Religious exclusivism unlimited

Philosophy

Like David Silver before them, Erik Baldwin and Michael Thune argue that the facts of religious pluralism present an insurmountable challenge to the rationality of basic exclusive religious belief as construed by Reformed Epistemology.I will show that their argument is unsuccessful. First, their claim that the facts of religious pluralism make it necessary for the religious exclusivist to support her exclusive beliefs with significant reasons is one that the reformed epistemologist has the resources to reject. Secondly, they fail to demonstrate that it is impossible for basic religious beliefs to return to their properly basic state after defeaters against them have been defeated. Finally, I consider whether there is perhaps a similar but better argument in the neighbourhood and conclude in the negative. Reformed Epistemology's defence of exclusivism thus remains undefeated

Religious exclusivism unlimited Jeroen de Ridder Faculty of Philosophy, VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam, the Netherlands email: firstname.lastname@example.com Abstract: Like David Silver before them, Erik Baldwin and Michael Thune argue that the facts of religious pluralism present an insurmountable challenge to the rationality of basic exclusive religious belief as construed by Reformed Epistemology. I will show that their argument is unsuccessful. First, their claim that the facts of religious pluralism make it necessary for the religious exclusivist to support his exclusive beliefs with significant reasons is one that the reformed epistemologist has the resources to reject. Secondly, they fail to demonstrate that it is impossible for basic exclusive religious beliefs to return to their properly basic state after defeaters against them have been defeated. Finally, I consider whether there is perhaps a similar but better argument in the neighbourhood and conclude in the negative. Reformed Epistemology's defence of exclusivism thus remains undefeated. Introduction A religious exclusivist maintains that her own religion is superior to other religions in the sense of it being the only true religion.1 According to Reformed Epistemology (RE), an exclusivist's religious beliefs can be rational or warranted in the manner of properly basic beliefs, i.e., without being based on reasons or arguments. Erik Baldwin and Michael Thune 2 (2008) criticize this claim and argue that an exclusivist who has become (fully) aware of the facts of religious pluralism can no longer be rational in holding her religious beliefs in the basic way.2 The facts of pluralism give her a defeater that can only be defeated by acquiring and retaining 'epistemically significant reasons' to support her religious beliefs. I will argue that Baldwin and Thune's argument fails for two reasons. First, the champion of RE need not concede the necessity of epistemically significant reasons to defeat the defeater that pluralism gives her. Secondly, even if she were to concede that reasons are necessary, it remains possible-in spite of Baldwin and Thune's claim to the contrary-that these reasons can be discarded once the defeater of pluralism has been defeated so that the exclusivist's religious beliefs return to their former proper basicality. After that, I will consider whether there is perhaps a better argument against exclusivism in the vicinity, but conclude in the negative. Baldwin and Thune on religious pluralism and defeat Full awareness of religious pluralism provides an exclusivist with trustworthy testimony, the content of which conflicts with her own religious beliefs. Testimony is a source of basic beliefs.3 So upon appreciating the facts of pluralism the exclusivist acquires basic beliefs that conflict with her own basic religious beliefs. Since, for all the exclusivist can tell, there is complete internal epistemic parity between her and adherents of other (incompatible) religions, these conflicting beliefs will act as a defeater for her own religious beliefs. Moreover, pluralism also acts as a defeater for any belief of hers to the effect that she has access to a special source of religious knowledge such as a sensus divinitatis or the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit (IIHS), as in Alvin Plantinga's (2000) extended Aquinas/Calvin (A/C) model for warranted Christian belief. In other words, the exclusivist cannot simply 3 appeal to her having such access in order to defeat the defeater that pluralism gives her. That is because adherents of other religions might make analogous appeals to such special sources of religious knowledge and testify that these sources produce in them their specific religious beliefs, which are incompatible with those of the exclusivist. This calls into question the reliability of the exclusivist's special source of religious knowledge. In order for the exclusivist's religious beliefs to become rational4 again, say Baldwin and Thune, she needs 'epistemically significant reasons' (2008, 451), i.e., 'at a minimum, some argumentation, evidence, or inference to other beliefs' (ibid., 453), which will either support her own beliefs directly or indirectly, by giving her reasons to discount incompatible religious beliefs. In other words: Necessity of Reasons (NR) Rationality requires that the religious exclusivist who is fully aware of the facts of religious pluralism have epistemically significant reasons to support her religious beliefs. By acquiring support from such reasons, however, the exclusivist's religious beliefs cease to be basic. Hence, Baldwin and Thune's conclusion: those who are aware of pluralism cannot hold their religious beliefs rationally in the manner of properly basic beliefs. But there is one possible escape to this line of reasoning, as Baldwin and Thune rightly point out. Perhaps epistemically significant reasons are needed only to discard the defeater but can be disposed of once that has been accomplished. Imagine that you look at a table in normal daylight and form the belief that it is red. Then your friend John comes along and tells you that the table is really white but is currently illuminated by red light. This gives you a defeater for your original belief. Five minutes later, however, John tells you that he was only joking. This defeats your defeater. You can forget about John's earlier testimony and your 4 original belief goes back to being a properly basic perceptual belief again. (See Plantinga (1993, 185) for a structurally similar case.) If something analogous is possible for religious belief that threatens to be defeated by pluralism, the exclusivist's belief could return to its original state of proper basicality after all. To block this escape, Baldwin and Thune (2008, 453) distinguish between Drain-O and table-leg defeater-defeaters. A Drain-O defeater effectively flushes itself out along with the defeater it defeats, so that the original belief can remain rational in exactly the way it was. It adds nothing to the original support for your belief, but only serves to discard the defeater. The red table case above is an example. In contrast, a table-leg defeater-defeater must be retained for the original belief to remain rational because it defeats a defeater by supplementing or even replacing the support for the original belief. Suppose your friend Bob tells you that Alice was at the party. You then learn that Bob had a few drinks too much and can't remember clearly who was and was not present at the party. This gives you a defeater for your belief that Alice was at the party. The next day you run into Alice, who confirms that she was at the party. This defeats your defeater and at the same time supplements (or replaces) the support for your belief that Alice was at the party. In order for your belief to remain rational, you must retain this defeater-defeater. Baldwin and Thune boldly assert that the epistemically significant reasons required to defeat the defeater presented by pluralism will always be table-legs (ibid., 453). Hence: Retainment of Reasons (RR) The epistemically significant reasons referred to in NR are always such that they must be retained in order for an exclusivist's religious beliefs to remain rational. 5 In the next section, I will show that the reformed epistemologist need not accept NR. In the section after that, I will argue that even if NR is accepted, RR can still be denied as its only plausible defence leads to unattractive fairly widespread scepticism. Are reasons necessary? The fundamentally sound intuition behind NR is that defeater-defeat requires something extra beyond the initial belief and its support. You cannot defeat a defeater for a belief by means of that very belief itself or the support you already have for it. Attempting to defend a belief merely by, as it were, stomping one's feet and holding onto it falls short of what rationality requires. Baldwin and Thune immediately go on to limit the admissible kinds of additional support to just one, namely reasons. For someone who sympathizes with RE that is a crucial mistake. For why could additional support not come from something else than reasons, such as perception, memory, or further testimony? This happens in many everyday cases of defeaterdefeat. Recall the red table case from above but now suppose that John hadn't told you he was joking. Could you not have defeated your defeater by further perception, i.e., by taking a closer look at the table, perhaps checking for the presence of nearby red lamps? Or take a case of memory belief. You remember having eaten a grapefruit for breakfast yesterday, when your partner tells you that she is convinced that it was an orange. You consult your memory again and vividly remember the look, smell, and taste of yesterday's grapefruit. By doing so, you defeat the defeater you acquired through your partner's testimony. For the case of religious belief this would mean-in terms of Plantinga's extended A/C model-that a renewed and more powerful working of your sensus divinitatis and/or a more powerful IIHS 6 could serve to defeat the defeater you acquired through becoming aware of the facts of religious pluralism. Indeed, this is exactly what Plantinga himself seems to have in mind. Consider first the following passage, also quoted by Baldwin and Thune: Perhaps you have always believed it deeply wrong for a counselor to use his position of trust to seduce a client. Perhaps you discover that others disagree; they think it more like a minor peccadillo, like running a red light when there's no traffic; and you realize that possibly these people have the same internal markers for their beliefs that you have for yours. You think the matter over