The knowledge
It may be that some of what people mean, when they talk about other ways of knowing and how different they are from science, is that there is a whole range of subjects that are interesting to talk about and think about that are inherently fuzzy – that are not yes or no issues – that are not purely factual – that are not helped or enhanced by experiment or testing (though data may be relevant); and that all that matters because it’s where we live. Stories (or ‘literature’) are about that stuff: they perform, illustrate, enact the iffy quality, the uncertainties, the ambiguities, the negative capability.
None of that is really knowledge – but it rests on a vast amount of background knowledge – including theory of mind. Austistics aren’t good at it, for that reason.
Stories are in a way part of that background knowledge. Our sense of how people behave, how we should behave, how things can go wrong, how quarrels can be fixed, and so on ad infinitum, is woven out of our experience with people and the stories we know; that combines to make up our implicit background knowledge.
In that sense, stories can be seen as a kind of knowledge, but all the same, it’s not the kind of knowledge we cite as we would cite historical or anthropological knowledge. We weave it into our background knowledge but it has a different status, different from experience as well as empirical knowledge. We think or say ‘That happened to me/a friend/my sister’ but we don’t say ‘That happened to Hamlet/Lizzie Bennett/Huck Finn.’ If we refer to stories we say things like ‘It’s like that situation in “King Lear”‘ or ‘This sounds like something from “The Office.””
In any case, all that isn’t a ‘different way of knowing’ – it’s a mixture of the ordinary way of knowing and other kinds of thought and feeling, none of which is weird or spooky or about the supernatural. None of it is particularly relevant to religion. Religion includes some stories…but that’s not spooky, it’s just more stories. It includes some moral talk, but again, that’s not peculiar to religion, and religion doesn’t add anything apart from claims about magical beings, which is fine in fairly tales and magic realism but not to be taken literally.
This does perhaps give a more satisfactory account of literature and stories – they do thicken and enrich our background knowledge: our sense of how people do behave, can behave, might behave.
Gossip is the same thing. Stories are fictional gossip; literature is the higher gossip. Some people perhaps think that religion too is the same kind of thing – but if so they’re dead wrong. Religion imports all sorts of extras that confuse the issues, create new motivations, raise irrelevant fears. The background knowledge is a secular subject or set of subjects, and adding souls and immortality and a deity changes that. We need to know how to behave in this world, the real one, where we’re not immortal and we don’t have souls and there is no god to supervise us.
It strikes me that what is meant by those who talk of “ways of knowing” is actually “ways of understanding”.
Perhaps, if they paid more attention to understanding how their choice of words and phrases has significant effects on how others understand what it is they are trying to express, their contributions would engender less argument and more discussion.
However, some people appear to think that using more “powerful” words will give their argument more weight, which sadly ends up with so many opinions presented as fact. Am I tempted to say “This is true” or “I know this is true” when I actually mean “there may be some merit to this idea”?
Well, no, actually.
I think the lingering worry, if there are any troubles here, is in making sense of alternate theories of truth in everyday speech that don’t appear to be themselves hopelessly confused. i.e., trying to create an account that can distinguish moral truth-claims from religious truth-claims in a principled way.
Moral truth-claims seem like upstanding candidates, perfectly meaningful and all that. But while they are claims that apply to our universe, they are not claims that need to be applied because we think they track any facts about our universe. On the face of things, it seems like we don’t need to be committed to the idea that we have to understand the details of anthropology and history to have a conscience.
Granted, the literalists do think there are moral facts. That’s daffy. Also granted, if people are not explicit about their kind of truth, they’re either bullshitters, or trading upon careless interpreters. They’re scumbags.
The worry is that a slick allegorical type might say, “Aha! As far as linguistic and mental content goes, we allegorists are expressing something that has a structure like that of moral truths”. Of course, they might be very wrong about the particulars (i.e., their allegories might be abhorrent or obscure), but at least they’d not be fundamentally confused. Or are they?
Jess, one worry about that view is that it seems like when we improve the intelligibility of a hypothesis after it has been discovered or thought up, i.e., by carefully and seriously committing it to particular expectations or inferences and bringing it into alignment with our other beliefs, we really are helping to justify our hypothesis. Improvements to the understanding, in this sort of case, are improvements to knowledge! The argument would be that the metaphorical cases help us immediately understand the relevance of certain kinds of facts to each other: the vampire and the corporation, the loop of string and the theory of everything, the frisbee and Mr. Feynman.
Benjamin, I read your posts several times and I’ll own up that most of what you said went “right over my head”. Now that may well be because my intellectual powers are lacking in some respect but, be that as it may, I’m still not sure what it is you’re getting at or quite how it engages (in the case of your second post) with my comment. But my curiosity is unlimited.
I imply nothing by it, but did you know you used the word “worry” three times over your two posts.
Jess, no worries — it’s not you it’s me!
In your post, you put forward the idea that people are confusing “ways of knowing” with “ways of understanding”.
