Abstract
Does faith require belief? “Belief-plus” accounts of faith say yes. “Non-doxastic” accounts say no but tend to place a “no-disbelief constraint” on faith. Both sides, I argue, are mistaken for making belief (or disbelief) explanatorily prior to faith. Indeed, both “faith” and “belief” have contextualist semantics, which leaves only a tenuous tie between the applications of the two words.
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Notes
I single out epistemic rationality here in deference to an anonymous reviewer who correctly observes that one can easy construct cases in which it is practically rational to have faith that p and not to believe that p (e.g. if I'll give you $1,000,000 were you somehow to come to have faith that p against all the evidence).
See footnotes 6 and 8 below for examples of analyses that include the no-disbelief-constraint.
For the notion that faith must be compatible with doubt, see Daniel McKaughan (2013, pp. 106–107).
I admit that it’s odd to think that belief that not-p constitutes doubt that p. However, there are contexts in which we say, ‘I doubt it’, but really mean that we believe its negation. This might be a loose way of talking, but it might be that disbelief is a limiting-case of doubt.
An anonymous reviewer is right to point out that, for the purposes of this paper, it’s important that this taxonomy of doubt is exhaustive. At first glance it may appear to be woefully incomplete. Surely, we can think of other forms of doubt! But, for the purposes of this paper, doubt1 can stand for any form of doubt that is compatible with belief and disbelief, doubt2 can stand for any form of doubt that requires disbelief, and doubt3 can stand for any form of doubt that requires neutrality such that it rules out both belief and disbelief. Since it would be strange to think that there’s a species of doubt that requires belief, the taxonomy is indeed exhaustive. Moreover, if we do need to add that strange species of doubt that requires belief, doubt4, the argument of this paper won’t be affected.
Daniel McKaughan (2013, pp. 112–113) writes, regarding the suggestion that propositional faith is a species of hope: “A plausible case could be made, for example, that the second condition for religiously significant hope should be that p is a live option for S or that S believes that the probability that p is true is not so small as to be negligible or that S does not believe not-p.” I take it that McKaughan offers the three disjuncts here as different ways of expressing one and the same condition. Not disbelieving p just is believing that p is (to some extent) a live option, which just is believing that the probability that p is true is not too small as to be negligible. Accordingly, McKaughan is committed to the no-disbelief constraint.
Indeed, it renders the argument from doubt redundant, since it gives us an immediate proof that faith is consistent with a lack of belief.
Another example of this phenomenon can be found in McKaughan’s later account of faith as a form of active commitment. He has clauses written into the analysis of faith about what would happen if the person of faith that p were to learn that not-p. He also argues that faith sometimes demands acting as if one strongly believes that p (McKaughan 2016). Both clauses require that belief is explanatorily prior to faith.
This concern was raised by an anonymous reviewer.
These two functions, broadly, map onto those functions previously identified by Paul Boghossian, who says that we use belief-ascriptions “for two related purposes: on the one hand, to enable assessment of his rationality” – an assessment that looks to a person’s conception characterization in order to assess it for coherence; “and, on the other, to explain his behavior”—which involves a characterisation of a person’s dispositions to act in certain ways (Boghossian 1994, p. 39). Boghossian himself (Ibid., p. 40) sees this distinction prefigured in the work of Tyler Burge (1982, p. 99).
Contextualism about ‘belief’ isn’t the only way to explain the case in question. One could, instead, appeal to the notion of double-mindedness, or to a distinction between belief and alief (Gendler 2008). But Schwitzgebel has strong arguments to favour his brand of contextualism over those other alternatives op. cit.
I tacitly distinguish here between non-belief and disbelief. Non-belief that p is simply not to believe that p. Disbelief regarding p is, by contrast, to believe that not-p.
Thanks to Hannes Leitgeb for taking the time to explain the mechanics of his position to me in correspondence.
Roger Clarke (2013) argues that we can achieve these results whilst holding a stable threshold for belief, the threshold being 1, or certainty. I don’t have space to engage with Clark’s arguments, but it’s important to note that his account also introduces context-sensitivity into our belief-ascriptions. The context doesn’t calibrate a minimum threshold, an agent’s credences are calibrated differently from context to context. This context-sensitivity regarding ACC-belief ascriptions might be enough to substantiate my claims about the relationship between faith and belief, even if we were to adopt Clarke’s account. Sadly, it is beyond the scope of this paper to work out the details of such an extension of my argument.
This is quoted from Brian Weatherson (2005, pp. 434–435) who adapts the original examples to sit better in his own framework—a framework I (partially) adopt.
Fantl and McGrath concede to Weatherson that one’s pragmatic environment helps to calibrate the minimum threshold for belief, but they also maintain that it calibrates justification too (Fantl and McGrath 2009, pp. 155–162).
