Pragmatic Encroachment, Phenomenology, and Religious Experience

Abstract

Aaron Rizzieri’s Pragmatic Encroachment, Religious Belief, and Practice (2013) is the fullest religious appropriation of a relatively new epistemological concept: pragmatic encroachment. To achieve this goal, Rizzieri rightly sees (1) how justification takes place within an encompassing pragmatic context and (2) how justification of religious belief establishes within a wider context less than absolute knowledge. While the first point can be supported by Alfred Schutz’s theory of action, often including multi-layered sub-acts, Schutz’s idea of a theoretical enclave can create a space for epistemic evidentialism, as an independent distinctive moment, with distinctive (justificatory) purposes, within an overarching practical action. Rizzieri’s book itself exemplifies such evidentialism, theoretically justifying pragmatic encroachment, after the fashion of Husserlian transcendental phenomenology. Rizzieri could also profit from Husserlian regional ontologies, on which he implicitly already relies to support religious knowledge. Husserl’s concept of bipolar intentionality would accommodate Rizzieri’s responsible internalism, while allowing for the action of objects upon us. This, in turn, opens the door to the evidence for religious knowledge that an account of religious experience such as Max Scheler’s could provide. Such an account could counter those who reduce religious experience to mere subjective projection—a critique to which internalism might be more vulnerable.

1. Stakes, the Contexts of Knowing, and the Meaning of Knowing Relative to Contexts

From Blaise Pascal’s wager to William James’s will to believe, philosophers have explored the question of whether one ought to believe in God despite the lack of convincing evidence that God exists, simply because the benefits of believing or the disadvantages of not-believing are so considerable that it is worth the risk to believe, despite the lack of evidence. Recent philosophical literature has recuperated a version of these traditional arguments under the canopy of “pragmatic encroachment”. According to this paradigm, the bar of justification for a belief, which one might think is merely an epistemic matter and decidable independently of one’s practical interests, can actually be elevated when the pragmatic stakes linked to one’s knowing are high (Rizzieri 2013).

Rizzieri (2013) presents a clear example of how pragmatic encroachment works in general before considering its religious application. A hypothetical banking case depicts a situation in which an individual, Hanna, ponders whether to transfer money to her grandmother on Friday or wait until Saturday, but if she does not successfully transfer the money this weekend, her grandmother will be unable to pay for life-saving surgery. Hanna remembers transferring money on past Saturdays and consequently has a true belief (which would presuppose that we know that the bank will be open and the transfer possible) that she can transfer the money on Saturday, but the question is whether, if she is not sure of her memories, she knows that the bank will be open and will permit the transfer service on Saturday. In Rizzieri’s view, Hanna, because she has some doubt about whether the bank still maintains the business hours she recalls, would be morally negligent if she did not double check before waiting until Saturday to go to the bank to initiate the transaction. This case clearly indicates the principle of pragmatic encroachment, namely that when the stakes are high (the grandmother’s surgery), the bar for justification becomes higher than it would be if the grandmother did not need life-saving surgery that had to be paid for on Saturday or if she had sufficient funds and would not need the monies from the transfer or if Hanna’s only concern was to go to the bank to make a deposit and to avoid the inconvenience of traveling to the bank on Saturday only to find it closed. Because the grandmother’s surgery heightens the need for the successful transfer, Hanna is morally required to check twice. On the basis of this and similar cases, Rizzieri (2013, p. 30) criticizes those “intellectualist” perspectives that divorce “the connection between knowledge, assertion, and practical reason” and that would “fail to register the significance of the fact that the degree of reliability that is required for Hanna to properly believe that [a proposition] o is affected by stakes considerations” (Rizzieri 2013, p. 23). In effect, they separate pragmatic concerns from epistemic concerns and fail to see their intimate connection so that pragmatic circumstances, as in Hanna’s case, can elevate the bar for justification. Rizzieri’s coupling of epistemic with pragmatic concerns also implies that knowledge can serve to ground the rationality of practical action, so that when Hanna’s justification is strengthened by double-checking, she would be guided to make the transfer in such a way that her grandmother’s surgery would be ensured.

Seeing this connection between knowing and practical action, Rizzieri argues that we can say that if Hanna knew or was justified about proposition p, it would have been rational for her to act as if p. Consequently, relying on only her vague memory that the bank had been open previously on Saturdays and not double-checking, Hanna would not have known sufficiently p (that the bank would be open on Saturday) to act on it, to act as if she knew p. The sufficiency of knowledge in this case is clearly affected, though, by the fact that if Hanna did not make the transfer that weekend, her grandmother’s life-preserving surgery would not have been able to take place. After checking, though, Hanna would have been rational in acting as if p, and we could say that at that point, however, much of her knowledge or justification may have fallen short of absolute certainty (e.g., the bank could blow up early Saturday morning) that she knew p or was justified in believing p. One knows or is justified in believing that p, if it is rational to act as if p. Furthermore, Rizzieri notes that the conditions under which Hanna, or anyone for that matter, would be negligent or irrational depends on what one should or could be aware of, with reference to the pragmatic situations facing them, with their different stakes. The higher the stakes, the higher the bar of justification.

Moreover, insofar as Rizzieri’s argument concentrates on the evidence one ought to have and its strength in order to act responsibly, that is, without negligence, Rizzieri’s account represents an epistemological internalism. Within such a responsible internalism, it is more suitable to speak of the justification for one’s beliefs than knowing. To illustrate how the justification involved in responsible internalism works, Rizzieri (2013) points out how a doctor who takes account of all the evidence available, all that she should be aware of, both to diagnose a client’s malady and prescribe the appropriate medication, is justified and acts responsibly. This would continue to be the case, even should the client in the end die because of properties present in the medication, unknown to pharmacological science at the time of her prescriptions and discoverable only later—properties that the doctor could not have possibly known about.

Rizzieri (2013) then applies his theory to religious belief and justification by considering the case of Tony, a believing Christian who has a strong evidential basis (but short of certain knowledge) for J, that Jesus rose from the dead. His belief in J is not risky since his psychology and behavior would be better off believing in the resurrection, even if, unbeknownst to him, that belief might be false. The stakes are not high and the justification bar is low. However, this all changes for Tony, when it comes to justification or knowledge regarding not-J. The psychological suffering and loss of hope that would result for Tony if he knew that not-J would be immense and since the stakes here of acting as if not-J are quite high, the level of justification for not-J is raised correlatively. In contrast, an atheist might think that the stakes are high to believe that J, since the atheist’s life might have to be considerably altered if J is known and so for the atheist, the bar for any justification of J would be high.

