Maverick Philosopher

These speculations of Professor Shanon raise some interesting questions. I take Shanon to be saying that Moses on Sinai (i) really did have an unusual experience, and that therefore there is nothing legendary about the report in Exodus of this experience, but that (ii) this experience was not supernaturally caused, but caused by Moses' ingestion of a psychotropic drug. Thus God did not reveal the Torah to Moses on Sinai; Moses had a drug-induced nonveridical experience of God revealing the Torah to him, or, to be maximally punctilious, a nonveridical experience as of God revealing the Torah to him.

One question concerns the validity of the inference from

1. Subject S under the influence of drug D experiences that p

to

2. S's experience that p is nonveridical.

Surely this is a non sequitur. Right now, under the influence of caffeine, I note that my coffee cup is empty. This is consistent with the perceptual experience of the cup's being empty being veridical, which it is. So from the mere fact that a subject is 'on drugs,' it does not follow that that any of the subject's experiences are nonveridical. Now caffeine is a very mild drug. But suppose I was I was on a combination of caffeine, nicotine, marijuana, and methampehtamine. Even then one could not infer that the perception in question was nonveridical. Even on a dose of LSD-25 most of one's perceptual experiences remain veridical. In the case of Moses, from the fact, if it is a fact, that he was under the influence of a psychotropic drug while on Sinai, it does not follow that his experience of being addressed by God and being given the Decalogue was nonveridical.

Of course, if you begin by assuming that there is no God, then it is plausible to explain the Sinai experience by saying that it was drug-induced. But that simply begs the question against the theist. The crucial point is that a subject's being on drugs is logically consistent with the veridicality of his experiences; therefore, one cannot infer from the fact, if it is a fact, that Moses was under the influence of a psychedelic or psychotropic drug that his experince was nonveridical.

So even if Shanon could prove that Moses and the people around him were under the influence of powerful drugs, that would not support his contention that nothing supernatural occurred on Sinai. It would not because it is consistent with theism. How does Shanon know that the drugs Moses supposedly took did not open "the doors of perception" (in Aldous Huxley's phrase) allowing him access to the transcendent, as opposed to shutting him up among figments of his own imagination?

There is a second question whose full discussion should be reserved for a subsequent post. It is clear that mathematical and other truths can be grasped whether one is awake or dreaming, sober or drunk, on drugs or not. If a valid proof occurs to a mathematician in a dream, it is no less valid because the mathematician is dreaming. Why should not the same hold for moral truths? If it is true that it is morally obligatory not to kill human beings, then the experiencing of this truth is veridical whether or not the subject is awake or sleeping, sober or drunk, on drugs or not. So even if it could be proven that Moses was under the influence of powerful drugs on Sinai, what relevance would that have? At the very most it might cast doubt on the veridicality of Moses' perception of God, but not on the veridicality of his experiencing of the content of the Decalogue. If it is true that one ought not kill, then it is true whether or not God exists. And if it is true that one ought not kill, then one's intuiting that it is true is veridical whether one is awake of dreaming, sober or drunk, on drugs or not, or a brain in a vat as opposed to a brain in a skull.

On a standard analysis of 'knows,' where propositional knowledge is at issue, subject S knows that p just in case (i) S believes that p; (ii) S is justified in believing that p; and (iii) p is true. This piece of epistemological boilerplate is the starting-point for much of the arcana (Gettier counterexamples, etc.) of contemporary epistemology. But its pedigree is ancient, to be found in Plato's Theaetetus.

It is obvious that on the standard analysis mere belief is inferior to knowledge since if I believe what is false I don't have knowledge, and if I believe what is true without justification I don't have knowledge either. How then can mere belief be a form or type of knowledge? It is rather a necessary but not sufficient condition of knowledge. Or so it seems to the modern mind.

Another puzzle has to do with certainty. Whether or not knowledge entails certainty, it seems to the modern mind that belief definitely does not entail certainty: what I believe but do not know I cannot be certain about since if I believe but do not know, then either truth is lacking or justification is lacking or both. How then can mere belief be said to be certain? And yet we read in Aquinas that "It is part of the concept of belief itself that man is certain of that in which he believes." (Quoted from Pieper, Belief and Faith, p. 15).

