Maverick Philosopher

Is it Wrong to Doubt When the Evidence is Sufficient?

Some say it is wrong to believe on insufficient evidence.  Is it also wrong to doubt or even disbelieve when the evidence is sufficient?

Is She Believable?

It depends on what 'believable' means. 

Many find Christine Blasey Ford 'credible' or 'believable.'  But there is a tendency among the commentariat to conflate her believability with the believability of the content of her allegation against Judge Kavanaugh. Those of us who want to think clearly about this SCOTUS confirmation business need to keep some distinctions in mind.

There are two main senses of 'credible/believable' in the vicinity and they need to be distinguished. There is the credibility of persons and the credibility of propositions. 

Credibility of Persons

Within the credibility of persons we should further distinguish sincerity from trustworthiness.  Does Dr. Ford sincerely believe what she alleges against Judge Kavanaugh?  I think so. So I find her credible in that sense. I don't think she is trying to deceive us. She seems to be saying what she sincerely believes is the truth. One can say what is false without lying.  So even if what she is saying is false, she can sincerely assert it. Bret Stephens says he "found her wholly believable. If she’s lying, she will face social and professional ruin." She is believable in the sense that she seems not to be lying. So that is one sense of personal believability.

But is she a trustworthy witness? That is a more difficult question. Even if she is a trustworthy witness in general, was she one that night when she was drinking? I don't know. A person can be believable in the sense of apparently sincere and apparently truth-telling without being  trustworthy because, perhaps, she has a tendency to confabulate.  So we should distinguish believability as sincerity from believability as trustworthiness.  

Credibility of Propositions

But Ford's personal credibility is not really the issue. The issue is whether the content of her allegation is credible. The alleging is one thing, the content another. Part of that content is the proposition that Brett Kavanaugh sexually molested her.  That proposition could have been alleged by people other than Ford. Is the proposition itself credible?

But what does credible mean? It means believable. But the '___able' suffix is ambiguous. Is the proposition such that some people have the ability to believe it? Yes, of course, but that is not the relevant sense of 'believable.'  People believe the damndest things and thus many false and absurd propositions are believable. They are believable because they are believed.

The relevant sense of 'believable' is normative: Is the proposition alleged worthy of belief? Is it a proposition that ought to be believed by a rational person, or may be believed by a rational person?  Is it epistemically permissible to believe that Brett Kavanaugh sexually molested Ford?

It is only if there is sufficient evidence. How much evidence is needed? Well, it has to be more than her say-so even if it  is a sincere say-so.  Suppose Ford sincerely states what she sincerely believes is the truth. That is not sufficient evidence that Kavanaugh in fact molested her.  But no other evidence has turned up: there are no corroborating witnesses, for example.

I conclude that Ford is not believable in the only sense that matters: the content of her allegation is not supported by enough evidence to make it worthy of belief.  Her testimony should be dismissed and Kavanaugh should be confirmed.

Related: Sex-Crimes Prosecutor Details 12 Massive Inconsistencies in Kavanaugh Accuser's Story

On Loss of Faith in the Roman Catholic Church

Rod Dreher writes,

At the risk of oversharing, the most painful thing about covering the scandal from 2002 until I left the Catholic Church in 2006 was losing my Catholic faith, which had been at the center of my life since my conversion in 1993.

If I have the story right, Mr. Dreher has moved from the RCC east to Orthodoxy.  If so, then we can safely assume that he is still a theist who believes in the divinity of Christ, the Trinity, and much else besides. So his loss of his Catholic faith was his loss of faith in the Roman church as the one, true, holy, catholic (universal) and apostolic church founded by Christ.  As he says a little later,

What’s worth pointing out is that the final straw was realizing that my wife and I could not trust the institution anymore.

One question that arises is whether it would be reasonable to cleave to one's faith in the institution as divinely ordained in the teeth of all the revelations of evil deeds and cover-ups.

I should think that this would prove psychologically impossible for many if not most of the laity. But I also think one could reasonably remain within the church if one accepts its traditional teachings. Michael Liccione on his Facebook page writes,

I'm Catholic because I believe that the only principled way to distinguish between divine revelation and human opinion is by the teaching of a visible authority, established by Jesus himself and temporally continuous with the Apostles, that is preserved from error by the Holy Spirit when teaching with her full authority. That's the authority which I believe the gates of hell will not prevail against. So even if the Catholic Church had to go underground, and thus become invisible to most people, there would still be her teaching and sacraments to sustain us, even if only through a few.

I would add the following. The Church is in the world where Satan is at work. So it is no surprise that Satan is at work in the Church. But if the Church was founded by Christ, the God-Man, and the current Church can trace itself back to the Founder, then there is 'no way in hell' that the gates of hell can prevail against it.

So if one accepts the RC worldview in all of its major tenets, as I believe Liccione does, then it is reasonable to cleave to one's faith in the institution as divinely ordained in the teeth of all the revelations of evil deeds and cover-ups.  This is because the worldview has the resources to explain away the appearance of its own fraudulence.

Of course, this leaves us with the problem of whether it is reasonable to accept the RC worldview in the first place.  Many will no doubt take the deep levels of corruption as good evidence that the Roman church was never the one, true, holy, catholic (universal) and apostolic church that enjoys divine sanction and is ongoingly guided by the Holy Ghost.  

But if one accepts Roman Catholicism in its orthodox form, then it is reasonable to stick with the faith despite the psychological difficulty of doing so at the present time.

Here's my problem. I accept God and the possibility of divine revelation, and I understand the need for a principled way to distinguish divine revelation from human opinion.  But what validates the RCC as this principled way and means? Well, it validates itself.

Is there a problem with that? For more on the general problem of the need for a "visible authority"  see Private Judgment? 

When Reasoned Faith No Longer Strikes One as Reasonable: What Then?

Thomas Doubting inquires,

I’ve met and talked to a number of people who, while originally atheists, have found faith in God and become active Christians as result of their intellectual pursuit that led them to the conclusion that God is logically necessary.

There is an ambiguity regarding 'logically necessary' that needs to be removed. Suppose there is a sound deductive argument A for the existence of God.  Necessarily, if the premises of A are all true, then A's conclusion -- God exists -- is true.  That is not to be confused with: If the premises of A are all true, then A's conclusion -- God exists -- is necessarily true.

The necessitas consequentiae must not be confused with the necessitas consequentis. See my separate post on this topic.  The premises of a sound argument logically necessitate its conclusion, but that does not imply that the conclusion is logically necessary.  

So even if one succeeds in demonstrating the existence of God, one has not thereby demonstrated the existence of a necessary being. For one might have succeeded only in demonstrating the existence of a logically contingent being.

I will read you as saying that there are people who come to faith in God via deductive arguments that they consider to be sound, just that, without the additional idea that the God so demonstrated is a necessary being.

Other relevant sources of ambiguity: Are you thinking of persons whose faith is SOLELY based on argumentative considerations?  Are the argumentative considerations demonstrative only, or are probabilistic considerations relevant?  

I will assume an affirmative answer to both questions.

I've always wanted to know, but was a bit uncomfortable to ask, how well are they prepared to deal with a quite conceivable situation where they should accidentally discover that their investigation was logically flawed and from the rational point their conclusion is not valid and, therefore the their faith in God’s existence has no logical grounding. 

In other words, if your intellect guided you on the road to God and in the years following the finding of God you developed strong faith in and love for God would you still cling to your faith if you had suddenly discovered that the reasoning that brought you to Him was defective?

Suppose someone comes to accept the existence of God on the basis of one or more arguments, but then discovers that those arguments are flawed. It would not follow from this that the person's reasoned faith has no logical grounding. For there could easily be other arguments that establish the existence of God.

So your question is better put as follows.   "Suppose a person who became a theist solely on the basis of arguments comes to believe that there is no extant argument that demonstrates the existence of God. Would that person be justified in clinging to his faith in God?" 

The question is interesting and important but also very complicated. I'll just make a couple of points.

Does the person also believe that there is no extant argument that demonstrates the non-existence of God?  Suppose that is the case. Then the person has three beliefs: that God exists; that God's existence cannot be demonstrated; that God's non-existence cannot be demonstrated.  Is he rationally justified in holding all three?  The theoretically-rational course would be to suspend judgment on the question of God's existence by neither affirming that God exists nor denying that God exists.  

But there is also prudential rationality to consider. If the arguments pro et contra cancel out, then God might or might not exist for all we know.  Believing would then be the prudentially rational thing to do, and pragmatically useful to boot. This is because the question of the existence of God is not a merely theoretical question, but one that bears upon our ultimate happiness and well-being.

If, on the other hand, the person in question has come to believe that some argument demonstrates the non-existence of God, then to be rational he ought to reject belief in God.  Or so it will seem to most.

But it is not that clear. Suppose one believes that there are no good arguments for the existence of God, but there are good arguments for the nonexistence of God, arguments from evil, say.  Suppose the person is also skeptical about the power of reason to decide such a weighty, metaphysical question.

Would it not be prudentially rational for him to go on believing? After all, God might exist.  And what would one lose by believing? What one would lose by believing would be as nothing as compared to what one might gain by believing and coming into right relation with God.

Related: Is it Sometimes Rational to Believe on Insufficient Evidence?  

 

Anti-Natalism and the Search for Truth

C. L. writes and I respond in blue:

You never seem to allow comments on the posts I want to comment on, so I'm forced to add another email to  your overwhelming pile.

BV: Well, my pile is not that bad. This is one of the many benefits of relative obscurity. And I am happy to receive your response.

Because I generally agree with you so much, I don't write too often. I don't even write where I moderately disagree with you. And I try not to write even where we sit on opposite ends of the table, because you are a trained philosopher and I am a dilettante.

For example, I tried to let this anti-natalism stuff pass by, but you posted again on it today with your typical caveat that you are out to seek truth wherever it may be found. I suppose I find that a bit cavalier when you are dealing with far-out ideas like anti-natalism because it seems so intuitively implausible, and not just to myself.

I think that though we both seek truth (and I am making an educated guess here so you'll forgive me the offence if I'm wrong), the reason I don't take anti-natalism seriously is because I am a Christian first and philosopher second, and you do because you are a philosopher first and a Christian (theist) second, which would explain your mantra about seeking truth wherever it is found as justification for taking this idea seriously. 

BV: I will first point out that there is a anti-natalist strain in Christianity.  See, for example, More on Christian Anti-Natalism and the accompanying comment thread. So it is not clear that Christianity rules out anti-natalism in such a way as to make it impossible for any Christian to take it seriously.  The logically prior question, of course, is: What is Christianity? Decide that question and then you will be in a  position to decide whether Christianity is anti-natalist.

I will also point out that if you set store by plausibility and reject without examination the implausible, then you ought to reject orthodox (miniscule 'o') Christianity since its central doctrine is an apparent (and many would say real) absurdity or logical contradiction.  And so is the doctrine of the Trinity which Chalcedonian incarnationalism requires. See, for example, the work of the Christian philosopher, Dale Tuggy. Both of these constitutive doctrines are apparently absurd for reasons I examine in detail in the Trinity and Incarnation category. However we analyze 'implausible,' it is clear that what is apparently absurd is implausible.  So if you reject without examination the implausible, then you should reject without examination Christianity. And if you don't do the latter, then you shouldn't reject anti-natalism without examination.

And then there is the fact that you simply reject Benatar's views without examining his arguments. That's what ideologues do, not philosophers. The arguments raise important questions as should be obvious from my ongoing series. So one can learn from his work even f in the end one doesn't accept his arguments.

A tougher and deeper fourth issue concerns how philosophy and a revelation-based religion such as Christianity are related. There is a tension here and it is the tension between Athens (Greek philosophy) and Jerusalem (the Bible), the two main roots of the West whose fruitful entanglement is the source of the West's vitality.    As Leo Strauss sees it, it is a struggle over the unum necessarium, the one thing needful or necessary:

To put it very simply and therefore somewhat crudely, the one thing needful according to Greek philosophy is the life of autonomous understanding.  The one thing needful as spoken by the Bible is the life of obedient love.  The harmonizations and synthesizations are possible because Greek philosophy can use obedient love in a subservient function, and the Bible can use philosophy as a handmaid; but what is so used in each case rebels against such use, and therefore the conflict is really a radical one. ("Progress or Return?" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 246, bolding added.)

Even a  philosopher who is open to the claims of Revelation will feel duty-bound qua philosopher by his intellectual conscience to examine the epistemic credentials of Biblical revelation lest he unjustifiably accept what he has no right to accept.  This attitude is personified by Edmund Husserl.  On his death bed, cared for by Catholic nuns, open to the Catholic faith which some of his star pupils had embraced,  he was yet unable to make the leap, remarking that it was too late for him, that he would need for each dogma five years of investigation!  That attitude is typical of a real philosopher.   If you can't 'relate to it' then you don't understand the demands of the philosophical vocation.  The philosopher is called to a certain sort of life, the life of autonomous understanding, as Strauss so well puts it.

It is a tough problem and the conflict is really radical as Strauss says. The sense of intellectual honesty and intellectual responsibility in a great philosopher like Husserl is burningly strong. Someone who shares this sense cannot easily accept without careful scrutiny some religion that he happens to have been brought up on. On the other hand, where does philosophy get us? Husserl bent every fiber of his being to establishing philosophy as strict science, strenge Wissenschaft, but he failed to persuade even his best and closest students. I am thinking of Edith Stein who, while recognizing Husserl as her 'master,' in the end turned to Thomas and became a Carmelite nun. And then there is Roman Ingarden, an outstanding but neglected thinker who rejected Husserl's transcendental idealism.  Heidegger, the most influential of Husserl's students, was also soon on his own exploring strange and dark Black Forest paths and wood trails. (The allusion is to his Holzwege.)

You have also said elsewhere that there is nary an argument (that is not either self-evident or tautological) that is uncontested by philosophers. 

BV: Right. That's the trouble with philosophy. None of its conclusions are conclusive. Nothing gets settled to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners.  Dogmatists confidently assert substantive theses, but it is mostly if not always bluster. The problems of philosophy are genuine, and many of them are humanly important; but none of them has ever been solved in a way that makes it clear that it has been solved.  The strife of systems continues unabated. But that is hardly a reason simply to plump for some ideology.

The only purpose of seeking truth is to find it (and probably to let others know about it once you have). But if you sought and you have found it (or are convinced you have found it), then what good is it to entertain truths that run contrary to it (or are precluded by it)? This just seems like regress, not progress. It's like considering infanticide when you already reject abortion. 

BV: True, we seek in order to find. And it is true that some convince themselves, or become convinced, that they have found the truth.  Such a one was Edith Stein:

In the summer of 1921, she spent several weeks in Bergzabern (in the Palatinate) on the country estate of Hedwig Conrad-Martius, another pupil of Husserl's. Hedwig had converted to Protestantism with her husband. One evening Edith picked up an autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila and read this book all night. "When I had finished the book, I said to myself: This is the truth." Later, looking back on her life, she wrote: "My longing for truth was a single prayer."

Now here is the question: If one is convinced that one has the truth, and this truth is logically incompatible with some thesis T (e.g., Benatar's anti-natalism), is one rationally justified in rejecting T and in refusing to examine the arguments in support of it?

I would say No. Note first that the conviction that one has the truth is a mere subjective certainty. No matter how psychologically powerful this certainty is, it does not entail objective certainty. One can be subjectively certain and still be mistaken.  Christopher Hitchens, who died on this date six years ago, was subjectively certain that there is no God. Edith Stein was convinced that there is. It follows that subjective certainty does not entail objective certainty. They can't both be right; so one of the subjective certainties was merely subjective. 

Given that subjective certainty does not entail objective certainty, the really serious truth-seeker must remain open to the possibility that he is mistaken about that of which he is subjectively certain.  If he is really serious about truth, and intellectually honest, he must ongoingly examine his doxastic commitments. He must hold them tentatively. This is not to say that he will easily relinquish them; it is to say that he will remain self-critical.  This strikes me as the right attitude here below for we who are in statu viae.  Doxastic rest, if it comes at all, comes later.  To rest prematurely would seem to indicate a lack of seriousness about the pursuit of truth.  It would seem to indicate more of a desire for comfort than a desire for truth.

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David Benatar in <i>The New Yorker</i>

Faith, Reason, and Edith Stein

Today, August 9th, is the feast day of St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross in the Catholic liturgy.  She is better known to philosophers as the Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of the Roman Catholic church. One best honors a philosopher by re-enacting his thoughts, sympathetically but critically. Herewith, a bit of critical re-enactment.

In the 1920s Stein composed an imaginary dialogue between her two philosophical masters, Husserl and Aquinas. Part of what she has them discussing is the nature of faith.

One issue is whether faith gives us access to truth. Stein has Thomas say:

. . . faith is a way to truth. Indeed, in the first place it is a way to truths — plural — which would otherwise be closed to us, and in the second place it is the surest way to truth. For there is no greater certainty than that of faith . . . . (Edith Stein, Knowledge and Faith, tr. Redmond, ICS Publications 2000, pp. 16-17)

Now comes an important question. What is it that we as philosophers want? We want the ultimate truths about the ultimate matters. If so, it is arguable that we should take these truths from whatever source offers them to us even if the source is not narrowly philosophical. We should not say: I will accept only those truths that can be certified by (natural) reason, but rather all truths whether certified by reason or 'certified' by faith. Thus Stein has Aquinas say:

If faith makes accessible truths unattainable by any other means, philosophy, for one thing, cannot forego them without renouncing its universal claim to truth. [. . .] One consequence, then, is a material dependence of philosophy on faith.

