Situated Religious Cognition in Jamesian Pragmatist Philosophy of Religion

Abstract

Pragmatist philosophy of religion has, since the early days of the tradition, developed distinctive accounts of (what we now call) “situated” religious cognition highly relevant to currently ongoing discussions in this developing field. This paper focuses on William James’s pragmatism as an important example of such an approach in the philosophy of religion. Some central “situational” themes in James are identified, and special attention is given to the relation between the (situation-dependent) concepts of belief and hope in Jamesian pragmatism. The ontological status of the “objects” of situated religious cognition is thereby also briefly discussed.

1. Introduction: Pragmatist Philosophy of Religion as Situationalist

Pragmatism generally emphasizes the situationality, contextuality, and practice-embeddedness of cognition as well as cognitive agents—both in the philosophy of religion specifically and in philosophy (including ethics and epistemology, as well as the philosophy of science and theory of inquiry) more widely. William James’s brand of pragmatism, which is my focus in the present essay, does this in a more individualist way than, say, Charles S. Peirce’s, John Dewey’s, or Jane Addams’s socially oriented versions of pragmatism. What is at issue for James is the individual agent in their unique situation in the natural and social world, which, however, is always, inevitably, a situation in a broader context—a world shared by other (also situated) individuals. Despite differences in emphasis, the fundamental pragmatist idea, developed in their distinctive ways by these and many other pragmatists, is that we human beings are not pure intellects (let alone immaterial minds) passively spectating unchanging eternal truths from an imagined God’s-Eye-View (viz., outside any human situations, as it were); instead, we are living and acting beings amidst our dynamically changing worldly situations. We can only cognize the world, including any religious aspects it might be taken to have, from within that insecure, precarious world itself, continuing to live in the world while seeking to get to know it better. This applies to religious cognition—if there is such a thing—as much as it applies to any other form of cognition. Pragmatism, then, might be regarded as a “situational” philosophy (of religion) par excellence.1

I see pragmatism as offering an extended argument—beginning with the founders of the tradition and continuing in more recent neopragmatism represented by thinkers like Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty and their followers—against the illusion of a purely intellectualist conception of inquiry, including inquiry into religion, postulating something like a “non-situated” thinker or knower transcending all merely human practices. Taking our situationality seriously is to take seriously the fact that our volitional and emotional states are as relevant as our intellectual ones in religious (or any) cognition. Failing to appreciate such situatedness, or in Jamesian terms, “the whole man [sic] in us”, is to be in the grip of what James often called “vicious intellectualism”. This is not to downgrade the intellectual aspects of human cognition but to appreciate their embeddedness in practices and situations that also contain other aspects. Pragmatism—both in James and other major figures of the tradition—is, holistically, critical of dualisms and dichotomies between reason and other capacities of our cognitive life, such as will and emotion.2

Furthermore, the kind of human situationality that we should, with pragmatists like James, recognize as crucial in our attempts to understand religious thought and life is not merely not narrowly intellectualist but also holistic in another way, that is, by being irreducibly both natural and social—with no sharp dichotomy between these only conceptually distinguishable aspects of our “thick”, genuinely human situations. Religious practices, just like everything else, take place in the natural (material) world, and religious cognitive agents participate in those practices not as immaterial minds but as embodied and embedded subjects.3 Moreover, such practices are also irreducibly social and cultural, and thus, normatively structured, even when a religious believer withdraws into solitary prayer or contemplation, having no direct contact with other human beings. Such solitude would make no sense and could not have the religious significance it has (or may have for the believer) without being embedded in a rich network of actual or at least potential social relations.4 Even solitude, then, is a special case of social situationality.

Moreover, the kind of religiously relevant situationality that pragmatists like James take seriously is never “merely natural” in the sense of being reducible to our simply occupying a certain location, standpoint, or perceptual perspective in the natural (physical, biological) world. Because of its irreducibly social character, our situationality is also always already normatively and ethically structured. We—insofar as we, by “we”, refer to us human beings rather than just physical objects moving in spacetime—cannot avoid being in an ethical situation. When engaging in religious thinking, ritual, practice, or activity of any kind, we are also ethically answerable to other human beings who are or may be (in their own situations) directly or indirectly affected by our engagement. Accordingly, a Jamesian-inspired pragmatist account of situated religious cognition cannot be reduced to an account of religious thinkers (“cognizers”) as “situated cognitive agents” in the sense of theories emphasizing cognition as something embodied, embedded, extended, and distributed—though, of course, such approaches in the philosophy of mind and cognition are highly relevant to contemporary articulations of pragmatism.5 A pragmatist view of religious cognition must acknowledge that such cognition is not only situational in the sense of being embodied and embedded in whatever physical locations or natural circumstances the cognizer happens to be located in, or in the sense of being extended beyond the individual, but also in the sense of being irreducibly ethically oriented—for better or worse—all the way from the beginning. The epistemic and the ethical are inseparably intertwined here, as they are (we may say) more broadly in holistic pragmatist theories of inquiry.6