more fully, imaginatively re-create and rehearse such situations, become more aware of just what is involved in such a situation (the breach of trust, the injustice and unfairness, the nasty irony of a situation in which someone comes to a counselor seeking help but receives only hurt), and come to believe even more firmly that such an action is wrong. (Plantinga 2000, 457) Baldwin and Thune interpret this passage as affirming NR. Thinking the matter over more fully, they believe, gives you reasons to support your belief that it is wrong for a counsellor to use his position of trust to seduce a client. These reasons then form an indispensable supplement to the support your moral belief had before from, presumably, moral intuition. Without them, your contested moral belief could not be held rationally anymore. In view of Plantinga's insistence on the possibility of rational basic religious belief, even for intellectually sophisticated exclusivists who are well aware of pluralism, such an interpretation is markedly uncongenial, if not plain wrong. So instead of interpreting this passage as affirming NR, we would do better by interpreting it along the lines of my earlier suggestion. The idea would then be that your thinking carefully about the situation occasions 7 a renewed and more powerful working of your moral intuition, which defeats the defeater you acquired upon learning that others disagree. The case of moral beliefs is particularly wellsuited to illustrate this possibility, since there is a respectable strand in the literature on moral realism that defends moral intuitionism; the idea that we grasp moral truths through a cognitive faculty of moral intuition (Moore 1903, Ross 1930, Audi 2004, Huemer 2005). These intuitionists hold that belief in moral truths is not rational in virtue of being based on reasons, but in a non-inferential way. Nonetheless, thinking carefully about the facts involved in morally significant situations is necessary to intuit the moral truth of the matter correctly. Not because it provides us with reasons necessary to support our moral beliefs, but because it occasions correct functioning of our intuition. Something analogous may well apply to the case of religious beliefs. Thinking carefully about the facts of religious pluralism could facilitate a renewed and more powerful working of your sensus divinitatis and/or the IIHS-the same cognitive processes by which your religious beliefs originally arose. To make this more vivid: imagine that you ponder over your Christian beliefs and rehearse some of the relevant facts about Christian theism, while also keeping in mind that other thoughtful and intelligent people hold incompatible religious beliefs. Your pondering occasions a powerful working of the Holy Spirit which reproduces your Christian theistic belief with great force and internal compellingness. Although you find the epistemic situation very complex, you cannot help but feel strongly convinced again that your religious beliefs are true, even though you admittedly have nothing to offer by way of independent evidence or arguments that will move those who hold incompatible religious beliefs even the slightest bit. To drive home the point that this is indeed what Plantinga has in mind, the following passage should suffice:5 8 A fresh or heightened awareness of the facts of religious pluralism could bring about a reappraisal of one's religious life, a reawakening, a new or renewed and deepened grasp and apprehension of (1) and (2). From the perspective of the extended A/C model, it could serve as an occasion for a renewed and more powerful working of the belief-producing processes by which we come to apprehend (1) and (2). In this way knowledge of the facts of pluralism could initially serve as a defeater; in the long run, however, it can have precisely the opposite effect. The facts of religious pluralism, therefore, (...) do not or need not constitute a defeater for Christian belief. (Plantinga 2000, 457, my italics) If all of this is correct, then NR is false. An exclusivist who is aware of the facts of pluralism does not necessarily need reasons to support her religious beliefs after all.6 Even if what I have said so far is successful as an exercise in Plantinga-exegesis, we should still ask whether the suggested procedure for defeater-defeat has any plausibility. This is not the occasion for a full evaluation, but I can reply to four worries. First, religious pluralism also provided the exclusivist with a defeater for any belief to the effect that the exclusivist possesses a special source of religious knowledge, so how can it be legitimate to rely on this very source to defeat the defeater? The answer to this lies in the realisation that RE promotes a strongly externalist account of rationality, on which rationality is determined almost exclusively by the de facto proper functioning of the subject's cognitive faculties and emphatically not by her having access to higher-order information about the epistemic pedigree or status of her beliefs.7 Specifically, rationality does not require a subject first to have good reasons to believe a cognitive faculty to be reliable (or any other higherorder beliefs) before she can rationally believe the outputs of that faculty. Rather, it can go the other way around: when called for, a subject can infer higher-order beliefs from first-order beliefs that have been formed by de facto properly functioning cognitive processes.8 9 This idea can then be extended to defeater-defeat. Applied to the problem at hand, a new and powerful working of the sensus divinitatis or further IIHS-de facto properly functioning faculties-will provide the additional support required for the exclusivist's (first-order) religious beliefs to become rational again. Finding herself with a strengthened conviction that her beliefs are true, the exclusivist will by implication (1) take incompatible religious beliefs held by adherents of other religions to be false and (2) take others who claim to have had incompatible religious experiences to be somehow epistemically less fortunate and their testimony therefore of reduced value.9 In doing so, she defeats both the direct defeater for her first-order religious beliefs and the defeater for the higher-order belief that she has access to a special source of religious knowledge. For those who remain sceptical, I should emphasize that this procedure for defeater-defeat is nothing more than a straightforward reapplication of RE's basic externalist conception of rationality. Recall that, according to RE, a subject can have rational beliefs while the fact that she has them, as well as other details of her epistemic status are (almost) completely opaque to her. In particular, she need not (1) have access to the grounds for her beliefs, (2) believe that her cognitive faculties are functioning properly or be able to offer arguments to that effect, and (3) believe-let alone be rational or warranted in believing or know-that her beliefs are rational. To the extent that you are willing to accept this as a basic conception of rationality, you should have no real problem also accepting the procedure for defeater-defeat under consideration, because that procedure merely reapplies the basic conception to defeaterdefeat. Defeaters for a belief can be defeated when that belief is reproduced (with greater strength) by cognitive faculties which are assumed to be de facto functioning properly. Just as before, the belief's being produced by de facto properly functioning cognitive faculties is what makes it rational again. By implication, defeaters for this belief are defeated. 10 Secondly, what I have been saying entails that an exclusivist can rationally hold religious beliefs in the basic way without having anything by way of a reason or argument to defeat the defeater of religious pluralism. The exclusivist would simply have to find herself with a firm conviction that her beliefs really are right, in spite of counter-testimony from seemingly trustworthy sources. Perhaps someone will want to object to this on the grounds that it 'allows exclusive religious beliefs to be effectively immune from defeat, and reduces epistemology to dogged psychological prejudices' (Baldwin and Thune 2008, 451).10 In reply, I would urge that it is incorrect that on the current proposal defeater-defeat requires nothing more than a 'dogged prejudice' to hold on to one's beliefs. Defeating the defeater of religious pluralism does require additional support. The point is that this support need not necessarily come from reasons. It can also come from the same non-inferential cognitive processes that originally produced the beliefs. It is also incorrect that religious beliefs become 'immune from defeat'. An exclusivist may fail-temporarily or indefinitely- to secure the additional support required, in which case her belief remains defeated. Nothing guarantees proper functioning of the sensus divinitatis or a renewed IIHS. Thirdly, someone may propose that adherents of other religions can appeal to an analogous procedure for defeater-defeat. They, too, might report that their religious beliefs have been powerfully reproduced in them so that they now strongly believe they are right again. Wouldn't this constitute yet another defeater for the exclusivist's religious beliefs? And isn't it implausible to reply that this defeater, too, could be defeated by yet another powerful working of the sensus divinitatis and/or renewed IIHS? Doesn't that lead to a possibly infinite succession of defeaters and defeater-defeaters? Two things in reply. (1) The reformed epistemologist need not concede that this scenario gives the exclusivist a new defeater. Once an exclusivist has defeated the defeater of pluralism by means of the above procedure, further testimony by adherents of other religions 11 no longer constitutes a defeater relative to her overall noetic structure.11 For that structure now includes a belief that adherents of other religions are epistemically less fortunate than she is; this belief being inferred from her reproduced properly basic first-order religious beliefs. As a result, their testimony can be dismissed. Or if the exclusivist's noetic structure doesn't include such an explicit belief, it will at least include an awareness that others may hold their religious beliefs with equal sincerity and conviction. Given this awareness, however, further testimony adds nothing new to the exclusivist's epistemic situation and hence doesn't give her a new defeater. (2) But even if the reformed epistemologist were to admit that further testimony does give the exclusivist a new defeater, I don't see why there would be