Then too, if faith affords the highest certainty attainable by the human mind, and if philosophy claims to bestow the highest certainty, then philosophy must make the certainty of faith its own. It does so first by absorbing the truths of faith, and further by using them as the final criterion by which to gauge all other truths. Hence, a second consequence is a formal dependence of philosophy on faith. (17-18)

But of course this cannot go unchallenged by Husserl. So Stein has him say:

. . . if faith is the final criterion of all other truth, what is the criterion of faith itself? What guarantees that the certainty of my faith is genuine? (20)

Or in terms of of the distinction between subjective (psychological) and objective (epistemic) certainty: what guarantees that the certainty of faith is objective and not merely subjective? The faiths of Jew, Christian, and Muslim are all different. How can the Christian be sure that the revelation he takes on faith has not been superseded by the revelation the Muslim takes on faith?  And what about contradictory faith-contents? God cannot be both triune (as the normative Christian believes) and not triune (as the normative Muslim believes).  So Christian and Muslim cannot both be objectively certain about their characteristic beliefs; at most they can be subjectively certain. Subjective certainty, however, has no epistemic value.  

Stein's Thomas replies to Husserl as follows:

Probably my best answer is that faith is its own guarantee. I could also say that God, who has given us the revelation, vouches for its truth. But this would only be the other side of the same coin. For if we took the two as separate facts, we would fall into a circulus vitiosus [vicious circle], since God is after all what we become certain about in faith.

[. . .]

All we can do is point out that for the believer such is the certainty of faith that it relativizes all other certainty, and that he can but give up any supposed knowledge which contradicts his faith. The unique certitude of faith is a gift of grace. It is up to the understanding and will to draw the practical consequences therefrom. Constructing a philosophy on faith belongs to the theoretical consequences. (20-22)

For Thomas and Stein, the certainty of faith is a gift of God.  As such, it cannot be merely subjective.  It is at once both subjective and objective, subjective as an inner certitude, objective as an effect of divine grace. Husserl, however, will ask how the claim that the certainty of faith is a divine gift can be validated.  It is after all, a contestable and contested claim.  How does one know that it is true? For Husserl, the claims that God exists and that the Christian revelation is his revelation are but dogmatic presuppositions.  They need validation because of the existence of competing claims such as those made by Jews and Muslims and atheists.

If, as Stein says, "faith is its own guarantee," then, since the faith of the Christian and the faith of the Muslim are contradictory with respect to certain key propositions, it follows that one of these faiths offers a false guarantee.  You can see from this that the Thomas-Stein stance leaves something to be desired.  But Husserl's approach has problems of its own.  Closed up within the sphere of his subjectivity, man cannot reach the truly Transcendent, which must irrupt into this sphere and cannot be constituted (Husserl's term) within it.  The truly Transcendent is not a transcendence-in-immanence.  It cannot be a constituted transcendence.

If man is indeed a creature, there is something absurd about measly man hauling the Creator before the bench of finite reason there to be rudely interrogated about his credentials.  On the other hand, the claim that man is a creature is a claim like any other, and man must satisfy his intellectual conscience with respect to this claim.  It is precisely his freedom, responsibility and love of truth that drive him to ask: But is it true?  And how do we know?  And isn't it morally shabby to fool oneself and seek consolation in a fairy tale?

Paradoxically, God creates man in his image and likeness, and thus as free, responsible, and truth-loving; characteristics that then motivate man to put God in the dock.

So there you have it. There are two opposing conceptions of philosophy, one based on the autonomy of reason, the other willing to sacrifice the autonomy of reason for the sake of truths which cannot be certified by reason but which are provided by faith in revelation, a revelation that must simply be accepted in humility and obedience. It looks as if one must simply decide which of these two conceptions to adopt, and that the decision cannot be justified by (natural) reason.

My task, in this and in related posts, is first and foremost to set forth the problems as clearly as I can. Anyone who thinks this problem has an easy solution does not understand it.  It is part of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem. 

Does Your Disagreement Give Me Good Reason to Question My Position?

In general, no. For you may be foolish or ignorant or otherwise incompetent with respect to the subject matter under discussion. Or you may be morally defective: a bully, a blowhard, a bullshitter, a quibbler, a sophist.  But suppose none of these predicates attach to you.  Suppose you are my moral and intellectual peer, and what's more, a competent practitioner in the discipline or subdiscipline which is home to the thesis we are disputing. Thus we are both competent, and we are equally competent. And suppose I believe you to be as intellectually honest and as competent as I am.

Suppose further that I have given careful thought to my thesis and have advanced it in respectable, peer-reviewed journals.

If you disagree with me, does this fact supply a good reason for me to question my thesis?  Ought I question it? Or would I be justified in ignoring your disagreement?

We note that this is a meta-question that sires a meta-disagreement.  This meta-disagreement is between the Conciliationist and the Steadfaster.

I am a Conciliationist. Thus I tend to think that your disagreement with me (given the stipulations above) ought to give me pause. It ought to cause me to re-examine my view and be open to the possibility of either rejecting it or withholding assent from it.  It ought to undermine my epistemic self-confidence. I tend to think I would be intellectually amiss, less than intellectually honest, were I simply to dismiss your disagreement. I tend to think I would be unjustifiably privileging my own point of view, preferring it over yours simply because is is mine. This seems wrong to me given that we are trying to arrive at the objective and impersonal truth.  Truth cannot be mine or yours.

The Steadfaster stands fast in the face of disagreement. Whereas the Conciliationist allows the fact of disagreement to undermine his epistemic self-confidence, the Steadfaster takes the fact of disagreement to undermine his prior conviction that his interlocutor is as morally and intellectually capable as he initially thought he was. So when you disagree with me, I question whether I am right. But when I disagree with you, you question my competence, rationality, probity, etc.

But now a puzzle arises. If I am a Conciliationist, then my position would seem to require that I question my Conciliationism due to the fact that the Steadfaster disagrees with me.  (Assume that the Steadfaster is as morally and intellectually well-endowed as I am and that I believe him to be such.)

It seems that the consistent Conciliationist cannot be steadfast in his Conciliationism given that there are Steadfasters out there who are, and whom he believes to be, his moral and intellectual equals.  So what should our Conciliationist do? Should he:

• Suspend judgment and neither affirm nor deny Conciliationism?
• Make an exception for the Conciliationst thesis itself by steadfastly adhering to it ar the meta-level while remaining otherwise a Conciliationist?
• Reject Conciliationism and become a Steadfaster?
• Do something else?

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Belief Skepticism, Justification Skepticism, and the Big Questions

1) The characteristic attitude of the skeptic is not denial, but doubt. There are three main mental attitudes toward a proposition: affirm, deny, suspend. To doubt is neither to affirm nor to deny. It can therefore be assimilated to suspension. Thus a skeptic neither affirms nor denies; he suspends judgment, withholds assent, takes no stand. This obvious distinction between doubting and denying is regularly ignored in political polemics. Thus  global warming skeptics are often unfairly tagged by leftists as global warming denialists as if they are willfully rejecting some well-known fact.

2) The skeptic is not a cynic. A cynic is a disillusioned idealist. The cynic affirms an ideal, notes that people fail to live up to it, allows himself to become inordinately upset over this failure, exaggerates the extent of the failure, and then either harshly judges his fellows or wrongly impugns their integrity. His attitude is predicated on the dogmatic affirmation of an ideal. Skeptics, by contrast are free, or try to be free, of dogmatic commitments, and of consequent moral umbrage.

Cynic: "All politicians are liars!" Skeptic: "What makes you think that scrupulous truth-telling is the best policy in all circumstances? And what makes you think that truth is a high value?"

3) One can be skeptical about a belief or a class of beliefs, but also about the rational justification for a belief or a class of beliefs. Thus skeptics divide into belief skeptics and justification skeptics. (See R. Fogelin, Walking the Tightrope of Reason, Oxford UP, 2003, 98) You can be one without the other. There are various combinatorially possible positions. Here are three of several interesting ones:

a) S doubts whether p is justified, but S does not doubt that p: he affirms that p.

b) S doubts whether p is justified, and in consequence doubts that p.

c) S doubts whether p is justified, and concludes that one ought to suspend judgment on p.

Ad (a). Suppose Tom canvasses the arguments for and against the existence of God and concludes that it's a wash: the arguments and considerations he is aware of balance and cancel out.  Tom finds himself in a state of evidential equipoise. As a result he doubts whether belief in God is justified.  But he decides to believe anyway.  In this example Tom does not doubt or deny that God exists; he affirms that God exists despite doubting whether the belief is rationally justified.  With respect to the existence of God, Tom is a justification skeptic but not a belief skeptic.

Ad (b). Like Tom, Tim doubts whether belief that God exists is justified. Unlike Tom, Tim transfers his doubt about the justification to the belief itself. Tim is both a justification skeptic and a belief skeptic.

Ad (c). And then there is Cliff. He thinks it is wrong always and everywhere and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence. Like Tim and Tom, he doubts whether the existence of God is justified and for the same reason: the arguments pro et contra balance and cancel.  He reasonably takes evidential equipoise as entailing that there is  insufficient evidence for either limb of a contradictory pair of theses. But, unlike Tom and Tim, Cliff infers a normative conclusion from his evidential equipoise: it is morally wrong, a violation of the ethics of belief, to believe that God exists given that the evidence is insufficient. 

For now I am concerned only with the rationality of doing as Tom does.  

Tom examines both sides of the question. He does his level best to be fair and balanced.  But he finds no argument or consideration to incline him one way or the other. Now it seems perfectly obvious to me that our man is free to believe anyway, that is, in our example either to affirm the existence of God or to reject the existence of God.  He is not psychologically compelled by his state of evidential equipoise to suspend belief.

But while Tom is free to affirm, would it be rational for him to affirm the existence of God? Yes, because for beings of our constitution it is prudentially (as opposed to theoretically) rational to believe beyond the evidence. Consider the case of

The Alpine Hiker

An avalanche has him stranded on a mountainside facing a chasm.  He cannot return the way he came, but if he stays where he is he dies of exposure.  His only hope is to jump the chasm.  The preponderance of evidence is that this is impossible: he has no epistemic reason to think that he can make the jump.  But our hiker knows that what one can do is in part determined by what one believes one can do, that "exertion generally follows belief," as Jeffrey Jordan puts it.  If the hiker can bring himself to believe that he can make the jump, then he increases his chances of making it.  "The point of the Alpine hiker case is that pragmatic belief-formation is sometimes both morally and intellectually permissible."

We should therefore admit that there are cases in which epistemic considerations are reasonably defeated by prudential considerations.

And now we come to the Big Questions.  Should I believe that I am libertarianly free?  That it matters how I live?  That something is at stake in life?  That I will in some way or other be held accountable after death for what I do and leave undone here below?  That God exists?  That I am more than a transient bag of chemical reactions?  That a Higher Life is possible? 

Not only do I not have evidence that entails answers to any of these questions, I probably do not have evidence that makes a given answer more probable than not.  Let us assume that it is not more probable than not that God exists and that (in consequence) it is not more probable than not that I have a higher destiny in communion with God.  

But here's the thing.  I have to believe that I have a higher destiny if I am to act so as to attain it.  It is like the situation with the new neighbors.  I have to believe that they are decent people if I am to act in such a way as to establish good relations with them.  Believing the best of them, even on little or no evidence, is pragmatically useful and prudentially rational. I have to believe beyond the evidence.  Similarly in the Alpine Hiker case.  He has to believe that he can make the jump if he is to have any chance of making it.  So even though it is epistemically irrational for him to believe he can make it on the basis of the available evidence, it is prudentially rational for him to bring himself to believe.  You could say that the leap of faith raises the probability of the leap of chasm.

What if he is wrong?  Then he dies.  But if he sits down in the snow in despair he also dies, and more slowly.  By believing beyond the evidence he lives his last moments better than he would have by giving up. He lives courageously and actively. He lives like a man.

Here we have a pragmatic argument that is not truth-sensitive: it doesn't matter whether he will fail or succeed in the jump.  Either way, he lives better here and now if he believes he can cross the chasm to safety.  And this, even though the belief is not supported by the evidence.

It is the same with God and the soul.  The pragmatic argument in favor of them is truth-insensitive: whether or not it is a good argument is independent of whether or not God and the soul are real.  For suppose I'm wrong.  I live my life under the aegis of God, freedom, and immortality, but then one day I die and become nothing.  I was just a bag of chemicals after all.  It was all just a big bloody joke.  Electrochemistry played me for a fool.  So what? 

What did I lose by being a believer? Nothing of any value.  Indeed, I have gained value since studies show that believers tend to be happier people.  But if I am right, then I have done what is necessary to enter into my higher destiny.  Either way I am better off than  without the belief in God and the soul.  If I am not better off in this life and the next, then I am better off in this life alone.

I am either right or wrong about God and the soul.  If I am right, and I live my beliefs, then then I have lived in a way that not only makes me happier here and now, but also fits me for my higher destiny.  If I am wrong, then I am simply happier here and now.

So how can I lose?  Even if they are illusions, believing in God and the soul incurs no costs and disbelieving brings no benefits. 

Addendum

Dave Bagwill hits me with a powerful objection, which I will put in my own way.

It may be that mere intellectual assent to propositions about God and the soul "incurs no costs." But how could that be true for those who live their faith?  There are plenty of examples of those whose lived faith has cost them their liberty, their livelihoods, and their lives.  As we speak, Christians are being driven from their homes and slaughtered in the Middle East by adherents of the 'religion of peace.'  

This is a good objection and at the very least forces me to qualify what I wrote, perhaps along the following lines: religious belief and practice incur no real costs for those of us fortunate to live in societies in which there is freedom of religion.

How long freedom of religion can last in the USA is a good question given the leftist assault on religious liberty. Yet another reason to battle the leftist scum.  Luckily, we now have a chance with Trump as president.  

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Is Conservatism a Belief System?

I should think so.  But in an otherwise excellent entry, Tony M. writes,

Conservatism is not really an ideology because it is neither a belief system per se nor a comprehensive social system. It is not a belief system because it does not take its foundational standards from belief but by reference to more basic truths that can be demonstrated or are self-evident. In contrast, progressivism for example is rooted in beliefs that could not be established firmly even in principle.

It follows from what Mr M. is saying that if a proposition p is demonstrable or self-evident, then there is no subject S such that S believes that p. In plain English: no one believes demonstrable or self-evident truths. But 'surely' (i) it is self-evident that nothing is both F and not F at the same time and in the same respect and in the same sense  of 'F'; and (ii) I along with Mr. M. believe that!  So some of us believe the self-evident.

Could M. have blundered so badly?   But let's be charitable. Is there a way to read what M. writes in such a way that it has a chance of being true?

Most philosophers maintain that knowledge entails belief:  Necessarily, if I know that p, then I believe that p.  (At issue is propositional knowledge, not know-how, or carnal knowledge, or knowledge by acquaintance.)  To put it another way, believing that p is a necessary but not sufficient condition of knowing that p.  We could call this the orthodox line and trace it all the way back to the Theaetetus of Plato.  But it doesn't seem quite obvious. 

One heterodox position is that knowledge logically excludes belief: Necessarily, if I know that p, then it is not the case that I believe that p.  Ordinary language lends some support to this.  "I don't believe that the sun is shining; I know that it is!"  Suppose I am asked by a phone pollster whether I am male or female.  It would be very strange were I to reply, "I believe I'm male."  Accordingly, what one believes one doesn't know, and what  one knows one doesn't believe. I'm told John Cook Wilson held this view. Dallas Willard reports that Roy Wood Sellars held it, and Willard himself held it.

I have puzzled over this heterodox view without coming to a clear decision.  But if knowledge excludes belief, and if the basic truths of conservatism are either demonstrable or self-evident, then it makes sense for M. to claim that conservatism is not a belief system.

In philosophy it is very important that we be as civil and charitable as possible. There is no place for polemics in philosophy.  In politics it is quite otherwise.  Please do not confuse political philosophy with politics.  

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Ralph Waldo Emerson on the Trumpian 'Flip-Flop'

Here is a famous passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self-Reliance" rarely quoted in full:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. (Ziff, 183)  

People routinely rip the initial clause of this passage out of its context and take Emerson to be attacking logical consistency.  Or else they quote only the first sentence, or the first two sentences.  An example by  someone who really ought to know better is provided by Robert Fogelin in his book, Walking the Tightrope of Reason (Oxford UP, 2001).  Chapter One, "Why Obey the Laws of Logic?," has among its mottoes (p. 14) the first two sentences of the Emerson quotation above.  The other three mottoes, from Whitman, Nietzsche, and Aristotle, are plainly about logical consistency.

It should be clear to anyone who reads the entire passage quoted above in the context of Emerson's essay that Emerson’s dictum has nothing to do with logical consistency and everything to do with consistency of beliefs over time.

The consistency in question is diachronic rather than synchronic. A “little mind” is “foolishly consistent” if it refuses to change its beliefs when change is needed due to changing circumstances, further experience, or clearer thinking. It should be clear that if I believe that p at time t, but believe that ~p at later time t*, then there is no time at which I hold logically inconsistent beliefs.

Doxastic alteration, like alteration in general, is noncontradictory for the simple reason that properties which are contradictory when taken in abstracto are had at different times. My coffee changes from hot to non-hot, and thus has contradictory attributes when we abstract from the time of their instantiation. But since the coffee instantiates them at different times, there is no contradiction such as would cause us to join Parmenides in denying the reality of the changeful world.

Belief change is just a special case of this.

Emerson’s sound point, then, is that one should not make a fetish out of doxastic stasis: there is nothing wrong with being ‘inconsistent’ in the sense of changing one’s beliefs when circumstances change and as one gains in experience and insight. But this is not to say that one should adopt the antics of the flibbertigibbet.   Relative stability of views over time is an indicator of character.