This essay will explore Jamesian pragmatist philosophy of religion as an account of religious cognition that is thoroughly “situational”. Having discussed (and defended, with some qualifications) James’s pragmatism on a number of earlier occasions (see, e.g., Pihlström 2021, 2023), I will here keep my analysis at a relatively general level. In the interest of providing a broad but illustrative overview, I will identify selected “situational” themes we may find in James’s views on religion (Section 2) before focusing more closely on the relationship between belief and hope (Section 3), which raises issues about what has to be presupposed regarding the wider context(s) of the (potential) religious cognizer’s situation. I will then briefly reflect on the question concerning the object(s) of situated religious cognition, as analyzed in terms derivable from Jamesian pragmatism (Section 4). This issue will actually be a culmination of a Jamesian analysis of situated religious cognition, because it turns out that for the Jamesian pragmatist, the relevant situation may “extend” to transcendence itself, rendering not just our cognition of any possible religious “object” but that very object itself (e.g., the divinity) as dependent on our situated cognition. Whether such a view is plausible at all cannot be settled in a single essay but must be left for further scholarship on Jamesian pragmatist philosophy of religion and situated cognition to determine. Some final concluding remarks (Section 5) will summarize the argument and suggest further questions that remain open.

Because of the relatively general way in which the concepts of situationality and situatedness are understood in this paper, my investigation may be regarded as a metaphilosophical exploration of how taking situationality seriously—in a pragmatist way—may influence the practice of the philosophy of religion. Not only my interpretation of James but also the reflections on the concepts of belief and hope as well as the ontological remarks on the object of situated religious cognition toward the end of the essay should be understood in this metaphilosophical context.

2. “Situational” Themes from William James

James, apart from being one of the founders of pragmatism, was also tempted by religious mysticism and transcendence. However, those temptations by no means provide a full story of his engagement with religious issues. By emphasizing a number of selected Jamesian themes highly relevant to religious cognition while at the same time manifesting our situatedness—that is, the significance of humanly natural religious experience, the will to believe, truth as pragmatically conceived, the role of philosophical temperaments, meliorism, antitheodicism, and humanism—I am hoping to keep Jamesian pragmatist philosophy of religion on the rough ground of situated, and thus, “worldly”, human cognition instead of making any leaps toward a (non-situational, otherworldly) transcendence. At least we may say that insofar as such “leaps” are possible for the Jamesian pragmatist, they must inevitably begin from within our concrete situations, from amidst our practices, and must themselves in this sense be situational.7

I will not be able to argue for any close reading of James in this essay; I will only summarize some basic ideas that have been comprehensively discussed not only by James himself but also in the rich scholarly literature on his philosophy of religion. Let me address the above-listed seven features of his pragmatism one by one.

First, an obvious “situational” element of James’s conception of religious cognition is his strong emphasis on individualistically conceived religious experience, as laid out in his magnum opus on the topic, The Varieties of Religious Experience, in which James ([1902] 1958, p. 42) tells us what he “arbitrarily” means by “religion”: “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” (original emphasis). Religious experience, according to this characterization, is always an individual’s experience encompassing both solitude and relationality. It is unavoidably situational. Given that James is primarily interested in individuals’ ways of experiencing religiously, any religious cognition based on such experiences is almost by definition situational, too. Each individual has their own distinctive ways of viewing the world they live in, and this applies to religious experience and cognition at least as much as it applies to other types of cognition. This does not mean that individuals would not have full responsibility for their personal ways of viewing the world, however. Individual freedom goes together with genuine responsibility.8

This leads us to the second situational theme in James, the will to believe (see James [1897] 1979, especially the title essay, “The Will to Believe”). James famously argued that individuals have a right to volitionally, without sufficient evidence, embrace a religious (or other worldview-related) belief when faced with “genuine options” that cannot be determined on purely intellectual grounds. Such options must be “live”, “forced”, and “momentous” (ibid., pp. 14–15); as seen from the personal situation of the would-be believer, the choice cannot be avoided (there is no “third way”), and it presents one with a unique highly significant opportunity. The scope of the will to believe strategy is not restricted to religion, but in Jamesian pragmatism, it is a paradigm case of situated religious cognition. Insofar as we can cognize anything religiously, this can only take place from an individual’s experiential situation characterized by whatever is (or are) the genuine option(s) open to that particular individual. Thus, “[o]ur passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, ‘Do not decide, but leave the question open,’ is itself a passional decision—just like deciding yes or no—and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth” (ibid., p. 20; original emphasis). This basic formulation of the will to believe is inherently situational, referring to the “circumstances” under which a “passional” decision is possible, or even necessary.

