge over all stories or that gives meaning to these concepts.
Grenz and Franke43
Stanley Grenz and John Franke’s core presuppositions bear a close family resemblance to those of Murphy, MacIntyre, Kallenberg, and Hauerwas. I will draw upon their Beyond Foundationalism, in which they seek to develop a theological methodology for our postmodern context, and in which they recognize that tradition and cultural contexts do influence theologizing.
According to Grenz and Franke, we do not have unmediated experiences, for they “are always filtered by an interpretive framework.”44 Indeed,It is simply not possible to step back from the influence of tradition in the act of interpretation or in the ascription of meaning. Interpretive communities that deny the reality of this situation and seek an interpretation unencumbered by the “distorting” influence of fallible “human” traditions are in fact enslaved by interpretive patterns that are allowed to function uncritically precisely because they are unacknowledged.45
Elsewhere they warn that insights that might be gained from sociology about the church as a community must not be allowed to “deteriorate into a new foundationalism.”46 Why might that be a concern?
Such degeneration occurs when speech about the church as community begins with some generic reality called “community,” which can supposedly be discovered through objective observation of the world, and then proceeds to fit the church into this purportedly universal phenomenon as if the community of Christ were a particular exemplar of some more general reality.47
Just as we have seen in Murphy and others, foundationalism has led us astray into thinking we can have objective, unmediated observations of the real, objective world. But that simply cannot take place. Quite confidently, Grenz and Franke assert that “we do not live in a universe that is simply a given, external reality.”48
Yet we live in “the” world, it seems, so what is it? Simply put, “we do not inhabit the ‘world-in-itself’; instead, we live in a linguistic world of our own making.” 49 Language becomes a primary focus for their theology, as language “provides the conceptual tools through which we construct the world we inhabit.”50 In their view, theology mainly is about “the world-constructing, knowledge-forming, identity-forming ‘language’ of the Christian community.”51
Like the other authors I have considered, Grenz and Franke think that language and world are internally related. But they do not give up completely on objectivity. They wisely acknowledge that the linguistic construction of the world cannot extend to all creation. After all, the physical world predates the appearance of humans on it. 52 And Christians can know the world eschatologically, as God wills it to be in the future. Here they appeal to what they call eschatological realism. This is what the biblical authors describe as the world and community God is creating, which are yet to be realized, and this vantage point provides the world with its main sense of objectivity.
How does the construction of the Christian world take place? The other authors emphasize the proper, grammatical use of Christian language within the Christian community. But Grenz and Franke also wisely bring in the role of the Holy Spirit, who speaks through Scripture today to the many Christian communities, thereby constructing the new community, the church. Importantly, this provides them with a “reality hook,” for though Christians are inside language, God the Spirit has broken through and given authoritative revelation in the written word of God and guides the construction of the church.
But if we cannot know some universal truth from an ahistorical vantage point, then it seems we are left with no essence to Christian language, and even the many “Christian” communities. While Grenz and Franke stress the local character of all theologies, including their historical and cultural con-texts, nonetheless these local theologies may bear a family resemblance in at least three respects, and if so, they are indeed Christian.53 Again, the Spirit plays a core role in uniting them:
The Spirit continually speaks through the biblical text, illuminating subsequent generations to understand their present in light of the grand, telic narrative of God and guiding them in the task of living out in their own contexts the vocation all Christians share, namely, that of being the community of Christ in the contemporary world.54
We now have completed our survey of the role language plays in the thought of Murphy, MacIntyre, Kallenberg, Hauerwas, and Grenz and Franke. While some details vary among them, nonetheless there is a strong family resemblance between their views, the most important being that a language and its world are internally related. That is, a world is what it is in light of its relationship to the language that was (and is) used to construct it. We simply cannot get outside language and know foundational (read: universal, transcendent, objective) truths, and thus we are always working from within language, even when we do theology, despite the conservative Christian theological claim that Scripture provides that inerrant foundation for the edifice of theological knowledge. On this view, to appeal to such a notion simply perpetuates a confusion that we can get outside language and know how reality truly is. And it also just does not help us in dialoguing with outsiders to the Christian community, for to many such people, it will strike them as just another claim to know objective truth, when so many think that we cannot achieve such knowledge. But that does not mean that Scripture becomes relatively unimportant for these authors. Rather, it is the “norming norm,” as Grenz and Franke put it, or the “grammar” for the Christian community.That is, Scripture is authoritative for all that we as Christians do and how we live.55 Indeed, it is normative for all people, as our authors would claim. Let us now turn to assess these many claims.
