One Notion of Religious Truth? Hilary Putnam’s Conceptual Truth and the Justification of Religious Propositions

Abstract

This article explores and gives a preliminary answer to the question whether, from a particular pragmatic pluralist perspective, the notion of truth can have any bearing on religious propositions in today’s secularised and multicultural societies. It is argued that the realist and antirealist answers to this question are not satisfactory. Along the lines of an analysis of Hilary Putnam’s notion of conceptual truth it is argued that establishing what a true proposition claims, and whether it is actually true, depends on the intellectual and practical abilities we have in the particular field in which the proposition is situated. I conclude that even in a secular or multi-religious society of today, the truth of at least some religious propositions can be assessed in ways similar to nonreligious propositions.