Before leaving this topic, let's consider what Walt Whitman has to say in the penultimate section 51 of “Song of Myself” in Leaves of Grass:

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Here it appears that Whitman is thumbing his nose at logical consistency. If so, the Emersonic and Whitmanic dicta ought not be confused.   But confuse them is precisely what Fogelin does when he places the Emerson and Whitman quotations cheek-by-jowl on p. 14 of his book.

That being said, Professor Fogelin is a very good philosopher, and the book I refer to above is well worth your time. 

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Ten Impediments to Religious Belief

Why is religious belief so hard to accept? Why is it so much harder to accept today than in past centuries?

Herewith, some notes toward a list of the impedimenta, the stumbling blocks, that litter the path of the would-be believer of the present day.  Whether the following ought to be impediments is a further question,  a normative question.  The following taxonomy is merely descriptive.  And probably incomplete.  This is a blog.  This is only a blog.

1. There is first of all the obtrusiveness and constancy and coherence of the deliverances of the senses, outer and inner.  The "unseen order" (William James), if such there be, is no match for the 'seen order.' The massive assault upon the sense organs has never been greater than at the present time given the high technology of distraction: radio, television, portable telephony, e-mail, Facebook and other social media, not to mention Twitter, perhaps the ultimate weapon of mass distraction.  

Here is some advice on how to avoid God from C. S. Lewis, "The Seeing Eye" in Christian Reflections (Eeerdmans, 1967), pp. 168-167:

Avoid silence, avoid solitude, avoid any train of thought that leads off the beaten track. Concentrate on money, sex, status, health and (above all) on your own grievances. Keep the radio on. Live in a crowd. Use plenty of sedation. If you must read books, select them very carefully. But you'd be safer to stick to the papers. You'll find the advertisements helpful; especially those with a sexy or a snobbish appeal.

If Lewis could only see us now.

2. The fact that there are many competing systems of religious belief and practice.  They overlap, but they also contradict. The extant contradictory systems cannot all be true, though they could all be false.  The fact that one's own system is contradicted by others doesn't make it false, but it does raise reasonable doubts as to whether it is true.  For a thinking person, this is a stumbling block to the naive and unthinking acceptance of the religion in which one has been brought up.

3. The specificity of religious belief systems and their excessively detailed dogmatic contents.  One is put off by the presumptuousness of those who claim to know what they cannot, or are not likely, to know.  For example, overconfident assurances as to the natures of  heaven, hell, and purgatory together with asseverations as to who went where.  Stalin in hell?  How do you know?  How do you even know that there is a place of everlasting punishment as opposed to such other options as simple annihilation of unrepentant miscreants?

There is the presumptuousness of those who fancy that they understand the economics of salvation to such a degree that they can confidently assert that so many Hail Mary's will remove so many years in purgatory.  For many, such presumptuousness is an abomination, though not as bad as the sale of indulgences.

The human mind, driven by doxastic security needs, is naturally dogmatic and naturally tends to make certainties of uncertainties. (It also does the opposite when in skeptical mode: it makes uncertainties of (practical) certainties.)

Related post:  Are the Dogmas of Catholicism Divine Revelations?

4.  The fact that the religions of the world, over millenia, haven't done much to improve us individually or collectively.  Even if one sets aside the intemperate fulminations of the New Atheists, that benighted crew uniquely blind to the good religion has done, there is the fact that religious belief and practice, even if protracted and sincere, do little toward the moral improvement of people.  To some this is an impediment to acceptance of a religion. 

Related point: the corruption of the churches.

Again, my task here is merely descriptive.  I am not claiming that one ought to be dissuaded from religion by its failure to improve people much or to maintain itself in institutional form without corruption.  One can always argue that we would have been much, much worse without religion. Even Islam, "The saddest and poorest form of theism," (Schopenhauer) has arguably improved the lot of the denizens of the lands in which it has held sway, civilizing them, and providing moral guidance.

5. The putative conflict between science and religion.  Competing magisteria each with a loud claim to be the proper guide to life.  Thinking people are bothered by this.

6. The tension between Athens (philosophy) and Jerusalem (religion).  The battle between faith and reason. So many of the contents of religion are either absurd (logically contradictory) or else difficult to show to be rationally acceptable.

7.  The weight of concupiscence.  We are sexual beings naturally, and oversexualized beings socially, and so largely unable to control our drives.  The thrust of desire valorizes the phenomenal thus conferring plenary reality upon the objects of the senses while occluding one's spiritual sight into the noumenal. See Simone Weil in the Light of Plato. Is it any surprise that the atheist Russell, even in old age, refused to be faithful to his wife?  It is reasonable to conjecture that his lust and his pride -- intellectuals tend to be very proud with outsized egos-- blinded him to spiritual realities.  Jean-Paul Sartre is another case in point.

8. Suggestibility.  We are highly sensitive and responsive to social suggestions as to what is real and important and what is not.  In a society awash with secular suggestions, people find it hard to take religion seriously.

9. The apparent moral absurdities of some religious doctrines.   See Kant on Abraham and Isaac. 

10. The rise of life-extending technology. For some of us at least, life is a lot less nasty, brutish, and short than it used to be.  This aids and abets the illusion that this material life suffices and will continue indefinitely. The worst illusion sired by advanced technology, however, is the transhumanist fantasy which I discuss here. 

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The Pyrrhonian as Epistemic Wimp

What is so bad about the strife of systems, controversy, conflict of beliefs? Are they always bad, never productive? Is it not by abrasion (of beliefs) that the pearl (of wisdom) is formed? At least sometimes?

Doxastic conflict can be mentally stimulating, a goad to intellectual activity. We like being active. It makes us happy. Happiness itself is an activity, a work, an ergon, taught Aristotle. It is not a passive state. There is the joy of movement: running, hiking, climbing, dancing. The joy extends to  mental movement. We like problem-solving in our homes, in our jobs, in the aethereal precincts of mathematics and philosophy and science.  We like puzzles of all sorts.  We like to test our wits as much as we like to test our muscles. The rest after the test is the keener, the keener the test.  Mental disturbance, the aporetic predicament, can be enlivening and exhilirating. Damn me, but there must be a way out, a way forward, a work around, a solution! Engineers and chess players and route finders know what I am talking about.

It is equally true that conflicts of belief can be troubling, painful, depressing, unmooring. Cognitive dissonance can induce extreme mental suffering. ('Doxastic dissonance' is a better name for it.) We want certain knowledge, but the indications are many that it is out of reach in this life.  We are thrown back on that miserable substitute, belief. Belief butts up against counter-belief. The joys of dialectic transmogrify into acrimonious division.

So Sextus and the boys are on to something. They see the problem, not that their their diagnosis, let alone their cure, can be reasonably endorsed. Unfortunately, they see the problem onesidedly. They see what is bad about belief and the conflicts of belief. But they ignore the good. Insofar forth they could be called epistemic wimps.

This fits well with the decadence of the late Hellenic schools of Greek philosophy. Things went south after the passing of the titans, Plato and Aristotle.  Social and cultural decline brought with it a turn away from pure theory and a concern with the practical and therapeutic.  The desire for knowledge gave way to a desire for freedom from disturbance.

That is a peace not worth wanting as I argued the other day.

I now hand off to the Franz Brentano, Vier Phasen der Philosophie. 

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Our beliefs, political and religious beliefs in particular, divide us and ignite sometimes murderous passions. A radical cure would be to find a way to abstain from belief, to live without beliefs, adoxastōs. Is this possible, and if possible, desirable?

No on both counts. Such is the interim conclusion of my ongoing series on Pyrrhonian skepticism, the infirmity of reason, and cognate topics. But I continue to inquire . . . . That's what a philosopher does. That's how he lives.

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Anti-Pyrrhonian Haiku

The truth we need
We cannot know.
So we must believe
That it is so.

Is it Sometimes Rational to Believe on Insufficient Evidence?

I should think so.

The notion that we should always and everywhere apportion belief to evidence in such a way that we affirm only that for which we have sufficient evidence ignores the fact that belief for beings like us subserves action. If one acted only on those beliefs for which one had sufficient evidence one  would not act as one must to live well.

When a young person believes that he or she can do such-and-such, it is almost always on the basis of insufficient evidence.  And yet such belief beyond the evidence is a sine qua non of success.  There are two necessary conditions of success in life: one must believe that what one proposes to do is worth doing, and one must believe that one is capable of doing it.  In both cases one believes and acts on evidence that could hardly be called sufficient. 

As a young man observing my professors, I said to myself, "I can do this and I can do it better!"  (It can be advantageous to have mediocre teachers!) My belief in myself was not without evidence but surely was not grounded in sufficient evidence. (Suppose we agree that sufficient evidence for proposition p renders p more likely than not.)  My believing in myself was a believing well beyond the evidence. But my belief in self, even unto cockiness, was sine qua non for my success.  Effort follows belief.  In cases like these, belief is a matter of the will: one chooses to believe that a certain good is attainable despite the insufficiency of the evidence the intellect can gather at the time.

This strikes me as a good maxim:  Don't let insufficient evidence prevent you from believing what you are better off believing than not believing. 

Let's consider another example.

The New Neighbors

What evidence do I have that my new neighbors are morally decent people? Since they have just moved in, my evidence base is exiguous indeed and far from sufficient to establish that they are decent people. (Assume that some precisifying definition of 'decent' is on the table.) Should I suspend judgment and behave in a cold, skeptical, stand-offish way toward them? ("Prove that you are not a scumbag, and then I'll talk to you.") Should I demand of them 'credentials' and letters of recommendation before having anything to do with them? Either of these approaches would be irrational. A rational being wants good relations with those with whom he must live in close proximity and whose help he may need. Wanting good relations, he must choose means that are conducive to that end. Knowing something about human nature, he knows that 'giving the benefit of the doubt' is the wise course when it comes to establishing relations with other people. If you begin by impugning the integrity of the other guy, he won't like you.  One must assume the best about others at the outset and adjust downwards only later and on the basis of evidence to the contrary. But note that my initial belief that my neighbors are decent people -- a belief that I must have if I am to act neighborly toward them -- is not warranted by anything that could be called sufficient evidence. Holding that belief, I believe way beyond the evidence. And yet that is the rational course.

So again we see that in some cases, to refuse to believe beyond the evidence is positively irrational. A theory of rationality adequate for the kind of beings we are cannot require that belief be always and everywhere apportioned to evidence.

It can also be shown that there are cases in which believing, not beyond, but against the evidence is sometimes rational.

Later.

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The Pious Pyrrhonian: Is Beliefless Piety Possible?

Is it possible to be a religiously pious Pyrrhonian?  The Pyrrhonian skeptic, aspiring to tranquillity of mind, tries to live without beliefs. These of course include religious beliefs which are a prime cause of bitter and sometimes bloody contention.  So one might think that a skeptic of the stripe of Sextus would have nothing to do with religion.  But this is not the case. Skepticism does not require abstention from religion. What Pyrrhonian skepticism implies is the project of beliefless piety or beliefless religiosity.  Let me explain.

The Pyrrhonian skeptic is in quest of the human good. But he is convinced that theoretical inquiry will not lead us to it. His is a medicinal or therapeutic conception of philosophy. We are ill, and we need a cure, an empirical cure. ('Empiricus' is not Sextus' last name!)   Therapy, not theory! would make a good Pyrrhonian motto.  There may be truth, but certain knowledge of it is unavailable to us. We are thrown back upon beliefs. But beliefs are many, they conflict, cancel each other, and inflame ugly passions.  Belief conflict militates against that freedom from disturbance or ataraxia which Pyrrhonian skeptics deem essential to human well-being (eudaimonia). On their view the cacophany of competing belief claims is a prime source of kakadaimonia.  Beliefs are part of the problem.

The skeptical cure for our doxastic ills is suspension of belief and a tranquil re-insertion into the quotidian.  We emerged from the everyday to seek the truth that we thought would bring felicity, but the truth rebuffed us, proving unknowable. We were cast back upon beliefs and the strife of systems. We ought then to return to everyday living and everyday discourse. Hence my talk of re-insertion into the quotidian. It is in the service of tranquillity. Tranquillity, not truth! might serve as a good second Pyrrhonian motto.The tranquil re-insertion into the quotidian  involves acquiescence in the customs and traditions of one's time and place.  

Among the most widespread and deeply embedded customs and traditions are those of a religious nature.  Making his peace with the everyday and the ordinary, the Pyrrhonian makes his peace with the observances, rites, rituals, and verbal formulations of the religion practiced around him. He participates in the observances and assents verbally to the formulae of worship and belief. But he abstains from inner commitment.

A Pyrrhonian Catholic

A Pyrrhonian Catholic might attend mass and in that context recite and give verbal assent to the Apostles' Creed: "I believe in God the Father, almighty creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only Son . . . .  But while uttering sentences, our Pyrrhonian would not affirm or deny any propositions. Withholding assent from theological propositions, he would suspend judgment on such questions as whether or not God exists; whether or not the cosmos is ontologically derivative from a causa prima; whether and in what sense this First Cause is omnipotent; whether and in what sense this God has a Son, and so on.  Thus he would presumably not get into a fight with an atheist over the existence of God, or with a Muslim over the tripersonality of God.  Our Pyrrhonian would simply go along with the prevailing religious customs and usages of his time, place, and social group while (silently) withholding intellectual assent from propositions which purport to record the structure of reality apart from language games and forms of life, to employ, anachronistically, some Wittgensteinian turns of phrase. (The post-Tractarian Wittgenstein was also an exponent of philosophy as therapy.)  Time to quote an authority.

Terence Penelhum: "The skeptic continues with the rituals and the formulae of his tradition, self-consciously seeing it as a tradition and not believing it, yet not denying it." (God and Skepticism, D. Reidel 1983, p. 14, emphasis in original.)

A radical Pyrrhonian Catholic might take it a step further.  It is one thing to suspend judgment with respect to a proposition; a more radical thing to doubt whether there is any proposition to suspend judgment about. The radical Pyrrhonian Catholic grants only the verbal formula; he does not grant that it expresses a proposition.  For example, he might doubt, with respect to the formula "There is one God in three divine persons" whether there is any coherent proposition that this sentence expresses.  The sentence is a grammatically admissible  concatenation of individually meaningful words, but this leaves open the question whether there is a unitary sense, or Fregean Gedanke/proposition, that these words, taken collectively as forming a sentence, express. Our radical will not assert that there is no such proposition; he will express his being at a loss over the question. He will give vent to the mental state of aporia, the state of being at a loss, being perplexed, flummoxed, uncomprehending.

With respect to the Trinitarian formulation, the moderate Pyrrhonian Catholic grants that the formula expresses a proposition, but suspends judgment as to the truth or falsity of the proposition. The radical Pyrrhonian Catholic, by contrast, suspends judgment as to whether or not the formula expresses a proposition.

Let us now put the radical 'on the back burner' to stew in his juices.  We may revisit him later.

Is the Moderate Position on Pyrrhonian Piety Plausible?

It is widely agreed that it is impossible for a Pyrrhonian to have no beliefs at all. But this is not our question. Our question is whether it is possible, and if possible plausible, for a person to live religiously, talking the talk and walking the walk, playing the language game and participating in the form of life, without specifically religious or theological dogmatic commitments or adherences. Is beliefless religiosity possible? Is it possible to give merely verbal but nonetheless sincere assent to religious formulae while suspending belief as to the truth value of the propositions these formulae express or imply?

I say it is not possible and so not plausible. What would it be to give merely verbal sincere assent to "I believe in God the Father, almighty creator of heaven and earth . . . ." while suspending judgment with respect to such propositions as: God exists, God is omnipotent, God is a creator, The cosmos and its contents are creatures, and so on?  This is impossible if the mental state of suspension is one in which one is settled on suspension and ceases all further inquiry convinced that the truth values of the propositions in question are unknowable.  For then suspension is in the service of tranquillity, not truth.   One ceases caring about truth.  But then one cannot sincerely utter the formulae.  One cannot sincerely say the sentence 'God created the world' in the context of a religious service without accepting the proposition the sentence expresses.  Of course, not every utterance of a sentence is an assertive utterance; but a sincere utterance of a religious sentence in the context of divine worship cannot be other than assertive.  Or so say I.

But suppose suspension of judgment is not in the service of tranquillity, but in the service of cognition.  I suspend judgment pro tempore in the interests of inquiry the better to get at the truth.  But then one forsakes the Pyrrhonian stance as I understand it. Suppose I sincerely say "Christ was born of a virgin" in the context of a worship service. This seems compatible with suspending judgment on the proposition expressed so long as my suspension is in the service of ongoing inquiry and I allow the possibility of a future acceptance of the proposition in question.

We need to think further and harder about the distinction between suspension in the service of tranquillity and suspension in the service of cognition. I detect a tension between the two in the skeptic camp.  The skeptic qua inquirer cannot rest in tranquillity and quietism renouncing all concern for truth; but as a therapist out to cure us of ataraxia-busting belief, he must rest in tranquillity and renounce the quest for truth.

Is it not essential to the skeptical stance that attainment of the human good does not require participation in the truth? 

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Seldom Seen Slim comments and I respond in blue:

Enjoyed your Sunday post on Pyrrhonism. It’s been a while since I worked on Sextus, but it strikes me that your essay on the Skeptics’ route to adoxia passes by an important premise: the attainment of equipoise and proper role of philosophy.

The skeptics don’t depend upon a normative principle like (o), but in fact a (stronger) claim that it is impossible to believe or assent to a proposition for which the evidence is strongly divided. Just as assent to what is evident in experience is involuntary, so lack of assent is an involuntary response, not merely a good policy, in the face of divided evidence. It is psychologically impossible to assent in those circumstances.

BV: I argued that without the normative principle

0) One ought to withhold assent from any proposition for which the evidence is not demonstrative/compelling

one would not be able to move validly from

1) There is no compelling reason to accept either T or its negation ~T

to

2) One ought to suspend judgment by withholding assent from both T and ~T.