anything wrong-given RE's epistemological outlook-in holding that this new defeater could be defeated by yet another working of the sensus divinitatis or IIHS. If the procedure was defensible the first time around, it is also defensible the second time in an exactly analogous way. This indeed leads to an exclusivism that vacillates, but it may be recalled that we now only see through a glass, darkly, in religious matters. Fourthly, although I am convinced that Plantinga's suggestion is fundamentally sound, I admit that the situation Plantinga envisages for a pluralism-aware exclusivist is indeed epistemically unattractive. Consider how her situation looks from her own perspective. She is firmly convinced of the truth of her religious beliefs. However, she need not know (nor even believe) that she is rational in believing as she does. When pressed, she might have to admit that nothing she can say will convince adherents of other religions of the truth of her own beliefs. Although she takes adherents of other religions to be epistemically less well-off, she can offer nothing to substantiate this, besides her own conviction that she is right. Obviously, such a situation is unattractive, at least in so far as rationality has anything to do with discussing and justifying one's own ideas in a dialectical situation.12 It exemplifies a kind of epistemic isolation that it would be preferable not to be in. 12 However, it does not follow that the exclusivist is irrational in sticking to her beliefs. There are lots of states one can be in that are epistemically unattractive, but that do not make one any less rational. For instance, believing falsehoods on the basis of misleading evidence or not believing important truths because one has not been properly exposed to them. A defender of RE can readily admit that the exclusivist's situation is unfortunate, but insist that it is sometimes the best one can do. Surely it would be epistemically preferable if we could always justify our true beliefs with publicly available and objective evidence that convinces those who demur, but such is not our privilege. This does not prove that rational exclusive religious belief is impossible. Must reasons be retained? Suppose the argument of the previous section fails and that NR is correct after all. Have Baldwin and Thune then succeeded in showing that rational religious belief cannot be basic for an exclusivist who is aware of pluralism? No, I will argue. RR, too, is false because defeater-defeaters for religious pluralism may well be of the Drain-O variety. The reason is that excluding this possibility requires an independence constraint on admissible defeaterdefeaters that leads to fairly widespread scepticism and is therefore unattractive. Although Baldwin and Thune assert that defeater-defeaters for religious pluralism will always be table-legs, they do not provide an argument to back up their claim. Let us first consider what a Drain-O defeater might look like for the case at hand. Suppose an exclusivist comes to believe-through reading a book on apologetics, say-that adherents of other religions are deceived by Satan into believing they have veridical religious experiences of a deity. God allows this because He is intent on testing the faith of his elect by exposing them to misleading testimony. This story would constitute a Drain-O defeater-defeater, for it 13 provides the exclusivist with a reason not to take the testimony of adherents of other religions seriously while it adds nothing new to support the exclusivist's own religious beliefs. It is like learning that your friend John was joking when he testified to the whiteness of the table in my earlier example. Having acquired such a defeater-defeater, you can forget about the whole affair and your belief goes back to its original proper basicality. Apparently, then, Baldwin and Thune think all defeater-defeaters of this kind are ruled out. The most plausible explanation for this is that they implicitly take for granted some kind of independence constraint on admissible defeater-defeaters, which attempts to rule out defeaterdefeaters that somehow depend for their rationality on the rationality of the original (threatened) belief.13 Without some such constraint, there is no reason to think that Drain-O defeaters are impossible and hence no reason to believe RR. Perhaps Baldwin and Thune believe something like David Silver's version of such a constraint is correct: Z cannot neutralize X as a potential defeater for Y if Z is evidentially dependent on Y (Silver 2001, 9), where belief Z is evidentially dependent on belief Y for agent S just in case it is rational for S to believe that the warrant for Z is derivative of the warrant for Y. Otherwise Z is evidentially independent of Y for agent S. (ibid., 8) Presumably, this constraint would rule out the above story as a defeater-defeater, because the rationality of believing that story is derivative of the rationality of the exclusivist's original 14 religious beliefs (although perhaps only indirectly so through being derivative of the rationality of the apologetics book's author's religious beliefs).14 I want to suggest that Baldwin and Thune would do well not to embrace any such unqualified independence constraints, as they engender fairly widespread scepticism, not only for religious matters, but also for many philosophical, political and moral matters. Such scepticism, moreover, undermines their own conclusion. To see why this is so, notice that the independence constraint above in effect demands that one has a non-question-begging argument or other source of epistemic support to back up one's belief. While this is usually feasible for beliefs about mundane matters such as the colour of tables and your friend's party attendance, it is far from obvious that this standard can be met for religious, ethical, political, and philosophical beliefs (Van Inwagen 1996, 2010, Elga 2010, Kelly 2010). In philosophical controversy, for instance, both parties can often marshal impressive arguments for their beliefs, as well as weighty objections to the other party's beliefs, clever responses to defuse these objections, and so on. Although there is no room to argue the point here, I am convinced that ultimately one's evaluation of the successfulness of the arguments, objections, and responses comes down to basic philosophical intuitions, which cannot themselves be defended by further non-question-begging arguments. Any attempt to defeat defeaters for one's philosophical beliefs, then, must sooner or later presuppose the truth of such basic intuitions. However, one's philosophical beliefs also depend on the same intuitions for their ultimate support. So we have a scenario in which, ultimately, basic intuitions are supposed to defeat defeaters for beliefs, the rationality of which is derivative of the rationality of those very same intuitions. This violates the independence constraint. As a result, many philosophical beliefs will be beset by undefeated defeaters and must therefore be given up. The same holds for controversial-which is to say many-moral, political, and religious beliefs.15 15 The point can also be brought out by considering Baldwin and Thune's discussion of Vogelstein's case of a moral realist who receives testimony from a sociopath to the effect that there are no moral truths (Vogelstein 2004, 189).16 Baldwin and Thune say the moral realist can easily defeat the defeater presented by the sociopath's testimony. The relevant defeaterdefeater 'involves the conjunction of (1) the fact that there are good arguments for moral realism and (2) the fact that one person's testimony against moral realism is, given (1), of little epistemic value' (Baldwin and Thune 2008, 449). The arguments they have in mind are those available in the philosophical literature. Now suppose that we exchange the sociopath for a competent philosopher, who is a passionate defender of moral antirealism.17 This philosopher is able to offer objections to any epistemically significant reason for moral realism the realist can muster. If what I said above about philosophical arguments-to wit, that their evaluation is ultimately a matter of basic philosophical intuitions-is roughly correct, then the moral realist will violate an independence constraint if she sticks to her belief. She must appeal to reasons that depend crucially on her basic realist intuitions for their ultimate support. Hence, the rational thing to do-for both the realist and the antirealist-would be to give up their respective beliefs and become agnostic. Given that this case is structurally similar to many controversies in religion, ethics, politics, and philosophy, anyone who embraces an independence constraint of the kind we have been considering in effect embraces widespread scepticism in these areas. For Baldwin and Thune specifically this entails that they ought to give up their conclusion that an exclusivist who is aware of pluralism cannot hold religious beliefs in a properly basic way, since that conclusion itself is confronted with counter-arguments from other philosophers and the only way to defend it may well be by arguments that ultimately beg the question against 16 the epistemological externalism RE promotes-that is what I take my four remarks at the end of the previous section to hint at. In sum, then, independence constraints of the sort we have been looking at are unattractive and therefore we have no reason to believe RR is correct. If RR is false, however, it remains possible for an exclusivist to obtain a Drain-O defeater-defeater, in which case her religious beliefs could go back to being rational in the manner of properly basic beliefs. A better argument against exclusivism? Baldwin and Thune's argument fails. But perhaps there is a better argument for the conclusion that exclusivism cannot be rational in the manner of properly basic beliefs lurking nearby. Like most epistemologies, RE is fallibilist; at least in the sense that it allows for rationally held but false beliefs. The facts of religious pluralism show that people who, for all appearances, are equally intellectually, morally, and spiritually virtuous hold religious beliefs that are incompatible with the exclusivist's beliefs and perhaps also that they do so, partly, because they claim to have access to a special source of religious knowledge that others lack. This makes the possibility that the exclusivist's own religious beliefs are false and her special source unreliable salient. Upon appreciating this possibility, the exclusivist should acquire a higher-order belief that her religious beliefs may well be wrong and that she may well lack access to a special