Relatedly, there are two kinds of knowing: learning a theory, and justification to ourselves that what we’ve learned is real. So we first learn, for example, that natural selection is a coherent and interesting way of explaining evolution, and that evolution does occur. Then we ask, “What would we expect to find out about the world if both evolution and the theory of natural selection were true?”
On the one hand, when we first learn a theory, it is a clear case of understanding and not justifying. On the other hand, if we can answer that kind of question and provide decent evidence, then it goes a long way to saying the theory is justified.
But during the period in between, as we engage in the search for evidence, asking new questions, revising our expectations by thinking the implications over in new ways, and so on, we’re both increasing our understanding of the theory and we’re giving ourselves reason to believe in it, so long as deep troubles don’t arise. During this twilight period between initial learning and eventual vindication, there is a sense in which our attempt to understand the theory is also an attempt to justify it. More to the point, metaphors, analogies, and that sort of thing are very helpful in that process. See what I mean?
The clever people these days are using terms like “worry” and “trouble” in philosophy because that way you sound as humble as possible. It might come across as weak-kneed mumbling to normal people, but it’s a helpful trick of the trade when dealing with professional philosophers, since they tend to be oversensitive narcissists.
“professional philosophers, since they tend to be oversensitive narcissists.”
Hmph! I resent the imputation! I am a completely insensitive narcissist, thankyouverymuch. A total clod, actually. You can tell I’m a clod because I never use sensitive words like “worry” or “trouble,” but I do use words like “blinkered, pig ignorant nonsense.”
*ahem*
That said…
I’m not sure what the point of some of these subtleties are. Yes, epistemology is complicated, and there are a lot of things that go into the process of coming to know. But faith is not and can never be a part of any genuine epistemology, period. One cannot have an epistemology without justification, and faith is a way of adopting or adhering to beliefs which utterly eschews justification. Analyze and describe and engage with the subtle variations of all the many and varied aspects of coming to know you care to, and faith will still stand in direct opposition to the part of the process where one weighs evidence and evaluates arguments and otherwise engages in justificatory activity.
The very idea of “coming to know” starts from a presumption of fallibilism – the understanding that one does not necessarily start out knowing, that one must therefore find out, and that even after finding out one should be open to finding out something quite different. And what is faith but the decision to embrace a given claim as true without any of that pesky finding out business, and to maintain that conviction in the face of any doubt? (Yes, I know, some of the faithful claim to some sort of fallibilism and to wrestle with doubts and all that. Except that they really don’t understand fallibilism or adopt a fallibilist perspective, or they wouldn’t go around embracing beliefs as a matter of faith: These are polar opposites.)
It’s worth remembering what’s at the heart of this dispute in the face of all the hand-waving and vagueness generated by those committed to obscuring the nature of the problem: And the problem is claims like “Supernatural creation stories may, in fact, be true; but science, as only one way of knowing, will never tell us this.” Such claims are… well… blinkered, pig ignorant nonsense.
Benjamin, thanks for the clarification although I’m now wondering if professional philosphers prefer to call a spade a ‘spade’, a ‘shovel’ or ‘an implement of excavation'(or if indeed they generally prefer their implements manufactured with polished stainless steel for its reflective qualities)!
It’s interesting that you interpreted my post as suggesting that. There may be some who are confused but it’s the ones who deliberately attempt to elevate the validity of their argument by the dishonest use of language that piss me off. Even if it is obviously ‘blinkered, pig ignorant nonsense’ to some (hat-tip to G Felis), I fear there are many who are persuaded by it in something akin to a subliminal fashion.
Oh well, back to playing scrabble now!
That’ll teach me to use ‘greater than’ and ‘less than’ symbols to delineate a snipped quote. The first line of the second paragraph was supposed to read:-
It’s interesting that you interpreted my post as suggesting “that people are confusing “ways of knowing” with “ways of understanding””
Narratives are always more convincing than arguments, especially when we’re the heroes of the stories, or at least when we can identify with the heroes. Commercials relentlessly exploit this preference.
Creation is more persuasive than evolution because it explains why we’re special and emphasizes that God loves us and everything happens for a reason.
I’m not at all hopeful, in the short term, that practical knowledge will prove more attractive than soul-soothing fiction. My elderly mother, a stalwart agnostic now suffering from dementia, demands a narrative for every scene she sees, and when I respond “I don’t know” she makes up a story for herself.
I’m a big fan of early Anne Rice. I’m less of a fan of exhuming and beheading corpses rather than tackling social or health problems.
There’s exploring meaning through thought experiments (which cognitive science and creativity theory show to be a good thing) and then there’s being harmfully wrong. Literature does not claim to be factual or imperative. Superstition does. It is hopelessly naive to ignore this difference.
Vampire scares occurred in the last decade of the twentieth century in the Balkans. What’s literature to one person can be much more serious to another. This cannot be grinned away.
This “ways of knowing” vs “ways of understanding”.
Can this be seen as “ways of knowing for humanity” vs “ways of knowing for the individual” or as “knowledge producing methods” vs “knowdlegde transferring methods” or do you mean something different.