ASSESSING THEIR VIEWS
There are several contributions from the views of these postconservative authors that we should note. I will rehearse a few of these briefly. First, Hauerwas and Kallenberg, at least, emphasize Christians being the people of God, and this stress focuses our attention on the importance of the body of Christ for our maturing in Christ. This focus is a healthy corrective from American society’s obsession with living autonomously and highly individualistically. The focus in Murphy, Kallenberg, Hauerwas, and MacIntyre upon Christians developing godly habits of behavior, and not just doctrinal beliefs, is very helpful in our becoming more like Jesus.
Second, our authors’ stress upon witnessing to the truth of the gospel story by our lives, especially lived in the context of a Christian community, is vital for a winsome witness to non-Christians today, who often question (or flatly deny) that we can know transcendent, universal religious truths. This is so important in a time in which many are looking for authentic lives. If we are to witness to the truth of the gospel, then we need to live out the faith in ways that will testify to the living reality of our Savior’s being in our midst.
Third, they are right on target to draw our attention to our particularity, and how our “situatedness” can and does influence our beliefs. Grenz and Franke especially call us to consider the historical, cultural context of our theologizing, for we are indeed influenced by it. The extent to which we are influenced is, of course, a different matter.
Fourth, I think all of these authors’ emphases upon how we do in fact use our language are quite interesting and illuminating. We do shape our understanding of the world by the terms we use. I recall how the Los Angeles Times announced several years ago on its front page that it would now use the term “pro-choice” to refer to people who favor abortion and “anti-abortion” for those who disagree. By their favoring “anti-abortion” over “pro-life,” they shaped and pitted the debate over abortion as between those who favor a good thing, choice, and those who are against something (“anti-abortion”), rather than as those who also have a positive stance (“pro-life”).
And some things are made into what they are by how we use our language. A minister declares that a man and a woman are now husband and wife, which marries that couple and establishes a legally recognized relation-ship. Defendants are declared guilty or not guilty in the eyes of the law when the jury foreperson utters those words. Adoptions are finalized when the judge uses words to declare that to be the case.
Fifth, I must mention the apparent strength of their view by its appeal to “humility of knowledge.” In this day and age, this appeal gains a hearing, for many people today have accepted the idea that we should be suspicious of universal truth claims. One factor that has influenced this attitude is the belief that there are no universal, objective moral truths, and so to appeal to them is in effect to oppress people and limit their autonomy. Another factor is what has played out in the use of science. For years, modern science has enjoyed enormous prestige, such as in medicine, and it has held out the hope that many diseases will be cured one day by science. This is the good side of science that promised an inevitable progress for the good of humanity. Yet that promise was shattered when science was used to create the atom bomb as a weapon of mass destruction, and also to perform hideous experiments upon Jewish captives in the Nazi concentration camps.
While the appeal to humility of knowledge seems to appeal to a virtue, it may not be a real advantage over a realist epistemology. As Moreland and DeWeese have argued, a chastened kind of foundationalism also may evince humility of knowledge by not requiring one-hundred-percent certainty in the foundations. So once again, I think the real issue surfaces—do we, or do we not, have access to an objective, real world?
These are some of the various strengths of their views, and I have not tried to be exhaustive. Now I will turn to address some concerns I have with their views, and these will focus on what I think is their core view—that we are inside language and cannot get out to know an objective world as it is in itself, and that instead we construct our worlds by our language use in our particular communities.
ARE WE ON THE INSIDE? THE ISSUE OF ACCESS56
Our authors attempt to take the view that we are inside language quite consistently; therefore I propose that we examine that view, and their claims, for consistency. That is, I aim to see just how consistent they are (or can be) on this view.
Let us start by considering their many, sweeping claims. Take, for example, Murphy’s claims that there are no theory-neutral observations, or that in foundationalism, the foundations inevitably are partly supported by theoret-ical beliefs. Or consider MacIntyre’s broad claims that we know there are no self-evident truths, that facts were a seventeenth-century invention, or that the standards for rationality are internal to traditions. Kallenberg, too, makes many such assertions and arguments, like his claim that language and world are internally related, and that there is conceptual confusion that metaphysical searches for “essences,” or universals, have foisted upon us. Hauerwas likewise claims that we cannot just go out and read facts off the world, for we always know things from under a certain aspect. Yet he does know that the gospel is the true story, even if we cannot prove it as such within history. And finally, Grenz and Franke tell us that foundationalism is (at the least) in dire disrepair; that we live in a linguistic world of our own making; and that all theology is local. Indeed, we could recite many, many such claims. The key question to ask, I think, is this: What are these claims? At one level, they are fascinating claims, and if right, we should embrace them. But, as I suggested, let us take their views seriously and consistently, and test these and other such claims by their own standards.