Is easy to understand how one who believes but does not know that p can be subjectively certain that p; but it is difficult to understand how such a person can be objectively certain that p. Objective certainty, however, alone has epistemic value.

We now turn to the remarkable 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. 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, 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 made above between subjective and objective 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?

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 conseuqences therefrom. Constructing a philosophy on faith belongs to the theoretical consequences. (20-22)

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. 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 problem as clearly as I can. Anyone who thinks this problem has an easy solution does not understand it.

And so it ought to come as no surprise that skepticism can aid the cause of fideism, which in turn grants carte blanche to dogmatism and fanaticism. Skeptical reason, having proven its own powerlessness, is powerless to prevent nonrational fixation of belief. In other words, why, if reason is impotent, accept (A) over (B)?

A: Because reason is impotent to fix belief, and the arguments for any given position are not compelling, one must respect and tolerate competing positions.

B: Because reason is impotent to fix belief, and the arguments for any given position are not compelling, one must simply believe and obey and oppose the infidels who refuse to believe and obey.

Simply put, my point is that skepticism can lead to intolerance as easily as it can lead to tolerance.

On a draconian understanding of sufficient evidence, sufficient evidence for a proposition p is a distinct proposition q (perhaps conjunctive)such that q entails p, where q entails p if and only if there is no possible world in which q is true and p is false. (Entailment is thus the necessitation of material implication.) Correspondingly, insufficient evidence for a proposition p is a proposition q such that q does not entail p. I take it that this is not what is meant by sufficient and insufficient evidence in discussions of the ethics of belief.

On a liberal understanding of sufficient evidence, sufficient evidence for a proposition p is evidence that is enough to tip the balance in favor of p when p is compared to its negation ~p. For example, Capital punishment deters crime versus Capital punishment does not deter crime. Suppose the evidence for each member of this contradictory pair is equal. Then, on the liberal understanding, one who believes either proposition believes on insufficient evidence. For he believes on the basis of evidence that does not suffice to make one member of the pair of contradictories more credible than the other.

An ethics of belief premised on Cliffordian evidentialism would then require that one suspend judgment, i.e., take no position on the question whether capital punishment is an effective deterrent. For if one assiduously apportions belief to evidence, then in a case where the evidence is equal on both sides of the issue, the apportioning would not result in affirming one side over the other.

Question One: Is that (the liberal understanding) what we ought to mean by 'insufficient evidence' in discussions of the ethics of belief?

Question Two: If that is what we mean, ought we accept Clifford's view that it is wrong to believe on insufficient evidence, and that in ebvery such case we ought to suspend belief?

Phil Philologos commented:

The concept of “insufficient evidence,” if I’m not mistaken, is a borrowing from legal theory. For an offense to be regarded as proven, statutory law lays down a set of material elements that be must be proven by the plaintiff or prosecution, proven either beyond a reasonable doubt or by a preponderance of the evidence, depending upon the nature of the offence. There is also a legal standard of evidence for bringing an indictment. Something like, does the evidence taken as a whole cause a reasonable person to believe an offence may have been committed? A finding of “insufficient evidence” in the latter case mandates no indictment, in the former case, acquittal of the charges.

The first point is, a finding of insufficient evidence in the criminal law does not lead to any suspension of belief, but to a directed verdict of no charge or acquittal, the burden of proof not having been met.

The second and more relevant point for the “evidential thesis” is that we lack a sense of what it means to say “it is wrong to believe anything on insufficient evidence” where no Rules of Evidence lay down what is a standard of proof, and who has the burden of proof, and what material elements must be proven. For this reason “There is insufficient evidence to believe in God’s existence” strikes me utter nonsense.

Phil's first point seems clearly correct. But the ethics of belief is not like the positive law. The latter is posited and determinate. But the ethics of belief is little more than a philosophical project that some of us would like to achieve and others of us will reject as absurd (perhaps because it presupposes the truth of limited doxastic voluntarism which they reject). What we ought to mean in the ethics of belief by 'insufficient evidence' need have little to do with what the positive law, civil or criminal, means by it. The purposes are different, after all.