Up to this point, Rizzieri’s argument could be taken to center on knowledge relative to specific contexts, in which higher stakes elevate the bar of justification needed for p if one is to allow p to guide one’s practical action—in contrast to another setting for p in which the stakes and the correlative bar of justification are lower. Rizzieri also raises the question about how this p, sufficiently justified to come to terms with a new context in which the stakes are higher, would fare vis-à-vis other kinds of knowledge and justified propositions such as those of the natural sciences, particularly if one’s p seems justified with respect to religious questions such as J or not-J. To begin this discussion, Rizzieri (2013, p. 48) acknowledges that there is no certain knowledge on either side of the religious belief or unbelief question, and so, for the religious believer, he focuses on the idea that knowledge of God’s existence should be expressed through the language of “hope”, following the views of Jeff Jordan (2006). Rizzieri (2013) asserts that one can neither hope in a religious/spiritual sense for what one knows to be false nor hope for what one knows will certainly obtain. Thus, regarding the former and retrieving the earlier discussion, the stakes are so high for the believer that she would need a high level of justification to assent to not-J (that Jesus did not rise from the dead). However, if one’s justified beliefs convincingly demonstrated not-J, the only responsible thing to do would be to abandon one’s religious/spiritual commitment. However, if one’s belief in not-J has not been conclusively demonstrated, the religious believer could still hope in J (that Jesus rose from the dead), but in that case, one would not know whether the object of one’s hope would be obtained. In spite of this fact, Rizzieri (2013, pp. 3, 48) conceives that one might nevertheless achieve a level of justification that is not sufficient for a settled “outright belief” that J, but that still might suffice to render J probable, adequate epistemically for one to maintain one’s commitment to spiritual/religious experience. Rizzieri suggests the parallel example of a widow who would hope that her missing husband is alive and search for him, even though there is strong evidence that he may not be alive and even if she does not know for sure that he is alive. However, if she knew that he was deceased, then she could not hope at all. It would make sense, Rizzieri (2013, p. 52) comments, for her to say “I know that he is probably dead, but I hope he is not”, as opposed to saying “I know that he is dead, but hope he is not”. This discussion on hope suggests that one’s belief that J need not be free of doubts and uncertainties. Keith de Rose marks out a similar in-between field when it comes to knowledge of God’s existence when he observes that we often engage in an inauthentic pretense of claiming to know things we merely accept to be the case. Consequently, he proposes an alternative form of religious belief that represents a kind of agnosticism, that of those who take themselves not to know, those agnostics, who “even when engaging in the pretense of knowing things they merely accept as being the case, won’t talk as if they know them” (DeRose 2018, pp. 300–1).

Despite religious belief falling short of “outright belief”, Rizzieri (2013, pp. 80–107) claims that his internalist position is more rigorous than Alvin Plantinga’s reformed epistemology. Plantinga, conceiving “warranted belief” (Plantinga 1993, pp. 46–47) as taking place when cognitive faculties function properly, that is, as they are supposed to, describes religious beliefs (e.g., about God’s existence) as basic beliefs (not dependent on other beliefs). Such beliefs are effected through the support of an in-born sensus divinitatus, but they also, because of sin, depend on the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit. Given the assistance of this divine efficacy, one’s burden of responsibility in the face of counter-evidence is to “do one’s best” (Rizzieri 2013, p. 101), that is, pay sufficient attention to such counter-evidence, which, if it is found uncompelling, requires no further effort. This “duty-blameless” (Rizzieri 2013, pp. 81, 95) approach to justification is weaker than Rizzieri’s attention to the important internal rationality requirement on knowledge, which would call upon one to abandon religious belief if it was disproven and to seek to articulate the level of justification possible for religious belief in relation to other types of “knowledge” and which Rizzieri (2013, p. 102) calls a “duty-fulfillment” notion. Rizzieri believes that Plantinga, as a result of his more relaxed standards, downplays evidential arguments against God’s existence because of the problem of evil and even could end up justifying negligent actions.

Reiterating the internalist position that one could be wrong even though not negligent insofar as one thoroughly assesses the evidence that one could be held responsible for knowing, Rizzieri (2013, p. 125) responds to objections that his internalist view could justify clairvoyance as a method for obtaining truth or a “subjective perspective” stance that might justify a belief that ends up true, but only by accident. Rizzieri insists that such objections neglect the fact that internal responsibility requires that one’s process of belief formation relies on virtues (even if an ordinary subject cannot articulate them all). Furthermore, an internally responsible subject would know that reliance on clairvoyance as a method of belief formation would be irresponsible and that to endorse a method that would arrive at truth only accidentally, would in effect permit one to arrive at action-guiding beliefs that could be charged with negligence. Instead, one’s process of belief-formation must have a track record of reliability over time. In other words, internalism heads off many of the objections that externalism raises against it.

In the end, for Rizzieri, pragmatic encroachment involves considering how the degree of evidence for believing p, namely that God exists, is calibrated with reference to p’s being a reason for acting, that of committing oneself to God in a religious relationship. For Rizzieri, the evidence for God’s existence is either counterbalanced or inscrutable, and the value of a commitment to God implies that that one can hope in God’s existence even if one is justified in believing in God’s existence in a way that falls short of “outright belief”, that is, a completely sufficient knowing of that belief. That is, one does not know that God does exist, which Rizzieri had admitted earlier, and one does not know that God does not exist (and we recall that for a believer, the stakes have to be high and therefore the bar of justification is high for showing that God does not exist). Rather, hope is more vulnerable than outright belief, but it embraces the internalist norm of providing a justification of p for which one can be held responsible, in contrast to knowledge that p, however much such knowledge might be an ideal for the guidance of an action.

As a final consideration of how one’s religious belief p might be brought into relationship with broader notions of “knowledge” (as opposed to considering specific contexts in which higher stakes affect the bar of justification), Rizzieri (2013) shows the relevance of his perspective to the thought of William James. Because William James, as a pragmatist, thought belief entailed willingness to act and perhaps because he was responding to Clifford, who held that one could only be morally justified in acting as if p only if one had adequate, knowledge-level evidence that p, James found it difficult to decouple the action (e.g., dedicating oneself to God) from one’s epistemic position on p (God exists). James held that the choice between believing that God exists or does not exist is forced, that is, for him, to fail to believe p (have knowledge that God exists) would be equivalent to believing not-p (that God did not exist). The latter, of course, would have undermined religious belief completely. Likewise, one could not fully dedicate oneself to God as an action unless one knew that God exists. The idea of a hope based on an internalist justification of p instead of “outright belief” that p, given the religious values at stake, was simply not available to James. Instead, Rizzieri (2013, p. 153) proposes, following Bishop (2007), that belief that p is not an “all-or-nothing affair”, not a forced option. One can fully dedicate oneself to a course of action on the basis of a partial belief (Rizzieri 2013, p. 151).