The third situational theme on my list is James’s well-known, and often sharply criticized, pragmatist conception of truth (James [1907] 1975, especially Lecture VI). When formulating this account of truth, James maintained that the subject of belief is in a sense “led” by true ideas to novel and relevant parts of reality (and experience of reality); thus, the pragmatic conception of truth is irreducibly situated, as truths are available for the subjects of belief (individuals) only within our worldly situations. It is only in the context of our situational inquiries that, in James’s words, “true ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify” (ibid., p. 97; original emphasis). “Truth happens to an idea” (ibid.) in a situation, though James does not spell this out in so many words. It is, therefore, again only in an irreducibly situational sense that we can meaningfully say that truth is “the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons” (ibid., p. 42; original emphasis). This also entails that we have to take religious diversity and pluralism very seriously, rejecting any monistic and exclusivist accounts that would reduce the individual and social richness of our religiously relevant situations to something allegedly privileged. The pragmatist account of truth is irreducibly pluralistic and must uncompromisingly reject religious exclusivism (see Pihlström 2021, especially chap. 2).9 Moreover, what is situated (and thus practice-embedded, “extended”, etc.) here is not merely our cognition of truths but truth itself: the radical Jamesian point is that there is no truth at all independently of the cognitive situations within which we pursue the truth, although this does not mean that our pursuits could ever responsibly give up the norms of critical truth-seeking.10

The fourth theme to be emphasized here was discussed by James in the same volume that famously sketches his pragmatist view of truth. What I have in mind is the treatment of individual philosophical temperaments with which Pragmatism opens (James [1907] 1975, Lecture I). Individual perspectives opened up by our situationality are irreducible when it comes to analyzing and understanding any philosophical argumentation and debate, especially in the philosophy of religion. A person’s philosophical temperament is a crucial aspect of their situation and thus of the standpoint from which they view the kind of fundamental issues that religious cognition is all about. James maintained that the history of philosophy is to a large extent a history of clashes of philosophical temperaments.11 That history is, then, also a history of situationality, not an exchange of purely intellectual ideas based on non-situational arguments. Even philosophers are not non-situated pure intellects but flesh-and-blood human beings living and thinking in a real world, amidst their situations. This affects everything they do in philosophy—not only religious cognition, that is, but their philosophical accounts of religious (or any other) cognition. Everything is situational all the way down when it comes to philosophy, even though philosophical argumentation, despite its temperament-embeddedness, may also seek to broaden the area of our situational understanding, tolerating otherness.

Fifthly, James’s pragmatism is not only individualist and pluralist but deeply meliorist (see especially, ibid., Lecture VIII). According to James, meliorism is a critical middle path between optimism and pessimism, again, especially in the philosophy of religion. We should avoid the extremes of both optimism and pessimism, that is, both the view that the “salvation” of the world is unavoidable (viz., that everything will turn out to be perfect in the end, no matter what we do) and that it is impossible (viz., that the world will ultimately go down the road of destruction and there is nothing to be done about it). The pragmatic meliorist rejects such philosophies of passivity and emphasizes that we have to do whatever we can to make the world better and to ensure its moral salvation, whatever that exactly means (ibid., pp. 139–42). This means that we ought to actively engage in the amelioration of the world, and of our human condition, from within the always insecure and incomplete situations we find ourselves in.12

Sixthly, the situationalism of Jamesian pragmatism can be highlighted by recalling the resolute antitheodicism with which Pragmatism both opens and closes (ibid., Lectures I and VIII)—although James does not use this term, which was coined almost a century later. What antitheodicy means is, simply, the rejection of theodicies that seek to justify or excuse an omnipotent, omniscient, and absolutely good God’s allowing the world to contain the horrendous suffering it does contain—or, better, the rejection of the normative expectation that a religious believer ought to deliver a theodicy, an expectation shared by both theistic and atheistic approaches. Antitheodicism is a way of taking (others’) suffering seriously as what it is, as something that can never be fully justified and with which we cannot eventually reconcile ourselves. We are always ethically situated vis-à-vis unjustifiably suffering others; we cannot avoid being situated with respect to others’ pain.13 Moreover, truth in religious cognition presupposes antitheodicism. There is no non-situational truth, and, therefore, there is no theodicist truth, either. Theodicism would be a prime example of a hopeless and unethical attempt to climb into an imagined God’s-Eye-View—to offer a totalitarian, absolute picture of the alleged metaphysical and theological meaning or purposiveness of individual suffering—that would neglect our human situationality.