As for Phil's second point, I agree that it doesn't mean much of anything to say 'There is insufficient evidence to believe in God's existence' unless 'insufficient evidence' is explained and probative standards laid down. But these are for philosophers to work out and cannot be modelled on the positive law.

As I understand it, in the criminal law, the probative standard for guilt is 'beyond a reasonable doubt,' while in civil cases the standard is less demanding: 'preponderance of the evidence.' Now in terms of the ethics of belief it is permissible for me to believe that a man is a murderer if the preponderance of the evidence points in that direction; but if I were a juror in his trial, then it would not be permissible for me to pronounce him guilty merely on the preponderance of evidence.

In Giving Dualism Its Due, we read:

Being a philosopher, of course I would like to think that my [materialist]stance is rational, held not just instinctively and scientistically and in the mainstream but because the arguments do indeed favor materialism over dualism. But I do not think that, though I used to. My position may be rational, broadly speaking, but not because the arguments favor it: Though the arguments for dualism do (indeed) fail, so do the arguments for materialism. And the standard objections to dualism are not very convincing; if one really manages to be a dualist in the first place, one should not be much impressed by them. My purpose in this paper is to hold my own feet to the fire and admit that I do not proportion my belief to the evidence.

In sum:

1. The arguments for dualism and the arguments for materialism both fail.
2. The standard objections to dualism are not very convincing.
3. It is rational to be a materialist.

In my opinion (1)-(3) is a consistent triad. If so, what does 'rational' mean? It cannot have the Cliffordian meaning according to which one apportions one's belief to the evidence. For that would require suspension of belief on the issues that divide dualists and materialists given the truth of (1) and (2). But Lycan does not suspend belief; he remains a committed materialist. He believes beyond the evidence in that he believes on insufficient evidence. The evidence is insufficient because it is counterbalanced by the evidence for the position he disbelieves. However we define 'insufficient evidence,' it seems clear that if the evidence for p and the evidence for ~p are equal, then the evidence for either is insufficient.

Lycan's is an interesting case because it doesn't display all of the Jamesian marks. The issue is live for Lycan and for the people here present, but is it forced and momentous? An issue is forced in the sense of William James if it is such that one's remaining theoretically agnostic about it is tantamount to deciding it in a particular way. James gives the example of a man who hesitates to get married. "It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married someone else?" (Will to Believe, p. 26) The man who refuses to commit himself to marriage commits himself to bachelorhood nolens volens.

But surely dualism versus materialism is not a forced option in the Jamesian sense. For one thing, one might reject both in the manner of the idealist. The positions are not logical contradictories of each other but logical contraries: they can't both be true, but they can both be false. Second, it is not the case that a suspension of judgment is tantamount to an opting for one side. If you take no position on dualism versus materialism, how does that commit you to one side or the other? On the God question, if one takes no position on whether or not God exists, then it it strongly arguable that one is a practical atheist: the agnostic lives as if God does not exist. And similarly for the immortality of the soul: to take no position is to live as if the soul is mortal. Or at least this is plausibly arguable. But the dualist need not be a substance dualist, and if he is not a substance dualist, then it is very difficult to see how the dualism versus materialism option is forced. And even if the dualist is a substance dualist, one might be a substance dualist without being committed to the immortality of the soul or mind.

A momentous option is one in which "We are supposed to gain, even now, by our belief, and lose by our nonbelief a certain vital good." (WB, 26) But I think it would be a stretch to think that the rather technical and abstruse issues that divide materialists and dualists are momentous in James' sense.

All this notwithstanding, the Lycan quotation above illustrates how rationality needn't require apportioning one's belief to the evidence. Or will you argue that Lycan is irrational in remaining a materialist despite his newfound insight that the arguments for it are not compelling?

Let's consider an example simpler than the one I gave yesterday. (This simplification may allow me to sidestep Phil's objection.) A man is dying of thirst in a desert. He knows that some of the water sources in the vicinity are lethally poisonous and some are potable, but he doesn't know which are which. He comes upon a water source, but the evidence available to him is insufficient to make This source is potable more credible than This source is poisonous. Assume that both of these propositions are equally credible, equally worthy of belief, given the scant evidence at the man's disposal, his weak state, his inability to perform tests, etc.