I think we should probably stick with G Felis here regarding the order of things. If we’re going to distinguish ways of knowing, then we start, as Scrates did, knowing nothing, and then try to build things up from there, giving epistemic reasons for making every move that we make as we go along.
There’s scant purpose in taking two ongoing practices, like science and religion, and then trying to sort out, between them, what constitutes knowledge for one and what constitutes knowledge for the other. The question is, why do we accept anything as epistemically sound? And at what point do epistemic reasons break down?
Apply that rule to things that are claimed to be known in both ‘going concerns’, and before long we’ll see that one line of development will take you from fairly basic facts about the world, confirmed by experiment and observation, and the other line of development gets bogged down, almost from the start, by claims about texts. They may try to say how those texts can be interpreted in such a way as to be relevant to present discussions about morality or politics, for example, but the question should be, why should we start there? What are the grounds for giving that text favoured status? Someone might throw in a bit of so-called ‘religious experience’ along the way (as, for example, in David Hay’s Something There), but none of it will be confirmed, even if someone else says, “Yes, I’ve had an experience like that too.” Because none of those experiences will give us a basis for saying “If we do x, then y will happen.” These are in the nature of Wittgenstein’s ‘private languages’. They may quite effectly structure social relationships, but they will not be able to say why we should accept this way of structuring social relationships over that one.
One of the things about works of literature is that aesthetic judgements about them are made on the basis of how well they delineate possible forms of human life, and the sense of confirmation that we get regarding our own lives when what we are reading rings true. This will even have a lot to do with the effectiveness of the language in expresing complex emotional states, and moral quandries. This is not squishy knowledge; it’s not really knowledge at all. In one sense, it’s a kind of social experience, in which we find ourselves caught up in a human world which is internally fascinating for all sorts of reasons, moral, emotional etc. I’m just reading Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, and, while I’ve never lived under a totalitarian regime, the complex interplay of rebellion and submission (amongst so much else, of course) is totally believable, it captures, or seems to capture the most intimate and yet most fleeting thoughts and feelings.
But religion turns out to be the surd here. It tells stories alright, and, to a certain degree, we may see the stories as reflecting, in the way that novels do, a range of possibilities for understanding human life and our own lives. But as religious texts they have to go beyond that, and that’s where the epistemic questions begin to come in, and they build up fast, if we’re really asking them; and we will find that the epistemic questions are not, cannot be, answered, even though people go on to answer them all the same.
And that is precisely why religion has to be left at the door of the laboratory, because, in fact, while fiction doesn’t interfere with scientific ways of knowing, religion undoubtedly will. At some point it will come up hard against the epistemic claims of religion, claims for which no epistemic grounds can be provided, and this in itself is enough, in some cases, to derail the scientific project.
Someone like Francis Collins may be able to keep CS Lewis and Watson in separate compartments, but a lot of people can’t do that, since religious claims are, epistemically, on all fours with scientific claims. They refer, in the same way that science does, to an objective world, somehow continuous with and integrated into the world to which scientific theories apply. And it is simply hopeless to think that this blending can possibly work. But the key here, I should have thought, is that we are speaking about one reality, and if that is so, then the way that one project fits in with another should be seamless, and there’s no way (so far as I know) that science and religion can be connected seamlessly in that way. And that’s why it is inappropriate to speak of ‘ways of knowing’, because just the language of ways of knowing, I think, implies that we are, in some way, dealing, not with separate realms of knowledge, but with separate worlds.
It’s also dangerous, by the way, to speak in these terms, for then we have people like the pope making claims to know things about human beings, and to prescribe certain kinds of actions with respect to them on the basis of this knowledge. When I doubt whether religion is about something, I’m not doubting that there is a world, but whether the world is like that
Axxyaan, if your question was aimed at me, then what I was thinking about was how often people with an agenda (not just religious folk, but there are prime examples among them) try to link what they believe (or wish) to be true (ie. something they have a *fixed* opinion about) to the idea of knowledge which is, I think, generally perceived as closely related to facts, which in turn implies immutability. Not to a scientist, of course, but in the minds of those who could be termed ‘lay people’. “We *know* xyz …” implies indisputability.
As a crude example, people of a particular persuasion when asked if they believe that people who give themselves to Jesus (whatever that means) will go to heaven, often reply that they don’t just “believe” it, they “know” it, as if that somehow makes it more definite, more factual, not open to discussion. The more intellectual variety of agenda-driven person seemingly tries to use the same trick to put their particular mumbo-jumbo on a sounder footing via the use of terms such as “ways of knowing”.
Although my original post was just the quick jotting of an ordinary bloke ‘off the top of his head’, I should have been more explicit and written with greater clarity. After all, that’s why I’m here reading Ophelia’s comments; because of their clarity! To put it in a nutshell, what I meant was the people who use the term “ways of knowing” are talking complete bollocks, either because they are deluding themselves or, more perniciously, attempting to hoodwink others.
There’s another way that fiction conveys information. For example, Madame Bovary could be a source of information about marriage and other customs in a small French town in the middle of the 19th century. It may be an accurate source; it may not be one. However, there’s nothing magical about taking Madame Bovary as a source of information; one could also take letters or diaries of the same period. That is, when we take a novel as a source of information, we apply exactly the same criteria as we do when we use any other source of information.
