Sankt Georgen Graduate School of Philosophy and Theology

The major conclusion emerging from this chapter is that a certain understanding of the phenomenon of belief, underlying most theorizing on the epistemology of disagreement, obscures important aspects of the phenomenon of interpersonal disagreement. According to this understanding, beliefs are attitudes toward objects of thought denoted by that-clauses used for attributing beliefs. The chapter presents a more exact and more realistic picture of what believing is, and what it is for beliefs of different people to be in conflict. It is loosely based on Robert Stalnaker’s and Akeel Bilgrami’s theories about mental content.

This chapter introduces Donald Davidson’s thoughts on interpretation in their relevance to the book’s subject matter. It argues that there is a tension between interpersonal interpretation based on charity on the one hand and the epistemological problem of peer disagreement on the other. The idealized situation of a peer apparently disagreeing with me, and there being no independent reasons for me to attribute a belief to him or her which I, according to my original evaluation of extant evidence, would consider false or unreasonable, suggests that the apparent disagreement fails to be genuine. Rather than being confronted with a clear and distinctive piece of evidence in the form of a deviating opinion, the participants in a dispute face a situation where they need to strike a balance between their assessment of the issue at stake and their assessment of the beliefs of the other person.

This chapter unveils the deeper moral of the findings in Chap. 6. Utilizing Davidson’s later writings on the topic of “triangulation,” and recent defenses of his metasemantics, it suggests that the epistemological peculiarities revealed in Chap. 6 are a result of the social nature of meaning and thought. Here, the epistemology and the metaphysics of disagreement intersect. Stated in a very general way, meaning arises when different agents converge on what they take to be true and seek to explicate divergences from this. Due to this, disagreements are as much a disturbance of communication and intersubjective intelligibility as they are disruptive for any agent striving to entertain true beliefs.

This chapter approaches the notion of disagreement from the perspective of semantics and the philosophy of language. It first provides a semantic characterization of disagreement and then turns to the intensely discussed phenomenon of “merely verbal disagreement.” The most important aspect of this phenomenon in the present context is how it visualizes the relationship between language and propositional attitudes in view of disagreement. The chapter reviews some recent efforts to define the notion of merely verbal disagreement and argues that they all point to the deeper question about the nature of disagreement at the level of rational attitudes.

This short chapter introduces the epistemological discussion of disagreement in its basic tenets. It distinguishes broadly between conciliatory and nonconciliatory positions and describes what the epistemological significance of interpersonal disagreement is in the first place. By discussing Robert Audi’s highly fine-grained taxonomy of “cognitive disparities,” the chapter ends by anticipating the main themes of Chaps. 6, 7 and 8: how the communicability and detectability of disagreement relate to the issues negotiated in the epistemological debate on disagreement.

This chapter demonstrates the relevance of the conclusions in Chaps. 6 and 7 to real-world cases of disagreement. It examines the nature of religious disagreement in the context of (inter)religious dialog. After considering some general tenets and suppositions of such dialog, it turns to the debate on peer disagreement in religion. Paralleling the discussion of Davidson in Chaps. 6 and 7, it argues that the specification of disagreements requires argumentative dialog where reasons for belief must be balanced against reasons for attributing specific beliefs to the dialog partner. A pivotal consequence of the Davidsonian insights is that the specification of religious disagreement requires shared epistemic criteria. At the same time, however, those shared criteria enabling the specification of disagreement are also what makes its resolution possible.

This chapter is dedicated to an inquiry into the nature of belief insofar as this nature is relevant to our understanding of disagreement. It first considers a common sentiment according to which a disagreement is a conflict at the level of propositional contents being the objects of beliefs. On closer inspection, this picture raises some questions concerning our understanding of the phenomenon of disagreement. Granted that we can give a rather straightforward semantic explanation of what exactly a disagreement is in terms of propositional contents, the following question remains: what is the relationship between rational agents believing those contents and those contents themselves? The chapter examines this by reviewing familiar puzzles of belief attribution.