2. Knowing in Contexts: Relevances, Bracketing, and Temporality

Rizzieri (2013) criticizes the intellectual contextualism of Keith DeRose and Stewart Cohen insofar as it fails to see the relationship between knowledge, assertion, and practical reasoning; holds that agents can instantiate knowledge relationships that serve no purpose; and overlooks how knowledge relations that p provide epistemic support that match the different levels necessary for rendering a variety of activities practically rational in various settings. Rizzieri’s pragmatic encroachment demonstrates the intertwining of knowledge, assertions (that p), and practical rationality, and it does so by showing how practical stakes interact with and affect the bar of justification for propositions that will guide action. One can illustrate the place of pragmatic encroachment (religious and non-religious) and the interweaving of valuative and epistemic concerns that Rizzieri argues for, if one not only lays out side-by-side pragmatic concerns and epistemic accounts of justification, each interacting with each other, but also sees that these different strands are entwined with each other as strata within a single, complex (vertically oriented) action. To envision this possibility, it is worthwhile to turn to the theory of action developed by Alfred Schutz.

In Schutz’s theory of action (Schutz 1967), one devises in reflection beforehand an in-order-to project, which one imagines in future perfect tense, that is, what will have resulted after one takes all the steps including all the sub-actions nested within and making up the process leading to the project’s realization. The ultimate goal of an action, its purpose, the in-order-to motive of an actor, functions as the guiding interest or “relevance” for the sake of which all the relevances and purposes for the sake of which the sub-actions are undertaken are themselves subordinated. Hence, Hanna’s ultimate motive might be to ensure that her grandmother receive her life-saving surgery and a sub-goal en route to achieving that purpose would be seeing to it that a money transfer could be effected by Saturday and to achieve that goal, one would need to have knowledge of a certain strength whether the bank would be open Saturday so that the transfer could be made. To achieve that knowledge, Hanna could not rely simply on her memory of past Saturday bank activity, but would need to double-check. In other words, a series of sub-projects and the sub-actions taken to realize them need to be executed so that the final goal, the grandmother’s surgery, can materialize. All of these components can be seen as constitutive of a single, intricate action. Were Hanna to adopt a different ultimate goal such as playing golf on Saturday instead of making the transfer, or were she to allow at a lower level of the single action her unexamined memory to guide her to going to the bank on Saturday (without double checking), she could be criticized, from either a common sense or theoretical level, for having a morally improper ranking of relevances in her choice of actions or for being morally negligent in establishing the belief (about the post office being open Saturday) that should have guided her action at that lower-level of the action sequence, leading to her final goal.

Similarly, in the religious/spiritual version of encroachment, the ultimate goal of one’s action might be to maintain a spiritual relationship with God but to achieve that actional goal, one would have to establish (justify to some degree) some belief/proposition that would be able to “guide” the action (parallel to Hanna’s determining that post-office would be open on Saturday). In the religious case, one can imagine even a reflective common sense actor, who might have unreflectively undertaken a religious commitment, at some point coming to consider what kinds of beliefs ought to be in place as a condition for the action of committing oneself to God. Rizzieri (2013) is clear that even normal adults are capable of recognizing without full-fledged philosophical, discursive analyses what propositions might be needed, or what truths they ought not to obtain if they are to responsibly pursue certain goals. Hence, it could definitively be shown that God does not exist, for example, one could not consistently commit one’s life to God (and hence, as mentioned, given these high stakes, the bar of justification for the non-existence of God would be high). Supposing that common-sense, reflective believers are convinced that there is no definitive proof that God does not exist, they might then go further to consider how much justification, in some way and to some degree, would be needed for them to responsibly engage in a relationship with God, just as Hanna recognized that in order to ensure her grandmother’s surgery, she would need more evidence about whether the bank would be open on Saturday than her vague recollection that it had been open on previous Saturdays. The proposition that would guide this action of relating to God would have to do with whether God exists and the degree of justification that one would have for that p. Of course, one could hold the action-guiding goal of making possible the surgery or having the relationship with God without engaging in the process of justifying to a degree p (“The post office is open on Saturday” or “God exists”), but in such cases, a common-sense actor would be refusing to seriously come to terms with the proposition or belief that it is necessary to guide the action one has undertaken or is about to undertake. In some sense, the project of considering, weighing, and deciding what kinds of grounds there are for the proposition guiding one’s ultimate action can be seen as a sub-project en route to that final action (e.g., committing oneself to God) and a subsidiary component of that entire action, just as Hanna’s investigation about whether the bank would be open on Saturday led toward her grandmother’s surgery.

Rizzieri’s book represents, from a sophisticated perspective, an effort to clarify philosophically what on a common sense level the epistemic/pragmatic processes that Hanna and the common-sense believer seem to be carrying out. For Rizzieri, the question is whether or not an actor would be morally negligent and epistemically irresponsible with regard to the demands of an accountable internalism. Placing Rizzieri’s account in a theory of action, one can understand that Hanna’s double checking and the examination of the evidence for the existence of God constitute sub-projects focused on the p, that is, to guide an action that itself aims at some ultimate goal (guaranteeing surgery or committing oneself spiritually/religiously). Such ultimate goals, toward which our actions are directed, constitute stakes that in turn prescribe the bar of justification for propositions that will guide those actions and the process of working out one’s justifications are sub-projects aimed at the ultimate goals. For Rizzieri, one could pursue with sufficient justification the high-stakes goal of committing oneself to God as long as one does not have knowledge that God does not exist, and even if one lacks outright belief in God’s existence. Rizzieri illuminates what must go on in the sub-project en route to the ultimate goal of committing oneself to God. It is a constituent part of this multi-layered action, just as Hanna’s double-checking is a partial act toward the ultimate action of guaranteeing her grandmother’s surgery. It is difficult to disentangle knowledge, assertions, and practical rationality insofar as they function together as constituents of a single multi-stratified action.