I think the second distinction that Axxyaan makes is the important one. Literature is not way to generate knowledge, but a way to transfer knowledge. The authors of a piece of literature intentionally put a certain message in their work, which could either be a literal message, or an allegorical one. Either way, the message clearly originates in the author, not in the book.
If the content of the message is to be considered knowledge, we should in some way be able to independently verify this content. At the very least, that means we must have access to the same sources of information that the authors had. Usually, we do.
Religion, however, often claims to have its own source of knowledge (nowadays mostly limited to moral knowledge): divine revelation. The knowledge obtained is then transferred through religious texts. The question, of course, is whether knowledge generated by religion is “knowledge” in the sense that we can independently verify it. In order to do this, we need to (1) establish that divine revelation exists, (2) that in principle anyone could have access to it, and (3) check if the results from divine revelation converge. None of these three have been established so far.
G, the only trouble is you definition of “faith”. My handy dandy pocket definiton of faith is ‘belief without evidence’, not without justification. Justification can be argumentative or inferential or what have you.
Eric, yes exactly, knowledge of separate worlds. It’s just that there’s only one real world, so I don’t think that this admission leads to negative consequences. And we’re led in this kind of direction because it’s harder to talk about moral truths otherwise, since moral truths are not facts about the real world. They’re truths about the moral world that are relevant to ours.
Granted, sure, I’d be the first to admit that that way of speaking feels too bloated and gassy. But that’s because I’m trying to phrase things in terms of the best current logic we seem to have (modal logic), which is still not very good at doing the job.
I mean, to get terribly nerdy, when talking about moral truths it isn’t even good enough to talk about different possible worlds. It would be more right to talk about different definitions of the possible (the morally possible, the logically possible, the empirically possible, etc.), which would be like saying moral truths occupy a different multiverse. Oi.
Still, I’m unaware of a logic that could deal with these kinds of questions, though I am open to suggestions and recommendations.
What you say, Benjamin, is almost exactly the reverse of what I wanted to say. I don’t think talking about different worlds is at all helpful here. That’s why religious language is so hopeless, because it does try to speak about this world, what it says has implications for this world, and yet it has no basis for anything that it says, least of all for its moral claims.
But morality does speak about this world, the very same world about which science speaks, but it speaks about it differently, about how it is appropriate for animals like us to act towards each other. This is not just talk of a possible world. This is the world we live in, the world in which animals like us have evolved, and have evolved the ability to think in terms of the good or harm that we can do to each other. There is no mystery about why such language should find some purchase in the world we live in.
The trouble with religion is that it wants to place this world in the context of an unseen and unsubstantiated world (even if it’s just a world of private mystical experiences a la Karen Armstrong), from which it wants to deduce consequences for us and our relationships. This is another sort of activity altogether, and that is a good reason why it should so often turn out to be morally disastrous in application. And of that we can speak with some assurance, because we can see the harm that it causes. This is a quite objective kind of evidential activity that is integrally related to what we do when we call things right or wrong, good or bad, just or unjust, and this whole project relates to this world, here and now.
I left the impression, and did not mean to, that morality has no bearing on the harm that we can do to other sentient beings. Of course it does, even though its primary locus lies in human relationships. As we have developed more and more moral sensitivity towards each other, we have at the same time developed moral sensitivity towards animals that can suffer as we do, and so moral language gets extended and refined. It is evolving too.
On the other hand, ‘God,’ taken as a moral being, is vastly more on the hook for animal suffering than we are. Enormously more on the hook.
What about it, God, you bastard?!
Well, whichever way you take him/her/it, any proposed God turns out to be a bastard. The point of Stephen Law’s tale, I believe, the God of Eth. That’s why the problem of suffering has become insoluble. The more sensitive we become, morally, the more outrageous any purported god must be. It’s not insignificant that most religious people (at least at an official level) live up to the reputation of their gods (name any god!).
Benjamin Nelson wrote: “My handy dandy pocket definiton of faith is ‘belief without evidence’, not without justification. Justification can be argumentative or inferential or what have you.”
Hmm. I think you need a new dictionary in your pocket, Benjamin, for two reasons: (1) Justification without evidence is not justification, it’s a shoddy impersonation of justification. Any argument or inference or what have you that doesn’t connect to evidence in any way has a marked tendency to result in codswollop. (2) While many people produce various “arguments” for their faith beliefs – that’s what apologetics is all about, after all – they start with the conclusion and work backwards, which is not a legitimate form of argumentation or inference. If apologists even nod towards the idea of evidence, they get it wrong by smuggling the conclusion in as evidence. For example, when the justification for taking a holy text as “evidence” is that it is divinely inspired, it makes rather poor evidence for the existence of the divine: “Let X=X, therefore X,” may be a logically valid argument, but it’s a bit tough to evaluate its soundness when the only evidence on offer is the conclusion that stands in need of justification…
Benjamin, you say:
In what way are religious and moral claims alike? Religious claims pertain to something for which there is reasonably thought to be no evidence at all, unless you can think of something fast. Moral claims are about the relationships of sentient beings. Put religion and its claims out of the equation, because, in general, it is religious conviction which puts our moral compasses out of kilter, and we can get a fair degree of agreement about the desirability or not of causing harm – the invariance you were looking for.