source of religious knowledge. This belief isn't a defeater of the kind we considered above as it isn't incompatible with anything the exclusivist believes. Nonetheless, it seems that this higher-order belief ought to have a downward effect on the exclusivist's first-order religious beliefs and lead her to reduce her confidence or even suspend judgement 17 on contested religious matters.18 Not doing so surely exhibits some kind of epistemic defect or negligence. This line of thinking receives further support from a comparison with other sources of basic beliefs. Suppose you and a friend both look out a window and see a car. Your friend says it's a model A whereas you see it to be a model B. From what the both of you can tell, your beliefs are formed in normally favourable circumstances, there are no obstacles in your respective lines of sight, you both have equally good eyesight, are equally knowledgeable about cars, aren't confused in any relevant way, etc. Taking another look doesn't resolve your disagreement. Wouldn't the rational thing to do be to suspend judgement? Or take memory beliefs. Your friend and you both try to remember what colour shirt Bob was wearing yesterday. Again, for all you can tell, you are both equally well-poised to remember correctly, there are no confusions, etc. Yet your friend says Bob's shirt was green and you remember it was blue. Careful reconsideration and exchange of information doesn't resolve your disagreement. Shouldn't the both of you give up your beliefs and suspend judgement? This seems to me to be the strongest case from religious pluralism against exclusivism that doesn't beg any questions against RE's externalism. But I don't think it is conclusive. I will consider three things that can be said on behalf of RE. First of all, the reformed epistemologist can readily admit that awareness of religious pluralism calls for reduced confidence. An exclusivist who is properly sensitive to the deeply ambiguous epistemic situation in which she and others form religious beliefs, will hold her beliefs with epistemic humility. However, it doesn't follow that suspension of judgement is rationally required. Pluralism might decrease one's confidence, but not necessarily below the threshold for rational (or warranted) belief. This might seem a little feeble in the absence of an explanation for how the warrant for the exclusivist's religious beliefs manages to stay above the threshold. That brings me to a second point. The defender of RE can once more insist on a thoroughly externalist understanding of 18 rationality. If, even while being fully and vividly aware of every relevant fact of religious pluralism, it strongly seems to the exclusivist that her religious beliefs are correct, then if this strong seeming is in fact brought about by a properly functioning sensus divinitatis and/or a renewed IIHS, her first-order religious beliefs will be rational, no matter what additional higher-order beliefs about the possibility of being wrong she may simultaneously entertain. She can even infer counterbalancing higher-order beliefs (e.g., that even though she may be wrong, it strongly seems to her that she is in fact right) from her renewed first-order beliefs.19 To put this in perspective, it is important to see that what is being claimed here is not that everyone, regardless of their favoured notion of rationality, must admit that the above scenario restores the rationality of exclusivism. The point is that exclusivism is rendered rational in the specific externalist sense endorsed by RE. Furthermore, the reformed epistemologist can grant that exclusivist adherents of other religions (who, we can safely assume, may feel just as strongly about the seeming truth of their religious beliefs) may also be rational in the qualified sense of internal rationality, although-assuming Christian theism to be true-they fall short of full rationality because they are not externally rational (see note 4 for this distinction). Given the input to their cognitive faculties, there is nothing wrong with their belief formation, but-again assuming Christian theism-their input itself ('upstream from experience') is not what it ought to be. Finally, it may help to consider what the alternatives are. Suppose it is accepted that withholding judgement is the rational response, at least until one gathers further support for the truth of one's beliefs from other sources. As we saw in the previous section, this easily leads down a path to widespread scepticism, not only in religious matters, but also in philosophy, politics, and ethics. While some may find this acceptable or even appropriate, I take such an outcome to show that one's construal of rationality has gone astray. 19 Thirdly and finally, in view of the analogy with perceptual and memory beliefs the defender of RE could develop her notion of rationality to allow for a differential treatment of different kinds of beliefs.20 There are at least two features of the perception and memory cases above that account for the intuitive rightness of suspension of belief. First, in real-life versions of such cases, there usually is an easy method available to settle the disagreement. You walk closer to the car or look the model up on the internet. You ask Bob about his shirt. It is therefore inappropriate to just hold on to your beliefs and not employ such a method of verification. Secondly, persistent disagreement hardly ever occurs in real-life cases of this kind. So if it does, something exceptional or weird must be going on. In consequence, all bets are off and you should withhold judgement. These two features are perspicuously absent in the case of religious belief (and also in many typical cases of philosophical, moral, and political beliefs). There are no (independent) methods of verification available and persistent disagreement is ubiquitous. Because of that, it not at all clear that it is rationally inappropriate to stick to these kinds of beliefs if they strongly seem true to you, even while you are fully aware of persistent disagreements and the impossibility of their resolution. The defender of RE can therefore reply that the above analogy is beside the point, because rationality gives different prescriptions for perceptual and memorial beliefs than it does for religious beliefs. Conclusion Baldwin and Thune's attack on RE's defence of exclusivism fails. The reformed epistemologist need not accept NR, while RR can only be made plausible with the help of an independence constraint that leads to unattractive fairly widespread scepticism. An argument similar to Baldwin and Thune's which doesn't rely on NR or RR also fails to establish the desired conclusion. As far as I can see, this exhausts the resources for arguing from pluralism 20 against RE's defence of exclusivism. I therefore conclude that RE's defence of the possibility of rationally holding religious beliefs in the basic way, even for an exclusivist who is aware of the facts of religious pluralism, remains as plausible as it ever was.21 References Alston, William P. (1988) 'An internalist externalism', Synthese, 74, 265–283. --- (1991) Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Audi, Robert (2004) The Good in the Right: A Theory of Intuition and Intrinsic Value (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Baldwin, Erik, and Michael Thune (2008) 'The epistemological limits of experience-based exclusive religious belief', Religious Studies, 44, 445–455. Cohen, Stewart (2002) 'Basic knowledge and the problem of easy knowledge', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 65, 309–329. --- (2005) 'Why basic knowledge is easy knowledge', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 70, 417–430. Elga, Adam (2010) 'How to disagree about how to disagree' in R. Feldman and T. Warfield (eds.) Disagreement (New York: Oxford University Press), 175–186. Huemer, Michael (2005) Ethical Intuitionism (New York: Palgrave MacMillan). Kelly, Thomas (2010) 'Peer disagreement and higher-order evidence' in R. Feldman and T. Warfield (eds.) Disagreement (New York: Oxford University Press), 111–174. Moore, G. E. (1903) Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Plantinga, Alvin (1993) Warrant and Proper Function (New York: Oxford University Press). --- (2000) Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press). 21 Pryor, James (2001) 'Highlights of recent epistemology', British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 52, 95–124. Ross, W. D. (1930) The Right and the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Silver, David (2001) 'Religious experience and the facts of religious pluralism', International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 49, 1–17. Van Cleve, James (2003) 'Is knowledge easy - or impossible? Externalism as the only alternative to skepticism' in S. Luper (ed.) The Skeptics: Contemporary Essays (Aldershot: Ashgate), 45–59. Van Inwagen, Peter (1996) 'It is wrong, everywhere, always, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence' in J. Jordan and D. Howard-Snyder (eds.) Faith, Reason, and Rationality: Philosophy of Religion Today (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield), 137–153. --- (2010) 'We're right, they're wrong' in R. Feldman and T. Warfield (eds.) Disagreement (New York: Oxford University Press), 10–28. Vogel, Jonathan (2000) 'Reliabilism leveled', Journal of Philosophy, 97, 602–623. --- (2008) 'Epistemic Bootstrapping', Journal of Philosophy, 105, 518–539. Vogelstein, Eric (2004) 'Religious pluralism and justified Christian belief: A reply to Silver', International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 55, 187–192. Weisberg, Jonathan (forthcoming) 'Bootstrapping in general', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 22 1 I choose not to follow Baldwin and Thune (2008) in speaking about 'exclusive beliefs'. That expression strikes me as inaccurate since any belief is exclusive in the sense that, if one holds it, one holds incompatible beliefs to be untrue. Hence, exclusivism is not so much a property of beliefs as it is a position or attitude of a person holding certain beliefs, to wit that of continuing to hold that one is right and others wrong while not having a knock-down argument for one's own beliefs (cf. Plantinga (2000, 440) a definition of exclusivism along these lines). 2 Their paper builds on earlier work by David Silver (2001) and replies to Eric Vogelstein's (2004) criticisms of Silver. 3 This 'principle of testimony' is accepted by everyone in the debate, cf. Plantinga (1993, 77– 82), Silver (2001, 5), and Baldwin and Thune (2008, 446). 