The Many Faces of Religious Truth: Hilary Putnam’s Pragmatic Pluralism on Religion

Religious statements can be true or false, and are not merely arbitrary

or personally meaningful. That is the core thesis of this work in

pragmatist philosophy of religion. Other contemporary approaches are

deficient, as they have problematic ways of understanding truth and

experience. The argument in this study draws on Hilary Putnam’s work in

such fields as ethics, epistemology, philosophy of language and

philosophy of mind. Influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein, however, Putnam

doesn’t fully acknowledge how religious statements, similar to other

statements, depend on an interaction of our language and the world. This

would make religious truth a matter of convention. Drawing on another

source of inspiration for Putnam, William James, Niek Brunsveld shows

how religious claims can have truth value.