Abstract In Religious Experience, Wayne Proudfoot argued that a tout court rejection of reductionism in accounts of religious experience was not viable. According to Proudfoot, it’s possible to distinguish between an illegitimate practice of descriptive reductionism and the legitimate practice of explanatory reductionism. The failure to distinguish between these two forms of reductionism resulted in a protective strategy, or an attempt to protect religious experience from the reach of scientific explanation. Among the theorists whom he accused of deploying this illegitimate strategy Proudfoot included William James and his work in The Varieties of Religious Experience. In this article, I argue that while James does occasionally deploy a protective strategy in Varieties, this is not the only nor most important method of treating religious experience James developed. Implicit in his rejection of medical materialism, James not only deploys the protective strategy Proudfoot criticizes, but the pragmatic method with which he treats all claims. I argue that James’s pragmatic method leads to what James called noetic pluralism, or the view that there is no privileged knowledge practice, but a plurality of knowledge practices, and that this method puts pressure on the explanatory reductionist, who is implicitly committed to noetic monism.

中文翻译：

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看不见的果实：基于宗教经验的解释性还原主义的詹姆士式挑战

摘要在宗教经验中，韦恩·普罗德富特（Wayne Proudfoot）认为，吹捧法院以宗教经验为由拒绝还原主义是不可行的。根据Proudfoot的说法，可以区分描述性还原主义的非法实践和解释性还原主义的合法实践。无法区分这两种形式的还原主义导致了一种保护性策略，或者试图保护宗教经验不受科学解释的影响。在他指控采用这种非法策略的理论家中，威廉·詹姆斯（William James）和他在《宗教经历的多样性》中的工作。在本文中，我认为，尽管詹姆斯偶尔会在《综艺》中部署保护性策略，这不是詹姆斯发展的对待宗教经验的唯一，也不是最重要的方法。詹姆斯暗示拒绝接受医学唯物主义，不仅采用了Proudfoot批评的保护策略，而且还采用了务实的方法来对待所有主张。我认为詹姆斯的实用主义方法导致了詹姆斯所说的“理性多元论”，或者认为没有特权的知识实践，而是多种知识实践，并且这种方法给隐性地致力于理性一元论的解释性还原论者施加了压力。 。