Sképsis: Revista de Filosofia ISSN 1981-4534 Vol. XII, N. 23, 2021, p. 18-34 Sképsis: Revista de Filosofia, vol. XII, n. 23, 2021, p. 18-34 - ISSN 1981-4534 WITTGENSTEIN, RELIGIOUS BELIEF, AND HINGE EPISTEMOLOGY Modesto Gómez-Alonso Universidad de La Laguna Email: mgomezal@ull.edu.es Abstract: Some hinge epistemologists have recently argued that the striking similitudes between hinge commitments and religious belief help supporting a parity argument to the end that religious beliefs are not less reasonable than ordinary ones. I will argue that both hinges and religious beliefs are able to gain a rational standing, but that their rationality stems from much deeper sources than in previous accounts. It is not, however, as if hinge epistemologists had to shed light through hinges to religious belief. It is rather the opposite —as if religious trust were instrumental to making sense of how trust in hinges might be ultimately rational. Keywords: Epistemic Agency; Hinge Commitments; Meaningfulness; Performance Normativity; Radical Scepticism; Religious Belief. 1 Introduction It has been a pet project for hinge epistemologists to read Wittgenstein’s remarks on religious belief in light of his way of characterizing so-called ‘Moore propositions’ or ‘hinge commitments’, as it is developed in On Certainty. As earlier as in 2001, Iakovos Vasiliou drew attention to the facts that for Wittgenstein neither religious beliefs nor Moore propositions are grounded in evidence, and that while having the form of ordinary empirical beliefs, neither of those two kinds of belief function in the same way as other empirical beliefs. The striking similitude between religious beliefs and Moore propositions would make intelligible Wittgenstein’s unusual claim that the religious believer and the non- believer do not in fact contradict each other (Vasiliou, 2001, 31)—they operate within different systems of reference. However, it has been Duncan Pritchard (2017), as an accomplished Wittgenstein scholar and as one of the greatest representatives of a recent theory of justification and knowledge broadly inspired in On Certainty (Coliva, 2016, 6) — Hinge Epistemology, who has embraced the program of deriving a particular religious epistemology from Wittgenstein’s (or Wittgenstein’s inspired) more general epistemology. Pritchard’s main purpose has been that of finding a middle path between what he calls the “epistemic heroism” (Pritchard, 2017, 101) of religious cognitivism and the “epistemic capitulation” (Id. 102) of fideistic accounts of religious belief. To this