Putting Rizzieri’s pragmatic encroachment theory to work within a theory of action highlights the seeming inextricable implication of epistemic concerns within projects of practical action and demonstrates what he claims that DeRose (2009) cannot explain: “a plethora of knowledge relations that p which … entail levels that are needed to render a variety of activities practically rational at various contexts” (Rizzieri 2013, p. 31, italics Rizzieri’s). According to Rizzieri, DeRose would hold that when Hanna relies on her remembered knowledge (without double-checking), she “knows”, but in a different way and degree than what she would know when she double checks, but Rizzieri construes Hanna’s situation differently. For Rizzieri, once one takes into account all of the pragmatic conditions Hanna faces, especially her grandmother needing surgery, anyone who would base their justification of p (the post office will be open Saturday) on the basis of unsubstantiated memories would not have knowledge, but would only have it after double-checking. In DeRose’s view, Hanna’s first knowing, based only on past memories, would be knowledge, but it just could not be put to work in a certain context. As a result, Rizzieri (2013, p. 30) thinks that DeRose interprets that first knowledge as an epistemic proceeding, shielded against or totally detached from any intrusion from a pragmatic context, and such an interpretation would lead to the improbable conclusion that “an agent can instantiate knowledge relations that do not serve any purpose”.

While Rizzieri is right insofar as he directs his philosophical attention to elucidate the intricate relationships between knowledge, assertion, and practical reasoning, it remains important to see how justification processes work in tandem with pragmatically shaped contexts and yet how they also involve, to a degree, a detachment, as DeRose (2009) suggests, from the pragmatic concerns impinging on one’s justification. For instance, rather than seeing Hanna’s first knowing on the basis of memories as “detached” from any pragmatic purposes, not serving any purpose, free-floating until put to work or inserted into a certain context, one could imagine Hanna’s knowing as continually tied to, but not reducible to pragmatic interests. In the second case, in the face of pragmatic pressure insofar as her grandmother required surgery and depended on the bank transfer occurring that same weekend, Hanna, at first, might have supposed that she, in accordance with her memories, could easily go to the bank on Saturday and make the transfer. However, since her considerations at this point would be at the service of securing the surgery for her grandmother and not separated from this pragmatic goal, she might have commenced to reflect on whether those memories provided sufficient evidence that the bank would be open on Saturday (en route to the long-range goal of making possible her grandmother’s surgery). In this reflective moment, Hanna, perhaps from the past experience of the inadequacy of her memories or the flexibility with which banks adjust their schedules, might have questioned whether her memories could have supported the proposition p, that the bank would be open on Saturday, and whether those memories could have guided her action of going to the bank to secure the transfer for her grandmother. In a sense, for a moment, Hanna would have stepped back or detached from the project of going to the bank on Saturday and temporarily bracketed the pursuit of that goal in order to undertake a new goal (on the way to the ultimate goal), in fact, a new sub-project: namely, examining how reliable her memories would have been; whether they would have provided sufficient evidence for p, the bank being open; what other evidences might have been available (e.g., calling the bank, consulting its website); and how reliable these evidences might have been relative to each other and her memories. In brief, a theoretical interlude would have opened up within the pragmatic project aimed at making the bank-transfer on Saturday. This kind of interlude, connected with pragmatic interests and yet undertaken at a momentary reflective distance from those interests, represents a pattern that might even have been at work in the case in which the grandmother’s surgery was not at stake, insofar as Hanna, planning to make use of the bank on Saturday (with no pressing issues at stake other than not wanting to make the effort to travel to the bank only to find it closed), might have briefly entertained a question of how reliable her memories were or how consistently the bank maintained its schedule of opening hours. Even here, a reflective moment might have arisen, needing epistemic adjudication, but still tied to practical purposes.

In the literature on pragmatic encroachment, one can find opinions about the concept eddying about two extreme poles. On one hand, there are those that would argue that the pragmatic context reaches in and actually affects the validity of a claim. Hence, Stanley (2005, p. 124) claims that “all normal epistemic notions are interest relative” and that “evidence is interest relative”. Rizzieri appears to concur with this viewpoint when he criticizes DeRose for claiming that if Hanna were to rely on her memories to substantiate the bank being open on Saturday in the situation where the practical interest of making possible her grandmother’s surgery was preeminent, she would have knowledge that just did not fit in that context; for Rizzieri, she would not have knowledge at all. Here, it would be as if the pragmatic concern enters into the epistemic process itself and disqualifies using memories as evidence for the proposition about the bank being open, as if a proposition supported by such evidence would have no validity at all. One would, however, give less force to the idea of such pragmatic interests as able to completely undermine the epistemic claims to validity, if one granted that the evidence from memories provided some evidence (albeit weaker than double-checking the bank’s website) that would make possible some knowledge, although of a lesser strength than double-checking would. The point is that checking the website would provide stronger evidence for p than vague memories, and this epistemic determination, albeit brought to the fore by the change in stakes, can be resolved by considering the epistemic relation between evidence and the claim the evidence is taken to support. On the other hand, the alternative would be to see the epistemic processes working in a vacuum, apart from any pragmatic conditioning, functioning as “knowledge relations that do not serve any purpose”—the view that DeRose seems to be taking, according to Rizzieri.

In fact, though a variety of positions see the value of conjoining pragmatic interests such as forming the conditions, within which epistemic claims to validity and their processes emerge follow their own autonomous trajectory, these determinations of validity can support the attainment of higher level pragmatic purposes, as Schutz’s idea of the layers of action indicates. Moss (2018), for instance, seeks not to eradicate pragmatic encroachment but to limit it from dictating the epistemic facts. Fantl and McGrath (2005), whose work was pivotal in the development of the notion of pragmatic encroachment, insist that shifts in pragmatic concerns do not undermine knowledge (as if one would not know what one knew at one point when the concerns shift), but rather the question becomes one in which evidentially established claims can be better relied on to achieve the pragmatic purpose in question (e.g., one could better rely in the case of one’s grandmother’s needing crucial surgery on a p established on the evidence turned up by double-checking as opposed to that based on vague memories). Sanford Goldberg (2005, p. 277) differentiates how stakes can affect “whether one’s epistemic perspective on a given perspective is practically adequate” without the stakes or practical adequacy being relevant “to determinations of whether the subject knows”. Pascal Engel (2009) separates the justification that one might have for a proposition at a particular time from the higher-level justification that one would need if the stakes were higher (e.g., the difference between relying on vague memories so one will not make an unnecessary trip to the bank versus the justification needed if the grandmother’s life-saving surgery was in the balance). The evidence on one level enables one to decide whether to believe p or not-p, but on a higher level, the question includes inquiring about what to do with that earlier established p. To say that the greater one’s interests are the stronger one’s evidence must be is not to say that “pragmatic factors enter or determine the amount of our justification, but just that pragmatic factors impinge upon our need of more evidence” (Engel 2009, p. 198). While not denying the importance of the pragmatic relevances whose significance Fantl and McGrath highlighted, Engel defends a place for evidentialism.