What, then, are these claims? On the one hand, it seems that these statements are claims made from within the community (or, more likely, commu-nities) of these authors. That is, if language and world are internally related, and we cannot know any objective, universal, essential truth, then we cannot know any essence of language. But we have seen that at least Murphy, Kallenberg, Hauerwas, and Grenz and Franke all appeal to the Christian community and, thus, the Christian language, as their specific kind of language. So that should help specify the particular community out of which they write.
Or does it? If we take MacIntyre’s admonishment seriously that there is no such thing as language as such, but only specific languages that are (or were) spoken and written in specific times and locations, then it is hard to see how a general appeal to Christian language will specify the relevant linguistic community. Such specification will make all the difference, for if there is no essence to language, but only many languages, and if each one is internally related to its particular world, then we must know which community it is out of which any postconservative author writes.
But if we take MacIntyre’s point seriously (and well we should, for our other authors do), then, as he asserts, there is no such thing as Latin-as-such; there is only Latin-as-was-written-and-spoken-in-the-time-of-Cicero-in- Rome. 57 Accordingly, it seems unjustifiable to simply refer to the Christian community and its language as being specific enough to pinpoint the relevant linguistic community. For despite commonalities, Christians are not a monolithic, homogeneous group. There are, for example, Baptists, Pentecostals, Methodists, Anglicans, Evangelical Free, and many more. And within each, there are other variations. For instance, within Baptists, there are Southern, Conservative, and American, to name a few. And within Southern Baptists, there is diversity, at least in terms of degree of adherence to the doctrine of inerrancy.
Additionally, there are variations in terms of geographic location, even just within the United States, not to mention the world. In other countries, there is diversity in other ways, such as the degree to which a local congregation is dominated by missionaries or indigenous leaders. Even within a local stateside congregation, there are sub-groupings or “cell groups,” in terms of age, geographic location, or other life stages.
So which is the relevant community? If we take their view seriously that language and world are internally related, and that languages are discrete, then detailed specification of the relevant linguistic community will make all the difference, for it is that community’s use of its particular language that makes its world. On this view, if taken consistently, the claims an author makes are claims made from a particular linguistic community and how it has shaped its world by how its members talk in it.
It is telling, therefore, when we see that none of our authors, with the possible exception of Murphy, informs us of the specific, discrete community out of which he or she writes. To her credit, in Whatever Happened to the Soul? Murphy informs her audience that she writes as a fellow Christian among other non reductive physicality at Fuller Theological Seminary.58 She also writes as an Anabaptist, but that too surely must include differences among its local groups. But at least in the works I have referenced in this essay, none of the other writers specifies his local communal affiliation besides saying that he writes as a Christian.
Does Murphy’s specification help her make her case? If languages are internally related to their respective worlds, then so what if that is how she and others at Fuller happen to talk? In reference to her Anabaptist affiliation, which specific community within that tradition is hers? Or so what if that is how the members of Kallenberg’s specific community happen to talk? The same goes for all our other authors. The discrete, historically situated charcter of forms of life means that each one writes from a relatively small Christian community. On this view, languages are discrete and internally related to their own particular worlds, so other groups literally talk in different languages, and they inhabit different worlds. Even other Christians would talk their own languages, which may or may not share some of these authors’ communities’ specific presuppositions.
So one possible answer to the question “What are these claims?” is that they are just constructs of each author’s discrete community’s way of talking.But if so, then so what? Yet Murphy and others have explored a response to this point. Even if we do speak different languages, the community and tradition still matter since we can see the rational superiority of one tradition over another. Murphy has embraced the holism of Lakatos and MacIntyre precisely because of their ability to adjudicate between rival programs, or traditions, which boil down to different languages, with their own related worlds. So let us see if MacIntyre’s work can provide the solution Murphy and others expect.