Suppose one is in a state of doxastic equipoise as between T and its negation ~T: one has no evidential grounds for preferring the thesis to its negation.  What ought one do?  Some say one ought to suspend judgment. My point was that one cannot validily infer the obligation to suspend judgment from the fact that one is in a state of doxastic equipose without assuming the principle of intellectual integrity, (0).  I then went on to argue that this principle is a doxastic commitment of the Pyrrhonian skeptic and that therefore the skeptic cannot be said to be free of all beliefs.

Slim's point, I take it, is that the question of either rationally or morally justifying suspension of judgment does not arise for the skeptic since it is psychologically impossible to be in the state of evidential equipoise and not suspend judgment.  Just as no one is a doxastic voluntarist with respect to the sensed sweetness of honey, no one is a doxastic voluntarist with respect to suspension of judgment in a state of evidential equipoise.

There are two questions here. One concerns the interpretation of Sextus. The other concerns how things stand in reality.   The second is my main interest. I say it is quite possible to be in a state of equipose with respect to a pair of contradictory propositions and to assent to one rather than the other.  What is actual is possible, and I actually affirm theism (the proposition that God exists) despite my belief that the arguments for and against balance and cancel. Therefore, it is possible for a person to  be in a state of evidential equipose with respect to a pair of contradictory propositions and to assent to one rather than the other.  This also shows that equipoise is not the same state as suspension.  I suspect that S. S. Slim is conflating the two.

Let us think about this more carefully.  What I am concerned to understand is the transition from the state of equipoise to the state of suspension.  They are obviously not the same state. Why does the skeptic, when he is in equipoise, suspend belief? I can think of three answers.

a)  Because it is psychologically impossible for him to believe once the state of evidential equipoise has been reached.  Suspension follows involuntarily upon equipoise. 

b) Because conflicting beliefs are disturbing; mental disturbance is incompatible with ataraxia; the latter is required for happiness (eudaimonia); the skeptic wants to be happy. Our skeptic voluntarily chooses to suspend belief for the sake of happiness.

c) Because of a commitment to a principle of intellectual integrity that requires one not to believe beyond the evidence. Our skeptic voluntarily suspends belief in situations in which contradictory claims balance and cancel to satisfy a precept of the ethics of belief. 

Ad (a). This is Slim's view. It strikes me as obviously false.  Suppose Old Man Clanton has never run a marathon and that the evidence for and against his completing the 26.2 mile course in the allotted time is evenly balanced. What's to stop Clanton from choosing to believe he can do it? Nothing. He voluntarily believes beyond the evidence. There is nothing psychologically impossible about this.  What's more, believing beyond the evidence in a situation like this is both rationally and morally justifiable.  We all know that effort follows belief: If I believe I can do something, I will make a greater effort, and will be more likely to pull it off.

I am unsure about what Sextus would say, but what I have read of him and his commentators suggests that he too would reject (a)., and that his reasons for suspension are (b) and (c). But I am open to refutation on this point if Slim or anybody can send me some text references.

The skeptics, recall, are zetetics, resolute inquirers into contentious philo questions like the existence of God. A thorough philosophical inquiry, the Skeptics believe, will take us to the point where strong arguments on both sides robustly oppose each other. This is a point of evidential equipoise, and the mind’s innate response to equipoise is to believe in or assent to neither. Equipose is spontaneously both a stable and a tranquil state of mind, free of contentious loyalties and anxious self-doubt.

Would that this were so! And obviously the skeptic is also not free of a whole set of dogmatic beliefs about how the mind must and cannot assent. And desire also follows automatically on assent, so if we believe in God, for example, we must desire a God-pleasing life. But philosophy enables us to escape doubtful, turbulent beliefs and commitments and to control what we believe and desire by taking us to a state of equipoise and so non-assent and tranquility.

A question I would give to you is whether philo inquiry ever takes us to something like equipoise, and if does, is this a stable and tranquil state.

BV: Slim may be conflating the state of equipoise with the state of suspension.  But if he isn't, I would grant only that some people suspend belief in evidential equipoise, not all. After all, there are pragmatic and prudential reasons for belief in addition to evidential ones.  Does being in equipoise lead to mental tranquillity? Not invariably.  

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Is Pyrrhonism a Doctrine? Can One Live Without Beliefs?

"Pyrrhonism is not a doctrine, but a way of intellectual life, a way of thinking, talking, and acting." (Benson Mates, The Skeptic Way, Oxford UP 1996, p. 66) Mates is a careful writer and his meaning is clear: Pyrrhonism is not a doctrine at all. It involves no beliefs or teachings or doctrines or dogmas. There is no Skeptic credo. The whole point of it is to live without beliefs, belieflessly, adoxastos.

Nice work if you can get it. In these days of bitter controversy and unremitting acrimony, would it not be great to be able to float through life belieflessly?  

Before asking whether it is possible to live without beliefs, we should consider why a life without beliefs might be thought to be desirable. But before that we need to understand what the Pyrrhonian skeptic means by 'belief.'

What is belief?

According to Mates, and I follow him on this, belief is "a firmly maintained affirmative attitude toward a proposition purporting to describe some feature of the external world . . . ." (SW, 60)  To illustrate, suppose our skeptic tastes some honey. Speaking with the vulgar, he may say 'This honey is sweet.' But he will think with the learned and intend 'This honey is sweet' as elliptical for 'It seems to me at present that this honey is sweet.' Thus he does not go beyond the sensory appearances, nor does he allow himself to fall into dispute with a cantankerous table mate who, tasting honey from the same jar, claims that the honey is not sweet.  There is nothing to dispute because there is no one proposition that the skeptic affirms and his table mate denies.

Sticking to the sensory seeming, our skeptic refuses to accept or affirm the proposition that the honey is sweet, a proposition that purports to describe a feature of the external world. Of course, he does not reject or deny this proposition ether. He takes no stand on its truth or falsity. He suspends judgment.  He may even take a further step and doubt whether there is any proposition to take a stand on.  He may question whether  the sentence 'This honey is sweet,' taken at face value and not as elliptical for the modalized sentence above, expresses any proposition.  He would then not be suspending judgment as to the truth-value of a proposition, but suspending judgment on the question whether a declarative sentence the constituent words of which possess meaning also possesses a unitary propositional sense or meaning capable of attracting a truth-value. More on this later, perhaps, in a subsequent entry.

As for 'external world,' I take it to refer not only to sense objects as they are in themselves, if there are any, but to any and all objects and state of affairs whose nature and existence are independent of us, whether physical or not. On this use of 'external world,' God and Fregean propositions are in the external world.  

Given this understanding of 'belief,' why should living without beliefs be thought to be a good thing? 

The beliefless life as the happy life

To put it briefly, the ancient skeptic thinks that belieflessness is the way to happiness. But what is required for happiness? According to the luminaries of late antiquity, ataraxia is at the core of happiness or well-being as a necessary component thereof.

Ataraxia is a concept central to the Skeptics, Stoics, and Epicureans. My concern at the moment is solely with the skeptics, and their main man, Sextus Empiricus.  Ataraxia (from Gr. a (not) and taraktos (disturbed)) refers to unperturbedness, freedom from emotional and intellectual disturbance,  tranquillitas animi, tranquillity of soul. Thus Sextus (circa 200 anno domini) tells us in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book One, Chapter Six, that  "Scepticism has its arche, its inception and cause, in the hope of attaining ataraxia, mental tranquillity." (Hallie, p. 35)

The skeptic's goal is not truth, but eudaimonia (happiness or well-being) by way of ataraxia (tranquillity of mind). The central means to ataraxia and happiness is the withholding of assent from all contents of assertion or belief, including such mundane contents as that honey is sweet, but especially those that transcend the mundane and give rise to contention and bitter strife. To use some contemporary examples, beliefs about abortion, gun control, capital punishment, wealth redistribution, illegal immigration, foreign policy, the nature and existence of God etc. lead to strife and in extreme cases bloodshed. Given the difficulty and seeming irresolvability of the issues, the skeptic enjoins the withholding of assent for the sake of ataraxia. The latter is supposed to supervene upon the practice of epoché, the practice of withholding assent.

A quick illustration. Suppose a political conservative maintains the thesis T that capital punishment is morally justified in some cases, while his liberal opponent maintains the opposite (the contradictory proposition, ~T): in no case is capital punishment morally justified. The propositions maintained cannot both be true given the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC).  Each side is passionately convinced of the truth of his thesis and each side marshals arguments in support of it.  But the best arguments on either side 'cancel out.' Or so the skeptic claims. Upon careful examination of the arguments for and against T, he finds no compelling reason to take one side over the other.  This puts him in a state of doubt with respect to T and its negation.  He then takes a further step: he suspends judgment about T.  This further step is not logically required because one who has no compelling reason to accept one or the other of a pair of contradictory propositions might decide to accept one or the other for no reason at all, or for prudential reasons. Let's think about this.

Is suspension of judgment rationally motivated by lack of demonstrative evidence?

The following is a non sequitur:

1) There is no compelling reason to accept either T or its negation ~T. Therefore:

2) One ought to suspend judgment by withholding assent from both T and ~T.

The inference is invalid, moving as it does from 'is' to 'ought.'  Why must I suspend judgment when I can plump for one or the other of the contradictories? An auxiliary premise, however, will validate the inference:

0) One must withhold assent from any proposition for which the evidence is not demonstrative/compelling.

In the presence of (0), the inference from (1) to (2) goes through.

Is the principle of intellectual integrity a belief?

Call (0) the principle of intellectual integrity.  It seems that this principle is a doxastic commitment of the skeptic. In plain English, it seems that this is a belief of his. But then he has beliefs after all, which gives the lie to his claim to live adoxastos, belieflessly. Our skeptic obviously needs the principle of intellectual integrity, and I don't think I am dogmatizing if I call it a belief.

We agreed with Mates that, for a skeptic, a belief is " "a firmly maintained affirmative attitude toward a proposition purporting to describe some feature of the external world . . . ." (SW, 60)  It seems obvious that (0) is a proposition and that the skeptic has an affirmative attitude toward it. That is,  he accepts or affirms it. He believes it.  You might object that this proposition does not describe anything. But I think it does. It describes an ideal of human behavior.  It describes what a person of intellectual integrity is like. Such a person withholds assent to the non-evident.  He doesn't dogmatize in the manner of the Platonist or the Stoic or the Christian.

Our Pyrrhonian skeptic, then, firmly maintains, over time, an affirmative attitude toward a proposition that describes something transcendent of his fleeting sensory states, namely, the person of intellectual integrity, the man who apportions his assent to the evidence and does not irresponsibly affirm beyond the evidence.  With respect to (0), the Pyrrhonian is not merely saying how things seem to him at present.  He is holding before us an ideal of the sage or wise man that is external to our fleeting mental states.

After all, a way of life cannot be founded upon a subjective seeming that might be overturned tomorrow by a contrary seeming. The skeptic's commitment to his way of life transcends the moment and what seems to him to be the case in the moment.

Interim conclusion

Pyrrhonism, while obviously not merely a doctrine, rests on doctrines. Others of these I will discuss later. So it is false to say that Pyrrhonism is not a doctrine.  It is also false that we can live without beliefs. If anyone can, it is the Pyrrhonist. But we have just seen that he needs beliefs too.

Since it is not possible to live without beliefs, it cannot be desirable to live without beliefs. One cannot rationally desire the impossible. 

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Belief, Designation, and Substitution

Suppose it is true that Sam believes that Hesperus is a planet.  One cannot substitute 'Phosphorus' for 'Hesperus' in 'Sam believes that Hesperus is a planet' and be assured that the resulting sentence will also be true.  And this despite the fact that Hesperus is Phosphorus. The reason is that Sam may be ignorant of the fact that Hesperus is Phosphorus.  So here we have a context, that of belief de dicto, in which the substitution of one co-referential expression for another fails to preserve truth.

Valid: Hesperus is a planet; Hesperus is Phosphorus; ergo, Phosphorus is a planet.

Invalid: Sam believes that Hesperus is a planet; Hesperus is Phosphorus; ergo, Sam believes that Phosphorus is a planet.

The difference in Quinean jargon is that in the valid argument, each name is in a referentially transparent position, while in the invalid argument the first occurrence of 'Hesperus' and the second occurrence of 'Phosphorous' are in referentially opaque positions. (Cf. Word and Object, sec. 30)

So far the Opponent will agree.  But he has a question for me.

Why does substitution succeed for the ‘designates’ relation, but fail for the ‘believes’ relation? The two arguments below are of exactly the same logical form:

A. ‘H’ designates H; H = P, therefore ‘H’ designates P.
B.  Sam believes that H is a planet; H = P, therefore S believes that P is a planet.

My answer is that substitution succeeds for the 'designates' relation because there is no referential opacity in (A).  'H' in (A) -- I am mentioning the third word in (A) -- is referentially transparent.  Let's not forget that we are assuming that names are rigid designators that refer directly to their designata, not via a Fregean sense or a Russellian description.

A directly referential term 'lassoes' its object, or you could say it 'harpoons' it or 'grabs' it. If I grab my cat I don't grab him under a description or via a Fregean "mode of presentation."  I grab the cat himself, all 25 lbs of him with all his parts and properties. Analogously, successful reference on Kripke's scheme get us right to the thing itself.  

I am maintaining against the Opponent that if names are rigid designators that target their designata directly and not via any sort of semantic intermediary, then the (A) and (B) cases are very different.  (B)-type cases are counterexamples to universal substitutivity salva veritate; (A)-type cases are not.  He is maintaining that the cases are parallel and that both generate referential opacity.

The Opponent's view might make sense if we add to the dialectic the Opponent's surprising thesis that all reference is intralinguistic reference, but this thesis cannot be brought into a discussion of Kripke who holds no such view.  My view is that while there is of course intralinguistic reference, it is a derivative phenomenon:  the paradigm cases are of extralinguistic reference.  Reference to a massive planet is nothing like a pronoun's back-reference to its antecedent.

But I don't endorse Kripke's views.  I incline toward a descriptivist theory of names.  Names don't refer; people or rather their minds refer using names that need not be publicly expressed.  Linguistic reference is built upon, and nothing without, thinking reference, or intentionality. The primacy of the intentional! (Chisholm would be proud of me.) The intentionality of finite mind, however, never presents us with the thing itself, Venus say, in all its infinitely-propertied glory.  Mental reference in never direct but mediated by a semantic intermediary, whether a Fregean sense, an Husserlian noema, a Castanedan guise, or something of that order.

Thinking about my cat is quite unlike picking him up.  When I pick him up I get the whole cat including stomach contents into my hand.  But I can't get the whole cat into my mind when I think about him.  I can only think of him under a description which doesn't begin to exhaust his full kitty-kat kwiddity. 

Kripke's scheme is crude, especially when he tries to explain via causation how a name acquires its reference.  The causal theory of reference quite hopeless for reasons canvassed in other posts.

Finally, if 'a' and 'b' are rigid designators that directly target their objects, and a = b, then surely there is no possible world in which the referents of these names both exist and are numerically different.  If substitution comes into this at all, it cannot fail to preserve truth. For if the meaning of 'a' is exhausted by a, and the meaning of 'b' exhausted by b, and a = b, then there is no additional factor that could induce referential opacity.

If a = b, it does not follow that necessarily, a = b, for if a/b is contingent, there there are worlds in which the identity does not hold.  But we can say this: if a = b, then essentially, a = b.  This rules out the contingency of their identity across all worlds in which a/b exists.

Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained

In belief as in action.

God and Proof

This is an addendum to clarify what I said two days ago.

My claim is that we have no demonstrative knowledge of the truth of theism or of the falsity of naturalism.  Demonstrative knowledge is knowledge produced by a demonstration.  A demonstration in this context is an argument that satisfies all of the following conditions:

1. It is deductive
2. It is valid in point of logical form
3. It is free of such informal fallacies as petitio principii
4. It is such that all its premises are true
5. It is such that all its premises are known to be true
6. It is such that its conclusion is relevant to its premises.

To illustrate (6).  The following argument satisfies all of the conditions except the last and is therefore probatively worthless:

Snow is white
ergo
Either Obama is president or he is not.

On my use of terms, a demonstrative argument = a probative argument = a proof = a rationally compelling argument.  Now clearly there are good arguments (of different sorts) that are not demonstrative, probative, rationally compelling.  One type is the strong inductive argument. By definition, no such argument satisfies (1) or (2).  A second type is the argument that satisfies all the conditions except (5). 

Can one prove the existence of God?  That is, can one produce a proof (as above defined) of the existence of God?   I don't think so.  For how will you satisfy condition (5)?  Suppose you give argument A for the existence of God.  How do you know that the premises of A are true?  By argument?  Suppose A has premises P1, P2, P3.  Will you give arguments for these premises?  Then you need three more arguments, one for each of P1, P2, P3, each of which has its own premises.  A vicious infinite regress is in the offing.  Needless to say, moving in an argumentative circle is no better.

At some point you will have to invoke self-evidence.   You will have to say that, e.g., it is just self-evident that every event has a cause.  And you will have to mean objectively self-evident, not just subjectively self-evident.  But how can you prove, to yourself or anyone else, that what is subjectively self-evident is objectively self-evident?  You can't, at least not with respect to states of affairs transcending your consciousness. 

Paging Baron von Muenchhausen.

I conclude that no one can prove the existence of God.  But one can reasonably believe that God exists.  The same holds for the nonexistence of God.  No one can prove the nonexistence of God.  But one can reasonably believe that there is no God.

Of course, when I say that no one can prove the existence of God I mean no one of us.  Presumably God can prove the existence of God, if he exists, not that he needs to.  And when I said above that a probative argument  is such that all its premises are known to be true, I meant, as any charitable reader would have assumed, "known by us."