For the majority of the German Catholic Church’s staff, their faith or spirituality helped them in the pandemic situation. They felt encouraged to be creative in the first Corona lockdown. The pastoral actors can be divided into three groups with regard to online-based communication: the inexperienced, the moderately proficient and the very proficient test persons. The experienced respondents state that their workload has remained the same during the Corona period. In contrast, the less experienced respondents report a decrease in their work time. For the respondents, it is clear that the traditional forms of worship are now being questioned by even more people. Pastoral ministers and assistants have discovered new forms of digital presence for worship. In the future, they want to offer more alternative forms of worship. In some cases, they also criticise the lack of spiritual interconnection.

The study of pastoral workers in the community pastoral sector of the Catholic Church in Germany was accompanied by an interest in identifying possibly clear typifications of different groups of pastoral workers: can patterns specific to professional groups and identities be discerned when dealing with the Corona pandemic and digital media? Do the data reflect specific tendencies of the age groups, as has been repeatedly discussed in the public discourse? These questions are explored below with regard to the Catholic participants in the CONTOC study in Germany. Four identity dimensions can be empirically shown among the pastoral actors: the traditional, the secure, the creatively open and the dimension of uncertainty. These are accentuated to different degrees by the respondents. Digital affinity is weakest among those with the dimension of uncertainty.

In the following introduction to the methodological procedure, the developments of the research design of the CONTOC study are outlined against the background of different initial observations on digital church practice made by the members of the CONTOC research team since the beginning of the Corona pandemic in Spring 2020, on the one hand, and discussed in different media formats, on the other. This is followed by explanations of the survey and its implementation, participation, coverage and representativeness. The chapter concludes with explanations regarding the development of the questionnaire design, as well as the steps and thematic focussing undertaken for more detailed analysis of the data.

The situation in Germany is traced from the first perception of a new viral disease appearing in the Chinese province of Wuhan on 3 January 2020 to the first case of infection in Germany on 27 January 2020 to the enactment of far-reaching contact restrictions on 22 March 2020, the first lockdown. The effects on public life in the form of hygiene rules and «physical distancing», as well as the consequences for church activities, are presented in excerpts. It is shown that the church organisation reacted quickly with organisational rules, but in a rather delayed manner with spiritual orientation. At least this is the view of critical voices such as the former Minister President of Thuringia, who triggered an intensive debate about pastoral presence in this social emergency.

Zusammenfassung Die VI. Kirchenmitgliedschaftsuntersuchung der Evangelischen Kirche Deutschlands wurde dank ihrer Kooperation mit der katholischen Deutschen Bischofskonferenz zu einer deutschlandweiten Repräsentativbefragung. Dieser Beitrag beleuchtet diese Untersuchung aus katholisch-religionspädagogischer Perspektive. Zu Fragen familialer und institutioneller Sozialisation sowie des schulischen Religionsunterrichts werden empirische Analysen präsentiert. Die Hauptbefunde werden vor dem Hintergrund des eklatanten Vertrauensverlusts in die katholische Kirche diskutiert. An diesem düsteren Horizont zeichnen sich ein paar religionspädagogische Silberstreifen ab.

There are strong reasons for assuming that Thomas Aquinas conceived of God’s existence in terms of logical necessity in a broad sense. Yet this seems to stand in some tension with the fact that he excludes the possibility of a priori arguments for the existence of God. One apparently attractive way of handling this tension is to use a two-dimensional framework inspired by Saul Kripke. Against this, this article demonstrates that a Kripke-inspired framework is inapt in this context because it allows for the conceivability of God’s non-existence, thereby rendering his non-existence possible in some important, and for Aquinas inacceptable, sense. Drawing on David Chalmers, the article submits that the existence of God can only be necessary if God’s non-existence is ideally inconceivable. On the basis of Aquinas’ own understanding of God, however, the article argues further that God’s non-existence in fact is inconceivable. The alleged conceivability of God’s non-existence is ultimately due to our (human) inability to grasp the nature of being, whereas creatures who grasp the nature of being are unable to conceive of God’s non-existence. This removes God’s non-existence from the realm of relevant conceivability and, therefore, from the range of possible worlds.