Bosphorus

One thing that makes Orthodoxy difficult is that its disagreements with other religious groups are denials of the suppressed premises of the arguments between the groups, and not denials of the conclusions of the arguments.

To clarify what I mean, consider Ramsey’s Maxim. (F. P. Ramsey was a gifted English philosopher of the early twentieth-century who died young.) Ramsey counseled his readers to try a different tactic for escaping from dead-ends in argument. He advised that whenever a person is faced with two arguments, one of which concludes A and the other not-A, the best tactic for the person is not to choose sides (choose the argument for A or choose the argument for not-A) but rather to discover the suppressed premise both arguments endorse, and deny it. Denying the suppressed premise frees the person from the mazeways of the traditional arguments. (Those who frequent Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason should recognize the kinship between what Ramsey counsels his readers to do and what Kant does in the Antinomies.)

Orthodoxy employs Ramsey’s Maxim instinctively. It responds to religious groups’ demands to choose, “Either-Or!”, with a surprisingly intelligible “Neither-Nor”. Where the religious groups see logical space completely divided between two options, the Orthodox see logical space as open to distinctions that relativize the two options. The options are exhaustive and exclusive only relative to the affirmed suppressed premise. Deny the premise and the options themselves become optional.

Soon I’ll discusses some cases of the Orthodox employment of Ramsey’s Maxim. Now I want just to clarify abstractly what it is to employ the Maxim.

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