Incommensurable criteria

At the risk of horning in on Prejean’s debate with Engwer, a couple of Prejean’s objections caught my eye:

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That's ridiculous. If they don't have commensurable reasons for believing X, then they don't even really have the same belief.

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Hmm. So if Jason believes in 9/11 because he saw the planes strike the Twin Towers on TV, and Prejean believes in 9/11 because he saw the planes strike the Twin Towers in a vision or a dream, then they don't even really have the same belief because their reasons for believing in 9/11 differ?

Their "reasons" are incommensurable, as involving "incommensurable" modes of knowledge—as between observation and revelation. But does that mean they don’t share the same belief?

In fact, a fair amount of Scripture consists in visionary revelation. The seer believes in the event because he saw it in a dream or vision, whereas a Christian believes in the event because he read the record of the dream or vision.

Let us suppose that Jason and Jonathan both saw 9/11 on TV, but they happen to differ in their epistemology. Maybe Jason is a direct realist whereas is an indirect realist. So do they not both believe in 9/11?

One problem is that Prejean is confusing ontological conditions with epistemic criteria. Even if the criteria are incommensurable, it scarcely follows that their respective truth-conditions are incompatible.

Moving along:

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My point has always been that what Christians believed was the process for developing binding doctrine ought to be the guide for what is apostolic, what Christianity is. Jason thinks that we ought to be looking for what the Apostles literally taught.

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An obvious problem with this "paradigm" is that the process for developing a dogmatic guide is itself an ongoing process of development. It took a long time for this process to evolve. So the process of development is taking you further away from the time of the sources, given the amount of time the process underwent to develop into a doctrinal guide. It is moving in the wrong direction—not nearer to the event, but ever more distant from living memory and eyewitness testimony.