There may be room for disagreement here, but existing disagreements are skewed largely because of religious beliefs regarding what a god or gods wants or requires. Take that away, ask people what they think they would prefer as a matter of human relationships, and we probably could come up with a fair degree of consensus. Weed out the Thrasymachuses – we’re not going to convince the powerful that they shouldn’t use their power, so we have to gang up a bit to moderate it – it’s called democracy – and, voilà! a fairly stable working model of morality.
And even if you think that’s a bit blasé – and it is – the point that I’m trying to make is that religion and morality simply aren’t in the same league at all. Religion makes claims about another world, and applies those claims in this one. Morality is about this world right from the start, and about how we should act towards each other and towards creatures that are capable of suffering. You know that already. And if you don’t know it, you’ll either be shamed into conformity, or locked up. Of course, that may not convince you to act morally when no one’s looking, but, in any event, logic won’t help.
G, nobody owns the words, but your usage of “faith” is idiosyncratic if it is meant to be definitional.
I was mildly surprised by your recent pronouncement since you had previously said: “faith will still stand in direct opposition to the part of the process where one weighs evidence and evaluates arguments and otherwise engages in justificatory activity.” I read that as if you were giving a list of justificatory activities, with evidence and arguments being two examples on the list. So by analogy I might say, “I like eating apples and oranges and otherwise delicious fruits” — which doesn’t imply that I need to be eating them all at once to enjoy them, and especially doesn’t imply that I have to enjoy eating apples in order to enjoy eating oranges. But evidently as far as the analogy goes you’re insisting that I must have my mouth full of fruit.
About evidence, I would make a distinction between justification (as in giving reasons for belief) and optimal justification (as in vindication of the belief). I would agree that evidence or proof is essential to optimal justification. But I don’t agree that it’s essential to justification. Whether we agree or not would depend on whether or not you accept that distinction, and how you would go about treating it. I like your “connectedness” idea: our arguments eventually ought to have some demonstrable relevance to evidence. But just what that connectedness or relevance looks like cannot always be anticipated in advance. Ask any theoretical physicist. Science is hard.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that we need to hold our breath and expect that appeals to divine revelation might one day be vindicated. Not bloody likely. But that’s because we have a track record of bad, silly arguments that go along that way and have been defeated, not because all increases in intelligibility are distinct from justificatory activities.
Eric, if they’re similar, then it’s in the way I wrote before. But you reject that crypto-modal stuff, so it won’t be convincing. I myself don’t like it much, though I don’t find it threatening either, since it’s just a way of speaking. Still, I want to agree with you, and I think you put it nicely. I guess my trouble is in trying to capture in logic the insight that moral truth is radically different from natural truth (since you can’t infer ‘ought’ from ‘is’ in some principled way), despite the fact that they’re both truths in the real world.
Though maybe there is a principled way of bridging the gap. Utilitarianism gives one. But I’ve gotten less and less optimistic that it can succeed in giving us the right answers when employed in a deadpan and bloodless Benthamite way. I quite like Mill — but his kind of utilitarianism has enough wiggle room that the is-ought gap is still very much there, since a lot of leeway is left to his “competent judges”, who decide which pleasures are better than others but may not agree. Shrug.
I think “giving reasons for belief” is far too fast and loose to qualify as justification: “Justification” must be more than that, although there’s still a lot of ground between the ‘more’ I require and complete vindication. At the very least, anything that would count as a justificatory reason to believe rather than an idiosyncratic/ purely personal reason to believe must be something public rather than private – a reason for anyone or everyone, not merely a subjective impression, personal opinion, or anything else taking place solely within the confines of a single person’s cranium, a reason-for-me. Something like the latter might count as a “reason” for one personally to believe something (if one is not much inclined to critical thinking), but I don’t think we ought to call such a reason justificatory – at least, not if we’re still talking about justifying belief in such a way that one can plausibly claim to know something, or at least be on the path to knowing something.
The quite reasonable and minimal requirement that justification must depend on publicly available reasons to believe a claim – that justification cannot wholly depend on purely private, entirely subjective reasons/motivations to believe a claim – is as far as I can see indistinguishable from saying that justification requires evidence: All ‘evidence’ amounts to is some publicly available reason to believe something else. To claim that a belief can be justified without reference to any publicly available evidence is to fall into the private language game, everyone-lives-in-their-own-little-world trap that makes a hash of epistemology and logic and justification and knowledge and everything else involved in making sense of the world (not, you’ll note, “make sense of the worlds“).
So if evidence is required for justification – as I believe it is – and faith is belief in the absence of evidence (and sometimes even in the presence of ample evidence to the contrary), then faith is quite clearly and directly opposed to justification. And I don’t see what’s at all idiosyncratic in that view. Rather, I suspect that any view to the contrary is rather idiosyncratic and falls well out of mainstream thinking in epistemology. I mean, justification doesn’t depend on evidence? Really? Who thinks that? Besides theologians, I mean.