The same goes for naturalism.  I cannot prove that there is more to reality than the space-time system and its contents.  But I can reasonably believe it.  For I have a battery of powerful arguments each of which satisfies conditions (1), (2), (3) and (6) and may even, as far as far as I know, satisfy  (4).

"So how is the atheist not irrational on your view, assuming he is apprised of your arguments?"

He is not irrational because none of my arguments are rationally compelling in the sense I supplied, namely, they are not such as to force every competent philosophical practitioner to accept their conclusions on pain of being irrational if he does not.   Surely it would be foolish to say that atheists, the lot of them, are irrational people.

Either God exists or he does not.  But both theism and atheism are rationally acceptable.  

To end with a psychological speculation:  those who hanker after proofs of God and the soul or the opposite are insufficiently mature to live with doxastic insecurity.

Our life here below is insecure physically, psychologically, socially, economically, and in every way, including doxastically.  We need, and sometimes crave, security.  Our pursuit of it can be ordinate.  For example, the wise make provision for the future by saving and investing, taking care of their health, buying insurance, planning how they will react to certain emergencies, etc.  Fools, by contrast, live as if there is no tomorrow.  When tomorrow comes, they either perish of their folly or suffer unnecessarily.

But there is also an inordinate pursuit of security.  It is impossible in this life totally to secure oneself in any of the ways mentioned, including with respect to belief.  One  must accept that life is a venture and an adventure across the board.

Is 'Justified Belief' a Solecism?

Panayot Butchvarov, Anthropocentrism in Philosophy: Realism, Antirealism, Semirealism, Walter de Gruyter, 2015, p. 33:

As used in epistemology, "justified" is a technical term, of obscure meaning and uncertain reference, indeed often explicitly introduced as a primitive.  In everyday talk, it is a deontic term, usually a synonym of 'just' or 'right,' and thus 'justified belief' is a solecism.  For it is actions that are justified or unjustified, and beliefs are not actions.

The argument is this, assuming that moral justification is in question:

a. Actions alone are morally either justified or unjustified.
b. No belief is an action.
Therefore
c. No belief is morally either justified or unjustified.
Therefore
d. 'Morally justified belief' is a solecism.

(b) is not evident.    Aren't some beliefs actions or at least analogous to actions?  I will argue that some beliefs are actions because they come under the direct control of the will.  As coming under the direct control of the will, they are morally evaluable.

1. It makes sense to apply deontological predicates to actions. Thus it makes sense to say of a voluntary action that it is obligatory or permissible or impermissible. But does it make sense to apply such predicates to beliefs and related propositional attitudes? If I withhold my assent to proposition p, does it make sense to say that the withholding is obligatory or permissible or impermissible? Suppose someone passes on a nasty unsubstantiated rumor concerning a mutual acquaintance. Is believing it impermissible? Is disbelieving it obligatory?  Is suspending judgment required? Or is deontological evaluation simply out of place in a case like this?

2. It makes sense to apply deontological predicates to actions because they are under voluntary control. Thus it makes sense to say that one ought to feed one's children because (apart from unusual circumstances) it is within one's power to feed one's children. So if it makes sense to apply deontological predicates to beliefs and related propositional attitudes, then they too must be under voluntary control.  If I cannot help but believe what I believe, then I cannot be morally censured for believing, disbelieving, or suspending judgment.

3. This brings us to the question of doxastic voluntarism: Are any of our (occurrent) believings under our direct voluntary control as regards their coming into existence? To introduce some terminology:

Extreme doxastic voluntarism: ALL beliefs are such that their formation is under one's direct voluntary control.
Limited doxastic voluntarism: There are only SOME beliefs over the formation of which one has direct voluntary control.
Doxastic involuntarism: There are are NO beliefs over the formation of which one has direct voluntary control.

Note that the issue concerns the formation of beliefs, not their maintenance, and note the contrast between direct and indirect formation of beliefs. Roughly, I form a belief directly by just forming it, not by doing something else as a means to forming it.

4.  I am a limited doxastic voluntarist.

a) Clearly, one cannot believe at will just anything.  One cannot believe at will what is obviously false. It is obviously false that the Third Reich continues to exercise its brutal hegemony over Europe, and  no one who is sane has the power to believe this falsehood at will, just by deciding to believe it.

b) One cannot not believe what is obviously the case. It is obviously the case that this thing in front of me is a computer monitor. Can I disbelieve this perceptual deliverance? No. Seeing is believing. It is a more subtle question whether I can suspend judgment in the manner of Husserl's phenomenological epoche. But this is a topic for a separate post. For now I am happy to concede that one cannot disbelieve at will what is obviously the case.

c) The matter becomes much more difficult when we turn to propositions from religion, philosophy, science and elsewhere that are neither obviously true nor obviously false. It is not obviously true that God exists, but neither is it obviously true that God does not exist. It is not obviously true that doxastic voluntarism is true, but neither is it obviously true that it is not true.

Suppose I am concerned with the freedom of the will, study the issue thoroughly, but am torn between libertarianism and compatibilism. It is surely not obvious that one or the other is true. If the positions strike me as equally well-supported, then nothing at the level of intellect inclines me one way or the other. Must not will come in to decide the matter, if the matter must be decided? Or consider the weightier question of the existence of God. Suppose the arguments pro et contra strike me as equally probative so that, at the level of intellect, I am not inclined one way or the other. If the issue is to be resolved, must I not simply decide to believe one way or the other? But William Alston, doxastic involuntarist, will have none of this: "How could we do that any more than, lacking any reasons at all for one alternative rather than another, we decide to believe that the number of ultimate particles in the universe is even rather than odd?" (Beyond "Justification," p. 65)

This response packaged in a rhetorical question strikes me as very weak. No one cares what the number of particles is let alone whether it is odd or even. Indeed, it is not clear that the question even makes sense. (How could one possibly count them?) The God question is toto caelo different. In Jamesian terms, the God question is live, forced, momentous, and not intellectually decidable. A live issue is one that matters to us and seems to need deciding. Whether the number of ultimate particles is odd or even is certainly not live. A forced issue is one that is compulsory in the sense that we cannot not take a stand on it: to remain agnostic or uncommitted on the God question is practically to live as an atheist. There is nothing forced about the particles question. A momentous issue is one about which it matters greatly which position we adopt. The particles question is clearly not momentous. An intellectually undecidable question is one which, if it is to be decided, must be decided by an act of will.

So what I would say to the doxastic involuntarist is that in some cases -- those that fit the Jamesian criteria are clear but not the only examples -- the will does in fact come into play in the formation of beliefs and indeed legitimately comes into play. To the extent that it does, a limited doxastic voluntarism is true.

If so, then some belief formation is under the control of the will and is morally evaluable, contra Butchvarov.

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1. It makes sense to apply deontological predicates to actions. Thus it makes sense to say of a voluntary action that it is obligatory or permissible or impermissible. But does it make sense to apply such predicates to beliefs and related propositional attitudes? If I withhold my assent to proposition p, does it make sense to say that the withholding is obligatory or permissible or impermissible? Suppose someone passes on a nasty unsubstantiated rumor concerning a mutual acquaintance. Is believing it impermissible? Is disbelieving it obligatory?  Is suspending judgment required? Or is deontological evaluation simply out of place in a case like this?

2. It makes sense to apply deontological predicates to actions because they are under voluntary control. Thus it makes sense to say that one ought to feed one's children because (apart from unusual circumstances) it is within one's power to feed one's children. So if it makes sense to apply deontological predicates to beliefs and related propositional attitudes, then they too must be under voluntary control.  If I cannot help but believe what I believe, then I cannot be morally censured for believing, disbelieving, or suspending judgment.

3. This brings us to the question of doxastic voluntarism: Are any of our (occurrent) believings under our direct voluntary control as regards their coming into existence? To introduce some terminology:

Extreme doxastic voluntarism: ALL beliefs are such that their formation is under one's direct voluntary control.
Limited doxastic voluntarism: There are only SOME beliefs over the formation of which one has direct voluntary control.
Doxastic involuntarism: There are are NO beliefs over the formation of which one has direct voluntary control.

Note that the issue concerns the formation of beliefs, not their maintenance, and note the contrast between direct and indirect formation of beliefs. Roughly, I form a belief directly by just forming it, not by doing something else as a means to forming it.

4.  I am a limited doxastic voluntarist.

a) Clearly, one cannot believe at will just anything.  One cannot believe at will what is obviously false. It is obviously false that the Third Reich continues to exercise its brutal hegemony over Europe, and  no one who is sane has the power to believe this falsehood at will, just by deciding to believe it.

b) One cannot not believe what is obviously the case. It is obviously the case that this thing in front of me is a computer monitor. Can I disbelieve this perceptual deliverance? No. Seeing is believing. It is a more subtle question whether I can suspend judgment in the manner of Husserl's phenomenological epoche. But this is a topic for a separate post. For now I am happy to concede that one cannot disbelieve at will what is obviously the case.

c) The matter becomes much more difficult when we turn to propositions from religion, philosophy, science and elsewhere that are neither obviously true nor obviously false. It is not obviously true that God exists, but neither is it obviously true that God does not exist. It is not obviously true that doxastic voluntarism is true, but neither is it obviously true that it is not true.

Suppose I am concerned with the freedom of the will, study the issue thoroughly, but am torn between libertarianism and compatibilism. It is surely not obvious that one or the other is true. If the positions strike me as equally well-supported, then nothing at the level of intellect inclines me one way or the other. Must not will come in to decide the matter, if the matter must be decided? Or consider the weightier question of the existence of God. Suppose the arguments pro et contra strike me as equally probative so that, at the level of intellect, I am not inclined one way or the other. If the issue is to be resolved, must I not simply decide to believe one way or the other? But William Alston, doxastic involuntarist, will have none of this: "How could we do that any more than, lacking any reasons at all for one alternative rather than another, we decide to believe that the number of ultimate particles in the universe is even rather than odd?" (Beyond "Justification," p. 65)

This response packaged in a rhetorical question strikes me as very weak. No one cares what the number of particles is let alone whether it is odd or even. Indeed, it is not clear that the question even makes sense. (How could one possibly count them?) The God question is toto caelo different. In Jamesian terms, the God question is live, forced, momentous, and not intellectually decidable. A live issue is one that matters to us and seems to need deciding. Whether the number of ultimate particles is odd or even is certainly not live. A forced issue is one that is compulsory in the sense that we cannot not take a stand on it: to remain agnostic or uncommitted on the God question is practically to live as an atheist. There is nothing forced about the particles question. A momentous issue is one about which it matters greatly which position we adopt. The particles question is clearly not momentous. An intellectually undecidable question is one which, if it is to be decided, must be decided by an act of will.

So what I would say to the doxastic involuntarist is that in some cases -- those that fit the Jamesian criteria are clear but not the only examples -- the will does in fact come into play in the formation of beliefs and indeed legitimately comes into play. To the extent that it does, a limited doxastic voluntarism is true.

If so, then some belief formation is under the control of the will and is morally evaluable, contra Butchvarov.

Kripke, Belief, Irrationality, and Contradiction

London Ed comments:

I also note a confusion that has been running through this discussion, about the meaning of ‘contradiction’. I do not mean to appeal to etymology or authority, but it’s important we agree on what we mean by it. On my understanding, a contradiction is not ‘the tallest girl in the class is 18’ and ‘the cleverest girl in the class is not 18’, even when the tallest girl is also the cleverest. Someone could easily believe both, without being irrational. The point of the Kripke puzzle is that Pierre seems to end up with an irrational belief. So it’s essential, as Kripke specifies, that he must correctly understand all the terms in both utterances, and that both utterances are logically contradictory, as in ‘Susan is 18’ and ‘Susan is not 18’.

Do we agree?

Well, let's see.  The Maverick method enjoins the exposure of any inconsistent polyads that may be lurking in the vicinity.  Sure enough, there is one:

An Inconsistent Triad

a. The tallest girl in the class is the cleverest girl in the class.
b. The tallest girl in the class is 18.
c. The cleverest girl in the class is not 18.

This trio is logically inconsistent in the sense that it is not logically possible that all three propositions be true.  But if we consider only the second two limbs, there is no logical inconsistency:  it is possible that (b) and (c) both be true.  And so someone, Tom for example, who believes that (b) and also believes that (c) cannot be convicted of irrationality, at least not on this score.  For all Tom knows  -- assuming that he does not know that (a) -- they could both be true:  it is epistemically possible that both be true.  This is the case even if in fact (a) is true.  But we can say more: it is metaphysically possible that both be true.  For (a), if true, is contingently true, which implies that it is is possible that it be false.

By contrast, if Tom entertains together, in the synthetic unity of one consciousness, the propositions expressed by 'Susan is 18 years old' and 'Susan is not 18 years old,' and if Tom is rational, then he will see that the two propositions are logical contradictories of each other, and it will not be epistemically possible for him that both be true.  If he nonetheless accepts both, then we have a good reason to convict him of being irrational, in this instance at least.

Given the truth of (a), (b) and (c) cannot both be true and cannot both be false.  This suggests  that the pair consisting of (b) and (c) is a pair of logical contradictories.  But then we would have to say that the contradictoriness of the pair rests on a contingent presupposition, namely, the truth of (a).  London Ed will presumably reject this.  I expect he would say that the logical contradictoriness of a pair of propositions cannot rest on any contingent presupposition, or on any presupposition at all.  Thus

d. Susan is 18

and

e. Susan is not 18

form a contradictory pair the contradictoriness of which rests on their internal logical form -- Fa, ~Fa -- and not on anything external to the propositions in question.

 So what should we say?  If Tom believes both (b) and (c), does he have contradictory beliefs?  Or not? 

The London answer is No!  The belief-contents are not formally contradictory even though, given the truth of (a), the contents are such that they cannot both be true and cannot both be false.  And because the belief-contents are not formally contradictory, the beliefs themselves -- where a belief involves both an occurrent or dispositional state of a person and a belief-content towards which the person takes up a propositional attitude -- are in no theoretically useful sense logically contradictory.

The Phoenix answer suggestion is that, because we are dealing with the beliefs of a concrete believer embedded in the actual world, there is sense to the notion that Tom's beliefs are contradictory in the sense that their contents are logically contradictory given the actual-world truth of (a).  After all, if Susan is the tallest and cleverest girl, and the beliefs in question are irreducibly  de re, then Tom believes, of Susan, that she is both 18 and not 18, even if Tom can gain epistemic access to her only via definition descriptions.   That belief is de re, irreducibly, is entailed  by (SUB), to which  Kripke apparently subscribes:

SUB:  Proper names are everywhere intersubstitutable salva veritate.

A Second  Question

If, at the same time,  Peter believes that Paderewski is musical and Peter believes that Paderewski is not musical, does it follow that Peter believes that (Paderewski is musical and Paderewski is not musical)?  Could this conceivably be a non sequitur? Compare the following modal principle:

MP:  If possibly p and possibly ~p, it does not follow that possibly (p & ~p).

For example, I am now seated, so it is possible that I now be seated; but it is also possible that I now  not be seated, where all three occurrences/tokens of 'now' rigidly designate the same time.  But surely it doesn't follow that it is possible that (I am now seated and I am now not seated).  Is it perhaps conceivable that

BP:  If it is believed by S that p and it is believed by S that ~p, it does not follow that it is believed by S that (p & ~p)?

Has anybody ever discussed this suggestion, even if only to dismiss it?

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Is it a Contradiction?

Islam is not Islam!

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Nietzsche, Truth, and Power

What Exactly is Kripke's Puzzle About Belief?

I will try to explain it as clearly and succinctly as I can.  I will explain the simplest version of the puzzle, the 'monoglot' version.  We shall cleave to English as to our dear mother.

The puzzle is generated by the collision of two principles, one concerning reference, the other concerning disquotation.  Call them MILL and DISQ.

MILL:  The reference of a proper name is direct: not routed through sense as in Frege.  The meaning of a name is exhausted by its reference.  The semantic value of a name is just the object to which it refers.  (Gareth Evans plausibly recommends 'semantic value' as the best translation of Frege's Bedeutung.)

DISQ:  If a normal English speaker S sincerely assents, upon reflection, to 'p,' and 'p' is a sentence in English free of indexical elements, pronominal devices, and ambiguities, then S believes that p.

The puzzle is interesting, and not easily solved, because there are good reasons for accepting both principles.  The puzzle is puzzling because the collision of the two principles takes the form of a flat-out logical contradiction.

And as we all know, philosophers, while they love paradoxes, hate contradictions.

(DISQ) strikes this philosopher as a principle than which no more luminous can be conceived.  How could one who is competent in English and familiar with current events sincerely and reflectively assent to 'Hillary is a liar' and not believe that Hillary is a liar?  The intellectual luminosity of (MILL), however, leaves something to be desired.  And yet it is plausible, and to many experts, extremely plausible.  Brevity being the soul of blog, I cannot  now trot out the arguments in support of (MILL).

The collision of (MILL) and (DISQ) occurs at the intersection of Mind and World.  It comes about like this.  S may assent to

a. Cicero was a Roman

while failing to assent to

b. Tully was a Roman

even though

c.  Cicero = Tully.

Given (DISQ), S believes that Cicero was a Roman, but may or may not believe that Tully was a Roman.  But how is this possible given the truth of (c)?  Given (c), there is no semantic difference between (a) and (b):  the predicates are the same, and the names are semantically the same under (MILL).  For on the latter principle, the meaning of a name is its referent.  So sameness of referent entails sameness of meaning, which is to say: the semantic content of (a) and (b) is the same given the truth of (c).

How can S believe that Cicero was a Roman while neither believing nor disbelieving that Tully was a Roman when the sentences express the very same proposition?  This is (an instance of) the puzzle.  Here is another form of it.  Suppose S assents to (a) but also assents to

d. Tully was not a Roman.

