PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION: A contemporary introduction

ARGUMENTS (2) 271

Self-authentication

Religious experiences are often said to be self-authenticating or self-
guaranteeing, so that appeal to them gives one a uniquely secure source
of experiential confirmation. If this is so, it is obviously an important
fact about religious experiences. It would be particularly relevant to
their status as evidence for religious beliefs. What exactly, then, is it for
some experience to be self-authenticating? Self-authentication is a
three-term relation; there is a person to whom an experience
authenticates, an experience that does the authenticating, and a belief or
proposition that is authenticated. Further, the idea is, the belief or
proposition in question is evidenced or authenticated in a particularly
strong way – in such a way, in fact, that the person cannot be mistaken
in accepting that belief or in believing that proposition. Formally, the
idea can be put in this fashion:

Chandra’s experience E is self-authenticating regarding propo-

sition P if and only if Chandra has experience E, it is logically

impossible that Chandra have E and proposition P be false, and

Chandra rests his acceptance of P on his having had E.2,3

If there are experiences that satisfy these conditions regarding persons and
beliefs, the most obvious examples do not concern religious beliefs.
Suppose that Wendy, perhaps feeling philosophical, reflects that, in
contrast to Santa Claus and unicorns but like salamanders and her dog, she
exists. Reflection is, after all, a kind of experience, and if Wendy reflects at
time T that she exists at T (a reflection that, she notes, includes her
believing that she exists), then she is fully justified if she also notes that
her reflecting that she exists is impossible unless she does exist; Wendy’s
experience of believingly reflecting on the fact of her existence is such that
it is logically impossible that she do so and her belief be false. So if she
rests her belief that she exists at T on the experience of believingly
reflecting that she exists at T, her experience of believingly reflecting that
she exists at T can be self-authenticating regarding her belief that she
exists at T. If we ask, then, what sorts of beliefs there are that can receive
self-authentication from experience, it seems clear that among them are:
one’s belief that one now exists, that one is now conscious, that one now
has at least one belief, and the like. Perhaps if one believes that one is now
in pain, then it is true that one is now in pain (though one can be wrong
about the pain’s cause and its location). These sorts of experiences and
beliefs represent the least controversial cases of self-authentication.