Oh, and the ‘liking fruit’ analogy leaves out the important bit about justification being part of the coming-to-know process, i.e. “faith will stand in direct opposition to the part of the process where one weighs evidence and evaluates arguments and otherwise engages in justificatory activity.” Actually, I do take weighing evidence and evaluating arguments together to be the distinguishing and required activities of justification – and I thought that was a view shared fairly broadly – but I didn’t want to give the impression that they are necessarily exhaustive: I included the “otherwise…” clause to acknowledge that there may well be other components to justification besides the essential activities noted. After all, these threads have included various lines of conversation about clarifying conceptual understanding and other creating narratives and other stuff that plausibly contribute to the process of coming to know, and depending on how one looks at it some of those things might be folded in with justification, or might be separated out as another part of coming to know.
Sometimes allowing for different ways of looking at things just leaves more openings for misunderstanding.
*shrug*
I think that “X is morally wrong” really comes down to “there are good reasons, given the values, etc., that we actually share, why you and I would both want to support a moral norm of discouraging X across the range of human societies that we have in mind”.
Such a claim can be true or false, and it is possible to reason about it, get evidence, etc. It shows why moral reasoning is so complex, yet not hopelessly so. It also captures what is attractive about moral relativism, while excluding what is so silly about it.
But it does make reference to the values of actual people, so it involves a “subjective element” in that sense. It can also be quite pluralistic about what values we have and which ones we actually share. Since it’s completely naturalistic – no spooky objective moral truths are involved – I call my position “naturalistic moral pluralism”.
I can’t see any prospect of a totally “objective” morality, according to which psychopaths and the like can be just mistaken, as we all can be about empirical matters.
Thank you Russell. This is along what I would like to say, though much more elegantly put that I would have put it. There is, though, a sense in which psychopaths can be mistaken, and know that they are. In general, psychopaths and sociopaths do recognise shared values, though they do seem to be able to act contrary to shared values without compunction. There is a disconnect between, ‘This is a virtue’, or ‘I should do X’, and what Hume might have called the ‘springs of action’ which lead to the doing of X. I do not know a lot about abnormal psychology, but I think this is correct.
G, I think we’re converging in one sense. You’re now emphasizing the syllogistic connection between justification and evidence, instead of stipulating that faith is without justification as if by fiat.
I am not sure that we have different views about what makes for public reasons. I don’t think evidence exhausts what can be publicly assessed in rational argument. I think quite a lot can be fruitfully debated in the public arena, so long as the conversants have appropriate sorts of philosophical virtues. Empirical evidence need not be present to justify a claim, just argument.
Still, I think you’d agree that we do have reason to suspect that without prospects for finding some kind of relevant evidence in the future, we will never vindicate the claim, and so our present reasons have no justificatory force. Our present arguments have to be presumed to have the promise of future vindication, in other words, in order for them to count as justifiers. When we create interesting analogies for complex systems (say, the ‘planetary orbit’ analogy to describe the behavior of atoms), we are training the mind to pay attention to relevant aspects of some claim, and this is quite good at getting us to latch on to evidence to prove the theory. I just happen to say that in doing so, it qualifies as a justifier.
You argue that all justifiers must be cases of evidence. I say it’s good enough that we have reason to believe it is on such a path for it to be a justifier. I say this because I think theoretical sciences and nascent sciences are still sciences, and are nevertheless distinct from religion. But I don’t think there’s any threat, in my account, of letting religion in, because I don’t have grounds to presume any future vindication there. If other people do think religion has such prospects, then they’re just wrong. Or at least they need to give me grounding that is in some way forward-looking, and not some useless navel-gazing platitudes about methodological/philosophical naturalism or logical possibility.
Benjamin, I think you’re right that we’re converging more than diverging, but one of us keeps confusing the issues and I’m fairly convinced it’s you. You have a different opinion, no doubt. ;-)
I think that the main confusion springs from your tendency to read my very generalized discussion of epistemology as if it were springing from some sort of rigid empiricism. All I said about evidence was that it needed (1) to be publicly available, which rules out revelation and such, and (2) to serve as a reason for believing something else, which rules out circularity. That’s pretty minimal, I think – but you seem to keep reading rather a lot into it.
For example, I keep talking about the process of justification – and I think the word “process” indicates as clearly as anything that I am not making strong commitments to complete and full evidence when I say that evidence is required for justification. Yet your responses keep drawing a distinction between what has not yet been – but might someday be – justified and what is already justified, a distinction that is surely implicit in my consistent references to justification a process. In this context, your claim that theoretical or nascent sciences are nevertheless sciences seems especially odd on two counts: Firstly, what did I say that in any way indicated otherwise? Secondly, even the most theoretical or nascent science still involves an attempt to account for and be consistent with our observations of the world, doesn’t it? Those observations are publicly available evidence, however tentative or anecdotal or in need of refinement they may be. Evidence is a part of justification whether or not the evidence is sufficient or the justification is complete. (I’m not even sure what “complete” justification might mean: I’m a fallibilist, remember.)
