Philosophical Foundations for Interreligious Dialogue: Theories of Interreligious Dialogue, the Epistemology of Disagreement, and the Idea of Constructiveness

According to many contemporary theorists, interreligious dialogue should be characterized by its constructive nature. Yet, despite the desire for interreligious interaction to be constructive, there are no accounts of what exactly constructiveness is. The lack of such an account makes it difficult to decide the extent to which the theoretical approaches to religious difference on offer are constructive and, if so, what makes this the case. This study engages this problem by developing an evaluative notion of constructiveness that provides a way of assessing the extent to which theories of interreligious dialogue are constructive and, if so, why. Importantly, since interreligious dialogue often involves disagreement, any account of constructiveness should consider the rational obligations that confront the individual in light of the fact that another may disagree about a given religious matter. Taking this into consideration, the account of constructiveness in the context of interreligious dialogue that I develop is attuned to the rational dimensions of dialogue. My account is based on three evaluative criteria: dialogicality, evidence expansion, and epistemic flourishing. After developing these evaluative criteria, I use them to assess the extent to which leading theoretical approaches to interreligious dialogue (organized according to the threefold typology of exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism) should be considered constructive. Since fulfilling one’s rational obligations is especially challenging in cases of religious disagreement, I first reconstruct each theoretical approach to interreligious dialogue in terms of the two leading epistemological theories of disagreement: Conciliationism and Steadfastness. I argue that inclusivism and pluralism are most naturally reconstructed in terms of Conciliationism, while exclusivism is most naturally reconstructed in terms of Steadfastness. Having reconstructed these theories, I show that, while some theoretical approaches may be more reliably constructive than others, no approach can be understood as intrinsically constructive. Instead, I argue that a more fundamental task underwrites constructive interaction: the task of assigning positive epistemic status to the other’s belief. In my estimation, constructive interaction depends on whether one is able to assign some measure of positive epistemic status to the other’s beliefs. This task is made possible by a process I call cognitive solidarity, an empathic-like attitude that uses imaginative modal reasoning to help one grasp the positive-epistemic-status-conferring features of the other’s belief. I suggest that the practice of cognitive solidarity can help each theoretical approach to be more reliably constructive, even though, in my estimation, certain versions of exclusivism, all things considered, possess features that give them advantages over other approaches.