Like MacIntyre, or his exemplar, Aquinas, Murphy somehow must have learned and mastered many different languages (such as the languages of science, theology, ethics, philosophy of language, and more, and in both their modern and postmodern versions), or else we would have to deny her schol-arly grasp of her material. And indeed, Murphy presents impressive credentials, with doctorates in both theology and philosophy of science. But on MacIntyre’s account, linguistic mastery is what she needs in order to see the rational resources available in various traditions, and their rational superiority and inferiority. How does one gain such mastery?
To master a language as a second first language, one has to learn it as an insider. It is not a simple matter of translation, for in translation we lose meaning. Becoming bilingual involves mastering a language’s verbal uses as well as its gestures (that is, the nonverbal behaviors). But that presents a problem. How could Murphy master these languages? She did not live in the time of Locke, Descartes, or Kant, or the nineteenth-century theologians she cites so often, and that is significant, for on her view languages are highly particular. It therefore seems impossible for her to master languages of people groups who no longer are alive. Also, presumably, she does not speak (as a native) the language of representational theorists in language, nor of substance dualists, since those are not her communal affiliations.
Now at this point, Murphy could object that this point is irrelevant. We have today many liberal and conservative theologians, foundationalists, dualists, and reductive physicalists, so it does not matter if a past community, along with its world and language, no longer exists. But each of these generalized groupings has diverse characteristics. Again, the same issue resurfaces: Which is the relevant community? That we (her readers) know this is highly important, for if language use makes a world, then it makes all the difference that we know her relevant community.
But this brings to the surface another key issue, which gives rise to a second way to understand the sweeping claims of these authors. Murphy and the other authors have given us accounts of foundationalism and its degenerative state; the failures of representational views of language; the problems of dualism or reductive physicalism, etc.; as well as all of Murphy’s suggested replacements. They have told us that language and world are internally related, and so on. In which world do these conditions obtain? And what are these claims? To be consistent, they must be constructions made by how people talk according to the language of a local, discrete community. They can-not be statements that are true in a sense of corresponding with an extra-linguistic reality, lest they undermine one of their core beliefs.
Therefore, why are there problems with foundationalism? It is because that is how they and their respective communities’ members talk, according to their grammar. The same holds for all their views, including the assertion that we can rationally adjudicate between rivals. All these claims are moves within language-games in their respective ways of life, and as such they are meaningful only because that community’s members have decided that such uses have meanings. Even the claim that one tradition is rationally superior to another is but a claim made from within a way of life and how its members have made its world. But so what? Why should anyone in a different community (even a different Christian community) talk as they do? There is no basis for com-mending any of our authors’ views to those outside of their specific groups. They just say that outsiders should join with them and see “reality” as they do.
But surely this conclusion is drastically opposed to their apparent intentions in writing many lengthy, detailed books on these subjects. Murphy has not written these essays in such a way as to just state how her community talks. Her choices of publishers (e.g., Fortress, Trinity, Westview, and Cornell) indicate that she expects a far broader audience to understand her work. The same holds for Kallenberg, Hauerwas, and MacIntyre, who all publish regularly with large presses like the University of Notre Dame Press. Grenz and Franke chose Westminster John Knox, a large press, and Grenz has written with many other publishers.
Also, Murphy has argued that we should reject modern epistemological, linguistic, metaphysical, and theological views in favor of her constructionist ones. And all the others have made similar kinds of claims. But since they do not seem content with just telling us how they talk in their respective, local communities, then it seems far more likely that each one actually presupposes an epistemic access to the real world in itself, even though they all officially deny that that is possible.
In either case, their view is in serious difficulty. On the one hand, if their claims are just constructs made by how they talk within their very localized communities, then so what? On their view, why should anyone else (even a Christian) outside that specific community talk that way? Alternatively, they presuppose epistemic access to the real world in itself, a result that would destroy the core of their whole view.
APPLICATIONS
Now that I have developed a negative argument against their view, let us see what applications we may draw from it. First, as I argued above, their attack on foundationalism is just a result of how they talk within their particular communities. Following their own view consistently, they cannot be giving us a report of how things are in the real (i.e., objective, extra-linguistic) world. If that is the case (and I do not see how it can be otherwise), then all their charges are just the ways they happen to talk in their respective communities (which remain unspecified). But if there is not a real, objective problem (i.e.,in the extra-linguistic world), then why should anyone outside their local communities accept (much less be concerned with) their claims?