What is the rational course of action for this man dying of thirst? Clearly, to drink is rational and not to drink is irrational. For if he does not drink, the probability of his dying is 1, whereas if he drinks the probability of his dying is <1. In plain English, if our man does not drink, he will certainly die; but if he drinks there is some chance that he will survive. It is therefore irrational for him not to drink since it is irrational for a man who wants to live to refuse to perform a simple action that has a chance of saving his life.

So far I have been addressing the rationality of action, but what about the rationality of belief? The thesis that the man acts rationally by drinking I take to have been established by the example. But it it a less obvious thesis that I am concerned to defend, namely, that there are cases in which one believes rationally even if one's believing goes beyond the evidence. In terms of our example, what I want to say is that the man dying of thirst believes rationally in believing that the water source he has come upon is potable even though the evidence at his disposal is insufficient to show that potability is more probable than the opposite.

One way to rebut this is by arguing that the man ought to suspend belief concerning the potability of the source but drink from it anyway. On this approach the man would be irrational in believing the source to be potable, but rational in drinking from it. Now imagine the following dialogue transpiring between the man (A) and a philosopher (B) who happens upon the scene:

A. I take no position on the question whether this water is potable but I will drink it anyway.

B. So you will drink the water for no reason? Is it not irrational to do something for no reason?

A. Not for no reason: I want to live and it is more likely that I will live if I drink than if I refrain from drinking.

B. So you believe that there is some nonnegative likelihood that the water is potable?

A. Yes.

B. But then you are not just acting, you are acting on a belief, a belief for which you have no sufficient evidence! For all you know, the water is poisonous! If you go by evidence alone, you are not justified in making any affirmation with respect to the water's potability. So if you suspend belief, then you cannot act rationally. For if you suspend belief with respect to the water's potability, then you refuse to affirm any of the following: The water is potable, The water is poisonous, The water is more likely to be potable than poisonous, etc. Therefore, if you just drink the water, then you act for no reason at all, which is to say: you act irrationally. But I thought you agreed that to drink the water is the rational thing to do. Therefore your acting must have a reason and that reason is your belief that the water is potable.

A. And what does that mean?

B. That means that your believing that the water is potable is as rational as your acting to drink the water, and this despite the fact that your believing goes beyond the evidence.

W. K. Clifford is famous for his evidentialist thesis that "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything on insufficient evidence." On this way of thinking, someone who fails to apportion belief to evidence violates the ethics of belief, and thereby does something morally wrong. Although Clifford had religious beliefs in his sights, his thesis, by its very wording, applies to every sort of belief, including political beliefs and the belief expressed in the Clifford sentence lately quoted!

Consider the case of a man dying of thirst in a desert. He comes upon two water sources. He knows (never mind how) that one is potable while the other is poisonous. But he does not know which is which, and he has no way of finding out. Should the man suspend belief, even unto death, since he has insufficient evidence for deciding between the two water sources?

On one way of looking at the matter, suspension of belief would clearly be the height of irrationality. The desert wanderer must simply drink from one of the sources and hope for the best. Clearly, by drinking from one (but not both) of the sources, his chances of survival are one half, while his chances of survival from drinking from neither are precisely zero. By making a leap of faith, he maximizes his chances of reality-contact, and thereby his chances of survival. Surely a man who wants to live is irrational if he fails to perform a simple action that will give him a 50-50 chance of living when the al;ternative is certain death.

Cases like this are clear counterexamples to theories of rationality according to which rationality requires always apportioning belief to evidence. In the above case the evidence is the same for either belief and yet it would be irrational to suspend belief. Therefore, rationality for a human agent (as opposed to rationality for a disembodied transcendental spectator) cannot require the apportioning of belief to evidence in all cases, as Clifford demands. There are situations in which one must decide what to believe. Will I believe that source A is potable? Or will I believe that source B is potable? In Jamesian terms, the option is live, forced, and momentous. (It is not like the question whether the number of ultimate particles in the universe is odd or even.) An adequate theory of rationality, it would seem, must allow for believing beyond the evidence. It must return the verdict that in some cases, to refuse to believe beyond the evidence is positively irrational.

