Commenting on my recent post on Terry Eagleton, and the respective roles of performance and propositions within religious observance, Chris purports to come to Terry's defence by arguing that 'There are lots of cases where belief or knowledge can only follow from performance.' He gives examples in support of thinking so.
It is only by playing a piece of music many times that we can come to truly know it. In successful arranged marriages, the couples come to love each other only after acting like husband and wife. We can only understand a foreign culture and language by immersing ourselves in it.
But I haven't said, and I don't think, anything to the contrary. Writing as I did 'Let's first take in everything about the performatives' was precisely my shorthand way of accepting the relationship between practice and understanding, experience and knowledge, participation and perception, that any adequate theory about the genesis of knowledge needs to include. But none of this has a bearing on the central point of my post. Which was that, with respect to certain types of proposition such as religions typically centre on, the performance or practice of adherents, though it might bolster their own beliefs, cannot validate the content of those beliefs.
Chris's examples are most telling in this respect - telling of the way in which he misses the point. Thus, the couples come to love each other only after acting like husband and wife; yes, but what they come to thereby is love, and while it may include a better knowledge each of the other than they started out with, it will not make the husband a star tennis professional if he isn't one, or give the wife supernatural powers that she doesn't have. Only by playing a piece of music many times can I truly come to know it, but if it's a Bach prelude, say, the existence or otherwise of that piece of music doesn't depend on whether I play it at all. Same deal for my understanding of a foreign language: for me to become proficient in it requires a certain practice, but the language has the properties it does independently of my immersing myself in it.
In pursuit of his purpose, Chris also cites Marx: 'The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.' To some very significant degree, yes indeed. But Marx, for all that, distinguished between accounts of (for example) capitalism that he took to be more or less sound and those he thought were merely ideological. Though all theory comes out of some practice or other, not all of it is equally good. It is interesting, in this regard, that Chris gives no examples of the way in which a set of practices can reinforce a belief in manifest falsehoods. If you hang out only with conspiracy-mongers, you'll be more likely to believe in confected conspiracies than if you don't. If you own slaves, you'll be more open to the idea of the benefits of slavery than if you don't. And so on.
My point was that religious belief involves certain propositional claims about the state of realities that are external to the activities and the perceptions of the believer. And when all is said and done - note, only then: at the end and not the beginning of the discussion - it matters what can be said for the truth or otherwise of such claims. Chris's own hunch, he says, is that religious practice gives us not true knowledge but an objective illusion. Well, objective or not, if it's an illusion, then the difference between him and me on this is a thin one. I wasn't writing about how you get inside a certain way of looking at things, though that is a very interesting topic in itself. I was arguing that if the way of looking at things claims to be about things 'out there', distinct from the act of looking itself, then we'll want evidence and reasoning in support of thinking they are, in fact, out there and have the character attributed to them by the people doing the looking.