Belief without Verification or Certainty

[Belacqua]

This conversation is premised on "We can know things." As false as that may turn out to be, it's an axiom for nearly all of our discussions.

I'm pretty sure we can know SOME things. No doubt there are also lots of things we can't know. 

What's at issue here, for me, is the idea that knowing always comes with verification, or verifiability. 

Neo alluded to this earlier, and I think it's crucial. We know things in different ways, and a lot of these are not logical or empirical type testable hypotheses. 

I'm still working on this. Here is a recent article on Derrida, which goes into the difference between analytical and continental philosophy. 

https://aeon.co/essays/after-jacques-der...philosophy

In brief, the analytic, A.J. Ayer-type people will demand a more cut and dried type of verification. While the continentals are still comfortable with the big, never-provable ideas. But that doesn't mean that these are things we don't reasonably have beliefs about. 

I liked this part of the article:

For Derrida, the division into analytic and continental philosophy is misnamed. For him, the division was between ‘analytic’ and ‘traditional’ philosophy – where the latter is philosophy that deals with big questions such as ethics, aesthetics, God and the meaning of life. As the English novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch put it, analytic philosophy explores a world where ‘people play cricket, cook cakes, make simple decisions, remember their childhood and go to the circus, not the world in which they commit sins, fall in love, say prayers or join the Communist Party.’

The list of big things -- sins, love, etc. -- are to me things that we believe without firm verification. There are reasons, and arguments, and we may be entirely reasonable in our conclusions, but that doesn't mean that anything is verified, in a strict sense. 

We know many things through symbolization. Here is a good article on that:

https://jhiblog.org/2021/11/15/reality-a...terminism/

What's got me thinking about this most, though, is a newish book by Andrew Bowie called Aesthetic Dimensions of Modern Philosophy. "Modern" here being mostly the Romantics and German Idealists up through Heidegger. Bowie (no relation to David, alas) emphasizes the importance of the arts in their work, because they all hold the non-conceptualizable, unverifiable aspects of the world to be of great importance. You'll recognize this as rooted largely in Kant -- the noumena are not directly knowable, and the only thing we can verify as intersubjectively reliable are the phenomena we share. Romanticism and Idealism are very much about not discounting the importance of the non-scientific, unverifiable bits of the world. 

The issue, of course, is that it's difficult to think about things that are non-conceptual. This is why the arts are so important for this bunch. Bowie says:

In the Romantic approach, the absolute is characterized precisely by its non-transparency to conceptual thought. This means it needs to be manifest in a way which is appropriate both to its ineluctability and to its conceptual inaccessibility. 

[...]

Whereas philosophy deals in concepts, abstracting from the empirical, art is empirically embodied, and yet involves the kind of sense philosophy seeks to understand, but in ways which are resistant to discursive articulation. Were that not the case, one could dispense with art by explaining what it says in conceptual terms.

And this from Kant:

[The principle of art that engages people is] the capacity for the presentation of aesthetic ideas; but by an aesthetic idea I mean that representation of the imagination which gives much cause for thought without any determinate thought, i.e. concept, being able to be adequate to it, which consequently no language can completely attain and make comprehensible.

I thought about putting all this in the thread about a possible crisis in psychology, largely because Freud's career exemplifies this. (He turns out to be very much in this Germanic Romantic tradition.) He really wanted to be a scientist, but he found in the end that what he was dealing with was not quantifiable or testable in that way. Some see this as a failure on his part, but I see it as recognizing the unavoidably fuzzy, unverifiable aspects of what it is to be human. 

In the end, what he invented was a sort of applied literature. Story-telling, symbol-making, to express truths which, like aesthetic truths, resist conceptualization. Myths and symbols retain their multivalent expressiveness, while quantified truths get a pin stuck through them. 

All of these things involve deeply held beliefs with neither verification nor certainty -- and this is all for the best.