4 Here and throughout, 'rationality' should be understood in RE's characteristic sense of having properly functioning cognitive faculties. Full rationality in this sense requires both what Plantinga (2000, 110–113) calls internal and external rationality. Internal rationality consists in proper function 'downstream from experience': forming the right beliefs in response to one's cognitive input of sensuous imagery and doxastic experience, having coherent beliefs, drawing the right inferences, making the right decisions given one's beliefs, and fulfilling one's epistemic duties. External rationality consists in proper function 'upstream from experience': forming the right kind of cognitive input, i.e., sensuous imagery and doxastic experience. 5 The passage is directly below the one quoted by Baldwin and Thune. In it, (1) and (2) stand for the following two religious claims: 23 (1) The world was created by God, an almighty, all-knowing and perfectly good personal being (the sort of being who holds beliefs, has aims and intentions, and can act to accomplish these aims); and (2) Human beings require salvation, and God has provided a unique way of salvation through the incarnation, life, sacrificial death, and resurrection of his divine son. (Plantinga 2000, 438). 6 Note that my interpretation of Plantinga differs from the Principle of Testimonial Evidence (PTE) that Vogelstein endorses to defend Plantinga: If I believe a proposition P in the basic way, then if I hear testimony that ~P and have no further defeater for P or ~P, I ought to weigh the strength of my inclination to believe that P against the strength of my inclination to believe that ~P (based on that testimony) in order to determine whether to believe P, ~P, or neither P nor ~P. (Vogelstein 2004, 190) Pace Vogelstein, I concede to Baldwin and Thune that simply weighing the strengths of your inclinations to believe is not enough. In the face of pluralism, one really needs additional support for one's religious beliefs. However, pace Baldwin and Thune I am urging that this support may come from the same quasi-perceptual and testimonial sources that originally produced the beliefs and need not stem from (independent) reasons. 7 Pryor (2001) provides a helpful overview of the many different versions of externalism. Here I take externalism as the denial of the theses that rationality requires that one have special access to (1) the grounds for one's beliefs and (2) the epistemic status of one's beliefs (e.g., their rationality or the adequacy of the grounds on which they are based). This is RE's brand of externalism. 8 Vogel (2000, 2008) objects to exactly this feature of externalist epistemologies, arguing that it allows for illegitimate bootstrapping. Cohen (2002, 2005), Van Cleve (2003), and Weisberg 24 (forthcoming), however, argue that the problem generalizes to internalist epistemologies and is independent of the internalism/externalism controversy. 9 As Plantinga (2000, 453) says about the exclusivist in such a situation: She must think that there is an important epistemic difference: she thinks that somehow the other person has made a mistake, or has a blind spot, or hasn't been wholly attentive, or hasn't received some grace she has, or is blinded by ambition or pride or mother love or something else; she must think that she has access to a source of warranted belief the other lacks. 10 Although the quote is part of an objection levelled to Vogelstein's PTE, the worry it expresses can also be raised for what I have been saying. 11 See Plantinga (2000, 360–363) for the point that defeaters are always relative to a person's total noetic structure. 12 Alston (1988, 273) suggests that the notion of justification derives from the idea of dialectically justifying one's beliefs. 13 One could read their endorsement of what Vogelstein calls the Principle of Testimonial Defeat (PTD) in this vein (Baldwin and Thune 2008, 447–451). This principle, which Vogelstein ends up rejecting, reads as follows: If I believe proposition P in the basic way, then if I hear testimony that ~P, I ought to believe neither P nor ~P (or equivalently, P and ~P act as defeaters for each other) unless I have a defeater for ~P other than P (in which case I ought to believe P), or a defeater for P other than ~P (in which case I ought to believe ~P). (Vogelstein 2004, 189) 25 14 Such indirect dependence introduces complications for the formulation of any plausible independency constraint that neither Silver nor Baldwin and Thune address, but that is not my concern here. 15 Here I disagree with Silver (2001, 12–15) who thinks the ensuing scepticism can mostly be warded off or, where it cannot, is warranted. 16 It is unfortunate that Vogelstein sets up his case around a sociopath, for someone's being a sociopath is already sufficient reason not to take his or her testimony on moral and social matters seriously. (We don't take testimony of a colour-blind on colours seriously either.) Baldwin and Thune rightly exploit this weakness in their reply. 17 If someone wants to object that the testimony of one antirealist is not enough to be taken seriously, you can bring in whatever number of antirealists is deemed sufficient. 18 Kelly (2010, 158ff.) calls this 'downward epistemic push'. 19 Kelly (2010, 159) labels this 'upward epistemic push'. Cf. also note 8 above for worries about bootstrapping. 20 I'm not aware of any attempts to try this for Plantinga's form of RE, but Alston's (1991) doxastic practice approach is sensitive to the fact that rationality may amount to slightly different things for different kinds of belief-forming practices. 21 I am grateful to Martijn Blaauw, Ian Church, Rik Peels, Herman Philipse, and René van Woudenberg for helpful comments on an earlier version. An anonymous referee deserves special thanks for inviting me to develop my argument in a further direction.


Philosophy

This article is about an intervention or approach in mental health care
          that has been developed from hermeneutics, more specifically the
          hermeneutics of Ricoeur. In this intervention photography is used as a
          means to assist patients in a process of meaning making from experiences
          in their life world. It aims at empowerment and strengthening
          the agency of patients. It does so by facilitating storytelling. Mimesis,
          as interpreted by Ricoeur, was found to be a central concept with
          which we could explain the therapeutic working of the approach and
          legitimize its ethical claims of empowerment and recovery. Another
          aspect is the concordance between narrative and action, as described
          by Ricoeur, which has a pendant in the goal orientation of the photography
          intervention. At the same time demonstrations and experiences
          from professional practice (nurses applying the intervention) will give
          us feedback on the theory and enrich it with new insights, e.g. on âiconic
          representationâ.

Hermeneutic Photography: An Innovative Intervention in Psychiatric Rehabilitation Founded on Concepts From Ricoeur Yorumbilimsel Fotoğrafçılık: Ricoeur'un Kavramlarına Dayanan Psikiyatrik Rehabilitasyonda Yenilikçi Bir Fotoğrafçılık Jan SITVAST ÖZ Bu makale akıl sağlığına ilişkin yorumbilimden, daha spesifik olmak gerekirse Ricoeur'un yorumbiliminden geliştirilip kavramlaştırılmış girişim ve yaklaşımlar hakkındadır. Bu girişime foto-enstrüman diyoruz. Hastaların yaşadıkları dünyadaki deneyimlerinden anlam çıkarma sürecinde hastalara yardımcı araç olarak fotografi kullanılmaktadır. Hastaların yaşamla olan bağlarını güçlendirmeyi ve pekiştirmeyi amaçlar. Öykü anlatmayı kolaylaştırarak bunu başarmayı amaçlar. Ricoeur tarafından yorumlandığı gibi mimezis, yaklaşımın tedavi sürecini açıklayabilmemiz, kişinin güçlendirilmesi ve kendini toparlamasının etik savlarını onaylamamız açısından bu kavramın merkezi önemde olduğu saptanmıştır. Başka bir yönü de Ricoeur tarafından tanımlandığı gibi fotografi girişiminde amaca yönelimde bir araç olan anlatımla eylem arasındaki uyumdur. Aynı zamanda mesleki uygulamada (girişimi uygulayan hemşireler) elde edilen deneyimler teoriye geri bildirim sağlamakta yeni içgörülerle (örn: ikonik, görüntülerle canlandırma) bu teoriyi zenginleştirmektedir. Anahtar sözcükler: Yorumbilim; akıl sağlığı bakımı; metaforlar; benzetim; fotografçılık; derlenme; ızdırap çekme. ABSTRACT This article is about an intervention or approach in mental health care that has been developed from hermeneutics, more specifically the hermeneutics of Ricoeur. In this intervention photography is used as a means to assist patients in a process of meaning making from experiences in their life world. It aims at empowerment and strengthening the agency of patients. It does so by facilitating storytelling. Mimesis, as interpreted by Ricoeur, was found to be a central concept with which we could explain the therapeutic working of the approach and legitimize its ethical claims of empowerment and recovery. Another aspect is the concordance between narrative and action, as described by Ricoeur, which has a pendant in the goal orientation of the photography intervention. At the same time demonstrations and experiences from professional practice (nurses applying the intervention) will give us feedback on the theory and enrich it with new insights, e.g. on 'iconic representation'. Keywords: Hermeneutics; mental health care; metaphors; mimesis; photography; recovery; suffering. ORIGINAL ARTICLE / ORİJİNAL MAKALE University of Applied Sciences Hogeschool Utrecht, Netherlands Correspondence: Jan SITVAST, M.D. e-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com Psikiyatri Hemşireliği Dergisi 2014;5(1):17-24 Journal of Psychiatric Nursing 2014;5(1):17-24 Doi: 10.5505/phd.2014.69772 Submitted: March 28, 2014 Accepted: June 10, 2014 17 we refer to our extensive reports in publications elsewhere. [1-6] The photo-instrument is an intervention in mental health care where patients are invited to share with care professionals the photographs they made of their life world.[1,2-6] More specifically these photographs are of a journey into domains of their lives where they experienced a connection with 'a valued life' beyond illness and hospitalization. Persons with a severe mental illness participate in a photo-group where they make photographs with a disposable camera (or nowadays a digital camera). The assignment is to make photographs of what one considers valuable or what is seen as dear to someone. The photographers are then interviewed about their meaning. This is done by the nurse leading the group. Participants are invited to prioritize and select photographs that illustrate or tell the story they want to tell. Photographs and text together form a photo-story that is exhibited at a photoexposition. The process is repeated in a follow-up series of sessions with a new assignment that embroiders on the earlier one. This new assignment focuses on photographing a wish or a goal and what it takes to realize this.