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On Transcendental Arguments

Transcendental arguments are demonstrations of the necessary conditions of the possibility of any act of human subjectivity-thinkingsubjectivity—thinking, understanding, believing, asserting, and so on. As such, they are "dialectically interesting" (Mourad), because their categorical premises are self-referential and undeniable, and, if their conditional premises are sound, their conclusions are likewise selfreferential self-referential and cannot be denied without self-contradiction. Being implied by any possible act of understanding or assertion, their conclusions can only be affirmed.

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Beliefs always involve interpretations of reality, and interpretations involve the use of signs that are in principle public. The concept of a sign implies that there must be public criteria for applying the sign (meaning) as well as public criteria for applying it correctly (truth). Thus any belief, involving, as it does, interpretation by means of linguistic signs, which in tum imply public criteria for their use, implies validity claims to be both meaningful and true.

Wiki MarkupTo claim truth for any belief, a subject presupposes the possibility that some argumentative appeal to experiential evidence would command consensus about that belief among the members of an "unlimited argumentation community." So any truth claim "presupposes that certain rules of argumentation are to be followed as normative conditions for the very possibility of \ [discourse\], that is\[,\] of the consensual redemption or critique of truth claims" (Apel).  

The idea of an unlimited argumentation community implies a community of subjects each of whom would have ideal access to the experiential evidence for any understanding and would evaluate it accordingly, by "ideal, uncoerced argumentative appeal to evidence" according to common rules of argumentation and evidential standards (Mourad). The idea further implies that such a community "has at its disposal a sufficiently shared and clear language in which it can formulate not only its problems but also possible solutions to these problems" (Apel). 

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A belief b is "justified" for a subject 5 S, relative to an epistemic principle EP, if b is permitted for 5 S according to EP, and 5 S chooses b, at least in part, in order to comply with EP (Mourad). 

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Its inputs include beliefs about the existence of subjective phenomena-thinkingphenomena—thinking, understanding, believing, asserting, etc.-based —based on introspection and formalizable as the categorial premises of transcendental arguments. Its inputs also include one or more beliefs, formalizable as the conditional premises of transcendental arguments, about the essential relationship between these phenomena and various conditions, based on transcendental implication. Its outputs, then, are based on deductive inferences involving the inputs formalizable as the two types of premises required by any sound transcendental argument 

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Beyond this first theological task that transcendental arguments may be able to perform, depending on how the "depth structure" of religious beliefs is to be correctly analyzed, there are at least the following theological tasks that transcendental arguments can perform, whatever the analysis of religious beliefs:

(1) they can defeat the self-referentially problematic position that there are no transcendental conditions of the possibility of subjectivity and thus of being as such;

(2) they can defeat beliefs about the coherence of any theological method that denies the relativity of type-specific epistemic principles to the meaning of the beliefs they are designed to evaluate;

(3) they can defeat the belief that there is no obligation to justify voluntary beliefs according to the relevant type-specific epistemic principles; and

(4) they can defeat the belief that the testimony of an authority can constitute a sufficient condition for the truth of a belief in the context of critical, properly theological reflection.

14 August 2006