On (DISQ), S believes that Tully is not a Roman.  So S believes both that Cicero was a Roman and that Tully was not a Roman.  But Cicero = Tully.  Therefore, S believes that Cicero was a Roman and S believes that Cicero was not a Roman.  This certainly looks like a contradiction. 

It seems that our governing principles, (MILL) and (DISQ), when applied to an ordinary example, generate a contradiction, the worst sort of intellectual collision one can have.

The Paderewski case is similar.  On different occasions, Peter assents to 'Paderewski is musical' and 'Paderewski is not musical.'  He has no qualms about assenting to both since he supposes that this is a case of two men with the same name.  But in reality he is referring to one and the same man.  By (DISQ), Peter believes both that Paderewski is musical and that Paderewski is not musical.  Given (MILL), Peter believes contradictory propositions.  How is this possible given that Peter is rational?

Given the luminosity of (DISQ), one might think the solution to Kripke's puzzle about belief is simply to jettison (MILL).

Not so fast.  There are powerful arguments for (MILL).

Related articles

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Peter van Inwagen, "A Theory of Properties," Exposition and Critique

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Background for a Discussion of Kripke's "A Puzzle About Belief"

London Ed wants to discuss the Paderewski example in Saul Kripke's  "A Puzzle About Belief."  But before doing so we should see if we agree on some preliminary points.  Knowing Ed, he will probably find a way to disagree with a good chunk what I am about to say.  So I expect we will get bogged down in preliminaries and never proceed to Paderewski.  We shall see.  Kripke references are to Philosophical Troubles, Oxford 2011.

Belief de re and belief de dicto

Kripke makes it clear that he is concerned only with belief de dicto in the paper in question (128).  So we need to understand the restriction.  The following I take to be constructions expressive of belief de re.

Cicero is believed by Tom to be a Roman
Cicero is believed to be a Roman by Tom
Cicero is such that Tom believes him to be a Roman
Tom believes, of Cicero, that he is a Roman

De re means: of or pertaining to the res, the thing, where 'of' is an objective genitive.  De dicto means: of or pertaining to the dictum, that which is said (dico, dicere, dixi, dictum), where the 'of' is again an objective genitive.  A dictum is the content of an assertive utterance.  It is a proposition, what Frege called a thought (ein Gedanke), not a thinking, but the accusative of a thinking.  I am not assuming a Fregean as opposed to a Russellian theory of propositions.  But we do need to speak of propositions.  And Kripke does.  For the time being we can say that propositions are the objects/accusatives/contents of such propositional attitudes as belief. Of course they have other roles to play as well.

What makes the above sentences de re is that they ascribe a property to Cicero as he is in himself, and not as he appears before the mind of Tom.  Or at least that is the way I would put it.  Because of this the following argument is valid:

Cicero is believed by Tom to be a Roman
Cicero = Tully
Ergo
Tully is believed by Tom to be a Roman.

The presiding principle is the Indiscernibility of Identicals: if x = y, then whatever is true of x is true of y and vice versa.  So if Cicero = Tully, and the former is believed by Tom to be a Roman, then Tully is also believed by Tom to be a Roman.  This is so even if Tom has never heard of Tully, or has heard of him but has no opinion as to his identity or non-identity with Cicero.  But the following argument, whose initial premise is expressive of belief de dicto, is invalid:

Tom believes that: Cicero is a Roman.
Cicero = Tully
Ergo
Tom believes that: Tully is a Roman.

The conclusion does not follow in the de dicto case because (i) Tom may never have heard of Tully and neither believes nor disbelieves anything about him, (ii) or  Tom has heard of Tully but has no opinion about his identity or non-identity with Cicero. What this example suggests is that codesignative singular terms are not everywhere intersubstitutable salva veritate.  The Latin phrase means: in a truth-preserving manner.  De dicto belief contexts are thus contexts  in which intersubstitutability of coreferential names appears to fail.  Thus if we substitute 'Tully' for 'Cicero' in the initial premise, we turn a truth into a falsehood despite the fact that the two names refer to the same man.

What this suggests, in turn, is that there is more to the semantics of a proper name than its reference.  It suggests that names have both sense and reference.  It suggests that what Tom has before his mind, the proposition toward which he takes up the propositional attitude of belief, does not have as subject-constituent Cicero himself, warts and all,  but a mode of presentation (Frege: Darstellungsweise) of the man himself, a sense (Sinn) that determines the reference to the man himself.

Before proceeding, we  note the difference between the de re

There is someone Tom believes to be a faithful husband

and the de dicto

Tom believes that: there are faithful husbands.

The first entails the second, but the second does not entail the first.  For if one believes that there are faithful husbands, one needn't  believe, of any particular man, that he is a faithful husband.  What one believes is that some man or other is a faithful husband.  Tom: "I'm sure there are faithful husbands; I just can't name one."

A problem for a Millian theory of proper names

Kripke tells us that on a "strict Millian view . . . the linguistic function of a proper name is completely exhausted by the fact that it names its bearer . . . ." (127)  Whether or not this is the view of the historical J. S. Mill is of no present concern.  The Millian view contrasts with the Fregean view according to which names have reference-determining senses.   The problem posed for Millian names by de dicto belief may be set forth as an aporetic tetrad:

a. There is no semantic difference between codesignative Millian proper names.
b. If (a), then 'a is F' and 'b is F' express the same proposition where 'a' and 'b' are both Millian and codesignative.
c. A person who believes a proposition cannot doubt or disbelieve that same proposition.
d. There are countless cases in which a person believes a proposition of the form a is F while doubting or disbelieving a proposition of the form b is F even when a = b.

This foursome is clearly inconsistent.  But each of the limbs, with the exception of the first, is extremely plausible if not undeniable. So the natural solution is to jettison (a) and with it Millian semantics for proper names. But this is what the Millian Kripke is loath to do.  He has already convinced himself that ordinary proper names are rigid designators whose designation does not depend on reference-determining senses.

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Do Christians and Muslims Believe in the Same God? Francis Beckwith and the Kalam Cosmological Argument

Francis Beckwith mentions the Kalam Cosmological Argument in his latest The Catholic Thing article (7 January 2106):

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence.

Suppose that a Muslim and Christian come to believe that God exists on the basis of this Kalam argument and such ancillary philosophical arguments and considerations  as are necessary to establish that the cause of the universe is uncreated, transcendent of the universe, unchanging, etc.  The result is a conception of God achieved by reason  without the aid of divine revelation.  It is a conception common to the normative Muslim and the normative Christian.  Crucial  differences emerge when the core conception is fleshed out in competing ways by the competing (putative) revelations.  But if we stick with the core philosophical conception, then all should agree that there is important overlap as between the Christian and Muslim God conceptions.  The overlap is achieved by abstraction from the differences.

So far so good.

Beckwith then asks whether the Muslim and the Christian "believe in the same God" and he concludes that they do. 

Permit me a quibble.  'Believe in' connotes 'trust in, have faith in, rely upon the utterances of,' and so on. I believe in my wife:  I trust her, I am convinced of her fidelity. That goes well beyond believing that she exists.  If I believe in a person, it follows that I believe that the person exists.  But if I believe that a person exists, it does not follow that I believe in the person.  Professor Beckwith is of course aware of this distinction.

At best, then, what the Christian and the Muslim are brought to by the Kalam argument and supplementary considerations is not belief in God, but belief that God exists.  To be even more precise, the Kalam argument, at best, brings us to the belief that there exists a unique, transcendent, uncreated (etc.) cause of the beginning of the universe.  In other words, both Christian and Muslim are brought to the belief and perhaps even the knowledge that a certain definite description is satisfied.  The properties mentioned in this description are what constitute the shared philosophical understanding of 'God' by the Muslim and the Christian.  At best, philosophy brings us to knowledge of God by description, not a knowledge by acquaintance.  The common description is usefully thought of as a 'job description' inasmuch as God in brought in to do a certain explanatory job, that of explaining the beginning of the universe.  As my teacher J. N. Findlay once said, "God has his uses." 

But note that this common Christian-Muslim description  leaves undetermined many properties an existent God must possess.  (And it must be so given the finitude of our discursive, ectypal, intellects.)  But in reality, outside the mind and outside language, God, like everything else, is completely determinate, or complete, for short.  I am assuming the following existence entails completeness principle of general metaphysics (metaphysica generalis).

EX -->COMP:  Necessarily, for any existent x, and for any non-intentional property P, either x instantiates P or x instantiates the complement of P.

What the principle states is that every real item, everything that exists, satisfies the property version of the Law of Excluded Middle.  It rules out of reality incomplete objects.  For example, God in reality is either triune or non-triune.  He cannot be neither, any more than I can be neither a blogger nor not a blogger.  The definite description(s) by means of which we have knowledge by description of God, however, are NECESSARILY (due to the finitude of our intellects) such that there are properties of God in reality that these descriptions do not mention.  This is of course true of knowledge by description of everything.  Everything is such that no description manageable by a finite mind makes mention of all of the thing's properties, intrinsic and relational.

Now suppose that Christianity is true and that God in reality is triune.  Then the above common definite description is satisfied.  The common Muslim-Christian conception is instantiated -- but it is instantiated by the Christian God which of course must exist to instantiate it.

The Christian and the Muslim both believe that God (understood as the unique uncreated creator of the universe) exists.  That is: they believe that the common conception of God is instantiated, that the common definite description is satisfied.  They furthermore believe that the common conception is uniquely instantiated and that the common description is uniquely satisfied.  But they differ as to whether the instantiator/satisfier is the triune God or the non-triune God.

So we can answer our question as follows.  The question, recall, is: Do Christians and Muslims believe in the same God?

Muslims and Christians believe in the same God, as Beckwith claims, in the following precise sense: they believe that the same God exists, which is to say:  they believe that the common philosophical God concept is uniquely instantiated, instantiated by exactly one being.  Call this the anemic sense of believing in the same God.

But this is consistent with saying that Muslim and Christian do not believe in the same God in the following precise sense: they don't believe that the wholly determinate being in reality that instantiates the common philosophical God concept is the triune God who sent his only begotten Son, etc.  Call this the robust sense of believing in the same God.

Now we robustos will naturally go with the robust sense.  So, to give a plain answer: Christians and Muslims do not believe in the same God.  If Christianity is true, the Muslim God simply does not exist, and Muslims believe in an idol. 

The mistake that some are making here is to suppose that the shared Muslim-Christian philosophical understanding enscapsulated in the common concept suffices to show that in reality one and the same God is believed in, and successfully referred to, and non-idolatrously worshipped by both Muslims and Christians.  Not so!

The real (extramental, extralinguistic) existence of God cannot be identified with or reduced to the being instantiated of a concept that includes only some of the divine determinations (properties).  'Is instantiated' is a second-level predicate, but God exists in the first-level way.  Equivalently, God is not identical to an instance of one of our concepts. God is transcendent of all our concepts. So if we know by revelation that God is a Trinity, then we know that the Muslim God, the non-triune God, does not exist.

Alles klar?

Why Muslims and Christians Worship the Same God 

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Doubt and Belief

Doubting no more confers dubitability upon that which is doubted than believing confers credibility upon that which is believed.

Evidence and Actuality: A Modal Punch at W. K. Clifford

W. K. Clifford is often quoted for his asseveration that "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."  Now one of my firmest beliefs is that I am an actual individual, not a merely possible individual. A second is my belief that while there is an infinity of possible worlds, there is exactly one actual world and that this world of me and my world mates is the world that happens to be actual.  (Think of the actual world as the total way things are, and of a merely possible world as a total way things might have been.  For a quick and dirty primer, see Some Theses on Possible Worlds.)

But not only do I have insufficient evidence for these two beliefs, it looks as if I have no evidence at all.  And yet I feel wholly entitled to my acceptance of them and in breach of no plausible ethics of belief, assuming there is such a subject as the ethics of belief.

Consider the following argument that I adapt from D. M. Armstrong, who borrowed it from Donald C. Williams:

1. Exactly one of the infinity of possible worlds is actual.

2. This world of me and my mates is a possible world.

Therefore, very probably,

3. This world of me and my mates is merely possible.

This is an inductive argument, but a very strong one.  While it does not necessitate its conclusion, it renders the conclusion exceedingly likely.  For if there is an infinity of worlds, how likely is it that mine is the lucky one?

And yet the conclusion is absurd, or to be precise: manifestly false.  Is it not perfectly obvious that this world of ours and everything in it is actual?  I am convinced that I am actual, and that all this stuff I am interacting with is actual.  I am sitting in an actual chair in an actual room which is lit by an actual sun, etc. 

But how do I know this?  What is my evidence?  There are no facts known to me that are better known than the fact that I am actual (that I actually exist).  So my evidence cannot consist of other facts.  Is it self-evident that I am actual?  You could say this, but how do I know, given the above argument, that my actuality is objectively self-evident as opposed to merely subjectively self-evident?  Subjective self-evidence is epistemically worthless, while objective self-evidence is not to be had in the teeth of the above argument.  No doubt I seem to myself to be actual.  But that subjective seeming does not get the length of objective self-evidence.  I now argue as follows:

4. If it is wrong to believe anything on insufficient evidence, then it is wrong to believe anything on no evidence.

5. I have no evidence that me and my world are actual.

6. It is not wrong to believe what is obviously true.

7. It is obviously true that I am actual.

Therefore, contra Clifford,

8.  There are some things it is not wrong to believe on insufficient evidence.

This is not a compelling argument, but it is a very powerful one.  Not compelling because the Cliffordian extremist could bite the bullet by denying (7).  He might say that the ethics of belief enjoins us to suspend belief on the question whether one is actual.  

Now this is psychologically impossible, for me anyway.  But apart from this impossibility, it is surely better known that I am actual than that Clifford's extreme thesis is true.

There are other obvious problems with the thesis.  Any tyro in philosophy should see right away that it is self-vitiating.  If it is wrong to believe anything on insufficient evidence, then it is wrong to believe Clifford's thesis on insufficient evidence.  But what conceivable evidence could one have for it?  None that I can see.  It is not only a normative claim, but one stuffed with universal quantifiers.  Good luck!  If you say that the thesis needn't be taken as applying to itself, then other problems will arise that you can work out for yourself.  Why do I have to do all the thinking?

Note also that if you take Clifford's thesis to heart you will have to suspend belief on all sorts of questions outside of religion, questions in ethics, politics, economics, climatology, etc., questions you have extremely firm opinions about.  The practical upshot, if one were consistent, would probably be a full retreat into Skeptic ataraxia.  At least until the political authorities came to put you in prison.  Then you would begin believing that some things are just and some are not, etc., and damn the insufficiency or nonexistence of the evidence for the contentious beliefs.

Our doxastic predicament is a bitch, ain't she?  Well, what do you want for a Cave?

On Indoctrination

Is indoctrination ever a good thing?

Presumably, to indoctrinate is to teach one doctrine as if it is true, as opposed to presenting a variety of different doctrines on the same topic without endorsing any one of them.  In general, indoctrination ought not be done at the college level: Competing positions should be presented fairly and objectively and students should be encouraged to think matters through themselves and form their own opinions.  But this point demands careful qualification. 

For surely indoctrination is legitimate in some subjects such as mathematics and the hard sciences.  No one could fault a math or science teacher for failing to give equal time to the views of numerologists, alchemists, astrologists, flat earthers and geocentrists.  And in political science classes short shrift should be given to 9-11 'truthers' and other conspiracy enthusiasts.  Their views may be discussed in passing, but to present them as if such theories are serious contenders in the arena of ideas makes a mockery of the search for truth, which presumably is what universities ought to be about. Certain views are beyond the pale and ought not be dignified by being taken seriously, e.g., Holocaust denial, the allegations made in the protocols of the Elders of Zion, the views of NAMBLA members, and so on.

But even in philosophy some indoctrination could well be justified, in logic, for example. One is justified in teaching introductory standard logic dogmatically without bringing in Hegelian and Marxist and dialetheist critiques of the law of non-contradiction, say.  But not only in logic.  To borrow an epithet from Arthur Collins, eliminative materialism is a 'lunatic" philosophy of mind.  I would cover it in a philosophy of mind course, but I would not present it as a possible view that one might justifiably hold; I would present it as not merely false but as incoherent.  And I would take myself to be justified in doing so.  Of course, I would present the doctrine and the arguments thought to support it accurately; but I would not present it as if it were one epistemically possible view among others.  So in that sense I would be engaged in legitimate indoctrination: if not by the promotion of the true view, at least by the rejection of false or incoherent ones.

If one were to oppose all indoctrination, then one would have to present every extant view on every issue as if it had a legitimate claim on our attention.  But this would encourage the view in students that all views are equally good, which is obviously not the case.   For example, in the philosophy of mind, eliminative materialism, behaviorism, and type-type identity theory are all very bad theories with eliminativism being the worst and the identity theory being the best of the three.  But nothing hinges on this example.  I could give many from different areas of philosophy.  The point is that a pedagogic posture of studied neutrality with respect to every view is as bad as an extreme doctrinalism in which contentious positions are tendentiously promoted.

One can see from these sketchy remarks that the issue is not easily sorted out.  Teaching that promotes relativism and skepticism, that leaves the student with the notion that all views are equally good or that nothing can be known is bad teaching.  Equally bad is teaching that merely foists opinions on students without inculcating habits of critical thought or without fairly presenting the debates surrounding reasonably debatable issues.  (Not all issues, however, are reasonably debatable.) Navigating between the Scylla of of the one and the Charybdis of the other is no easy task.

Life Without Views

Could one live well without views, 'long' views?  I address the question in Long Views and Short Views: Is Shorter Better?

Decision and Conclusion

How much of decision is included in every conclusion?  Did you conclude that there is no God or decide that there is no God?  Some of both?  Which then is the major player here, reason or will?