Schutz, whose theory of action we have shown to accommodate the interwovenness of knowledge, assertions, and practical rationality that Rizzieri and other encroachers desire, also provides a way for preserving the evidentialism that Engel and other authors believe to work in tandem with pragmatic preoccupations. In On Multiple Realities, Schutz (1962b) develops the finite province of the meaning of scientific theory, which involves separating oneself from pragmatic everyday life and taking up an overarching attitude with a distinctive self-concept and stance toward one’s body, temporality, way of engaging others, and, above all, an overriding purpose or relevance which Schutz (1962b, p. 245) depicts in this way: “Scientific theorizing—and in the following terms theory, theorizing, etc. shall be exclusively used in this restricted sense—does not serve any practical purpose. Its aim is not to master the world but to observe and possibly understand it”. Schutz (1962c, p. 169), though, then argues that in the midst of executing pragmatic projects in the everyday world of working, we can “stop and think” and adopt a theoretical-contemplative approach, reviewing plans and projects before making up our mind. Insofar, as such reflection is undertaken for the sake of pragmatic goals, it is not itself an example of the province of the meaning of scientific theory, but rather an “‘enclave’ of theoretical contemplation within the world of working” (Schutz 1962b, p. 245). The paradigmatic cases of pragmatic encroachment, then, exemplify enclaves. When Hanna is thinking of going to the bank on Saturday, merely to make a deposit and to avoid inconvenience, she is willing to follow the guidance of p, that the bank will be open, but then she stops to think about whether the bank will be open and whether the evidence she has, her past memories, support p. Although establishing p can be conceived as a sub-action en route to the final goal of carrying out her banking business, Hanna achieves the goal of establishing p by weighing and considering critical evidence to see if it gives epistemic grounds for p. The ultimate relevance of this sub-act, this reflective interlude, this interruptive enclave, is not itself practical (thought it serves a longer-range practical purpose), but epistemic, and it examines whether the evidence supports the truth that the bank will be open on Saturday. Should a new pragmatic relevance surface, namely that Hanna’s grandmother needs life-saving surgery to be paid for immediately, Hanna would have to temporally enter a theoretical enclave no less epistemically oriented (but also for the sake of this new pragmatic relevance) and she would come to see that stronger evidence could and should be given for p if she checked the bank website beyond relying on her memories. One reason why these epistemic enclave moments are not recognized in their distinctiveness, but are assimilated with the longer-range pragmatic relevance, ultimately governing the multi-layered action they serve, is that we regularly move rapidly through a series of experiences in which different relevances predominate and our attitudinal stance undergoes continual and subtle modifications. As Schutz (1962b, p. 258) observes, “my mind may pass during one single day or even hour through the whole gamut of tensions of consciousness, now living in working acts, now passing through a daydream, now plunging into the pictorial world of a painting, now indulging in theoretical contemplation”. Nevertheless, by combining Schutz’s theory of action with his account of enclaves, one is able to include both the pragmatic contexts of conditions within which knowledge arises, as Rizzieri, Stanley, and other encroachers emphasize, and the “evidentialism”, or “purism” in Engel’s view (Engel 2009), intrinsic to knowledge-establishment and upheld by De Rose, Fantl and McGrath, Moss, Goldberg, and Engel.

One final comment on temporality. It is certainly the case that one’s memories could be taken to constitute sufficient evidence for p when all that is stake is whether Hanna would be inconvenienced by going to the bank on Saturday only to find it closed. With the subsequent emergence of a new relevance, needing to ensure the grandmother’s surgery, Hanna could see that the evidence from memories would be insufficient and second checking would be needed. When comparing these cases, one might be tempted to say that one really did not even know p in the first case, as Rizzieri suggests. However, this conflation of the two cases neglects that one would have had evidence for p, attaining a level and degree of knowledge, limited, but also appropriate for the pragmatic purpose of simply avoiding inconvenience. Schutz himself identifies and opposes an analogous conflation when economists, equipped with better information, look back on an earlier economic decision adequately based on the information at hand at that time and then (mistakenly) criticize that earlier decision as mistaken. Such transposing of oneself into a different or earlier context while overlooking the unique conditions (in Hanna’s case, perhaps the information requisite for avoiding inconvenience) prevailing in each context represents the fallacy of hysteron proteron (Schutz 1996).

3. Transcendental Phenomenology, Regional Ontologies, and Spiritual/Religious Experience

While the previous section discussed how the justification of p takes place with regard to different contexts shaped by pragmatic concerns that circumscribe but do not undermine evidentialism, a further question rises after one has provided evidence for some p, say in questions of religious knowledge. How does this type of knowledge and evidence in the domain of religious experience relate to other domains of knowledge such as that of the natural sciences? How do the metaphysical or epistemological arguments supporting a religious p differ from the empirical evidence utilized to validate claims in the natural sciences? Rizzieri seems fully aware of this problem insofar as he admits that religious knowledge is a matter of “hope”, falling short of “outright belief”. Husserl addressed these questions of types of knowledge relative to different objects within his theory of regional ontologies as a part of his transcendental phenomenology. One can imagine Rizzieri, given his focus on the interconnection between knowledge, assertion, and practical reason in which stakes considerations play a significant role, being reluctant to engage this higher level of epistemological analyses that can seem quite remote from the pragmatic considerations they have left behind. Furthermore, one can imagine Rizzieri being critical of Schutz when he makes the statement, anticipating perhaps the transcendental level of philosophy, that the finite province of theorizing does not serve any practical purpose.