The seventh, and here final, situational theme in James is his humanism. There is no way we can escape our human predicament (viz., our situationality itself) when reflecting on the nature of religious—or any other—cognition possible for beings like us. This entails that the philosophy of religion must be a critical (and self-critical) study of our practices of religious cognition, as distinguished from any transcendent metaphysical speculation about what exists or fails to exist beyond those practices. The religious believer (or “cognizer”) may have beliefs about such transcendence, but the philosopher’s task is a critical analysis of those beliefs and other attitudes, as we will soon see, not a metaphysical theory about transcendence itself. Situated religious cognition can only be humanistic because, for us, there is no other way of occupying any situation in the world than a human way.

In Stephen Bush’s (2017, especially chap. 9) terms, we may summarize these Jamesian themes in terms of a thoroughly normative account of democratic, individualist, and (above all) humanist religion. The key point is normative: James is not offering us a neutral theory of what religious cognition (qua situated) factually is, given the kind of psychological and social creatures we are, but an irreducibly philosophical (and theologically relevant) account of what it ought to be like in order for us to be able to take adequate responsibility for ethically ameliorating our human condition—our “situations”. Responsibility always takes place in concrete situations in which we are (situationally) free.

The seven Jamesian themes listed above are thus all interrelated. Importantly, our situatedness determines what the genuine options available to us (in terms of the “will to believe”) are, and this availability is an irreducibly normative notion. Philosophical temperaments are formative factors in the history of philosophy, and this by itself affects the way in which we can view our cognitive projects as projects of pursuing the truth and ameliorating the human condition. Everything—our search for truth and our care for the other and their suffering—takes place from within our situations, religiously or non-religiously conceived. While these Jamesian situational themes may not directly fall within the standard topics of research in theories of situated cognition, they might in their own way widen the scope of such research, recognizing the rich diversity in which our situatedness is manifested in religiously relevant contexts.

3. Belief and Hope as Modes of Situated Religious Cognition

The “situational themes” we have located in James’s thought about religion are helpful for understanding how religious cognition is embedded in and arises from our natural practices of life and how it ought to be conceptualized and assessed, especially with regard to the ways in which our situations involve facing other human beings’ (religious or non-religious) situations. However, little has up to now been said about the crucial question of what kind of cognitive or doxastic attitudes are (or can be) justified or legitimate in situations of religious cognition, based on the kind of situational considerations from which they emerge. In addition to the situational “themes” discussed above, we need a sense of what might be called the relevant “modes” of religious cognition that our situationality may yield. Unsurprisingly, we may here return to what James has to say about these matters in “The Will to Believe”, but we should also remember that in Pragmatism he proposes pragmatism as “a philosophy of hope” (see James [1907] 1975, Lecture III). A pragmatist account of situated religious cognition must reflect on how such cognition involves believing and/or hoping that God exists. In the next section, we will extend this account to a reflection on the sense in which even the object(s) of belief and/or hope (viz., God) may be considered ontologically situation-dependent according to Jamesian pragmatism. My remarks in this section and the next one will not be intended as detailed interpretations of James’s actual views but as an attempt to develop some key aspects of a Jamesian, or James-inspired, pragmatist account of religious cognition.

What I have in mind is, in a first approximation, that a Jamesian pragmatist account of religious cognition can invoke the idea of situational religious faith being based on, or even characterized as, religious hope rather than (firm) belief, especially if by the latter we simply mean, say, the propositional belief that God exists. This does not mean that religious attitudes and the situations within which they arise would be non-propositional, however. Rather, one’s fragile situationality itself may not determine what the appropriate “force” of one’s attitude to the relevant religious propositions should be, and it may thus make one both epistemically and existentially uncertain about whether to embrace a full religious commitment or not—even if one accepts James’s will to believe strategy as in principle sound. Therefore, one might maintain that it is epistemically safer to merely hope that God exists, instead of believing this to be the case, even if one were, in the will to believe sense, pragmatically entitled to believe. One may also find this not merely epistemological but at least partly existential type of uncertainty better captured by the concept of hope than, say, the idea that one’s belief in God would be merely probabilistic. One may even consider the very idea of attaching probabilities to God’s existence a profound misunderstanding of the nature of religious faith.14 Such faith itself would then resemble hope rather than belief, hope here indicating an acknowledgment of our situationality itself, especially its existential precariousness. Faith would not be replaced by something “milder”, hope, but it would be reinterpreted as a form of hope.