Dolezal, Knowledge, and Belief

R. C. writes,

I hadn't heard of the Dolezal case until reading your blog post. It occurred to me that this case might serve as a counterexample to the standard epistemological position that belief is necessary for knowledge.

I don't know Dolezal's psychological/epistemic state. But suppose she knows that she isn't African-American by race, but she has convinced herself to believe she is so. Would she have knowledge without belief?

Perhaps yes. Or perhaps she doesn't really believe she is African-American by race. Or, perhaps she is double minded: one mind knows and thus believes she isn't, and the other lacks knowledge on the matter but believes she is.

Anyway, I'd be interested in your take.

As I construe his example, the loyal reader is offering a case in which a subject knows that p without believing that p.  Thus he is supposing that Dolezal knows that she is Caucasian, but does not believe that she is.  If so, we have a counterexample to the standard view that, necessarily, if S knows that p, then S believes that p.  On the standard analysis, believing that p is necessary for knowing that p.  What the example suggests is that believing that p is not necessary for knowing that p.

We should distinguish between a weaker and a stronger thesis:

1. It is not the case that knowledge entails belief. (Some cases of knowledge are not cases of belief.)

2. Knowledge entails disbelief. (No cases of knowledge are cases of belief.)

I read the following passage from Dallas Willard as supporting (1):

Belief I understand to be some degree of readiness to act as if such and such (the content believed) were the case. Everyone concedes that one can believe where one does not know. But it is now widely assumed that you cannot know what you do not believe. Hence the well known analysis of knowledge as "justified, true belief." But this seems to me, as it has to numerous others, to be a mistake. Belief is, as Hume correctly held, a passion. It is something that happens to us. Thought, observation and testing, even knowledge itself, can be sources of belief, and indeed should be. But one may actually know (dispositionally, occurrently) without believing what one knows.

Whether or not one believes what one represents truly and has an appropriate basis for so representing, depends on factors that are irrelevant to truth, understanding and evidence. It depends, one might simply say, on how rational one is. Now I do not think that this point about belief in relation to knowledge is essential to the rest of this paper, but I mention it to indicate that the absence of any reference to belief in my general description of knowledge is not an oversight. Belief is not, I think, a necessary component of knowledge, though one would like to believe that knowledge would have some influence upon belief, and no doubt it often does.

Now we can't get into Dolezal's (crazy) head, but the following is plausibly ascribed to her.  She knows who her biological parents are; she knows that they are both Caucasian; she knows that Caucasian parents have Caucasian children; hence she knows that she is biologically Caucasian.  Could she nonetheless really believe that she is not Caucasian?

Perhaps.  Belief is tied to action.  It is tied to what one does and leaves undone and what one is disposed to do and leave undone.  Dolezal's NAACP activities and her verbal avowals among other behaviors suggest that she really believes that she is racially black.

But if Dolezal really believes that she is racially black, when she knows that she is racially white, then she is irrational.  Why not say the following by way of breaking the link between belief and knowledge:

D1. S knows that p =_df S justifiably accepts that p, and p is true.

D2. S  believes that p =_df S accepts that p and S either acts as if p is true or is prepared to act as if p is true.

These definitions allow that there are cases of knowledge that are not cases of belief without excluding cases of knowledge that are cases of belief.  What is common to knowledge and belief is not belief, but acceptance.

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Do You Think Your Views Will Ever Change?

The question was put to atheist A. C. Grayling. His response:

No, my views will not change; I am confident in the rationalist tradition which has evaluated the metaphysical and ethical claims of non-naturalistic theories, and definitively shown them to be vacuous in all respects other than the psychological effect they have on those credulous enough to accept them.

 Vacuous?  Grayling is quite the gasbag.

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Plantinga Reviews Philip Kitcher, Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism

Here.

The wild diversity of religious doctrines suggests to Kitcher that they are all almost certainly false.  Plantinga makes an interesting response:

But even for whole systems: there is certainly wide variety here, but how does it follow that they are all almost certainly false? Or even that any particular one is almost false? Kitcher's book is an exercise in philosophy. The variety of philosophical belief rivals that of religion: there are Platonists, nominalists, Aristotelians, Thomists, pragmatists, naturalists, theists, continental philosophers, existentialists, analytic philosophers (who also come in many varieties), and many other philosophical positions. Should we conclude that philosophical positions, including Kitcher's low opinion of religious belief, are all almost certainly false? I should think not. But then wouldn't the same be true for religious beliefs? The fact that others hold religious opinions incompatible with mine is not a good reason, just in itself, for supposing my beliefs false. After all, if I were to suppose my views false, I would once more be in the very same position: there would be very many others who held views incompatible with mine.

To put it my own way:  a philosopher discrediting religion on the ground of doctrinal diversity is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.  Philosophers notoriously contradict one another on anything and everything.  Everything is up for grabs.  What then gives philosophy the right to judge religion?

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Against Historical Relativism: Adorno on What is No Longer Believable After Auschwitz

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno is exasperating but exciting. Although as sloppy as one expects Continental thinkers to be, he is nonetheless a force to be reckoned with, a serious man who is seriously grappling with ultimates at the outer limits of intelligibility. Derrida I dismiss as a bullshitter; indeed, to cop a line from John Searle, he is someone who "gives bullshit a bad name." But I can't dismiss Adorno. I confess to being partial to the Germans. They are nothing if not serious, and I'm a serious man. Among the French there is an excess of façade and frippery. But now let's get to work — like good Germans.

Suppose we focus on just part of one of Adorno's serpentine sentences. This is from Negative Dialektik (Suhrkamp, p. 354):

Dass das Unveraenderliche Wahrheit sei und das Bewegte, Vergaengliche Schein, die Gleichgueltigkeit von Zeitlichem und ewigen Ideen gegeneinander, ist nicht laenger zu behaupten . . . .

Adorno is telling us that

It can no longer be asserted that the true is the unchangeable while the mobile and mutable is mere appearance, or that eternal Ideas and the temporal realm are indifferent to each other . . . .

So what is our man saying? He is saying that after Auschwitz — where 'Auschwitz' collects all the genocidal and totalitarian horrors of the Third Reich — one can no longer take Platonism seriously, or the people's Platonism either, Christianity. And indeed most traditional philosophy, consisting as it does, in Whitehead's phrase, of a series of footnotes to Plato. The old metaphysics is dead, the metaphysics according to which Being itself has a positive and hence affirmable character.  An experience has refuted the old metaphysics, the experience of Auschwitz.

But if it can no longer be asserted that that the true is the immutable, then it once could be asserted. And indeed, by 'assert' is intended assert with truth or at least justification. Note the ambiguity of 'assertible' as between capable of being asserted and worth of being asserted. And make a meta-note of how a broadly analytic thinker like me pedantically points out something like this whereas your typical Continental head would find my procedure boorish or somehow gauche. "How low class of you to be so careful and precise!"

But I digress. My point, again, is that if a proposition can no longer be asserted and believed, then it once could be asserted and believed. But if a metaphysical proposition was once true or believed with justification, then it is now true or believable with justification. For a metaphysical assertion is necessarily true if true at all. The structure of being cannot be contingent upon our contingent experiences, even experiences as shattering as that of the Nazi horror. (It is telling of course that Adorno, good man of the Left that he is, does not mention the Stalinist horrors which were known since 1956 — but that is a separate post.)

What I am objecting to is Adorno's apparent historical relativism. By this I mean the view that truth itself is historically conditioned and thus capable of being different in different historical epochs. Metaphysical conceptions are of course historically variable, but not their objects, the structures of being. Adorno is doing the the Continental Shuffle, sliding from the epistemic/doxastic to the ontic and back again.  That views of truth are historically conditioned is trivial and scarcely in need of being pointed out; but that truth itself is historically conditioned is incoherent.

More fundamentally, what I am objecting to is Adorno's lack of any argument for his view that historical experience can refute a metaphysical thesis and his lack of consideration of the sort of (obvious) objection I am now raising.

The Continental 'trope' or 'move' — such-and-such can no longer be believed --ought to be defended or dropped. Why, for example, should it no longer be possible to believe in God after the horrendous events of the 20th century when people believed in God at the time of the Lisbon earthquake and the time of the Bubonic plague? What is so special about these 20th century horrors? The fact of evil may well rule out the existence of God, or more generally, the affirmability of Being. But if it does, this is surely no recent development.

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Be Glad there is no Physiognomy of Belief

If the faces of people were as radically different as their beliefs, how few of our fellows would we recognize as human!

The Complacency of Unbelief

Doubt is to be deployed against the complacency of unbelief as much as against the complacency of belief.

A vital faith is never entirely free of purifying doubt which in some persons, at some times, extends to the brink of despair. Christ on the cross experienced the deepest depth of Incarnation in the feeling of being forsaken and abandoned by God.  Can a Christian then expect his faith to be free of doubt?

A fruitful doubt is not a sterile skepticism but a questioning attitude that holds open the possibility that its questions be answered.  If you cannot believe, then you cannot.  The matter can't be forced.  But the unbeliever oughtn't rest in the complacency of unbelief any more than the believer in the complacency of belief.  Seek, and you may or may not find.  But seek.

Doxastic Conservatism

The onus probandi is on the extremist in matters of belief.  Extreme beliefs bear the burden of proof.  There is a defeasible presumption in favor of moderate views just as there is a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional ways of doing things.  Note the qualifier, 'defeasible.'

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Not Enough Evidence?

 "Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence!" (Bertrand Russell)

It may well be that our predicament is such as to disallow conclusive or even sufficient evidence of the truth about it. If Plato's Cave Allegory is apt, if it lays bare the truth of the human predicament, then it must be that the evidence that the cave is a cave and that there is an outer world, whether it be the evidence of someone's testimony or the evidence of one's own rare and fleeting experiences, is scant and flimsy and easily doubted and denied.  What I merely glimpse on rare occasions I can easily doubt.  One can also doubt what any church teaches for the simple reason that there are many churches and they contradict each other on many points of doctrine and practice.  And the same goes for what I believe on the testimony of others.

We don't know that the human condition is a cave-like predicament along Platonic lines, but if it is then we have an explanation of the paucity of sufficient evidence of its being what it is.  (By sufficient evidence for a proposition p I mean evidence that renders p more likely than its negation.)

It is vitally important to us whether God or some form of Transcendence exists, and whether a higher life is possible for us beyond the miserably short and indigent predicament in which we presently find ourselves.  But it may be that the truth in this matter cannot be known here below, but only believed on evidence that does not make it more likely than not. It may be that our predicament is such as to make impossible sufficient evidence of the truth about it.

Do I violate an ethics of belief if I believe on insufficient evidence?  But don't I also have a duty to myself to pursue what is best for myself?  And seek my ultimate happiness?  Why should the legitimate concern to not be wrong trump the concern to find what is salvifically right?  Is it not foolish to allow fear of error to block my path to needed truth?

Lately I've heard bandied about the idea that to have faith is to pretend to know what one does not know.  Now that takes the cake for dumbassery.  One can of course pretend to know things one does not know, and pretend to know more about a subject than one does know.  The pretence might be part of a strategy of deception in the case of a swindler or it might be a kind of acting as in the case of an actor playing a mathematician.

But in faith one does not pretend to know; one honestly faces the fact that one does not know and ventures beyond what one knows so as to gain access to a needed truth that by its very nature cannot satisfy the strictures that we moderns and post-moderns tend to build into 'know.'

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Underbelief

Much of religion is overbelief, but much of science is underbelief.  One sees less than is there; one sees only what one's restricted method allows one to see.  Examples are legion.  Find them.

For more on overbelief and underbelief, see the first two articles below.

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Cognitive Dissonance or Doxastic Dissonance?

From what appears to be a reputable source:

Cognitive Dissonance Theory, developed by Leon Festinger (1957), is concerned with the relationships among cognitions. A cognition, for the purpose of this theory, may be thought of as a ³piece of knowledge.² The knowledge may be about an attitude, an emotion, a behavior, a value, and so on. For example, the knowledge that you like the color red is a cognition; the knowledge that you caught a touchdown pass is a cognition; the knowledge that the Supreme Court outlawed school segregation is a cognition. People hold a multitude of cognitions simultaneously, and these cognitions form irrelevant, consonant or dissonant relationships with one another.

[. . .]

Two cognitions are said to be dissonant if one cognition follows from the opposite of another. What happens to people when they discover dissonant cognitions? The answer to this question forms the basic postulate of Festinger¹s theory. A person who has dissonant or discrepant cognitions is said to be in a state of psychological dissonance, which is experienced as unpleasant psychological tension. This tension state has drivelike properties that are much like those of hunger and thirst. When a person has been deprived of food for several hours, he/she experiences unpleasant tension and is driven to reduce the unpleasant tension state that results. Reducing the psychological sate of dissonance is not as simple as eating or drinking however.

The above, taken strictly and literally, is incoherent.  We are first told that a cognition  is a bit of knowledge, and then in the second quoted paragraph that (in effect) some cognitions are dissonant, and that if one cognition follows from the opposite of another, then the two are dissonant.  But surely it is logically impossible that any two bits of knowledge, K1 and K2,  be such that K1 entails the negation of K2, or vice versa.  Why? Because every cognition is true -- there cannot be false knowledge -- and no two truths are such that one follows from the opposite of the other.   

The author is embracing an inconsistent pentad:

1. Every cognition is a bit of knowledge.

2. Every bit of knowledge is true.

3. Some, at least two, cognitions are dissonant.

4. If one cognition follows from the opposite (the negation) of another, then the two are dissonant.

5. It is logically impossible that two truths be such that one follows from the negation of the other:  if a cognition is true, then its negation is false, and no falsehood follows from a truth.

The point, obviously, is that while beliefs can be dissonant, cognitions cannot be.  There simply is no such thing as cognitive dissonance.  What there is is doxastic dissonance.

"What a pedant you are!  Surely what the psychologists mean is what you call doxastic dissonance."

Then they should say what they mean.  Language matters.  Confusing belief and knowledge and truth and related notions can lead to serious and indeed pernicious errors.  A good deal of contemporary relativism is sired by a failure to make such distinctions.

The Politics of Impassibility

This just over the transom:

 

I hope you don’t mind my seeking your help on an issue related to the history of philosophy. I and a few friends are have a disagreement re: the origin of belief in divine apatheia.

 

In Manana: Christian Theology from a Hispanic Perspective, Justo Gonzalez discusses the political motivations behind the origin and development of the concept. His claim is that belief in divine impassibility merely reflects the desire for permanence (of power) on the part of the ruling class so that Athenian politics is responsible for the philosophical development of the belief, a projection onto God of the political aspirations of the elite.

 

The question of how apatheia got adopted/revised by Christians isn’t so much my concern at this point (as legitimate a question as it is). I’m interested in Gonzalez’s history and whether and to what extent he’s right in supposing apatheia was a projection onto the divine being of the political aspirations for the permanence of the city and its ruling class.

 

Does that ring true with your understanding? Thoughts?

 

Well, if it serves my political interests to believe that p, that leaves open the question whether p is true or false.  Suppose I am a member of the royal court.  Then it would serve my earthly interests if the masses were to believe that the king rules by divine right.  But one cannot show that the king does not rule by divine right by showing that the interests of the ruling class are served by that belief's being widespread.

 

So there are two logically independent questions.  Does the holding of a belief serve interests?  Is the belief true?  To say that the questions are logically independent is to say that both an affirmative and a negative answer to the first is consistent with both an affrmative and a negative answer to the second.

 

If God exists, then he is either impassible or not.   This question cannot be decided by showing, assuming that it could be shown, that widespread belief that God is impassible would help legitimate the dominance of the ruling class. (I am having a hard time imagining how such an abstruse doctrine could get a grip on the popular mind.  Does Joe Sixpack think about such things?)

 

The bolded thesis supra is a 'weasel' thesis.  Gonzalez does not state unambiguously that the impassibility doctrine is nothing other than an expression of class interests, and therefore either false or unsupportable by reasons.  But that is probably what he means.

 

If that is what he means, then  he is guilty of the logical/epistemological error of confusing the holding of a belief with the propositional content of a belief.  It is a concern of the sociology of knowledge to study the incidence of beliefs as states of people, their causes and effects and modes of transmission.  But the evaluation of belief contents as to truth, falsehood, consistency, inconsistency, rationality, etc., does not belong to the sociology of knowledge.

 

There is nothing new about the move Gonzalez appears to be making.  It's old hat.  It is the  standard Marxist rubbish of reducing belief systems to systems of ideology in the service of class interests.  But if all is ideology in the service of class interests, then so is the system of Marxist beliefs.  In which case it is a self-vitiating system of beliefs if not outright self-refuting.

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3. Don't let insufficient evidence prevent you from believing what you are better off believing in the long run than not believing in the long run.

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In the Absence of Knowledge, May One Believe? Remarks on Magee

According to Bryan Magee ("What I Believe," Philosophy 77 (2002), 407- 419), nobody knows the answers to such questions as whether we survive our bodily deaths or whether God exists. Citing Xenophanes and Kant, Magee further suggests that the answers to these questions are not only unknown but impossible for us to know. Assuming that Magee is right on both counts, what follows?

One inference one might draw from our state of irremediable ignorance about ultimates is that it provides us with 'doxastic wiggle-room' (my expression): if one cannot know one way or the other, then one is  permitted either to believe or not believe that we survive and that God exists. After all, if it cannot be proven that ~p, then it is epistemically possible that p, and this epistemic possibility might be taken to allow as reasonable our believing that p. Invoking the Kantian distinction between thinking and knowing (Critique of Pure Reason, B 146 et passim) one could maintain that although we have and can have no knowledge of God and the soul, we can think them without contradiction, and without contradicting anything we know. Does not the denial of knowledge make room for faith, as Kant himself famously remarks? CPR B xxx: Ich musste also das Wissen aufheben, um zum Glauben Platz zu bekommen... "I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith...."  (And given that contact with reality is a great good, would it not be better to venture contact with the unknowable portion of it via faith rather than have no contact with it at all by insisting that only knowable truth is admissible truth?)