Second, I now want to draw out some specific implications for their linguistic constructionism for core Christian doctrines. I will examine quickly the nature of God and the prospects for special revelation; the two natures of Christ; the crucifixion, resurrection, and atonement; justification and hamartiology; and finally, the Christian practice of witness.59
The Nature of God and the Prospects for
Special Revelation
Orthodoxy has held that God exists in his own right, that he is not dependent upon us for who and what he is. Conservative Christians also have held that God has revealed himself in his Son and in Scripture. While we may not be able to know God fully, what we know through the ways he has revealed himself is veridical.
But notice what happens to these doctrines on the postconservative views we have been considering. Just as we cannot know things as they are, in an objective sense, so we cannot know God as he is in himself. The reason is that we are inside language and cannot get outside to know reality as it truly is, i.e., apart from language. But let us suppose that God is not inside language. Could it not be the case that while we are inside language, God has broken through that barrier and revealed objective truth? He did this through Scripture, and he also did so in his Son, who lived among us and revealed the Father. Indeed, some may suggest that God participates in our language-games. 60
This is a natural, attractive reply to my argument, so let us consider how it fares on the views of postconservatives themselves. Regardless of God’s abilities to break through, we still are on the inside of language. Therefore, no matter how God tries to reveal himself and objective truth, we cannot know such revelation in itself. Accordingly, we make the revelation what it is for us by how we talk about it. The same goes for God himself. We cannot know God as he is in himself, so we must make God by how we use our language. But that result is plainly idolatrous on the terms of conservative Christians’ own grammar, the Bible. If I am right, then that result alone ought to make us pause and give up these postconservative views.
The Two Natures of Christ
Consider now God’s revelation in Christ, the perfect God-man. As God, he would know all truth from (literally) a God’s eye view. As a human, however, Jesus would be inside language. Even worse, he would know both situations to be true at the same time! That resulting mental makeup would seem to be radically schizophrenic and unlivable. Surely such a person would not compel our worship, but that seems to be the kind of Savior we end up with on postconservative views.
The Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Atonement
Pivotal to Christian theology, the faith rises or falls on the resurrection. Paul certainly realized this in 1 Corinthians 15, for if the dead have not been raised, then our faith is worthless. But Christ has been raised. Likewise, the crucifixion and death of Christ are essential to the faith, for without it our sins have not been atoned for. Orthodox Christians have held that the crucifix-ion, resurrection, and atonement are real, historical events.
But what are they on the postconservative view? As Hauerwas points out, though the gospel is the true story, there is no way within history to prove it as such. But even worse, events too are things we cannot know as they truly are. Just like the other things we have examined, events take on their character by the way we talk in our communities. Our language use makes them what they are. So what are these particular events? They are what they are due to how Christians have talked and made their world. They are “true”simply because of that.
If that is so, then there are worlds in which Jesus is not the Savior, such as the Muslim world(s), or Buddhist one(s). That Jesus is the Savior in Christian world(s) is due to how Christians talk. But the Bible teaches that Jesus is the only way to God (Acts 4:12), so this conclusion undermines what Scripture clearly teaches.
It also follows that there are worlds that simultaneously exist in which God foreknows all possible future contingents (e.g., in a Christian community that talks the language of Molinism and middle knowledge), and yet oth-ers in which God cannot know that which in principle cannot be foreknown (as in a Christian community where the language of open theism is spoken).In both kinds of communities, the members say that God is omniscient, yet how that term is used in each community varies. If language use makes a world, and languages are discrete, so that there is no essence to Christian language, but many “Christian” languages, then it follows that, at the same time, God may know all future contingents and not know them.
Now some may reply that though this is true, it is not a problem, because within the open theist world, God is omniscient in the way its members use that term, while within the Violinist world, God is omniscient in terms of how Molinists talk. The problem I have raised only arises if we assume we can somehow get a viewpoint apart from language to see that we have (apparently) contradictory views of God.
While that is a possible reply, I do not think it is a good one. For one, I already have argued that postconservatives most likely presuppose an epistemic access to a language-independent world in order to deny that such a view is possible. For another, the issues surrounding the specificity of community resurface here. If a language and a world are internally related, then how members use their language within their communities makes their particular world, including, as I argued above, God. But then there would be Christian communities in which God himself (and not just their respective views of God) has different properties, and we would know that, even within a community on a postconservative understanding. Hence, I do not see how we as Christians plausibly can maintain such a view, when our “grammar” (i.e., on postconservatives’ own views) is the Bible, and the Bible plainly teaches that God always is the same in his essential attributes. The Christian God must be identical to himself in all communities, but that conclusion does not follow from the postconservatives’ own views.