This pragmatist view, only tentatively suggested here as a possible way of elaborating on our religious situationality, might be compared to Simo Knuuttila’s (e.g., 1998) account of hope (rather than belief) as the “minimal” doxastic attitude a religious person could embrace.15 Knuuttila suggested that a person who merely hopes (but fails to believe) that God exists may consistently (continue to) use religious language and engage in religious activities, as long as they do not believe God’s existence to be impossible, the key assumption here being that it would be inconsistent and thus deeply irrational to hope something that one believes to be impossible to be true. Thus, Knuuttila argued that an agnostic can be a religious person in this moderate sense—and so could, presumably (although he never acknowledged this possibility), an atheist, insofar as they may hope that God exists while believing that he does not (though possibly could). Accordingly, Knuuttila proposed a “presupposition theory” regarding the relation between religious and non-religious areas of discourse (or “language-games”, as he also occasionally called them, especially when commenting on Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion). The Wittgensteinians can be considered to be right in claiming that one’s religious language use need not as such contain metaphysical statements that would be taken to be justified or unjustified outside those language-games (such as, “God exists”, if uttered as a metaphysical theoretical statement), but one’s consistently engaging in such language use may have presuppositions concerning one’s epistemic or doxastic attitudes also outside religious language-games. Thus, one’s hoping (religiously, non-metaphysically) that God exists presupposes that one believes (metaphysically, outside religious language use itself) God’s existence not to be impossible. What this means, in our terms, is that religious situations and the religious cognition possible within them are not “pure” but presuppose something from non-religious situations and contexts.

Furthermore, the concepts of belief and hope can be deeply entangled in one’s situation of religious cognition itself. I may not only hope that God exists but I may (in addition or separately) hope that I can or could believe that God exists, which would obviously be different from my believing that I so believe, as well as from my believing that I hope God to exist. These distinctions are easy to formulate by changing the orders of the relevant doxastic operators (B = belief, H = hope, applicable to a doxastic agent a and a proposition p) to be attached to in principle any propositional content (p), which of course may, among other things, stand for the proposition that God exists:

B_ap ≠ H_ap ≠ H_aB_ap ≠ B_aB_ap ≠ B_aH_ap

These elementary distinctions between different doxastic attitudes and their iterations could be specified in great detail in terms of doxastic and epistemic logics developed especially since Jaakko Hintikka’s seminal Knowledge and Belief (Hintikka 1962).16 I will stay at an elementary level, not going into any details of such logics. Informally, in terms of James’s “The Will to Believe”, adding a “will operator” to the obvious doxastic ones, I might will to believe that God exists (W_aB_ap)—which, of course, ought to be distinguished from simply willing that he does (W_ap)—even if I am not (yet) capable of actually believing this to be the case, and I might also hope that my will to believe will result in a belief, presumably by means of some psychological process through which the belief itself may be taken to be produced by the will to believe. However, if we follow Knuuttila in maintaining that hope is a highly relevant, or at least sufficient, religious attitude, and if even hope (let alone belief) is not immediately available to me, then I may in some religiously relevant situation need to actively will to (be able to) hope that God exists (if, that is, such a hope does not arise by itself, without a “passional” exercise of the will):

• W_aH_ap

Or, in a more complex situation, I may find myself having to actively will to hope that I could believe that God exists:17

• W_aH_aB_ap

This would be an extension of the Jamesian “will to believe” to something like a “will to hope”. A Jamesian twist to Knuuttila’s hope account of religious faith would thus be the suggestion that even hope may—in some situations—require active (or in James’s terms “passional”) willing. It arguably depends on the specific situation we are in whether we need an active effort of will to be able to hope (e.g., that God exists).

Further complexities can be introduced by adding a modal status to the relevant proposition, as well as, whenever needed, negations to various places in these simple formulae. One could, for instance, hope God not to exist while believing that he does (or vice versa, as in the case of the atheist hoping God to exist). Clearly, someone believing in God but convinced of one’s being damned might hope that their belief is false. One might also hope to be able to will to believe that God does not exist, even if one believes or even knows that one currently lacks such a strength of will, being (e.g., as a result of one’s specific situation, including religious education or family background) unable to reject theism while being convinced (e.g., based on the problem of evil and suffering) that for ethical reasons one ought to.

Knuuttila’s presupposition theory, in turn, may be formulated as an entailment from one’s hoping that God exists to one’s believing that it is possible that God exists. Of course, adding modal dimensions to the discussion makes things considerably more complex. One might hold that believing God to exist is to believe God to necessarily exist because God’s existence would by definition be necessary existence.

Knuuttila’s theory might also be further analyzed as an inference from the claim that insofar as one uses religious language (in a given situation of potential religious cognition), then one either believes or hopes that God exists, via the premises that one’s so believing or hoping entails one’s believing God’s existence not to be impossible (which is trivial in the case of belief but perhaps not completely trivial in the case of hope) to the conclusion that if one uses religious language, one believes God’s existence to be possible:18

For all (potential religious cognizers) x, if x uses religious language, then x either believes that God exists or hopes that God exists.

If x believes that God exists, then x believes that God possibly exists.

If x hopes that God exists, then x believes that God possibly exists.

Therefore, for all x, if x uses religious language, then x believes that God possibly exists.