[1-6] We will first describe how the photo-instrument is a form of hermeneutic photography. Then we will discuss how the Introduction In this article we will discuss how the photo-instrument, an innovative intervention in mental health care, relates to care ethical issues and is embedded in the philosophy of Ricoeur. The article summarizes studies that have been undertaken by the author in the period 2006-2011 and of which the results were published as a thesis to take a PhD-degree.[1] We do not intend to go into the scientific evidence and research methodology on which our claims are based as the present argumentation is a recapitulation of findings from earlier studies with a focus on the ethical and philosophical inferences and their relations with the praxis of nurses facilitating recovery. For an account of the validity of primary research findings intervention relates to the recovery movement in psychiatric rehabilitation and can be connected with care ethical issues like empowerment and relational autonomy. Recovery will be discussed as a focus for interventions rather than a process per se from the patient's perspective, notwithstanding both aspects cannot be separated (and indeed will be related to each other). The hermeneutic character of the intervention will steer our argumentation to a discussion of storytelling as the main vehicle for recovery. We will describe how concepts from the hermeneutic philosophy of Ricoeur give the photoinstrument a strong theoretical underpinning. Hermeneutics in nursing has until now often been a theory of interpretation and a method of analyzing research texts,[7-10] but we focus on the process of meaning making by the participants of our study themselves and how this can be facilitated by nurses. In nursing the hermeneutic dimension has been given little attention in relation to clinical interventions, but in the Nordic school of nursing that puts caring in the center there are renowned examples of authors who set value by processes of meaning giving: Katie Eriksson's reflections on understanding suffering[11] and Lennart Fredriksson's 'caring conversation'[12] for instance have deeply influenced our own thinking. Ethical Issues A proper informed consent procedure was performed to acquire permission of participants of photo groups for publication of their photographs in scientific journals. The original studies that preceded the present argumentation were executed in accordance with the norms and regulations under Dutch legislation on medical research (the WMO-Law) and were approved by the appropriate Medical-Ethical Board. Hermeneutic Photography The photo-instrument is a potentially strong medium that makes visible what otherwise may remain hidden. Awareness of values in life and what one holds as dear tend to be buried under daily routines and overwhelming burdens of illness. The photo-instrument focuses on meaning making. We therefore consider the photo-instrument a hermeneutic instrument. In nursing research hermeneutic photography was first used by M. Hagedorn,[13] but as an aesthetic technique for generating data. Photography can be used for therapeutic ends because of the potential of photographs to mirror the personal history of the person who has made the photograph.[14] In the Photo-instrument service users made their own photographs. In another variant a professional photographer photographed service users while they were in action.[15] Both are forms of hermeneutic photography in which the photographs are not just an anecdotic report on activities that were performed, but invite a person to see himself as part of a story, an inner discovery journey during which meaning was given to experiences in the life world. Reflecting on the pictures afterwards helped service users to recognize how certain things impacted their lives and how they could integrate them in a broader meaningful context and develop a new perspective. Working in a mental health setting at the time that we developed the intervention and did our PhD-research we were confronted with patients who often had difficulty to voice their life story and cope with the consequences of psychiatric illness in their day-to-day lives. Sometimes they learned from treatment conversations to distrust their feelings and thoughts. Often they were not asked to tell their feelings and thoughts, except for diagnostic and treatment purposes. Nevertheless they felt an urgent need to make sense of their lives, integrate illness experiences and recovery into their life story and find a (new) perspective to live for. This is conditional for achieving harmony with oneself.[16] Recovery In the psychiatric rehabilitation of chronic patients nurses have realized the importance of the concept of 'recovery'. Instead of focusing on improving skills and adapting deficits in psychosocial functioning as an effort of making the best of one's losses, nurses now try to optimize and utilize possibilities, talents and other sources of strength.[17,18] Recovery does not necessarily mean that one becomes free from the symptoms of a severe mental illness. It is much more about distinguishing that part of your life that is affected by mental illness from a core of your identity where values and strivings reside. The Photo-instrument is meant to be a nursing intervention on the basis of hermeneutic photography, that is: photographs are used as a tool in processes of meaning making and construction of one's identity and future. In this way we hope to contribute to a more recovery-oriented rehabilitation that focuses on strengths, hope and patients making their own choices. There is a core of wholeness in every individual, even in a person whose first appearances impress as bizarre, lunatic or strange. In the photographs made by service users we see a whole person, someone like us who has goals, strivings and ambitions that cannot be reduced to the status of being a patient. These photographs enable us to recognize true faces behind the sometimes distorted faces of suffering. Everyone Has the Right to Determine Who He/She Is We believe that hermeneutic photography is an example of empowerment. Why is it empowering? We think that the claim of empowerment can only be justified when the right of someone to determine who he or she is will be respected. Psikiyatri Hemşireliği Dergisi Journal of Psychiatric Nursing 2014;5(1):17-2418 The concept of empowerment emphasizes the subjectivity of the individual and the control over one's own life. In hermeneutic photography we do not apply a professional gaze that diagnoses certain characteristics, or personality traits of a person as sick, inadequate or deviant. Service users have gone through that sometimes for many years in treatment programs. We focus on strengths: talents, skills, strong beliefs and interests capable of motivating people, affiliations with other people, etc. Central to our approach is the idea that you cannot empower someone else. Empowerment happens from within an individual himself. Empowerment requires an atmosphere of trust and respect. These conditions are guaranteed by the lead that service users can take in the project when they take us on a journey to their sources of strength. We foster a dialogical relation in the project. In the end the individual's right to determine who he or she is, contributes to restoring a sense of authorship and agency. Relational Autonomy Empowerment is a dialogical process based on the reciprocity of dependency: today you need me to help you but tomorrow I need you. As humans we are vulnerable. One day or another I fall ill or I will be stricken with misfortune. But even in good health and well-being I need the other to realize aims in life and share everything of value that I care for and care about. In this way we are connected with each other.[19,20] Individual autonomy is not, as we are led to believe by some neo-liberal thinkers, made up by isolated individuals making conscious independent and rational choices, but must be perceived as an ongoing process of interdependent individuals within a communicative setting.[21] People make choices that are shaped by influences from the environment. We use the notion of relational autonomy[22] to denote this interdependency. Nurses can help persons with a psychiatric disability to become empowered by stimulating them to define themselves not as patients but on the basis of authentic choices, their historical identities and own perspectives.[4] This may result in new goals in life and may be considered a step in the rehabilitation process. When people have difficulty to talk about emotional experiences or find words for feelings that are complicated and diffuse, then there is a need for non-verbal and creative means to stimulate the process of meaning making and goal setting. We therefore consider hermeneutic photography as complementary to the traditional verbal exchange in goal setting talks of practitioners of psychiatric rehabilitation with their clients. Mimesis and Ricoeur Photographs are images. We think that images play a role in triggering people into reflection on personal history and values. Images invite people to widen their horizons and enter a process of meaning making of their experiences. There is interplay between factual images and imagination, which contributes to strong 'dense' images. These images are laden with meaning. They keep coming back in the mind, are memorized and in this way become mentalized. Thus they serve as mental icons and may become a compass for further trajectories of recovery. Our understanding of how this works was enriched by reading the works of Ricoeur.