Let us consider another such case. What evidence do I have that my new neighbors are 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 deinition 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. 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. 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 tnat 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.

Various objections and questions can be raised with respect to the foregoing. They will be explored in further posts.

1. For Hume, a belief is an idea to which we assent. Hume is thinking of occurrent beliefs, not latent or dispositional beliefs. To believe that God exists, for example, is to assent to the idea (concept) of God. Thus as I read Hume, believing is not a propositional attitude in Russell's sense: the believer in believing is not related to a proposition but to a non-propositional object, an idea. In every occurrent belief one must distinguish the act of believing from the content believed; but it is not obvious that this content must be a proposition.

In the case of singular existential beliefs or judgments (that God exists, that Vulcan does not exist, etc.) it is very tempting to say that the belief-content is a non-propositional object. For if the object of the existential belief were propositional, then it would have to have the subject-predicate logical form a exists when it is not at all clear that 'exists' is a first-level predicate or existence a first-level property. As Hume points out, employing one of his signature 'riffs,' "The idea of existence is nothing different from the idea of any object. . . ." (Selby-Bigge, 94) If I conceive of God as existent, I "in reality make no addition to or alteration on our first idea."

To conceive of X and to conceive of X as existent are the same: existence makes no addition to X's concept. This is an important point and seems wholly correct, and it doesn't matter what 'X' denotes. Consider the unique X so defined that X's existence is included in its concept. There is no incoherence in maintaining that this object does not exist. Or compare the golden mountain and the existent golden mountain. Neither exist. 'The existent golden mountain does not exist' is not a contradiction in the way 'The snow-covered golden mountain is not snow-covered' is a contradiction. And yet there is a huge difference between a golden mountain's existing and its not existing. One should conclude from this, not that there is 'no such thing' as existence, but that existence is not part of anything's concept. If you were to tell me that existence is part of the concept existent golden mountain, then I would reply that the existence that is includable in concepts is not the genuine article; it is not the existence we mean when we say that such-and-such exists. Nothing seems clearer than that existence, the genuine article! (stamp the foot, pound the table, release the safety) is not includable in anything's concept. Surely Hume and Kant and Brentano and Aquinas and Santayana and a host of others are right about this.

But if so, if, to put the point in an alternative way, existence is not a first-level property, then there is no atomic proposition God exists or atomic state of affairs God's existence, and to believe that God exists is not to stand in the belief relation to a proposition.

2. So what are we doing when we make existential judgments?

(A) When I think of God, think of him as existent, or believe him to be existent, "my idea of him neither encreases [sic] nor diminishes." (94) But (B) "there is a great difference betwixt the simple conception of the existence of an object, and the belief of it. . . ." And because (C) ". . . this difference lies not in the parts or the composition of the idea, which we conceive . . ." it follows that (D) ". . . it must lie in the manner, in which we conceive it." (Selby-Bigge 94-95)

To believe that Peter exists is not to believe that Peter has a certain property, the property of existence: there is no such property. With a sidelong glance in the direction of Brentano we might say that to believe that Peter exists is to accept Peter, and to believe that he does not exist is to reject Peter. Positive belief (acceptance) and negative belief (rejection) are mental acts external to the belief-content. The belief-content is non-propositional. Brentano thinks that this is the case for all contents including those that are not obviously existential. For Brentano, to believe that Peter is sick is to accept sick-Peter, and to believe that Peter is not sich is to reject sick-Peter. The object or accusative of the act of believing is structured, but not propositionally: the accusative is sick-Peter, not Peter is sick.

This is not quite what Hume means, but I would say that Hume in on the way to the Brentano view in that Hume holds that the contents of belief (in some cases at any rate) are non-propositional. Unlike Brentano, Hume does not see judging as a category of act distinct from conceiving, but as a conceiving with increased "force and vivacity":

So that as belief does nothing but vary the manner, in which we conceive any object, it can only bestow on our ideas an additional force and vivacity. An opinion, therefore, or a belief may be most accurately defin'd, A LIVELY IDEA RELATED TO OR ASSOCIATED WITH A PRESENT IMPRESSION." (Selby-Bigge, p. 96, emphasis in original)

There is much that is murky here. For example, how can a belief in God be a lively idea related to an impression when there is no impression of God?

