Doubt and Faith
Doubt is the engine of inquiry. But inquiry ultimately rests on faith, faith that there is something to be known, something that lies beyond our shifting experiences.
Both doubt and faith are necessary. We are inquirers, but also believers. The trick is to balance doubt and faith, to curb our credulousness without drowning our minds in the all-corrosive acid-bath of skepticism.
Doubt is the engine of inquiry, but there must be faith to assure us that there is an object of inquiry. Otherwise, doubt turns in upon itself and consumes itself. Doubt should serve the purpose of inquiry into what is transcendent of our shifting experiences; it is not an end in itself.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Doubt and Faith
- The Strange Case of U. G. Krishnamurti
Posted by William F. Vallicella on
Friday September 22, 2006 at 7:03pm
This is not a prescription, but a call to vigilance.
Thanks for the reference. It is nice to have Leibniz on my side. I have the Huggard translation. He has 'gangway' for 'plank.'
Is Leibniz a compatibilist? He seems to vacillate in the paragraphs around #302. Schopenhauer thought he had no well-defined position on the freedom of the will.
Right, it's a matter of finding the balance between accepting and questioning. In the present state of the world, this seems especially important.
1. Huggard's 'gangway' translates the French planche.
2. I don't see the vaccilation you mention.
3. Leibniz does seem to be a compatibilist. Indeed, he seems to have thought that freedom requires determination. We can see this in the following text, one of his clearest presentations of his views on freedom. It's apparently an entry he prepared for his planned universal encyclopedia, and to my knowledge has never been published in English. This is my translation:
What I got from the post was that doubt, inquiry, and faith (in truth) are all tied together. In a way, doubt is indeed the engine of inquiry. It is true I ask because I desire to know. But I desire to know because I do not know for certain. The two are interwoven. I do not ask what 1 plus 1 equals. Where there is no doubt there is no inquiry.
Bill says that doubt must be balanced by faith (in truth). In a way doubt presupposes faith. One cannot doubt that something is true if one has no faith in truth. Nihilists never have doubts. In fact, postmodernists never have doubts, because they also don't believe in truth; they just label what they believe "truth" (but that's just semantics).
I challenged your notion of self-determination on the other thread and got no response. As you understand it, what exactly does it mean to say that a person is self-determined? You imply that to be self-determined is to act for a reason. But are these reasons then determining, or not? If they are determining, then there isn't an ability to do otherwise of the sort libertarians want.
It isn't perhaps clear in the passage I provided, but Leibniz believes that we are self-determined in the sense that our natures, together with the circumstances we find ourselves in, determine us to do the things we do. I suspect that isn't what you mean by 'self-determination'.
One thing that is clear in the above passage is that God is determined by his nature to do what is most perfect. There is a real sense, then, in which God lacks the ability to do what is less than the most perfect. And yet according to Leibniz God is free in choosing the most perfect option. (Indeed, he is the most free substance.) Therefore, for Leibniz freedom does not require the ability to do otherwise in the sense desired by libertarians.
I didn't mention self-determinism as part of my argument in the other thread. I merely mentioned it as an aside, so I wouldn't have defended it. Nevertheless, I thought you had agreed with it, so didn't think it needed defending anyways. I must have missed your challenge to it, honestly. I apologize for that. I didn't intend to do that.
The ability to do otherwise and self-determinism are not identical. I'm not sure if you think they are but I don't know why you brought up the ability to do otherwise issue since I made no reference to it. I will find an article which explains self-determinism (in regards to LFW) better than I can since I'm sure I would just muddy the waters on that.
Oddly, I couldn't find much online on this. Maybe you or others can. It is, though, the version I most often find defended in the books I have. The two terms I find used synonymously in this arena are self-determinism and agent-causation. (Libertarianism is often used equivalently, but it can also be used to mean indeterminism, which is not the same.) The section entitled "Libertarianism" in these notes may be useful, as well as Section 3 of this Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry. Just to be sure, it is not my intention (nor desire) to defend this theory of free will. I am merely attempting to clarify it (since you, justifiably, ask, "what exactly does it mean to say that a person is self-determined?"). And I only do this to support what I stated in my '9.23.2006 8:32pm' post, namely, that "all that Leibniz says in that [previously quoted] passage is consistent with self-deterministic LFW [or self-determinism or agent-causation or whatever one wishes to call it]."