I deliberately left the notion of evidence loose, but even so I still think it’s plenty tight enough to say that justification requires evidence or it’s not justification – and that faith is therefore opposed to justification. Consider the various attempts offered by apologists to justify their faith beliefs, such as Alister McGrath’s A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest For God In Science And Theology. Such efforts rely on evidence and argument, and therefore are attempts at justification – or at least attempts to imitate justification. However, they are BAD attempts justification – bad not solely for their failure to in any way justify what they claim to justify, but for their failure to engage in the process of justification honestly or correctly in the first place: Such arguments consist in rationalizations for predetermined conclusions rather than actual reasoning which follows the evidence, and the evidence is blatantly cherry-picked to suit the rationalizations (instead of all evidence relevant to the conclusion at issue being taken into account in the argument). What do these failures stem from? The faith conviction that predetermines the conclusion without regard to evidence, in advance of any attempt at justification.
Thus, the problem with “arguments” for articles of faith is NOT simply that there is no evidence now and none forthcoming, but otherwise the arguments are genuinely engaged in a process that is properly seen as justificatory: Rather, they are not engaged in genuine justification in the first place because faith eschews evidence, which forecloses the possibility of justification in advance.
G, if that’s your sense of evidence, then we agree, and your way of stating things protects the same activities I want to protect (the theoretical and nascent sciences) while rejecting the things that need to be rejected (apologetics).
In your view, faith is belief without evidence, and to provide evidence is at minimum to give public reasons.
I don’t see what unique work the word “evidence” is doing in your account except underwriting justificatory activity, i.e., by giving a very minimal set of standards to which a process of justification itself must adhere. In which case your claim that the process of justification requires evidence is trivially true. Why not just say (1) and (2) are inherent parts of the process of justification and leave out the middleman which we’re calling “evidence”? My way of talking about the empirical is by talking about “evidence”, which I think at least has the virtue of making it completely clear where the empirical fits into the process.
Either I don’t agree with your final paragraph, or it doesn’t agree with me, depending on the meaning of “evidence”. If we’re going by my sense of evidence, then the “no empirical evidence forthcoming” provision suffices to describe the problem of faith. If we’re going by your sense of evidence, then I must admit being troubled. In your lexicon, faith is belief without trading public reasons, and that’s not justification on pain of contradiction — fine. But a conclusion held by faith is different from justification of that conclusion. The faitheist, or “believer in belief”, can justify their conclusion without resorting to faith in your sense. So they can go about this justification business. But then we have no warrant for any deep complaints when their acts of faith follow their sporting attempts at justification. This way of doing things seems like a Maginot Line, it doesn’t have the exciting benefits that might have seemed appealing.
As an aside, I think that arguing with a pre-arranged conclusion in mind really can be a case of justificatory activity if it turns out that the argument is, as a matter of fact, a real hum-dinger. (As it turns out, it probably won’t be, sure — but it’s not impossible. Sometimes, with a bit of creativity, you can get lucky.) Rather, what’s more important in examining the authenticity of the process of justification are the intellectual virtues of the arguer(s), i.e., such that they are reasons-, welfare-, and evidence-responsive. Arguing to a conclusion is not an intellectual crime. (Well, I suppose that it’s a kind of intellectual mischief — but it’s not a felony.) The real crime is of encouraging people to adopt dogmatic habits in debates. That’s how faith corrodes the process of justification, and gives us less reason to think that empirical vindication is coming down the pike. As a consequence, I am willing to say that a dubious argument that is clearly formulated and at least seems to have empirical prospects somewhere down the road is more justified than faith alone. I am not sure whether or not that would include McGrath (I haven’t read that work, and don’t generally have a lot of time for apologetics). But it might. So this may be a place where we might diverge?
But people *do* go about trying to justify faith (believing things without evidence) as a legitimate epistemology without themselves having faith: Joshua Roseneau doing exactly that has been the occasion for this conversation. We might call such efforts “second order faith arguments,” wherein the arguer is not (1) simply choosing to believe certain things (such as the existence of God) without evidence, and is not (2) simply making bogus rationalizations in support of beliefs already adopted without evidence/justification, but rather (3) is presenting a case that engaging in the first or second activity is for some reasons or other a legitimate way of arriving at beliefs, or even knowledge – the faitheist maneuver, if you will. I will grant for the sake of argument that the third activity (the faitheist maneuver) isn’t just a slight variation on the second activity (apologetics) – although frankly it sometimes looks like it no matter how often the arguer claims not to be a person of faith him- or herself. But so what? Do I lose anything by acknowledging that such faitheists are indeed making a genuine attempt to provide evidence and reasoning in support their position? Not at all! After all, if they are genuinely engaged in an attempt to justify, then I can address the substance of their justifications – and their justifications range from merely awful to genuinely ludicrous. Just because I cannot complain that they aren’t engaging in justification doesn’t mean I can’t complain that their justifications are awful, and show exactly why. So I’m afraid that I don’t understand your point – or rather, I’m afraid you’ve missed my point.