Thus it is quite natural to suppose that such deontological predicates as 'permissible,' impermissible,' and 'obligatory' are legitimately applied to acts of belief. (An act is an occurrent mental state.)

But such predicates are applicable only if beliefs and cognate attitudes are under voluntary control. The point could be put as follows: Epistemic deontology is a viable project only if doxastic involuntarism is false.

I am coming to the view that doxastic involuntarism is false (thereby joining the excellent company of Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes and other great philosophers) and that at least some beliefs are under voluntary control. But of course the logically prior question is: What is belief? Whether belief is under voluntary control depends on what belief is.

One cannot understand belief except in relation to other mental states. So let's consider how believing and knowing are related. They are obviously different, and yet they share a common element. Suppose we say that what is common to S's knowing that p and S's believing that p is S's acceptance of p. I cannot (occurrently) believe that Oswald acted alone unless I accept the proposition that Oswald acted alone, and I cannot (occurrently) know that he acted alone with accepting the very same proposition. To accept, of course, is to accept-as-true. It is equally obvious that what is accepted-as-true might not be true. Those who accept that the earth is flat accept-as-true what is false. Now one could analyze 'S knows that p' as follows:

a) S unconditionally accepts-as-true p
b) p is true
c) S is justified in accepting-as-true p.

This is modelled on, but diverges from, the standard justified-true-belief (JTB) analysis of 'know' the locus classicus of which is Plato's Theaetetus.

And one could perhaps analyze 'S believes that p' as follows:

a) S unconditionally accepts-as-true p
d) S does not know that p.

These analyses accommodate the fact that there is something common to believing and knowing, but without identifying this common factor as belief. The common factor is acceptance. A reason for not identifying the common element as belief is that, in ordinary language, knowledge excludes belief. Thus if I ask you whether you believe that p, you might respond, 'I don't believe it, I know it!' Do I believe the sun is shining? No, I know the sun is shining. Do I know that I will be alive tomorrow? No, but I believe it. That is, I give my firm intellectual assent to the proposition despite its not being evident to me. Roughly, belief is firm intellectual assent in the absence of compelling evidence.

Surely this is what we mean by belief in those cases that clearly count as belief. Lenny the liberal, for example, believes that anthropogenic global warming is taking place and is a dire environmental threat. Lenny doesn't know these two putative facts; he believes them: he unconditionally accepts, he firmly assents to, the two propositions in the absence of compelling evidence. And it seems clear that an element of will is involved in our boy's belief since the evidence does not compel his intellectual assent. He decides to believe what he believes. His believing is in the control of his will. This does not mean that he can believe anything he wants to believe. It means that a 'voluntative surplus' must be superadded to his evidence to bring about the formation of his belief. Without the voluntative superaddition, he would simply sit staring at his evidence, so to speak. There would be no belief and no impetus to action. Beliefs typically spill over into actions. But there would not be even a potential 'spill over' unless there were a decision on Lenny's part to go beyond his evidence by superadding to it his firm intellectual assent.

"But aren't you just using 'believes' in an idiosyncratic way?" It is arguably the other way around. Someone who says he believes that the sun is shining when he sees that it is shining is using 'believes' in an idiosyncratic way.

"But then isn't this just a terminological quibble? You want to substitute 'accepts' or 'accepts-as-true' for 'believes' in the standard JTB analysis of 'knows' and you want to reserve 'believes' for those cases in which there is unconditional acceptance but not knowledge." The question is not merely terminological. There is an occurrent mental state in which one accepts unconditionally propositions that are not evident. It doesn't matter whether we call this 'belief' or something else. But calling it 'belief' comports well with ordinary language.

Let me now elaborate upon this account of belief, or, if you insist, of Aquinian-Pieperian belief.