However, one can find traces of transcendental phenomenology or Schutz’s theory of how the non-pragmatic finite province of theory works in Rizzieri’s own book Pragmatic Encroachment, Religious Belief, and Practice itself. For example, in the first chapter, Rizzieri addresses the general structure of pragmatic encroachment, how it can be that practical concerns of varied types can interact with varied degrees of epistemic justification, that is, with high stakes raising the bar for justification, which Rizzieri explains through an internalism that depends on a knower taking the epistemic responsibility for the kinds of justifications that could be expected of any rational agent. To lead his reader to philosophical insights into such pragmatic encroachment, Rizzieri presents a variety of examples such as Hanna’s grandmother’s need for life-surgery shaping the standards of knowledge that Hanna must meet. After limiting the general features of pragmatic encroachment that encompasses a wide variety of concrete examples and presenting the generalized internalist epistemological perspective that he will make use of—from Chapter 2 onward, Rizzieri moves to a concrete level, an enclave, if you will, in which he provides a thorough elucidation of how one committed to a religious relationship with God might think about certain propositions that would guide (or undermine) that action of relating to God and which would require certain degrees of justification that Rizzieri distinguishes (e.g., no knowledge that God does not exist, hope that falls short of outright belief). The kind of reasoning that Rizzieri produces in his general discussion of pragmatic encroachment in Chapter 1, internalism, and the propositions that guide actions and require degrees of justification, function as high-level theorizing, not clearly or directly serving practical purposes. Such reasoning differs markedly from the very specific kind of reasoning that is exemplified in enclaves such as when Hanna tries to figure out what degree of justification she needs for her belief that the bank will be open when her grandmother’s life hangs in the balance or when the religiously committed person weighs a religious commitment by evaluating not-J. In these concrete cases, potential knowers are immersed in spelling out and pondering knowledge relations that serve a definite purpose; the applied philosopher—a role Rizzieri takes up from Chapter 2 onward in his book—joins them in their enclave, making explicit the factors and questions that they must ask and answer and that they might already be implicitly aware of, but are unable to articulate as lucidly as the trained philosopher.

However, in effect, Rizzieri, in Chapter 1, engages in the kind of scientific theorizing of the type of a Schutzian province of meaning that delineates what pragmatic encroachment is in general, but it is not itself an attempt to address the questions posed within enclaves by the kind of concrete pragmatic encroachment, the religious, that Rizzieri later mentions and analyzes. High-level theorizing itself is not necessarily an example of what it theorizes about; a theory about pragmatic encroachment is not necessarily itself an example of pragmatic encroachment. In the same way, Schutz’s account of the theoretical province of meaning in On Multiple Realities, strives to get a sense of what is generally involved in any theory at all, despite the wide varieties of examples of theories in which it would be instantiated. It is not one of those particular theories seeking to observe and possible understand the world, but stands above all those theories that do so and seeks to articulate their inner structure. Such a theory could be said to serve no pragmatic purpose, but instead it presents a theory of theories about providing an accurate or true description of theories to “get it right” about what they are and how they work. In the same way, Rizzieri’s book seeks to get it right about what pragmatic encroachment is in general and how epistemology strives to adapt and come to terms with it. On the meta-level of philosophy, there is a place, then, for knowledge that seems not to serve any practical purpose and that can actually depict how knowledge can serve the practical purposes that it is engaged with and that affect it and how it can do so responsibly. The enclave of theory within religious experience that Rizzieri works out from Chapter 2 onward does serve pragmatic purposes, showing how one can responsibly live a religiously committed life that depends upon the guiding propositions it has adequately justified.

Even though the enclave of theorizing, directed toward practical purposes and actions, differs from higher level theorizing about theorizing, just as Rizzieri’s Chapters 2–6 differ from the more general Chapter 1, the two levels nevertheless share normative epistemic commonalities derivative from the internalism that underlies Rizzieri’s book. That is, enclave theorizers ought to think in the right way for concrete practical situations, to strive to be accurate about the details considered, to refrain from distortive biases, and to comport themselves with epistemic responsibility, in brief, to strive “to get it right”. Therefore, Hanna, realizing that her fallible memory may not be sufficient to determine if the bank is open on Saturday with her grandmother’s surgery in the offing, will double check, but this will require that she perhaps check a website with the bank’s hours and make sure that that website is up-to-date. Similarly, religious believers examining arguments supporting the belief that God does not exist ought to first aspire to understand accurately what the arguments are, perhaps in the interest of fairness, setting in abeyance for a while their religious leanings, trying, for instance, to understand correctly Hume’s views on miracles first, before assuming a critical stance that will be on the lookout only for omissions, misinterpretations, or imbalanced emphases. However, also in Chapter 1, one proceeds with epistemic responsibility, trying to understand and carefully and fairly evaluate Rizzieri’s point of view, his idea of pragmatic encroachment, his ideas about truth and practical rationality, and how they interrelate. In a sense, one is implementing internalist responsibility about Rizzieri’s quite generalized account of internalist responsibility, trying to understand it accurately, inquiring if correct or deficient in any way, etc.—as is happening throughout this paper. Similarly, one undertakes a theoretical attitude when considering Schutz’s idea of a finite province of the meaning of theory, striving to understand it and assess it fairly, trying to get oneself right about it.

Rizzieri might protest that even what he writes about in Chapter 1 is not theorizing detachedly from practical purposes and action, since the account of pragmatic encroachment ultimately makes possible a responsible commitment in relationship with God, as one sees by the time he reaches Chapter 6. Such a point need not be denied, but the distance from pragmatic concerns that one experiences in Chapter 1 (one does not know in Chapter 1 where things will end up by Chapter 6) makes it particularly visible that there is an epistemic level where questions of evidence and validity are prominent and require assessment to a degree independently of the pragmatic goals, as a relatively independent sub-act, en route to a more comprehensive act (making that responsible commitment). As Moss comments, the point is not to eradicate pragmatic encroachment but to locate its legitimate place with regard to evidentialism.