This inference, however, the inference from our irremediable ignorance to the rational allowability of belief in the epistemically possible,  is one that Magee resolutely refuses to draw, seeing it as a shabby evasion and an "illegitimate slide."(408) Thus he holds it to be illegitimate to move from the epistemic possibility of post-mortem  survival to belief in it. As he puts it, "What I find myself wanting to drive home is not merely that we do not know but that the only honest way to live and think is in the fullest possible acknowledgment of that fact and its consequences, without ducking out into a faith of some kind, and without evasion or self-indulgence of any other sort."  (417) Near the beginning of his essay, Magee cites  Freud to the effect that no right to believe anything can be derived from ignorance. (408)

The relevance of the Freudian point, however, is unclear. First of all, no one would maintain that ignorance about a matter such as post-mortem survival justifies, in the sense of provides evidence for, the belief that one survives. And a person who thinks it rationally allowable to believe where we cannot know will presumably not take a deontological approach to belief in terms of epistemic rights and duties. In any case, the issue is this: Is it ever rationally permissible to believe where knowledge is unavailable? Magee answers this question in the negative. But I cannot see that he makes anything close to a convincing case for this answer. I will simply run through some questions/objections the cumulative force of which will be to neutralize, though perhaps not refute, Magee's view. Thus I play for a  draw, not a win. I doubt that one can expect more from philosophy.  This post presents just one of my questions/objections.

Probative  Overkill?

One problem with Magee's argument is that it seems to prove too much. If we have no knowledge about such metaphysical/religious matters as God and the soul, and so must suspend belief in them lest we violate  the putative epistemic duty to believe only on sufficient evidence, then we must also suspend belief on a host of other issues in respect of which we certainly cannot claim knowledge. Surely, the very same reasons that lead Magee to say that no one knows anything about God and the soul must also lead us to say that no one knows whether or not there are cases in which justice demands capital punishment, or whether or not a just society is one which provides for redistribution of wealth, or whether or not animals have rights, etc. Indeed, we must say that no one knows what justice is or what rights are. And of course it is not merely about normative issues that we are ignorant.

Do we know what motion, or causation, or time are? Do we know what properties are, or what is is for a thing to have a property, or to exist, or to change, or to be the same thing over time? Note that these questions, unlike the God and soul questions, do not pertain to what is transcendent of experience. I see the tomato; I see that it is red; I see or think I see that it is the same tomato that I bought from the grocer an hour ago; applying a knife to it, I see or think I see that slicing it causes it to split apart.

For that matter, Does Magee know that his preferred ethics of belief is correct?  How does he know that?  How could he know it?  Does he have sufficient evidence? If he knows it, why do philosophers better than him take a different view?  Does he merely believe it?  Does he believe it because his fear of being wrong trumps his desire for the truth?  Does he want truth, but only on his terms?  Does he want only that truth that can satisfy the criteria that he imposes?  Would it not be more self-consistent for Magee to suspend belief as to his preferred ethics of belief?  Why is it better to have no contact with reality than such contact via faith?  Isn't it better to have a true belief that I cannot justify about a life and death matter than no belief about that matter?  Does the man of faith self-indulgently evade reality, or does the philosopher of Magee's stripe self-indulgently and pridefully refuse such reality as he cannot certify by his methods?

No one knows how economies really work; if we had knowledge in this area we would not have wildly divergent paradigms of economic explanation. But this pervasive ignorance does not prevent people from holding very firm beliefs about these non-religious issues, beliefsthat translate into action in a variety of ways, both peaceful and violent. It is furthermore clear that people feel quite justified in holding, and acting upon, these beliefs that go beyond what they can claim to know. What is more, I suspect Magee would agree that people are often justified in holding such beliefs.

So if Magee is right that we ought to suspend belief about religious matters, then he must also maintain that we ought to suspend belief about the social and political matters that scarcely anyone ever suspends belief about. That is, unless he can point to a relevant difference between the religious questions and the social-political ones. But it is difficult to discern any relevant difference. In both cases we are dealing with knowledge-transcendent beliefs for which elaborate rational defenses can be constructed, and elaborate rational refutations of competing positions.

In both cases we are dealing with very abstruse and 'metaphysical' issues such as the belief in equal rights, a belief which manifestly has no empirical justification. And in both cases we are dealing with
issues of great importance to our welfare and happiness. On the other hand, if Magee thinks that we are justified in holding beliefs about social and political matters, something he does of course hold, then he should also maintain that we are justified in holding beliefs about religious matters. There is no justification for a double standard. In this connection, one should read Peter van Inwagen's Quam Dilecta, in God and the Philosophers, ed. T. V. Morris (Oxford University Press, 1994), 31-60. See especially 41-46 for a penetrating discussion  of the double standard. 

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Nine Impediments to Religious Belief

Why is religious belief so hard to accept?  Herewith, some notes toward a list of the impedimenta, the stumbling blocks, that litter and lie in the path of the would-be believer.  Whether the following ought to be impediments is a further question,  a normative question.  The following taxonomy is merely descriptive.  And not in order of stopping power.  And perhaps incomplete.  This is a blog.  This is only a blog.

1. The obtrusiveness and constancy and coherence of the deliverances of the senses, outer and inner.  The "unseen order" (William James), if such there be, is no match for the 'seen order.'   The massive assault upon the sense organs has never been greater than at the present time given the high technology of distraction: radio, TV, portable telephony, the Internet . . . and Twitter, the ultimate weapon of mass distraction.  Here is some advice on how to avoid God from C. S. Lewis, "The Seeing Eye" in Christian Reflections (Eeerdmans, 1967), pp. 168-167:

Avoid silence, avoid solitude, avoid any train of thought that leads off the beaten track. Concentrate on money, sex, status, health and (above all) on your own grievances. Keep the radio on. Live in a crowd. Use plenty of sedation. If you must read books, select them very carefully. But you'd be safer to stick to the papers. You'll find the advertisements helpful; especially those with a sexy or a snobbish appeal.

If Lewis could only see us now.

2. The fact that there are many competing systems of religious belief and practice.  They overlap, but they also contradict. The extant contradictory systems cannot all be true, though they could all be false.  The fact that one's own system is contradicted by others doesn't make it false, but it does raise reasonable doubts as to whether it is true.  For a thinking person, this is a stumbling block to the naive and unthinking acceptance of the religion in which one has been brought up.

3. The specificity of religious belief systems and their excessively detailed dogmatic contents.  One is put off by the presumptuousness of those who claim to know what they cannot, or are not likely, to know.  For example, overconfident assurances as to the natures of  heaven, hell, and purgatory together with asseverations as to who went where.  Stalin in hell?  How do you know?  How do you even know that there is a place of everlasting punishment as opposed to such other options as simple annihilation of unrepentant miscreants?

The presumptuousness of those who fancy that they understand the economics of salvation to such a degree that they can condifently assert that so many Hail Mary's will remove so many years in purgatory.  For many, such presumptuousness is an abomination, though not as bad as the sale of indulgences.

Related post:  Are the Dogmas of Catholicism Divine Revelations?

4.  The fact that the religions of the world, over millenia, haven't done much to improve us individually or collectively.  Even if one sets aside the intemperate fulminations of the New Atheists, that benighted crew uniquely blind to the good religion has done, there is the fact that religious belief and practice, even if protracted and sincere, do little toward the moral improvement of people.  To some this is an impediment to acceptance of a religion. 

Related point: the corruption of the churches.

Again, my task here is merely descriptive.  I am not claiming that one ought to be dissuaded from religion by its failure to improve people much or to maintain itself in institutional form without corruption.

5. The putative conflict between science and religion.  Competing magisteria each with a loud claim to be the proper guide to life.  Thinking people are bothered by this.

6. The tension between Athens (philosophy) and Jerusalem (religion).

7.  The weight of concupiscence.  We are sexual beings naturally, and oversexualized beings socially, and so largely unable to control our drives.  The thrust of desire makes most real the sensuous while occluding one's spiritual sight.  Is it any surprise that the atheist Russell, even in old age, refused to be faithful to his wife?  It is reasonable to conjecture that his lust and his pride -- intellectuals tend to be very proud with outsized egos-- blinded him to spirtual realities.

8. Suggestibility.  We are highly sensitive and responsive to social suggestions as to what is real and important and what is not.  In a society awash with secular suggestions, people find it hard to take religion seriously.

9. The apparent moral and logical absurdities of some religious doctrines.   "God said to Abraham, Kill me a son!"  See Kant on Abraham and Isaac. 

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Overbelief and Romans 1: 18-20

I met with S. N. in Tempe yesterday for philosophy and chess. While we were talking about overbelief, it occurred to me that Romans 1: 18-20 is another good example of overbelief.  Now there is an issue that the budding theologian S. N. made me aware of, an issue that the philosopher in me desires to set aside, namely, the question whether St. Paul is speaking in his own voice in the passage in question.  That is indeed an interesting question, but my concern is with the argment that the passage embodies, regardless of who is making it.  I will write as if Paul is speaking in his own voice.  If you disagree, substitute 'pseudo-Paul' for 'Paul.'

I will first give my reading of the passage, and then explain how it connects with William James' notion of overbelief.  (I understand that the term 'overbelief' surfaces first in Matthew Arnold who supposedly derives it from Goethe's use of Aberglaube.  My concern is solely with James' use of the word.)

The Pauline Passage

Rather than quote the whole of the Pauline passage at Romans 1: 18-20, I'll summarize it. Men are godless and wicked and suppress the truth. What may be known about God is plain to them because God has made it plain to them. Human beings have no excuse for their unbelief. "For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities -- his eternal power and divine nature -- have been clearly seen,
being understood from what has been made . . . ."

Paul's claim here is that the existence and nature of God are evident from creation and that unbelief is a
result of a willful turning away from the truth.   There is no excuse for unbelief because it is a plain fact that the natural world is divine handiwork.  Now I am a theist and I am sympathetic to Christianity. But although I have one foot in Jerusalem, the other is  planted firmly in Athens. And so I must point out that to characterize the natural world as 'made' or 'created' begs the question in favor of theism. As begging the question, the Pauline claim about the evidentness of the world's being created offers no support for theism.  It is an analytic proposition that there is no creation without a creator. So if the heavens and the earth are a creation, then it follows straightaway that a creator exists.

But is the world a divine creation? This is the question, and the answer is not obvious. That the natural world is a divine artifact is not evident to the senses, or to the heart, or to reason. Of course, one can argue for the existence of God from the existence and order of the natural world. I have done it myself. But those who reject theistic arguments, and construct anti-theistic arguments, have their reasons too, and it cannot fairly be said that what animates the best of them is a stubborn and prideful refusal to submit to a truth that is evident.  It is simply not evident to the senses that the natural world is a divine artifact. 

I may be moved to marvel at "the starry skies above me."  This was one of two things that filled Kant with wonder, the other being "the moral law within me."  But seeing is not seeing as.  If you see the starry skies as divine handiwork, then this is an interpretation from within a theistic framework.  But the datum seen can just as easily be given a nontheistic interpretation.

If the atheism of some has its origin in pride, stubborness and a willful refusal to recognize any power or
authority beyond oneself, or beyond the human, as is plainly the case with many, it does not follow that the atheism of all has this origin.

It is all-too-human to suspect in our opponents moral depravity when we cannot convince them. The Pauline passage smacks of that all-too-humanity. There are sincere and decent atheists, and they have plenty of excuse for their unbelief. The best of them, if wrong in the end, are excusably wrong.

Overbelief in the Pauline Passage

Here is my working definition of 'overbelief' based on my reading of William James: an  overbelief is a belief arrived at by reading out of an experience more than is contained within it.

We experience the world as existent, as beautiful, and as orderly.  But we don't experience the world as divine handiwork any more than we experience it as the work of Satan contrived to fool us into taking it to be real when it is not, and seduce us  with its beauty and order.  That the world is divine handiwork is therefore, by the above definition, an overbelief.

That is not to say that it is false.  It is to say, as S. N. pointed out yesterday, that the belief is undetermined by the experience.  Overbeliefs are undetermined by what we actually and literally experience.  (Admittedly, it is a tricky question what exactly we literally experience: do I see my car, or only the front of my car?  Do I touch my cat, or only the fur of my cat?  I see a green tree, but do I see that a tree is green?  Do I even see a green tree?  I see an instance of greenness and an instance of treeness, but do I see that the two property-instances are compresent?)

That the world is divine handiwork is an overbelief.  That doesn't make it false or even unreasonable.  Indeed, overbeliefs are unavoidable.  As James writes,

These ideas [overbeliefs] will thus be essential to that individual's religion; -- which is as much as to say that over-beliefs in various directions are absolutely indispensable, and that we should treat them with tenderness and tolerance so long as they are not intolerant themselves.  As I have elsewhere written, the most interesting and valuable things about a man are usually his over-beliefs. (The Varieties of Religious Experience, Penguin 1982, p. 515, orig. publ. 1902) 

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Unusual Experiences and the Problem of Overbelief and Underbelief

One day, well over 30 years ago, I was deeply tormented by a swarm of negative thoughts and feelings that had arisen because of a dispute with a certain person.  Pacing around my apartment, I suddenly, without any forethought, raised my hands toward the ceiling and said, "Release me!"  It was a wholly spontaneous cri du coeur, a prayer if you will, but not intended as such.  I emphasize that it was wholly unpremeditated.    As soon as I had said the words and made the gesture, a wonderful peace descended upon my mind and the flood of negativity vanished. I became as calm as a Stoic sage.

That is an example of what I am calling an unusual experience.  Only some of us have such experiences, and those who do, only rarely.  I never had such an experience before or since, though I have had a wide variety of other types of unusual experiences of a religious, mystical and paranormal nature.

A second very memorable experience occurred while in deep formal meditation.  I had the strong sense that I was the object of a very powerful love.  I suddenly had the feeling that I was being loved by someone.  Unfortunately, my analytic mind went to work on the experience and it soon subsided. This is why, when the gifts of meditation arrive, one must surrender to them in utter passivity, something that intellectual types will find it very hard to do. 

The typical intellectual suffers from hypertrophy of the critical faculty, and in consequence, he suffers the blockage of the channels of intuition.  He hones his intellect on the whetstone of discursivity, and if he is not careful, he may hone it away to nothing, or else perfect the power of slicing while losing the power of splicing.

Now suppose one were to interpret an experience such as the first one described  as a reception of divine grace or as the answering of a prayer by a divine or angelic agent.  Such an interpretation would involve what William James calls overbelief.  Although the genial James uses the term several times in Varieties of Religious Experience and elsewhere, I don't believe he ever defines the term.  But I think it is is keeping with his use of the term to say that an  overbelief is a belief arrived at by reading out of an experience more than is contained within it.

Similarly, if I came to believe that what I experienced in the second experience was the love of Christ (subjective genitive), that would be an overbelief.  The experience could not be doubted while I was having it, and now, a few years after having the experience, I have no practical doubts about it either:  I have the testimony of my journal account which was written right after the experience, testimony that is corroborated by my present memories. 

Unfortunately, experiences do not bear within themselves certificates of veridicality.  There are two questions that an experience qua experience leaves open.  First, is it of something real?  Second, even if it is of something real, is it of the particular thing the overbelief says it is of? 

Suppose a skeptic pipes up: "What you experienced was not the love of Christ, you gullible fool, but a random electro-chemical discharge in your brain."  But of course, that would be wrong, indeed absurd.  The experience was certainly not of that.  The experience had a definite and describable phenomenological content, a content not describable in electro-chemical or neural terms.

Indeed, it is arguable that the skeptic is trading in underbelief, a word I just now coined.  [Correction, 11 July: James uses 'under-belief' on p. 515 of The Varieties of Religious Experience.] If an  overbelief is a belief arrived at by reading out of an experience more than is contained within it, then an underbelief is a belief arrived at by reading out of an experience less than is contained within it, or reading into it what manifestly is not contained within it. 

Pounding on such a boneheaded skeptic, however, does not get the length of a proof of the veridicality of my experience. 

We are on the point of becoming entangled in a thicket of thorny questions.  Are there perceptual beliefs?  If yes, are they not overbeliefs?  I see a bobcat sitting outside my study and I form the belief that there is a bobcat five feet from me.  But surely that existential claim goes beyond what the experience vouchsafes.  The existence of the cat cannot be read off from the experience . . . .

Or is it rather underbelief  if I refuse to grant that seeing a bobcat in normal conditions (good light, etc.) is proof that it exists in reality beyond my visual perception?

Should we perhaps define 'overbelief' and 'underbelief' in such a way that they pertain only to non-empirical matters?

Furthermore, is an overbelief a belief?  Might 'over' function here as an alienans adjective?  Beliefs are either true or false.  Perhaps overbeliefs are neither, being merely matters of attitude, merely subjective additions to experiences.  I think James would reject this.  For him, overbeliefs are genuine beliefs.  I'll dig up some passages later.

Sam Harris, you may remember, holds that the nonexistence of the self is something that one can learn from meditation.  But he too, I should think, is involved in overbelief.  One cannot observe the nonexistence of the self.  Harris' belief goes well beyond anything that meditation discloses.  The self does not turn up among the objects of experience as a separate object.  Granted.  It doesn't follow, however, that there is no self.  To get to that conclusion overbelief is necessary, along the lines of: Only that which can be singled out as an object of experience exists or is real.  How justify that on the basis of a close inspection of experience?  It is sometimes called the Principle of Acquaintance.  Are we acquainted with it?

The irony shouldn't be missed.  Harris, the febrile religion-basher, embraces a religious overbelief in his Buddhist rejection of the self.  Buddhism is a religion.   

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