1. Belief is a form of acceptance or intellectual assent. To believe that p is to accept p, and to disbelieve that p is to reject p. One may also do neither by withholding p.

2. If acceptance is the genus, then knowing, believing, and supposing are species thereof. In knowing and believing the acceptance is unconditional whereas in supposing it is conditional. It follows that believing is not common to believing and knowing as on the JTB analysis. To think otherwise is to confuse the genus (acceptance) with one of its species (belief).

3. What distinguishes believing and knowing is that the believer qua believer does not know, and the knower qua knower does not believe. Both, however, accept. But here I must confess to a difficulty. What I just wrote appears objectionably circular. It seems to boil down to this: what distinguishes believing and knowing is that they are distinct!

If believing and knowing are species of the genus acceptance, what is the specific difference whereby the one is distinguished from the other? Believing that p and knowing that p are not distingusihed by the common propositional content, p. Nor are they distinguished by their both being modes of unconditional acceptance. Can we say that they differ in that the evidence is compelling in the case of knowing but less than compelling in the case of believing? That is true, but then the difference would seem to be one of degree and not of kind. But if knowing and believing are two species of the same genus, then we have a difference in kind. Perhaps the difference is that belief is based on another's testimony whereas knowledge is not.

4. It is essential to belief that it involve both a proposition (the content believed) and a person, the one whose testimony one trusts when one gains access to the truth via belief. To believe is to unconditionally accept a proposition on the basis of testimony. If so, then there are two reasons why it makes no sense to speak of perceptual beliefs. First, what I sense-perceive to be the case, I know to be the case, and therefore, by #3 above, I do not believe to be the case. Second, what I sense-perceive to be the case I know directly without need of testimony.

On this approach, the difference between believing and knowing is that believing is based on testimony whereas knowing is not. Suppose p is true and that my access to p's truth is via the testimony of a credible witness W. Then I have belief but not knowledge. W, we may assume, knows whereof he speaks. For example, he saw Jones stab Smith. W has knowledge but not belief.

1. There is this much agreement: both of us are doxastic voluntarists. We agree that it in our power to believe G, disbelieve G, or 'practice epoche' with respect to G, i.e., suspend judgment as to the truth or falsity of G.

2. Thus we both endorse the possibility of an ethics of belief, though we differ as to its content, as to what it prescribes, proscribes, and permits. My view is that in the O.J. case, given that prob(G/E) >> prob(~G/E), it is permissible that a juror believe that G. (Let us set aside the question whether it is also obligatory. Everything obligatory is permissible, but not conversely.) I take TV man's view to be that it is impermissible for a juror to believe that G. (If it is permissible (impermissible) for a juror to believe that G, then a fortiori it is permissible (impermissible) for a non-juror to believe that G assuming the non-juror has access to the same evidence.)

3. Consider the following two immediate inferences:

A. Prob(G/E) >> prob (~G/E)
-----
B. It is permissible that one believe that G.

A. Prob(G/E) >> prob (~G/E) -----
C. It is impermissible that one believe that G.

If the first argument is invalid, then so is the second. So if TV man is accusing me of reasoning incorrectly, then I can easily return the compliment. I would say that both arguments are invalid — how does one extract a deontic conclusion from a non-deontic premise? — and that the conditionals corresponding to the two arguments are synthetic, i.e., neither narrowly logical nor analytic. In other words, I am not saying that (B) follows from (A), I am saying that If (A), then (B) is a synthetic necessary truth. Correspondingly, TV man can be interpreted as saying that, even though the probability that O. J. killed his ex-wife, given the available evidence, is much greater than the probability that he did not given the same evidence, it is nevertheless impermissible to believe that O.J. killed his wife, and that this is a necessary synthetic truth.

4. TV man's justification for his conditional is that we could be wrong about O.J. After all, it was a circumstantial case. There were no eye-witnesses. Thus TV man invokes the legitimate epistemic desideratum, Avoid error! But there is a competing desideratum, namely, Acquire truth! In the case before us, the truth is not merely theoretical but has important practical consequences. I don't think that there can be any reasonable dispute that in a case like this it is very important that we get to the truth even if our means of getting there is not absolutely sure.