In principle, then, we may construct indefinitely complex cases of such nested doxastic attitudes that could at least in some cases clarify some aspects of our situational religious cognition, and such attitude operators can be placed within quantified sentences of, for example, the kind that express the basic ideas of Knuuttila’s presupposition theory.19 The sense in which such constructions actually help us understand genuinely situated religious cognition is debatable, though. What we may learn—for the purposes of our pragmatist examination of situated religious cognition—from the reflections inspired by Knuuttila is the very important insight that our using religious language and (thus) being “in a religious situation” (if we may put the matter as simply as this) presupposes that we understand that situation itself as contextualized (or, in other words, as itself situated within broader situations): metaphysical beliefs about what is or is not possible (specifically, the belief that God’s existence is not impossible) are needed for us to be able to consistently find ourselves in the religiously relevant situation in which religious language use is a consistent possibility, or a genuine option, for us. The pragmatist theorist of situated religious cognition thus needs to appreciate the ways in which such cognition takes place in situations that are themselves embedded in broader contexts of non-religious thinking and cognizing. Appreciating this view does not commit us to endorse all details of Knuuttila’s position, especially not the assumption that it unproblematically makes sense to speak of God’s possibly existing (or of it being an epistemic or doxastic possibility for the religious language user that God exists) in a manner directly comparable to other (possibly) existing and non-existing beings, such as stones, tables, or unicorns.

However, it may now be argued that as helpful as the distinction between belief and hope may be in interpreting the doxastic aspects of our situations of religious cognition, this distinction—up to now more or less taken for granted and even logically articulated in a semi-formal manner—is not a hard or sharp dichotomy; it is, rather, itself situated, grounded in our individual religious and non-religious practices and their contexts. Our reasons for maintaining a view like this, softening the conceptual boundary between belief and hope (without reducing these concepts to each other, though), are, again, pragmatic. The matter is important because it may lead us to re-evaluate the applicability of the kind of perhaps too simplified analysis provided above to genuine cases of situated religious cognition.

In Jamesian terms, though with an extension not explicitly available in James’s own writings, we may say that hoping that I can or could (will to) believe something to be the case presupposes that so believing is, for me (given my situation and given who I am in that particular situation, including my philosophical temperament and its development in my personal history), a genuine option. My situation must be such that I do not merely abstractly believe God’s existence to be possible but conceptualize the issue of God’s existence as a genuine option in the will to believe sense. Arguably, even before being in a situation in which theistic belief is a genuine option, hope as an attitude affirming that it would in some sense be good if such a belief were true must be a genuine option for me. While for Knuuttila, hoping that God exists presupposes that God’s existence is not believed to be impossible, we might say that hoping that I could believe presupposes that embracing belief is not impossible for me—that it is, indeed, a genuine option. The conditions of the application of the will to believe, or analogous conditions, need to be satisfied, at least partly, even for us to be able to hope.

Thus, my “situation” crucially influences my open and/or genuine options, and thereby it influences the relevant doxastic attitudes or cognitive states that I am able to embrace in my religious cognition. We may call this the transcendental significance of our situatedness: the ways in which we occupy our situations open different possibilities of thinking (e.g., hoping and believing) for us.20 In saying this, we must remember, however, that James himself was no transcendental philosopher. He was always sharply critical of Kant—though I would say this was partly against his own better self-understanding. There is no principled reason why a pragmatist philosopher could not engage in Kantian-inspired transcendental reflection on the constitutive features of our situational cognition. Situationality itself is both pragmatic and transcendental: our cognitive practices themselves are inevitably situational, and this situationality itself is a necessary condition for the possibility of any cognition within those practices. Our semantic and epistemic relations to any religiously relevant transcendent reality we may believe, disbelieve, or hope to be there depend on the situations we find ourselves in.21

However, our situation-dependent “field” of open (religious) possibilities of belief and hope is thoroughly normative. We are responsible for our philosophical temperaments and for the ethically and epistemically responsible use of the will to believe.22 This responsibility is realized in our taking seriously, for example, the requirements of humanism and antitheodicism as Jamesian themes of situationality (see Section 2). This may be compared with Kant’s famous account of religious hope: the relevant sense of hope is subordinated to normative requirements in the Kantian phrase, “was darf ich hoffen?” (“what am I entitled to hope?”). Our hope must be legitimate or justified, not arbitrary or merely wishful thinking. Textbook accounts of James as a philosopher legitimizing wishful thinking are simply false. On the contrary, the will to believe strategy itself expresses a philosophy of sincerity, a willingness to thoroughly explore our situation and the way it affects what we find genuine options in our doxastic lives. Everything depends on what we are entitled to (starting from) within the situations we occupy.