In addition to Rizzieri’s own book exemplifying on a meta (transcendental?)-plane the relationship and difference between pragmatic interests and evidentialism, he also engages in a semi-transcendental project when he recognizes that after justifying p relative to some pragmatic context, there is a further question of how one might situate claims like p, say in a religious setting, to other types of claims such as those in different sciences. Throughout the book, Rizzieri shows sensitivity to different contexts that require different kinds of evidence. Thus, for Hanna in the pragmatic setting where her grandmother’s life is at stake, a kind of “empirical” double-checking (e.g., of the bank’s website) would provide her belief that she could make the money transfer on Saturday with satisfactory justification. Similarly, religious believers who need the belief in God’s existence to guide the act of committing themselves must have sufficient justification to reject the proposition that God does not exist and sufficient justification for propositions about God’s existence, though the evidence for these claims would fall short of “outright belief” and therefore would presumably differ from the empirical evidence one might find in perceiving an object or on a website or by calling the bank. The propositions necessary to guide practical action can concern empirical objects (e.g., the bank being open) or objects not sensibly given such as God. There are different types and degrees of justification (which internalism accommodates) possible for such propositions and for the knowledge of their diverse objects. In this, Rizzieri converges with the thought of Edmund Husserl (1960, pp. 63–64) who argues on an ultimate transcendental philosophical plane that there are diverse regional ontologies that depend on eidetically described objects that found “sciences” in which there are different types and degrees of evidence that can be modalized as “possible, probable, or doubtful” (Husserl 1960, p. 58). For instance, empirical evidence would be used to validate the claims of the natural sciences, whose founding objects are material things, but in the case of the social sciences, whose founding object is the social world and whose scientists can interpret others who are interpreting their world through Weberian type-constructs, these constructs can be validated by the community of social sciences but not by narrow empirical, sense observations typical of the empirical sciences (Schutz 1962a, pp. 51–52). When considering the object of religious belief, empirical evidence will not be pertinent, but other kinds of evidence would be necessary, and Husserl (2014) even suggests that religious experience can be used as evidence for theological claims. The Husserlian view of regional ontologies, another aspect of his transcendental phenomenology, makes explicit a framework that Rizzieri implicitly seems to presuppose when he observes that religious propositions, justifiable within the ambit specified by pragmatic encroachment, could be justified in comparison and in contrast with other domains of knowledge, even though the religious justifications may differ from and fall short of “outright beliefs” that might be found in those other domains.

In some ways, Rizzieri also converges with Husserl’s thought in aspects of his internalism. Justification for Rizzieri (2013) is explained in internalist terms insofar as he focuses on the perspective internal to the knower, who is justified in believing that p if she has fulfilled all of the duties that pertain to obtaining evidence for the truth of p. Clearly, as Fumerton (1995, p. 13) remarks, internalism by inquiring what a person was justified in believing recognizes “the relevance of the epistemic perspective of the agent”. In a similar way, Husserl insists on including the internal point of view of the subject, who undertakes all justification by seeing, for instance, whether the evidence given to the subject at hand fulfills or thwarts a proposition, which the subject signitively intended previously. The subject is the one who must responsibly bring into synthesis a proposition, its evidence, and the decision of whether the evidence supports the proposition or not (Husserl 2001). This notion of intentionality with a subject oriented toward an object that presents itself to acts of conscious is basic for Husserl and hence every external object appears and every justification takes place in relation to the intentional acts of a subject (and so it is not coincidental that this citation comes from the Cartesian Meditations of Husserl, which are modeled on the philosopher who made subjectivity central in the knowing process).

Whatever exists for a man like me and is accepted by him, exists for him and is accepted in his own conscious life, which, in all consciousness of a world and in all scientific doing, keeps to itself. All my distinguishing between genuine and deceptive experience and between being and illusion in experience goes on within the sphere itself of my consciousness … Every ground, every showing of truth and being, goes on wholly within myself; and its result is a characteristic in the cogitatum of my cogito

(Husserl 1960, p. 82)

One can see how Husserl’s understanding that everything presenting itself to us in the world and processes of “evidencing” happen with reference to intentional conscious acts would result in a subject who, like Rizzieri’s subject, when faced with pressing pragmatic concerns, would exercise responsibility by trying to find whether evidence will support the propositions that are to guide one’s practical action, considering what evidence is needed, how strong it is or needs to be, whether the processes of establishing the evidence are reliable, etc. However, because of the bipolarity of the foundational character of intentionality for Husserl, it can be said that the object, not reducible to the subjective acts through which it is given, is more clearly seen to act on the subject, soliciting the subject’s attention (Husserl 1973), resisting manipulation, and exploding intentional anticipations. Husserl gives more of an “equal” status to the objective, noematic pole of experience that is not prominently to be found in Rizzieri. Of course, for Husserl, such soliciting, resisting, and exploding themselves are experienced within the field of consciousness of the subject.

In the picture that Rizzieri (2013) paints, the emphasis is on the subject assessing inputs from the external world rather than attending to the experience of being affected by it. Over and over again, Rizzieri points out that within the internalistic paradigm, one’s belief could be justified, even if one were wrong about the way the world is. Thus, a doctor who took all the necessary steps to ensure knowledge-level justification that the needle she was using was safe could defend herself against being negligent if the needle turns out to spread infection. Or a doctor prescribing a medicine that all the available evidence indicates ought to have been prescribed would have acted justifiably even if later evidence, of which the doctor could not have known, emerges that this medicine ought not to have been administered. Furthermore, an agent inhabiting a Cartesian framework and not believing in an external world could be more perceptive about what presents itself (e.g., the number of speckles on a hen that presents itself) than a non-Cartesian—which implies for Rizzieri (2013, p. 116, my italics) that “Only the ability to reliably detect features of one’s experiences that represent the external world in a certain way is required”. Clearly, this representational framework differs from Husserl’s idea of phenomenological access to the world in which there is no intermediary representing the object, as the intentional act reaches its object directly, without an intermediary. Rizzieri (2013) further handles the standard objections raised against internalism such as that it might license relying on clairvoyance, project wishful thinking onto the world (a standard objection to religious belief, also, for instance), or getting at the truth merely by accident, as a matter of a hunch or lucky guess—as Bergmann (2006) observes. Rather than discuss how objects would offer resistance and serve as obstacles to such subjective projections onto the world, Rizzieri responds to critics such as Bergmann that one must rely on processes of belief formation that display reliability over time and that to establish justifications in any other way would be irresponsible. In a religious example, Rizzieri thinks that Plantinga’s trivialization of the internal rationality requirement and the need for self-critical justification of one’s beliefs could result in an uncritical Abraham actually killing his son simply because he has received an external command from God.

Perhaps Rizzieri might reply that his internalist processes of justification themselves have already taken account, as some level, of how objects are presented to us and act upon us. The Husserlian could reply to this reply by insisting that one must take as foundational in the first place a phenomenological account of the life-world that would describe and demonstrate exactly the kind of interaction that exists between conscious acts and noematic objects before one embarks on a theory or the kind of theoretical justification processes Rizzieri describes. If one did this, one would be less liable to de-emphasize the significant role that objects play in the bipolar structure of intentionality.