5. If I am a juror, and so must take a position, then I must avoid convicting an innocent man, but I must also avoid acquitting a guilty man. Either way the consequences are momentous. If convicted, imprisonment or execution. If acquitted, an injury to the social fabric in the form of loss of respect for the rule of law, not to mention the injustice to the person murdered and those who care about her.

6. It seems to me obvious that a juror should vote to convict, and thus that it is permissible to believe that O.J. is gulty as charged. For the evidence stacked against him is overwhelmingly strong. (See Part I, Part II and Part III of an interview with Vincent Bugliosi.) The fact that the evidence does not raise the probability of his guilt to 1 (= objective certainty) is not a good reason not to convict. TV Man seems to ignore completely the negative consequences (the damage to society, the undermining of the rule of law, the setting of a terrible precedent, the allowing of race to be injected into any case regardless of its relevance, etc.) of freeing a man who is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

Indeed, if you think about it, TV man's position reduces itself to absurdity. For if the probative standard is set so high that "What if we are wrong?" is allowed to trump evidence as detailed and massive as that brought against Simpson, then the criminal justice system would have to be dismantled.

7. But what about the NT command: Judge not lest ye be judged? Such an invocation is a clear example of the misuse of Scripture as I explain in Immigration, the Catholic Bishops, and the Misuse of Scripture.

The absence of any reference to belief in my statements on knowledge and knowing will be immediately noticed. The absence is intended, and though rare today in discussions of knowledge it is by no means unique in the history of the theory of knowledge.14 Even such a resolute Naturalist as Roy Wood Sellars specifies the nature of knowledge without reference to belief.15

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.

In addition, it seems to me that specification of knowledge in terms of belief is a harmfully tendentious characterization, favoring the naturalization of knowledge. This is because belief has an essential tie to action, and is therefore easily located in the natural world--say as a mere tendency of the physical organism to behave in certain ways. I suspect that it is the almost overwhelming Empiricist--and in that sense Naturalist--tendency of thought in our time that has created the general presumption that knowledge must be some kind of belief. Hence we must here at least question that presumption; and, I believe, when questioned it will not prove to be obvious or, finally, sustainable.

I am not sure how deep the Pieper-Willard similarity on this topic runs, but it is worth exploring. One caveat: Willard above agrees with Hume that belief is a passion, "something that happens to us." This does not appear to comport with Pieper's doxastic voluntarism.

I am also puzzled by this sentence of Willard's: "But one may actually know (dispositionally, occurrently) without believing what one knows." The dispositional and the occurrent are opposites. Why does Willard bracket them together? Furthermore, if I actually know something, if my knowing is 'in act' as a Scholastic might put it, then my knowing is occurrent, and there is nothing potential or dispositional about it. Finally, what would be an example of Willard's point?

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.

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

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. Alston's project in the pages I am covering is, first, to show that we do not have "effective voluntary control over believings." (p. 60), and second, to infer that the deontological triad "required, permitted, or forbidden" has no application to believings and such related propositional attitudes as withholdings. Alston, then, is a doxastic involuntarist.

Alston's thesis, to be precise, is not just that we do not, but that we cannot, have direct voluntary control over belief formation. He means the 'cannot' psychologically, not logically. His point, then, is that it is psychologically impossible to believe at will.

You can see why his book is entitled Beyond "Justification." Alston doesn't think that there is any place in epistemology for justification if this term is taken deontologically. The sneer quotes suggest that there is no such thing as epistemic justification. Thus, if I understand Alston, it makes no sense on his view to say that a belief or a believing is justified since that is tantamount to saying that it is permissible. But no believing is permissible or impermissible since no believing is under the direct control of the will. Therefore, for Alston, justification interpreted deontologically has no place in epistemology. There is no such thing as epistemic justification.

5. Alston's examples in support of his thesis fall into three categories.

a) One cannot believe at will what is obviously false. It is obviously false that the Romans continue to exercise hegemony over Western Europe, and it is hard to disagree with Alston when he concludes that no one has the power to believe this falsehood at will, just by deciding to believe it. (p. 63)

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 to Alston that one cannot disbelieve at will wh