Had my account of the context sensitivity of ACC-belief ascriptions only taken into consideration the environment of the subject of the belief-attribution, my view would have amounted to a subject sensitive invariantism regarding ACC-belief. It’s only because my account sometimes renders ACC-belief ascriptions sensitive only to the context of utterance that my account of ACC-belief ascriptions develops into a full blown contextualism. But in fact, as Roger Clarke argues, “a situation-sensitive view of belief [i.e., a view of belief that is sensitive to the context of the believer] lends itself naturally to a contextualist view of belief ascriptions. This,” he rightly points out, “contrasts with the analogous view about knowledge: pragmatic encroachment on knowledge is usually set up as an alternative to k[nowledge]-contexutalism” (Clarke 2017, p. 406).
They actually put forward four truisms, but the last two only generate a worry for views that calibrate the minimum threshold exclusively in relation to the pragmatic environment of the agent. Since STV sometimes calibrates the minimum threshold in terms of a value made salient by the context of the conversation, rather than the pragmatic context of the agent, I take it that Ross and Schroeder would accept that STV is off the hook regarding their final two truisms. Accordingly, I present the two that might be thought to challenge STV.
Ran Lanzet, in correspondence, worries that I’ve really rejected Stability and replaced it with the following precisification-based principle:
Stability*: For every precisification beliefn of ‘belief’, a fully rational agent does not change her beliefns purely in virtue of an evidentially irrelevant change in her credences or preferences.
Perhaps this is a better way of putting my view. Accordingly, Lanzet worries: ‘don’t you owe the reader an explanation of why the original Stability seemed true while in fact it wasn’t?’ I think the explanation is straightforward. If Stability* is true, then the original version, Stablity, is super-true (i.e., true on every precisification of ‘belief’).
Another source of concern for contextualist accounts of belief comes from Tadeusz Ciecierski (2017). Considerations of space leave me unable to address his distinctive worry. But this much, I will say. Ciecierski concedes that his argument against contextualism only goes through if ‘belief’ is, in Carnap’s sense of the word, a ‘theoretical term.’ Since I’m not convinced that it is, I leave his argument to one side. There are also important considerations to bear against the situation-sensitivity at the heart of STV, which considerations of space also leave me unable to address, but see (Stalnaker 1984, pp. 80–81; Maher 1986, p. 383; Foley 1993, p. 199; Kaplan 1996, p. 101).
I’m open to the existence of further distinctions. Perhaps our practices of evaluative-belief-ascription – which is to say, beliefs that interact with reactive attitudes in a specific way – pick out a different sort of mental state; given the arguments of Buchak (2014).
I say ‘at least generally’ to make room for a possible class of exceptions regarding evaluative-beliefs, as I sketched in the previous footnote.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting the need for this paragraph.
Thanks to Ran Lanzet for raising penumbral connections with me.
I am no experimentalist, but for what it’s worth, I can offer the following anecdotal evidence that this section of the paper has things right. I set up an online survey of 100 participants. I gave them the four quotes to read (Hume, Clifford, Russell, and Maher) before asking them the series of questions (Q1)-(Q5), presented as they were in this paper. Only 58% of participants were willing to violate the no-disbelief-constraint at Q4. This is, I concede, a slim majority. A significant minority resisted. But Q5 changed a lot of people’s minds. Only 23% of the participants held out. Therefore, 77% were willing to accept that in some ‘strict’ sense, M does believe that not-p whilst having faith that p. Just over half of the 100 participants were philosophers. When you filter them out, the results were even more impressive. Only 19% of the non-philosophers resisted. That’s to say, 81% of the non-philosophers were willing (under pressure) to violate the no-disbelief-constraint. Perhaps the unusual context led the 81% astray. But why should we draw such conclusions since we have a well-motivated contextualism about ‘belief’ and ‘faith’ that can easily explain the survey’s result. Moreover, Q5 refers to an unusually strict rather than a loose sense of the word ‘belief.’
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Michael Antony, Jonathan Berg, Helen De Cruz, Daniel Howard-Snyder, Arnon Keren, Iddo Landau, Ran Lanzet, Hannes Leitgeb, Daniel McKaughan, Ariel Meirav, Michael Scott, Aaron Segal, Saul Smilansky, and Danny Statman for helpful suggestions and discussion. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers provided by Synthese. I am happy to note that since I authored this paper, the University of Haifa has indeed offered me a tenure track appointment to begin in October 2021. I owe a debt of gratitude to all of those in my department who toiled to make that happen. I thank them for their faith in me, and for translating my own faith into belief.
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Lebens, S. Will I get a job? Contextualism, belief, and faith. Synthese 199, 5769–5790 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03045-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03045-3