of this training in the practice, those descriptions do not constitute our only means of
picking out God. We also think of God as the one referred to in such practices by all our
predecessors in the religious tradition in question.
At this point I need to sharpen up the distinction between direct and descriptive reference.
I have been taking the former from Kripke's conception of an “initial baptism” followed
by a chain of transmission. But, although I presented the initial baptism as involving a
direct perceptual identification of the object, Kripke himself correctly points out that the
“baptizer” might pick out the object descriptively as well. This indicates that the
taxonomy needs to be more complex. We need to distinguish direct reference into
primary and derived. The former involves zeroing in on the referent as a current object of
experience. The latter involves standing at the end of a chain of transmission that
originated in an experientially based identification of an object. Should we make the
same distinction for descriptive reference? We could distinguish between making a
descriptive reference from scratch, wholly on one's own resources, and doing so by
deriving the descriptions from others. But here the distinction is less important, for once
one derives identifying descriptions from others and so long as one remembers them, one
is able to cut oneself loose from the source and use them just as one would if one had
thought them up oneself. There is no important difference between the use of identifying
descriptions by their original inventor, and their use by one who has learned them from
others. But reference by perceptual encounters with an object cannot be transmitted to
others in such a way as to make them usable in the same way as by the original perceiver.
If a person picks up the practice of referring to God from someone who connected the
term with an object of experience, and the former lacks a firsthand experience of God
himself, then it is only by virtue of the source of the transmission of the referring practice
that his reference to God can be called direct.
Things are this complicated even for “pure” cases, but they get more complicated with
mixed cases, which are much more numerous in real life. Kripkean chains often involve
multiple lines of transmission with different origins, and some of the latter may involve
direct and some descriptive reference. Moreover, a person's reference to God that starts as
purely derivative from a chain may later be mixed with experiential encounters with God.
And this in turn may be mixed with novel identifying descriptions. But sufficient unto the
day is the complication thereof. I will restrict my sights to relatively pure cases.
It will not have escaped the reader's notice that in the foregoing I have been assuming
that there is such a phenomenon as perception or “experiential encounter” with God.^2 I
have treated this matter in detail in Alston (1991) and do not have space here even to
stick my toe in the water. Suffice it to say that there have been innumerable records of
such experiences and no doubt many more unrecorded ones. For some documentation,
see, in addition to the above, James (1902) and Beardsworth (1977). Lest one think that
we are beyond all that now in this “enlightened” age, several recent sociological surveys
show that well over half of Americans believe themselves to have had at some time an
experience of God. One should also distinguish between direct and indirect experience of
God, the latter coming through experience of something in nature or elsewhere in the
natural world. Either kind could stand at the origin of a practice of referring to God. It is
also relevant to note the plausibility of supposing that (putative) experiential encounters
with God are prominent in the originating events of a religious tradition, as the Bible and
other sacred texts make clear.
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