Belief without Verification or Certainty

[vulcanlogician]

Thanks for the responses. I have done a ton of thinking about this recently, and I'd like to see how the discussion develops among others before I start throwing my weighty retorts in. Since Neo and Angrboda have asked for clarification, though, I feel the need to say this:

At the same time, I'm reminded of all the self-help talk about improving a person's self-confidence leading to improved chances of success.  Yet there were suggestions from some studies that people who succeed have higher self-confidence than people who don't, so it's not clear that self-confidence is the lever that enables success or simply the result of that success.  In general, I would place such things under the heading of useful myths.  It is a dogma of many that if you work hard and do what you're supposed to in life, that you will succeed.  However, there's good reason to believe that luck and circumstance play a much larger role in whether one will become the next millionaire than hard work or intelligence.  Yet without this belief, people would likely be less motivated to work hard.  In that I see the invisible hand of evolution.  A wise man once told me that luck is the meeting of skill and opportunity.  If you aren't working hard and doing the right things, even if life selects you out of the millions who will do likewise and not succeed, you aren't going to be able to take advantage of the opportunity.  Evolution drives the many so that the few will result.

I have to take issue with William James here, as this is a just so story, not based upon any actual study of the matter.  Sure, a lack of confidence in the jumper may lead him to failure, but undue confidence can lead to failure as well, in leading the climber to be less careful about how he makes his jump, or in preparing his leap.  Just as confidence can aid success, it can also hinder it by encouraging negligence.  So I'm not sure what to make of James' argument other than, well, maybe.

I don't think James would deny that unverified belief can result in a stony end. That's why he spends approximately the first third of The Will to Believe singing the praises of skepticism. James recognizes that verified knowledge is stronger precisely on account that it is less prone to error. THAT is what the skeptic does, according to James: he avoids error. (Also, "justified knowledge" may be the better term, I agree.)

There are two ways of looking at our duty in the matter of opinion,--ways entirely different,
and yet ways about whose difference the theory of knowledge seems hitherto to
have shown very little concern. We must know the truth; and we must avoid error,-
-these are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are not
two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two separable laws.
Although it may indeed happen that when we believe the truth A, we escape as an
incidental consequence from believing the falsehood B, it hardly ever happens that
by merely disbelieving B we necessarily believe A. We may in escaping B fall into
believing other falsehoods, C or D, just as bad as B; or we may escape B by not
believing anything at all, not even A.
Believe truth! Shun error!-these, we see, are two materially different laws; and by
choosing between them we may end by coloring differently our whole intellectual life.

http://krypton.mnsu.edu/~jp6372me/THE%20...EVE%20.pdf

***

Another problem I see with my examples is that they both use "personal confidence" as the primary mechanism by which belief influences the outcome. That's my fault. James wasn't making a larger point about confidence and its effects on human ability. He is chiefly concerned with belief affecting the outcome period... not belief affecting one's personal abilities and therefore the outcome.

We can look at another of James's cases: the case of the train robbers. This one isn't bogged down by potentially erroneous "self help" assumptions.

A whole train of passengers (individually brave enough) will be looted
by a few highwaymen, simply because the latter can count on one another, while
each passenger fears that if he makes a movement of resistance, he will be shot
before any one else backs him up. If we believed that the whole car-full would rise
at once with us, we should each severally rise, and train robbing would never even
be attempted. There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a
preliminary faith exists in its coming.

tl;dr: A few train robbers have some passengers at gunpoint. If any one of them attempts to interfere, they would be shot. But if the whole train car were to rise against the robbers, it might be possible to overcome them with minimal to no loss. Obviously, one who has the belief that the other passengers might help is more prone to initiate such an assault. And... in the case that they did help, his belief would be confirmed.

Of course, the one passenger jumping up and getting shot is also a possibility. James is aware of that. James says that the skeptic is GOOD for considering that possibility, because it's very real. But what James wants to do is point out those specific cases where skepticism can't give us knowledge, but faith can.

I don't think James does a very good job of endorsing religious faith with his arguments. But I do think he makes the case that we ought to set limits to skepticism. Everyone knows skepticism can go too far. James's analysis goes deeper than this. He also gives us a principle concerning where to set the boundary around skepticism: when a belief influences the outcome. That's not to say when beliefs begin to influence a situation that we abandon skepticism. No. We should never ignore skepticism, but neither should we be slaves to it because, as James argues, it has a few principle failing points that can end up denying us knowledge.