Our Sinfulness and Justification
The same result follows for the doctrines of hamartiology and justification. Why are we sinners? Because that is how Christians have made their world by how they talk. And how is it that we are justified? Yes, it is by faith in Christ, but this is so because of how Christians have made their world. We set up the conditions we all face, and the solution as well! But these conditions clearly seem to be beyond our abilities to establish or control. Furthermore, these conclusions contradict Scripture, which clearly teaches the universal sinfulness of all people (e.g., Rom. 3:10, 23) as well as the universal offer of the gospel to all people(s) (Matt. 28:19), as truths that are not dependent on our use of language within our communities to make them so.
Witnessing and the Authentic Jesus
Last, I will consider the doctrine of witness. I think this is one of the attractive points of postmodern, postconservative theology. Postconservatives such as Hauerwas and Kallenberg call our attention to the need to live out the faith in community in such a way that outsiders may see the authentic Jesus in our midst. We thereby witness by our lives, and not so much by propositional arguments, which supposedly appeal to universal, ahistorical reason, which we have seen is an Enlightenment fiction on this view.
Hauerwas gives several illustrations of this kind of witness,
. . . in which people are faithful to their promises, love their enemies, tell the truth, honor the poor, suffer for righteousness, and thereby testify to the amazing community-creating power of God. . . . This church [the confessing one] knows that its most credible form of witness (and the most “effec- tive” thing it can do for the world) is the actual creation of a living, breath-ing, visible community of faith.61
We could augment this list of intelligible acts of witness with Christians’ loving one another; their giving to those who ask of them; and so forth.
All these actions are exceedingly powerful in their Christian witness. Jesus did say, “by this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35, NIV). The problem, though, arises because of the post-conservative understanding of the nature of behaviors in linguistic forms of life. Verbal and nonverbal behaviors are tied to a form of life and are endowed with meaning by a particular community. It would seem, then, at least at first glance, that such behaviors (which amount to bodily movements) alone will not necessarily communicate what Hauerwas and others think they will.
Moreover, the very claim that these behaviors are intelligible to outsiders is itself just a claim made from within Hauerwas’s way of life (whichever one that is). It is a sweeping universal claim, but its truthfulness is due just to how his community has made its world by its language. So the same issues resurface. We do not see Hauerwas specify in sufficient detail which Christian community he speaks from, but it cannot be some generalized Christian body, unless he be guilty of the same kind of theoretical confusion that metaphysicians supposedly have created. So his claim is just a particular claim made true by how some discrete “Christian” group has used its language to create its world. Included in that world are the outsiders, who gain their form as such due to how Hauerwas’s community has described them, including their having the ability to see that the Christian virtues are the truthful way to live.Therefore, this assertion of the intelligibility of Christian behaviors to out-siders is utterly question begging. By insisting upon the intelligibility of the truthfulness of these actions, Hauerwas presupposes that outsiders have a point of contact with Christian language. But that presupposition contradicts his notion that the Christian world stands in a strictly internal relation to its language.
Furthermore, a Christian way of living is not the only way to live out the virtues he depicts as being so clear in their witness. If this is so, then their witness to the unique truthfulness of the gospel may not be as clear as Hauerwas thinks. Muslims likely would stress the importance of telling the truth, and for that matter, so might atheists. There is no inherent reason they would not want to keep their promises, although their reason for so doing might be different from what we would expect of a Christian. And the Christian way of living out these virtues may not be the only way to do so. For instance, Jews would likely honor the poor, and, again, so might secularists.
Additionally, non-Christians may perform acts that would fall under these descriptions in ways different from Christians. For instance, consider that what counts as suffering for righteousness in one community might not be the same in another. What some Jehovah’s Witnesses see as righteous behavior, and thereafter suffer for it, may not look the same in a Protestant Christian setting. Jehovah’s Witnesses may encounter criticism from a Protestant Christian when doing door-to-door proselytizing, and for that they may think they have suffered for righteousness. Yet, from a Christian stand-point, they have not done so for the true gospel. On the other hand, a Christian may suffer for righteousness by going as a missionary to a people group, preach the gospel to them, and then be martyred by those very people. So, if each way of life makes its own world by its language, then there is no way for outsiders to distinguish between these alternative ways of acting and their corresponding meaningfulness.