This takes us back to James—and especially Bush’s (2017) interpretation of his individualism: we need a normative theory of humanistic, democratic, and morally and politically motivating religion (cf. ibid., chp. 9) as a theory of what situated religious cognition ought to be like and what (and how) it entitles us to hope—or, in other words, a normative theory of what kind of (individual) religious situations we ought to strive after in our lives. The interplay between our changing situations and what the genuine options (for belief and for hope) for us in those situations are yields a continuous self-reflective reflection on who we are in this (our) situation (currently, as well as in view of our expected future, as the pragmatic method urges us to do).23 We are always in a situation. Indeed, “We are never not in a situation”, as Stanley Fish (1978, p. 631) once aptly remarked,24 and our freedom is inevitably freedom in a situation (as Jean-Paul Sartre used to argue in developing his existentialist philosophy of freedom). And we are always on the move to our next situation, reinterpreting, as John Dewey saw, whatever “ends in view” are available for us on the way, expecting to have novel ends in view from within a new or reinterpreted situation.

James’s humanistic (and, as I have briefly suggested above and argued at more length elsewhere, antitheodicist) pragmatist meliorism can, furthermore, be seen as an instance of “fragile thinking” in Mara van der Lugt’s (2021) sense, even though Jamesian meliorism of course must not be confused with pessimism (which van der Lugt defends as a potentially hopeful and compassionate approach taking suffering seriously).25 A Jamesian pragmatist recognizes the fragility and indeterminacy of our situations. Meliorism is, then, most importantly, a philosophy of situational hope, an affirmation of our being at least in principle able to make our situation(s) better, both in religious contexts and more broadly. Meliorism, above all, commits us to a constant attempt to ameliorate those situations, and the world at large. However, it might be suggested that meliorism itself—as one of the key aspects of Jamesian situationality, as discussed in Section 2 above—is possible only in a situation in which pessimism, too, is a genuine option for us, that is, in a situation taking very seriously the possibility of pessimism resulting from our precariousness. Analogously to the sense in which one’s hoping that God exists presupposes one’s believing (outside specifically religious language use) that God possibly exists (as suggested by Knuuttila, and as analyzed earlier in this section), meliorism can be taken to presuppose the possibility of both pessimism and optimism, or of their being genuine options.

These possibilities going beyond our situation itself are integral aspects of our situationality. Whenever we are in a particular situation, we are, so to speak, never merely in that situation. We are never not in an indefinitely extendable situation. We are, rather, placed in a considerably broader situational context within which (only) our specific situation is possible for us, with the genuine options it enables. Again, this is a matter much wider than situated religious cognition, but it should be appropriately acknowledged in the study of such cognition, especially when pragmatically articulated.

4. What Is the Object of (the Philosophical Study of) Situated Religious Cognition?

Having primarily focused on epistemic or doxastic dimensions of our situationality, such as the concepts of belief and hope and their relationship, I have so far avoided discussing the ontological status of the religiously relevant reality that situated religious cognition could be taken (by the believer) to be “about”. Jamesian pragmatism, though officially strictly anti-Kantian, agrees with Kant that we can have no metaphysical or theological knowledge of a transcendent supernatural God. We might say that, for Jamesian pragmatists (even though, again, James himself does not put the matter in these terms), the “object” of religious cognition is not simply, or at least not primarily, any otherworldly divinity but our ethically and experientially complex human situationality itself (albeit specifically regarding its efforts to, possibly, come into some kind of experiential relationship with such a divinity), that is, a situationality that some of us may characterize with reference to the concept of human beings’ relationships to the divinity, or by employing the word “God”. Such a religious conceptual scheme (or language-game) may, when used within our situational practices, have a profound value- and meaning-bestowing character for its users, and thus, the vocabulary of “God” is used, when it is used, valuationally. In this case, the “object” of religious cognition and language use, God, is, though by definition transcendent, inextricably intertwined with our situatedness. The kind of situationality relevant to situated religious cognition, and to pragmatist attempts to account for it in the philosophy of religion, thus involves the religious cognizer’s attempts to refer to a reality reaching far beyond that situation itself, to stand in (or move into) a relation with a trans-situational divine agency. In addition to the temporal extensions and the indefinite contextualizability of our situations, this is one more way in which our situationality always, inherently, reaches beyond itself.

In the articulation of the relations between belief and hope (in Section 3 above), it was presupposed that these doxastic attitudes may themselves take the proposition that God exists as their object. This, however, is elliptical for saying that the subject of situated religious cognition (a) can, by having such attitudes, reach out toward a situation-transcendent divinity. The analyses above can be taken to be specifications of the religiously relevant cognitive situation such an agent is in, as the availability of hope and belief as genuine options to the subject of the relevant cognition (and the situation) is a crucial aspect of the situationality at issue. Alternatively, a’s situationality could be explicitly expressed in the relevant formulae themselves:

• H_a,sp

would then be read, “a hopes in situation s that p”, and similarly for the other operators employed. The problem here, however, would be the assumption that the situation s could be identified independently of the attitudes of hope and/or belief that the agent, a, entertains in that situation. It would make better sense to say that the relevant situation is the entire complex of the agent (in their surroundings, natural and social) and the doxastic attitudes toward a religious proposition whose objects (if the proposition is true) would radically transcend the situation itself. Yet, the philosopher of religion seeking to understand what it is to cognize religiously would not directly deal with those transcendent objects but with the situation itself. This is, in some sense, just to state the obvious: the “objects” of cognition in religion and the philosophy of religion are distinct. Both would inescapably invoke situationality but would still be distinguishable from each other as cognitive pursuits.