My purpose here (stated in various ways from the start of this conversation, here and in the prior thread) has been to keep attention focused on the fact that faith is by nature an anti-epistemology – a guaranteed method of insuring that one does not and can never know the truth about the matter under consideration, rather than a method for acquiring knowledge. Whether we call them merely “accommodationists” or “believers in belief” or “faitheists” or whatever, people who present the sorts of silly “many ways of knowing” guff that Roseneau does are in fact attempting to justify a claim or set of claims about the nature of faith and its relation to science (and, I would say, faith’s relation to reason/critical thinking more broadly than science). In other words, they are making an argument – and there are two basic ways to attack any argument (which I feel I’m being pedantic in explaining, but you seem not to get what I’m up to, so…). One can attack the evidence and reasoning offered in support of the claim under consideration, a task on which OB and others have been doing a fine job. One can also offer a direct argument in support of a conclusion directly opposed to the claim under consideration. That’s what I’ve been focusing on – and that’s what you seem to be persistently misunderstanding.
I’m not arguing that faitheism – which is ultimately an argument about epistemology – is itself what I’ve called an “anti-epistemology.” I don’t think it is. Rather, I think the faitheist understanding of faith and its compatibility with legitimate epistemology is simply not supportable – or at least, it isn’t supported by any of the arguments offered in its favor that I’ve seen. Also, there are good arguments against faitheism – and I think the best argument against it is that any careful attention to what faith is and how faith works reveals that faith IS an anti-epistemology.
I don’t think we disagree about most of this, really – I just think you’ve been offering me feedback and refinements for some project that I’m not actually engaged in and have missed what I’m actually up to, so we keep talking past one another.
Thanks each of you for an interesting and educational comment thread. If I grow up I would like to study epistemologogy too.
G, just to be explicit, the position you take against (1) is a very strong case, falling far outside of the domain of the justifiable. (Let’s refer to 1, 2, and 3 together as ‘The Kindly Ones’.) Your position is a style of objection to the Kindly Ones that is much stronger than anything I have said in my account, and if it turned out that such a strong account had some fringe benefits that mine didn’t — i.e., if it applied to more than just (1) — then it would be a reason to prefer yours to mine. So for instance, if it were to turn out that promising argumentation through analogy were at the same level as (1), then it would be a worry for me. But while your account first seemed like a powerful argument, it has turned out to not be so comparatively powerful after all, which is what I meant when I referred to it as a “Maginot Line”. It has the same power as mine.
This isn’t so much my concern, though. As far as the initial point that I set out to make, it would appear we’re in agreement: argumentation (use of public reasons) can be a form of evidence, and hence a justifier. And as for the point you emphasize, there is no disagreement or misunderstanding when it comes to its purest form, since I fully agree that (1) is not a justifier when it stands alone. But we have different reasons for coming to that conclusion. For you, it’s because it isn’t a public reason. For me, it’s because it has no promise of empirical vindication. But when I say, “the claim has promise of vindication one day”, this promise is not itself a public reason, since it deals with future events (or non-events) that nobody can yet see. Nevertheless it still seems like a justifier. FWIW, that’s one other reason why I don’t accept the formulation of “evidence” that you endorse.
While we don’t disagree on the core item of concern, (1), the ways we disagree might be illustrated in the borderline cases. For example, it isn’t clear what the status of (2) is in our respective accounts — you seem to want to say that (2) are not (or tend not to be) justifiers due to infelicities of reasoning, while I want to appeal to intellectual virtues and the promise of future evidence. The outcomes of this would be non-trivial, neither irrelevant hairsplitting nor merely pedantic — apologists may be like the mouth-breathers, or they may be like the faitheists, or both, or neither. But it might be better to leave those issues for another time, since I’m satisfied that despite our merely verbal disagreements along the way, at least on the points that we both set out to make there is no actual disagreement.
I am autistic, and would not have it any other way.
As for fiction/literature and my clearly retarded “theory of mind”, it is this that makes (for me) say: Homer’s Odyssey so compelling: I cannot for the life of me predict how even a grossly stylised character might react to their formulaic social situation.
When it is revealed in its subtlety, I marvel, and am spellbound.
That’s really interesting, Michael.
I once got in a big argument (big but friendly) at a book group about not having it any other way. We’d read Oliver Sacks’s Anthropologist on Mars and part of it was about someone who was autistic and wouldn’t have it any other way. (Was it Temple Grandin? Not sure. He wrote about her, but I’m not sure it was in that book.) One grouper kept saying that the person in question didn’t know what she was missing and that she was missing good stuff – and I kept saying maybe so but she gets different stuff and she doesn’t want that other good stuff and she’s not wrong not to want it. We kept going yes she is no she isn’t for a long time. I tried to convince her (the grouper) that there’s more than one way to be and that realizing that is itself enriching – but she wouldn’t be convinced.
Grandin wouldn’t have it any other way. It gives her insights and skills that she wouldn’t have otherwise.