So not only does Hauerwas’s assertion beg the question, it also is not the case that these listed behaviors are limited to just the Christian community. They also need not be performed in the same way. Somehow their intelligibility as being truthful of just the Christian way of life presupposes some fur-ther standard, one that apparently is so apart from linguistic expression. Yet Hauerwas may reply and agree that, yes, others may act in certain ways that would fit these descriptions based upon how they use their language. However, he could contend that mature Christians will tend to live out most or all of these virtues, and that would be something uniquely truthful of the Christian community. Hence the consistent practice of these virtues could be intelligible to outsiders.
Perhaps Kallenberg can help strengthen this point. He thinks that Wittgenstein held to the idea that primitive reactions convey meanings across communal boundaries. Somehow these behaviors supposedly are prelinguistic, and they become the basis for language. Wittgenstein cites such reactions as grimacing when stuck with a pin, or a mother’s caring for her crying child, as primitive reactions. Could therefore Hauerwas’s aforementioned kinds of Christian behaviors count as primitive reactions, something that will communicate across linguistic boundaries and perhaps preserve this intelligibility of their Christian witness?
Unfortunately for Hauerwas, an appeal to primitive reactions will not help, for on his own account, the virtuous behaviors he describes presuppose linguistic usage. For instance, to see someone as an enemy requires that a self has been formed by use of language to take on that characteristic. The same holds for who counts as the poor, and what counts as a promise, at least on his view of the relation of language and the world. And the same can be argued for what counts as truth telling, righteousness, or honoring someone. To make these extra-linguistic is tantamount to jettisoning the entire view that a world is internally related to language. That is, if these are exceptions and are prelinguistic, then why should not other things be outside as well, such as the gospel, virtues, or other things? But to be consistent on Hauerwas’s account, seeing someone as an enemy or as the poor or honoring someone all require the use of language. Once again, Hauerwas begs the question; on his own account, these intelligible, virtuous behaviors have been made so by how his linguistic community has made its world by its language.
Furthermore, there is a deeper issue at stake here. A supposed strength of the postconservatives’ views is that they emphasize the importance of authentically living out the faith. The promise is that outsiders can see the authentic Jesus in the Christian community formed in the ways postconservatives propose. But is that even possible on this view’s own terms? I do not see how, for if we cannot know things as they truly are, then neither can we know the real, authentic Jesus. The Jesus we can know on this view is just a construction of how Christians talk in their own community. But that result takes away one of the apparent strengths of this view.
EPILOGUE
So far, I have given a “negative” argument against Murphy, MacIntyre, Hauerwas, Kallenberg, and Grenz and Franke’s views. Here I will not begin to sketch my own way of showing that we do indeed have access to the way things really are, apart from language or any other supposed barrier that stands between us and the real world.62 Instead, I will build upon what Moreland and DeWeese have argued in the previous chapter—that is, a direct realist view, in which we can and do have epistemic access to reality.
We can and do get “outside” of language because we were never on the “inside.” In fact, we come in contact with the real world every day. If that is the case, then Murphy’s second argument against all kinds of foundationalism fails. That view held that the foundational beliefs are not theory-independent, because we cannot have any theory-independent, neutral contact with the objective, real world. But we can and do have such contact, and so this argument is defeated.
Now does this mean that my view suffers from a lack of epistemic humility, the supposed virtue of the approach taken by the authors I have consid-ered? I do not think that needs to be the case at all. Postconservatives claim that their view allows for epistemic humility because they do not have to prove (with certainty) that the faith is true in an objective sense. But we do not need to have one-hundred-percent certainty to be justified in believing that we can and do come in epistemic contact with the objective, language-and mind-independent world. There are many things we know, such as that we exist, that Jesus is the only way to God, and that the postconservative view under consideration fails to meet its own criteria. We do not have to have certainty to know these things, as well as many, many other things. Instead, we can show humility by giving reasons for our beliefs, all the while acknowledging that it is possible we could be wrong. By that I mean that I could be mistaken. For example, it is possible that I am just a brain in a vat, and these sentences are just the result of the stimulation of “my” brain by a mad scientist. But then I want to ask the questioner, why should I believe that? If we have ample reasons for our beliefs, then the burden of proof is upon the one who challenges us. And we can walk humbly before our God, all the while having great confidence that we know the truth, and that we can (and should) commend it to others with compelling evidence.
1 Nancey Murphy, Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism: How Modern and Postmodern Philosophy Set the Theological Agenda (Harrisburg, Va.: Trinity Press International, 1996), 15-16.