[2] Especially 'The Rule of Metaphor. The creation of meaning in language'[23] and 'Time and Narrative'[24] are relevant for us, because these studies focus on processes of meaning making in the context of storytelling or narrative. In these key studies Ricoeur developed a theory about how people make sense of their experiences in real life and attribute meaning to them by constructing a story. People tell stories or narratives to reorganize disjointed bits of information in a new meaningful structure that has the following elements:[25] the action of the story (the sequence of events), the scene (where and when did things happen), the agent (who did the action), agency (how did he or she do it) and the purpose (why did it happen). In constructing a story someone brings together these elements and relates them to each other in the plot of the story. This is called the emplotment of a story. In 'The Rule of Metaphor' and 'Time and Narrative' Ricoeur wondered how this emplotment came about. According to Ricoeur emplotment is the outcome of a transformational process that he identified as 'mimesis'. He distinguishes several steps. First there are lived experiences. Usually someone feels the urge to get grip on them. However, this is hard when you are still immersed in the situation, for instance when you are a patient and live through the direct aftermath of a psychiatric crisis. That's when someone needs to create some distance between him and an overwhelming experience in order to be able to reflect on what has happened. When someone succeeds in finding the necessary distance then his position does not longer fully coincide with overwhelming events. A meta-position is created from where it is easier to open up to other meanings than seemed dictated by the facts of an experienced event. This is what Ricoeur called a widening of horizons. The process of mimesis is one in which past memories and anticipations (hopes, wishes, fears) of the future join the reflection of experiences in the present, in this way making possible a fuller and maybe more authentic (in terms of someone's history) account of what events mean to someone. What triggers this process is imagination: a creative play in which the mind juggles with associations and images. Ricoeur claimed that metaphors and imagery have a central role in this creative play. Metaphors are a figure of speech which transfers meaning from one domain to another, for instance from perception into cognition in 'I can see what you mean'. Imagery is the more general SITVAST J, Hermeneutic Photography and Recovery 19 naming for figures of speech in which an image carries a connotated meaning, as for instance in 'Photographs are a vehicle of messages about oneself '. Metaphors and imagery enable someone to jump from one line of thought to another and in this way reformulate lived experiences. These reformulated experiences then condense in a narrative plot. The Role of Images in Mimesis What is of special interest in the context of hermeneutic photography is the role of images in Ricoeur's concept of the mimetic process. Ricoeur's theory enabled us to recognize phases in the patients' trajectory of meaning making: through distanciation of lived experiences to a condensation in a narrative plot. Pieter for instance, a participant in one of our photo projects, made a photograph of a mouldered elm ravaged by a storm and used it as a metaphor for what a psychosis had done to his mind. In this way he could reflect on his situation, rethinking where his position was in his contact with caregivers. The story that he emplotted around this imagery helped him to find a new balance in his life and take new initiatives, actions based on his novel understanding of himself. According to Ricoeur, action, lived experience and its emplotment in stories are strongly interlinked. In premeditated action he sees a parallel with narrative as the action scenario resembles a story plot.[26] Yet Ricoeur focuses on textual aspects, paying less attention to performative aspects. We however found that patients used their photographs not only as imagery, but also to situate their story in reality. Distanciation was often followed by certain factuality; connecting patients again with concrete palpable reality (see textbox). In this way patients re-appropriate their lived experiences again, an act that was reinforced in the second series of sessions by the focus on photographing a wish or a goal and what it takes to realize this. Textbox Ellen, a participant in one of our photo projects, photographed a lane in the wood that she already visited in her youth. The dark lane with light shining through the trees evoked strong emotions and associations with her course through life. In the image memories merged with anticipations and hope, which was mirrored in the alternation of light spots and dark corners. The grounding of the photographs in local contexts and strong sensorial experiences lent her narrative a powerful appeal. Images remained linked up with strong sensory perceptions. This gave stories a freshness and acuteness in communication, deriving from 'dense impressions', not fully accounted for by Ricoeur. He downplays the role of the image, because he claims that images can only become intelligible through interpretation in language. Our finding that images retain strong links with sensory perceptions enriches Ricoeur's theory, acknowledging that taking photographs is a distanciating act, putting a camera between you and the perceived reality and that image as a result of this act invite further reflection. We described the sensory impact of images in terms of iconic quality.[2] Like in religious icons, photographic images can be charged with associations and impressions that make sense of an experience, or in other words represent it. We conclude that the concept of iconic representation, also embraced by Ricoeur, should not be restricted to verbal icons. The sensible, sensual plenitude that Ricoeur[23] ascribes to poetry can also be found in sculpture and in photographs. In photographs too, we observed a fusion of sense and sensa: sounds, images and feelings that does not only provide an occasion for an unfolding of the imagery, but also exerts a force in it self upon the world, including language (Goodman, cited with Ricoeur, 1977). This force is based on the principle of psychological association and is realized in the act of expression. In fact, the effort of expression evokes the psychic associations (Ullmann cited with Ricoeur, 1977) of lively impressions from memory and emotions that makes the image 'iconic'. This is the figurative ability of images, the potential of making-seen, the 'setting before the eyes'. In metaphor, the verbal moment and the non-verbal moment cooperate. As Ricoeur says, 'metaphor owes to this liaison its seemingly essential concreteness' (23: 246). Ricoeur argues that images alone (apart from their functioning in metaphors), seem closed to themselves and stand for a sort of 'private' mental experience that impedes the mimetic process, the 'seeing as' that makes the sense and image hold together. On the basis of our findings however we think that the 'thingyness', the 'iconic solidity' of images, however self-contained it may be, lends a vividness to what is told, be it a metaphor or more concrete information about someone's life world, reifying it and making it more compelling and easier to remember. This is related to the domain of psychology and neurology, which we will not go further into here. Iconic Photographs in the Context of a Caring Conversation Still, we may conclude that the iconic quality of images is very important in the context of the nurse-patient relationship, because it grounds the communication between nurses and patients in the sensory lived-through experiences of the patient. Photo-stories protect nurses from a too rapid and premature thinking in actions and things to do. We did not research this specific aspect, but we assume that this effect is brought about by the density of meanings in certain photographs that possibly lends them an urgency that is sometimes lacking in 'ordinary' conversations between patients and nurses. These iconic photographs probably make a strong Psikiyatri Hemşireliği Dergisi Journal of Psychiatric Nursing 2014;5(1):17-2420 appeal on the viewer to further explore the condensed meanings with the patients who made them. They seem an entry for learning more about the identity of the patient and his needs. We think that iconic photographs facilitate recognizing someone's identity and his needs. If so, this is of imminent importance for certain basic competences of nurses. According to Tronto,[20] nurses need to be attentive and sensitive to patients' needs, combining a concern for someone with skilled expertise in order to realize good care. Attentiveness, which comes even before the diagnostic process of assessing health problems, at a later stage, enables responsiveness of care to the unique person and his particular needs. It takes into account the susceptibility of the patient for certain specific nursing interventions. In other words: does the nurse sense how a patient will receive and respond to care that she will give? In the rush of busy routines under time pressures that are always present, nurses tend to forego this process of tuning to the person of the patient and pass on to the pragmatics of daily care. We think that photographs invite the nurse to suspend acting from a problem-oriented way of working and that by sharing the meanings of a photograph they may come to know a patient better. For instance, patients suffering from a chronic illness sometimes compare their body with a motor that sometimes falters (but then can be repaired). This may be helpful to invoke an image and voice a perception of realities and inequities of a life with pain that is less threatening than the idea of an irremediable illness and a body that betrays us in an unpredictable way. The imagery of a mechanical device may help the narrator to open up to a differentiation between pain and suffering, making a distinction between who we are and the inflictions that beset us.[27,28] In this way the metaphorical transformation of meaning that we endow to our lived experiences may help us in restoring the idea that we are to some degree the agents of our own lives. It reduces the suffering that comes from experiencing powerlessness in the face of illness and pain. Reclaiming Life: A Moral Learning Process Hermeneutic photography facilitates story-telling through which patients not only represent their lives, but also reconstruct them. With Nussbaum we hold that feelings and emotions as they are expressed in narratives reflect a personal standpoint and value commitment.[29] This is the ethical aspect. People start telling stories because they encounter dilemmas and face conflicting duties in everyday life where they are challenged by concrete practical affairs. Their deliberations are presented as anecdotes, puns and stories. These stories do not only represent the reality of someone's life with illness, crisis and traumas, but are also a vehicle to give meaning to a dramatic episode in one's life.[30] They often reflect notions about the good life.