Even if self-deterministic LFW were possible, which I doubt, we can infer from the passage above that Leibniz does not hold such a view. For he says that God is both free and not able to do less than the best. (If God is determined to do the best, then in a real sense he isn't able to do otherwise, even though it is possible (i.e., not contradictory) that he do otherwise.) Therefore, for Leibniz freedom does not require the ability to do otherwise in the strong sense required by libertarian accounts of free will. So Leibniz is not a libertarian, self-deterministic or otherwise.
I'm glad to read that you have no desire to defend "self-deterministic libertarianism." I have no problem with talk of self-determination, as long as it is understood in a sensible way. (See here for more.) But I don't see how to understand self-determination in a way that makes it compatible with libertarianism.
There are also some papers on agent causation under the "Free Will" section at Chalmer's site.
I am using self-detemination and agent causation synonymously. (My apologies if I did not make that clear before.) So when you say "I don't see how to understand self-determination in a way that makes it compatible with libertarianism," I'm not sure what to say since agent causation (what I have also been calling "self-determination") is understood as being a form of libertarianism. Maybe you think agent causation altogether faulty, but it is understood as a form of libertarianism.
Leibniz says that "God is determined by himself," which seems to be a form of self-determination. Of course God's freedom is not identical to ours. Leibniz acknowledges this, and any theory of freedom would have to account for that, but what he says in that passage doesn't seem to be opposed to an agent causation theory of free will.
In the post of yours that you linked to, you say:To answer your question, I would say that is causal determinism. Self-determinism as I was using it (that is, as synonymous with agent causation) doesn't mean "happens in a self" but "happens by a self." I can do no better here than to quote from Craig and Moreland's Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview:In compatibilism, agents aren't originators. Everything is caused by a prior event. Self-determination or agent causation, though, supposes that agents can be originators; thus their actions may be self-determined or agent caused.
You also say,This, though, is not a correct understanding of agent causation. This sort of understanding would allow computers to be capable of agent causation. Hopefully the above quote from Craig and Moreland helps clarify what is meant by agent causation.
To clarify my answer (in my last post) to your question, I was understanding "causes" in "my thought of a certain thing causes me to be angry" to mean causally determines. If it simply meant influenced then I would have answered differently.
Thanks for the links pertaining to agent causation. It seems rather peculiar to me to use 'self-determinism' and 'agent causation' interchangeably. According to the theory of agent causation (as explained by Craig and Moreland), the agent (directly) causes the action. For example, I cause the raising of my arm. But to call such causation 'self-determination' seems highly misleading. When I, the agent, cause the raising of my arm, in what sense am I determining myself, or determining my arm to rise? I see no real determination here. To call the theory of agent causation 'self-determinism' is not thereby to make that theory a form of self-determinism.
I'd like to go back to part of the passage you quoted from Craig and Moreland:
I find this passage highly problematic. One problem is that Craig and Moreland have an overly simplistic view of compatibilism. On the version of compatibilism I favor, it is quite true that persons "have the power, as free agents, to exercise the ability to act as the ultimate originators of their actions. It is the I, the self that acts; not a state in the self that causes a moving of some kind." I am the ultimate originator of the raising of my arm in the sense that I am the one who raises it. It is I who freely wills to raise my arm, and I who actually raises it. True, I will to raise my arm because that is the option my intellect represents as the best available option, and it is my nature to will that which my intellect represents as the best. Further, my intellect was determined to represent that option as the best by past states of my soul, and so forth. But none of that changes the fact that it is I who willed to raised my arm, and I who actually raised my arm. It is not at all the case, on my view, that some desire or mental state of mine causes the raising of my arm. So Craig and Moreland seem to be guilty here of caricaturing compatibilism.