2 Nancey Murphy, Anglo-American Postmodernity (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997), 92.
3 Stanley J. Grenz and John R. Franke, Beyond Foundationalism: Shaping Theology in a Postmodern Context (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 53.
4 For a detailed exposition of MacIntyre, Hauerwas, and Kallenberg’s linguistic views, see chapters 1 through 3 of my Virtue Ethics and Moral Knowledge: Philosophy of Language After MacIntyre and Hauerwas (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003).
5 Murphy, Anglo-American Postmodernity, 27.
6 Ibid.
7 This is the burden of Murphy’s Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), as well as the focus of chapter 9 of Anglo-American Postmodernity.
8 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 222.
9 Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 357.
10 Ibid., 7.
11 Murphy, Anglo-American Postmodernity, 58.
12 Ibid., 59.
13 E.g., see MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? chapter 19.
14 Murphy, Anglo-American Postmodernity, 140.
15 Ibid., 127.
16 Murphy, Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism, 81.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., 117.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., 112.
21 It is true that I can misread a quote from a book and not even be aware of it, whereas others present can recognize the error and correct me. So, there is some truth to this part of the view. But, does that mean that meaning is a third-person, social matter, and not primarily a first-person one? For more discussion of Wittgenstein’s use of the private language argument, as well as how Kallenberg and MacIntyre use it, see chapters 1 and 2 of my Virtue Ethics and Moral Knowledge. For my critique, see chapter 5.
22 Ibid., 127.
23 Murphy, Anglo-American Postmodernity, 120 (emphasis added).
24 See Brad J. Kallenberg, Ethics as Grammar (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001).See Murphy’s endorsement on the jacket.
25 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. Anthony Kenny (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), §55.
26 Ibid., §95.
27 Kallenberg, Ethics as Grammar, 234.
28 Ibid., 180.
29 Ibid., 182.
30 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, §55.
31 Murphy, Anglo-American Postmodernity, 30 (emphasis added).
32 Ibid., 20.
33 Stanley Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue (1974; reprint, Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 71.
34 Ibid., 20.
35 Ibid., 17.
36 Stanley Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life (1975; reprint, Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 18.
37 Ibid., 33.
38 Ibid., 102.
39 Ibid., 101.
40 Stanley Hauerwas, “Ethics and Ascetical Theology,” Anglican Theological Review 61, no. 1 (January 1979): 97.
41 Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 96.
42 Kallenberg, Ethics as Grammar, 156.
43 I have written elsewhere on Grenz and Franke’s views in “Christian Postmodernism and the Linguistic Turn,” in Christianity and the Postmodern Turn, ed. Myron Penner (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, forthcoming, 2005).
44 Grenz and Franke, Beyond Foundationalism, 49.
45 Ibid., 113.
46 Ibid., 226.
47 Ibid., 226-227; emphases added.
48 Ibid, 271.
49 Ibid., 53.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid.
53 See page 25 of Beyond Foundationalism for their initial statement of this concept. But see also page 166, where they summarize what they will unpack in part 3: that all localized Christian theologies should be “trinitarian in content, communitarian in focus, and eschatological in orientation.”
54 Ibid., 259.
55 Ibid., 57-92.
56 For a detailed examination of this line of argument, see chapter 4 of my book Virtue Ethics and Moral Knowledge.
57 MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? 357.
58 Even this specificity may not be sufficient, for surely there are subgroups within Fuller. In that case, it will not do to refer just to Fuller as the relevant community. Rather, which group within Fuller is the relevant one?
59 See chapter 7 of my Virtue Ethics and Moral Knowledge for a more complete account of what this view will do to orthodox Christian doctrines.
60 This comment was made to me by a Fuller graduate at my presentation on Murphy’s views at the western regional meeting of the American Academy of Religion, March 21, 2004, at Whittier College, California.
61 Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens (Nashville: Abingdon, 1989), 46-47.
62 For an excellent article that develops the basis for our having knowledge of objective truth, see Dallas Willard, “How Concepts Relate the Mind to Its Objects: The ‘God’s Eye View’ Vindicated,” Philosophia Christi 2:1:2 (1999): 5-20. See also my “Hauerwas and Kallenberg, and the Issue of Epistemic Access to an Extra-linguistic Realm,” Heythrop Journal (July 2004). At the end of that essay, I sketch some reasons why we can and do have such access. In Virtue Ethics and Moral Knowledge, I also develop some cases to show this same point (e.g., see chapter 5).