[31] Nurses who enter on a dialogue with patients can be considered co-creators of patients' photo-stories to some extent. Nurses leading photo groups facilitate patients to deliberate on underlying experiences and in this way they foster a moral learning process in which patients start redefining their existence and a new perspective of the good life can be constructed.[32,33] From being a psychiatric patient one may become a person with a mental illness: someone who has goals, strivings and ambitions that cannot be reduced to the status of being a patient. To say 'I am' is to say 'I want, I move, I do" (34: 321). The notion of existence here is associated with the notion of action and the power of acting. Ricoeur holds that suffering occurs where the power of acting decreases and someone becomes the patient of actions by others (versus being an agent of one's actions), as often is the case in mental illness when one becomes the object of treatment. Being an agent of one's actions, includes being subject to morality by which we understand the articulation of ethical aims in norms that help someone to characterize his action as good, just and wise.[34] In the photo-instrument this takes the form of a dialogical process of formulating and recounting of actions and how they match with someone's concept of the good life.[4] We think that the concrete factuality of images helps patients to reconnect again with the pragmatics of daily life in a dynamic movement of appropriation that follows upon distanciation and a widening of horizons. We follow Ricoeur here again where he, in Time and Narrative[35] described the dialectic relationship between distanciation and appropriation as 'moments' in the process of mimesis. The relevance of these dialectics for Recovery from the patient's perspective finds an adequate pendant in Phil Barker's claim that recovery processes can be understood as a 'reclaiming life'.[36] We will explain this further. The Concept of Face and Voice By means of structured photography assignments the intervention facilitates reflection on things that a participant considers as important and valuable here and now. The next step, in a new round of making photographs, is intended to photograph a wish that one would realize in the near future. Thus we connect the present with past memories and anticipations (hopes, wishes, fears) of the future that invites patients to formulate a new perspective. Participants are also asked to picture (and photograph) what it takes to realize their wish in terms of learning new skills, assembling strength or organizing support. This is premeditation on the action part that grounds the photo story in reality. Reflection and dialogue on the necessary actions often elicit further goal setting. If these goals are realistic and can be attained then this raises hope. In working on recovery service users need readiness: a readiness to go forward, pick their own goals and go for them, but without neglecting limitations and handicaps. This implies that mentor nurses and others must offer a dialogical contact. During this process of dialogue, participants realize that their SITVAST J, Hermeneutic Photography and Recovery 21 mental illness and its consequences for daily life may interfere with their plans. It has to be fit in somewhere. This is the assimilation and acceptation of vulnerability for psychiatric crisis. Without it recovery becomes a hazardous adventure. [16] At the same time service users often have to deal with stories that do not reflect who they are and undermine their sense of identity, integrity and dignity. Professional narratives tend to be plotted around setting a diagnosis and therapeutic actions that need to be taken to restore the patient's health. The patient's narrative is then reduced to a therapeutic narrative, which often leads to the feeling of not being heard and recognized. The concepts of face and voice can be used here to explain that people want to be acknowledged as a certain kind of person.[4,37] Especially in informal talk people will share personal experiences in order to maintain respect and to prevent a loss of face that would incur feelings of shame. As this is an interactive process of construction one might speak of enacted identity narrative.[38] Narratives may represent a polyphony of narrative voices that make up our identity.[39] Their function may be twofold: a transformation of the self or a replay and an upkeeping of face. We use the concepts of face and voice as operationalization of the relational and ethical context of (photo-) storytelling. With Ricoeur we consider face as essentially standing for a reciprocal relationship between a person who suffers and someone giving care. This reciprocal quality had been lost in the imperative call that the concept of face had with Levinas. According to Ricoeur with Levinas face is the face of a master of justice, summoning the other to respond to suffering in a dissymmetrical way (34: 189). Discussing the concept of solicitude Ricoeur argues that in the end we receive just as much as we give when we help someone who is suffering, even where this person we help is the object of our actions in one-way direction. He claims that what we receive in return, namely the chance to experience that we humans are vulnerable, can be of great cathartic value (34: 188). Translated into the praxis of nursing this experience or awareness contributes to be truly present in our contact with patients[40] and be with a person who is suffering. Nurses that accompany service users on their journey of recovery, as they do in photo groups, must refrain from acting on the basis of their knowledge of psychiatric malfunctioning (of course at other moments -in situations of psychiatric deteriorationtheir expertise may be needed and treatment must be given). They must adopt the role of facilitator who makes possible the journey. It befits them to be thankful for the privilege to be let in on the journey that touches on very personal and sometimes painful confrontations and choices and learn about the life of their patient in a way that they probably would never have from patients' charts and histories. We think that this learning is a reciprocal process for both service users and nurses (see also textbox with case description). It helps nurses to become sensitive to the strengths of service users and how to use this in their professional support of recovery.[15] The journey of discovery on which nurses and patients embark together fosters an increased sense of closeness and at times even equality with the staff, comparable with findings from other studies where nurses participated in a lifestyle program together with their patients.[41] Textbox Marjolein participated in a photo group in a residential setting of a mental health institute. She had been an inpatient for quite some time, but was going to spend more time in her own house as part of a resocialization program. She felt torn apart by ambivalent feelings: fear that she could not cope and hope that she can live on her own. She did not dare to reflect on her situation. She selected a photograph she took of a professional camera and told that she wanted to make semi-professional photographs. This seemed an unrealistic phantasy as if she could not face reality here and now. How can we understand this living in one time-frame, Psikiyatri Hemşireliği Dergisi Journal of Psychiatric Nursing 2014;5(1):17-2422 Figure 1. Photograph by Ellen of a dark lane in the wood. Figure 2. Photograph made by Marjolein. "I want to buy a semiprofessional camera!" when someone lives his life from day to day, in terms of the theoretical notions on mimesis? We followed Ricoeur in his Aristotelian interpretation of mimesis as a constructive and creative reformulation of reality. Ricoeur claims that this is based on an exchange between expectations based on experiences from the past, circumstances in the present end anticipations of the future. One may say that this exchange between aspects of meaning giving from three time-frames is incomplete in Marjolein's way of coping with suffering. However, as Ricoeur[35] also stated, narrative identity oscillates between two limits: a lower limit where permanence of time is predominant and an upper limit where self-constancy is at stake. On the one hand we wish to convince others that we are the same person from who we were before and who we are now. On the other hand we want to show that we are whom we pretend we are and that others can count on us to be that person. The notion of self-constancy with Ricoeur is essentially an ethical one and carries in itself aspects of a promise. If someone can count on me, then I am accountable for my actions. We can see how both ends, permanence and promise, are linked up in Marjolein's story. The permanence is reflected in the fact that photography has always been with Marjolein and her family. The promise is that Marjolein pledges her future to learning how to making photographs in a semi-professional way. The narrative unity of her life, or in other words the degree to which Marjolein is able to relate circumstances from the present to memories and anticipations, may be considered an unstable mixture of fabulation and actual experience (35: 162), because she doesn't reckon with her unstable psychic condition. We should, however, take into account that the context in which her photo-story is conceived and received is a photo group that prepares a photo-exhibition. This context directed Marjolein towards making a statement. Her story can be read as an illocutionary act. Marjolein didn't only refer to her hobby of photography as something that is interesting to know but she also implicated something more, namely that she intended to go for it. It is a performance in speaking. Conclusions The hermeneutic philosophy of Ricoeur clearly enriches the praxis of caregiving of the photo-instrument by lending it a theoretical framework that legitimizes its care ethical principles and explains its hermeneutic working. At the same time experiences from the practice of the photo-instrument may contribute to a further development of theoretical notions in Ricoeur's philosophy, as for instance in the case of 'iconic representation' and its role in action-oriented performance. The connection between narrative (e.g. photostories) and action (recovery in psychiatric rehabilitation) in Ricoeur's philosophy makes it a strong middle ground where praxis and philosophy can meet. Mental health nursing can only profit from this meeting. The article is based on a thesis that can be consulted at http://DARE.UBVU.VU.NL/handle/1871/28777. References 1. Sitvast J. The Photo-instrument as therapeutic intervention in mental health care. How to use clients' photo-stories for recovery. 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