I found the Freddoso article helpful and I think he's largely on target in what he says.
I don't see that Craig and Moreland are caricaturing compatibilism. There is a sense in which YOU originate the raising of your arm, but are you the ULTIMATE originator? I take it that you are both a compatibilist and a determinist. But determinism, as Kant remarks in a footnote in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, is really predeterminism: the ultimate causal antecedents of your actions antedate your birth.
If so, then you are not the ultimate originator of any action.
"I see no real determination here." Are you saying that you can understand how there could be agent causation, but not agent necessitation? Are you saying that an agent cause cannot determine a decision to so A?
When Craig and Moreland write that "For the compatibilist, the person, insofar as he or she is an agent, is simply a series of events through which a causal chain passes on its way to producing an effect, say, one's hand going up," they are caricaturing compatibilism. A compatibilist may coherently maintain that the agent is not simply a series of events but an enduring soul or mind that (in a sense) raises his arm, even though he is determined thus to raise his arm by his prior states.
Is such an agent an ultimate originator of his actions? Perhaps not. But as you say, he is still some kind of originator of his actions, and Craig and Moreland obscure this fact, even though they don't deny it outright. On the other hand, perhaps such agents are ultimate originators. You mention Kant's objection about ultimate causal antecedents predating one's birth, but what if I existed prior to my birth? What, indeed, if I have existed since the creation of the world, so that the antecedents of my present-day choices are all states of mine? Would this not undercut Kant's objection?
If you are saying that a compatibilist need not adopt a bundle theory of the self acc. to which it is a bundle of events, then I agree.
Your second paragraph raises a set of questions regarding what could be called transcendental compatibilism. Kant could be so described. My phenomenal self is wholly determined, but my noumenal self is free. The problem, of course, is how these two selves fit together.
On the subject of determination, if an agent (an unmoved mover) causes a certain action, I suppose that action is determined in a very weak sense. (I am committed to holding this, since I hold that there cannot be causation without determination.) But in such a case, I still want to say that there is no real (better: substantial, significant) determination. Suppose a completely random event E occurs somewhere in the universe, perhaps at the subatomic level. E then causes some event F to occur in accordance with the laws of nature. Would it be accurate to say that F was determined to occur? No doubt F was determined to occur given E's occurence, but since E's occurence was random, I'm tempted to say that F was not in any significant way determined to occur. That is the source of my difficulties with referring to agent causation as self-determinism.
It is obvious we have different views of what "self-determination" means, which is fine. The use of a term in one's theory is irrelevant. It is the concept that matters. So for clarification, I will cease referring to "self-determination" and only refer to "agent causation."
You're welcome for the links. Ironically, they were probably more useful to me since I am not an expert in this area. (You at least have a solid knowledge of Leibniz and, from what I know, he dealt with these issues quite a bit.)
2. Disallowing comments from a particular person, or deleting an offensive, off-topic, or otherwise substandard comment, has nothing to do with censorship. People who think otherwise confuse censorship with lack of sponsorship. I am under an obligation not to interfere with anyone's exercise of legitimate free speech rights. But I am not under any obligation to aid and abet anyone's exercise of free speech rights, legitimate or illegitimate.
3. The Comments area is not an open forum for anyone to say anything about any topic. As the name implies, it is primarily for commenting on the author(s)' posts. But to comment on them, one must have read them. And if I have spent three hours on a post, a reader will not understand it in thirty seconds. Secondarily, the Comments area is to facilitate civil discussion between and among commenters as long as the discussion remains on-topic.
4. Some undesirables: The skimmers, those who cannot read but only read-in. The sophists who, abusing argument, argue for the sake of argument. The ideologues, those who are out for power, not truth. The uncivil. The illogical. The politically correct. Worst of all, perhaps, are those who exemplify the anti-Socratic property: those who think they know what they don't know. If Socrates was famous for his learned ignorance, these types are marked by their ignorant unlearnededness.