James, remarkably, maintained that God’s existence may partly depend on us, on individuals’ personal religious faith.26 Religious cognition, according to the Jamesian account (or at least some version of it), thus possibly helps us create its “object”, or at least it may do so, and this “co-creation” of divine reality in which human beings’ volitionally embraced faith can play a crucial role is, again, necessarily situational, because the very availability of such faith (or some specific attitude of belief and/or hope) depends on the genuine options our situatedness opens up for us. If God in some sense exists and nevertheless depends on our faith, and what our faith amounts to depends on our situation (e.g., on belief and hope available in a situation), then God’s existence itself, not merely any possible religious cognition, must be understood as situation-dependent. This dependence itself (rather than God as one of its poles) would then be a relevant “research object” of the philosophy of religion, even if we need to account for religious cognition as at least potentially taking transcendence or divinity as its presumed object(s), without making (within the philosophy of religion) any metaphysical or religious commitments to the independent existence of any transcendent deities.

5. Conclusions

This paper has not formulated any straightforward argument for a particular understanding of situated religious cognition. Rather, I have offered a selection of remarks inspired by William James (and some others, including Simo Knuuttila) on various, primarily epistemological and ethical, dimensions of our situationality that need to be taken into consideration when seeking to develop a pragmatist philosophy of situated religious cognition. What is essential in such a project is a self-critical awareness of our (religious or non-religious) situation(ality) as something inherent in any pursuit of religious cognition and the need to take full responsibility for critically transforming such situations. The Jamesian “themes” characteristic of our situationality and situational responsibility, including antitheodicism, meliorism, and humanism, thus apply not only to religious cognition but, at the meta-level, to the philosophical study of our situationality itself. A Jamesian-inspired pragmatist philosophy of situated religious cognition must itself be humanistically characterized and further developed, just as much as (according to pragmatism) such cognition itself must. Within such a pragmatist account of religious cognition, we cannot adopt any apologetic stance by declaring the truth of either theism or atheism (for instance); rather, pragmatist philosophy of religion, when fully aware of its situationalist character, must focus on the human situations of religious attempts to reach out toward the transcendent. It is compatible with this basically humanist attitude to suggest, with James, that if God did exist (in some sense), then even God’s reality would be inextricably intertwined with the faith possibly arising from our human situations.

We saw how our pragmatic situationality (when viewed along Jamesian lines) has a decisive influence on how our doxastic attitudes to religious propositions—such as belief and hope—may be intertwined and to what extent they may be rationally defensible. The availability of genuine options (in the “will to believe” sense) and the ethical constraints that humanist, antitheodicist meliorism sets to our religious cognition are also irreducible dimensions of our situationality. As we saw, our situationality may even play a role in determining whether the religious propositions we may be committed to from within those situations eventually come out true or false, if James is correct in suggesting that God himself (if real) might depend on individuals’ situational faith. For many philosophers of religion, theist or atheist, this may be a step (or several) too close to something like full-blown constructivist antirealism. But even if the Jamesian pragmatist account of situated religious cognition fails to provide any intersubjectively binding reasons for endorsing religious faith, those of us who (unlike the present author) are lucky enough to possess such faith, or those capable of even a religiously interpretable hope if not any full-fledged belief, may find compelling the sense in which even the truth values of the propositions affirmed from within such faith might depend on our situational practices.

In Kantian-inspired terms, this dependence could, finally, be considered (quasi-)transcendental. Spelling out what exactly this means would require a more comprehensive undertaking. The general idea would be that the truth values of religious propositions (such as “God exists”) would transcendentally depend on our situationality in the sense that their being even candidates for possible truth or falsehood would be grounded in the religious lives that individuals live within such situations enabling them to have religiously relevant genuine options.27 Participating in religious forms of life—or religiously relevant situations—would thus be a necessary condition for the possibility of the kind of faith that could ontologically co-create its object along Jamesian lines. A full-scale account of pragmatist situationality in Kantian-like transcendental terms—as a case of transcendental dependence analogous to, say, the dependence of empirical cognition in general on the pure forms of sensible intuition and the pure concepts of the understanding (viz., the categories) in Kant’s transcendental idealism—would be a task for a much more detailed account of the Kantian dimensions of (Jamesian) pragmatism.