Of course, part of the epistemic suspicion of religious experience has to do with the fact that it seems to have broken loose from knowledge based upon the encounter with the world of sense and science in which empirical objects confront us, resist us, and compel us to be accountable to them. Rizzieri (2013, p. 43) himself alludes to this point when he observes how for Hume “purported miracles have such a horrendous fit with our background knowledge concerning the laws of nature”. No doubt this lack of empirical evidence for religious/spirituality claims explains why, as Rizzieri (2013) admits, we do not have outright belief that God exists or why William James thought that someone trying to avoid error might refrain from positing God’s existence. By retreating from the physical encounter with objects at the basis of science and other kinds of knowledge and focusing on internal processes of justification, Rizzieri’s internalist approach to religious belief might well confirm the empirically-minded in their suspicions that religious experience is nothing more than a psychological projection of a belief in God onto a world devoid of such non-observable entities, despite Rizzieri’s own insistence that clairvoyance and wishful thinking (often considered to be at the root of projectionism) are not reliable or responsible methods of belief formation.

It could be that one way to counter such an empiricist critique of religious experience would be to take seriously what goes on in the religious experience itself. Rizzieri, I have argued, labors with a theoretical enclave within the broader finite province of religious experience and his questions have to do with how one theoretically see one’s way clear to make a religious commitment, and so, in effect, he does not consider in itself religious experience (itself a distinctive entire province of meaning in the Schutzian paradigm). He does, however, make remarks that suggest what he thinks of the religious experience: evaluating the rightness of religious actions includes asking whether they maximize total happiness; produce a rich, inner spiritual life; or enable one to live a psychologically healthful life (Rizzieri 2013). However, such an idea of religious experience might simply reinforce the skeptical position of the empirically minded toward it: one projects an idea of God in order to fulfill psychological needs.

What, though, if Rizzieri complemented his work with a fuller account of religious experience that could serve as evidence within the enclave of theory within the religious province of meaning, evidence correlated with and justifying propositions in the situation of pragmatic encroachment that the religious experience initiates and that heightens or lowers the bar of justification?

Scheler (2010) focused precisely on religious experience and developed an account that could supplement Rizzieri’s stance. Scheler’s lengthy essay, Problems of Religion, drawing for its entire structure on the intentional framework of act and object in the phenomenological tradition, objects to William James’s description of religious experience, which, not unlike Rizzieri’s, is built around a “downright utilitarian touchstone: the happy issues of convictions in practical life” (Scheler 2010, p. 292). Instead, Scheler carefully delineates the nature of the religious act, which differs from acts of wishing, seeking need-satisfaction, and desires, hence projecting a God out of one’s own resources. Scheler insists that the religious act is distinctive from other psychological acts, and, in effect, it mobilizes these other acts such as imagination, affect, and other sub-intentionalities, under an orientation toward the supernatural. The religious act is essentially receptive, “disposed for and concerned with a possible reception” (Scheler 2010, p. 254), however, much spontaneity may play a role in it. In executing a religious act, one knows oneself to be dependent on the object of the act, God, who as a free person must freely bestow revelation, with the result that all knowledge of God comes from God. In fact, part of the uniqueness of the religious act is that it takes aim at the value region of the absolute, which only the infinite God can fill, and should one fill that absolute region with a finite object, one engages in a kind of idolatry that ultimately will frustrate and enslave oneself, at least until God disillusions one from this idol. Furthermore, given that God, as the absolute, occupies the highest value sphere, it is part of the law of valuing that the higher one ascends the value scale, the less power one has over the object one is directed toward, the more passive and receptive one becomes toward it. In Scheler’s phenomenology of religious experience, then, God is active, intrusive, interruptive, free, resistant to human efforts to control, and loving before we even respond, and our role, to take up the religious act, is to be receptive to the action of God that we do not manage. Indeed, William Alston’s comparison of religious experience to perception that impinges upon us can be seen to ally itself with Scheler’s interpretation of religious experience (Alston 1991). Similarly, Barber (2020) sought to demonstrate that God interacts with us as a “consociate”, in the sense that word has in the Schutzian depiction of the social world, engaging us face-to-face and immediately, taking initiatives, correcting or confirming our typifications of God, acting on us in ways similar to the way the object acts on the subject according to the Husserlian theory of intentionality. Rizzieri’s theory of pragmatic encroachment could mine religious experience described in this way as another source of evidence, one encountered in the finite province of religious experience before one theorizes within the theoretical enclave that arises within that province and that can take up such experience into its justifying processes. There is no guarantee that this evidence will convince those disposed otherwise. However, surely this evidence would offer justification for what Rizzieri calls an act of “hope”, as opposed to outright belief or knowing. Plantinga (2000, p. 500) seems to recognize this possibility in this quotation that Rizzieri (2013) cites, despite his admission that he is not exactly clear about what Plantinga means:

From the point of view of classical Christianity … this includes also the proper function of the sensus divinitatis. Someone in whom this process was functioning properly would have an intimate, detailed, vivid, and explicit knowledge of God; she would have an intense awareness of his presence, glory, goodness, power, perfection, wonderful attractiveness, and sweetness; and she would be as convinced of God’s existence as her own.

4. Conclusions: Pragmatic Encroachment and Phenomenology

Rizzieri shows the role that pragmatic concerns can play in affecting the bar of the justification requisite for a proposition that can guide action in various particular domains of knowing (e.g., very practical domains such as whether and when to go to a bank or that of religious belief). A Schutzian theory of action with a strata of sub-actions leading to an ultimate final action and goal can support Rizzieri’s wish that knowledge, assertions, and practical rationality function in concert. However, the Schutzian notion of enclaves, in which one puts into abeyance, temporarily, the pragmatic pressures to make space for a moment of epistemic evidentialism (which might in the end support longer-range practical goals), allows one to make use of pragmatic encroachment without subsuming and dissolving the epistemic search for evidence and justification that must proceed to a degree independently of pragmatic purposes. Finally, Rizzieri’s own book demonstrates, on a semi-transcendental plane, the independence (and relatedness) of pragmatic encroachment and evidentialism. Furthermore, the propositions justified, which guide actions in specific actional domains, must venture into a broader field of knowledge and evidential systems such as those of the different sciences, and to distinguish regional ontologies as Husserl does, makes possible a variety of domains of rationality irreducible to each other. Finally, Rizzieri, for the justification of the propositions of religious belief, could profit from the noetic–noematic paradigm of bipolar intentionality in order to give an account of the action of the divine on oneself, as Max Scheler depicts the religious act, thereby resisting projectionist accounts of religious belief. Rizzieri’s internalism cannot take sufficient account of the religious experience in which the revelation of God takes place from God and offsets the projectionist account of religious experience that internalism more easily falls prey to. Such a move would also enhance Rizzieri’s ability to take religious experience as evidence for religious beliefs.