The Public Rational Entitlement of Faith: an inferentialist proposal for religious reasons in practices of public justification
Keywords:
Public Justification. Inferentialism. Religious Reasons.Abstract
This article proposes an Inferentialist Model of Epistemological Approach (IMEA) to address the normative conditions under which religious reasons may be legitimately used in public justification practices. Drawing on Robert Brandom’s inferentialist pragmatics, the article advances a model of rationality grounded in the social practice of giving and asking for reasons, emphasizing concepts such as epistemic entitlement, scorekeeping, and logical expressivism. In this view, the legitimacy of a reason does not rest on its neutrality or universal acceptability but on its intelligibility–understood from an inferentialist perspective–that is, whether it can be rationally understood and assessed by others within a shared discursive space. Religious reasons, therefore, are not excluded a priori but must meet the inferential demands of public reasoning. The IMEA framework challenges traditional foundationalist or evidentialist standards in public reason theories and offers a robust account of rational pluralism. Ultimately, the article argues that IMEA enables a more consistent and inclusive treatment of religious reasoning within public justification, without undermining the rationale of public reason.
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