Belief without Verification or Certainty

[Neo-Scholastic]

@vulcanlogic, for this discussion are we defining truth in the foundationalist terms of "justified true belief?"

[brewer]

Well if any of you know who Marissa Peer is I can tell you that she is all about this, "fake it till you make it," mindset when it comes to confidence and therapy. The fact of the matter is this, the words we are told by other people matter but they will never be as impactful as the words we tell ourselves. 

I am one who is slowly climbing out of depression and a class by her has helped me to do this. The whole idea is that you keep telling yourself good things, even if you know them to be lies, because even though our brains are complicated they are simple to program. If you tell yourself you are worth it, then you will believe and act like you are worth it. If you tell yourself you are worthless, then your mind and body will follow. I'm a firm believer in this self-fulfilling prophecy mindset where you give yourself positive affirmations on a regular basis. Tell yourself you are kind, merciful and generous and over time these seeds will grow.


Moving outward from the topic a little, the OP made me think of how much knowledge we take for granite. I mean most of us don't know how an engine works despite the fact that we drive vehicles on a daily basis. For us, the claim that an engine can convert gasoline into power and use that power to turn the wheels is an unverified claim. There are millions of things which engineers and scientists have already discovered/invented which we take for granite every day even to the extent that we don't even know what we don't know. I understand that claims regarding engineering and science can be verified but my point is that for the individual, a lot of times we just have to accept that someone else understands how these things work.

OMG, have you met Ahriman?

[vulcanlogician]

@vulcanlogic, for this discussion are we defining truth in the foundationalist terms of "justified true belief?"

We could. What do you have to say on the matter?

[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.

[Belacqua]

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.)

I'm also inclined to think that "verified" may be on the strong side for what you're talking about. To me it has a nuance of certainty. 

If the passengers in the train have verified (by subtle communications among themselves, unheard by the robbers) that all will rise as one, then much less faith is required to act. 

I looked in the dictionary just now, and I see that the definitions for "verify" and "justify" are almost the same, except that it says a "justified decision" may be a "reasonable" one, not simply a proved one. To me, that's the space where it gets interesting -- what is reasonable, despite a lack of total verification. In what cases are we justified in going ahead when we have 51% confidence, rather than 99% confidence. 

At the simplest level, as has been pointed out, a total lack of faith means you won't even try. And if you don't try you're bound to fail. There has to be some adequate feeling that success is at least in the realm of possibility, and then the mere fact that you're making an effort raises the chances above 0%. But we have to factor in desire, also. If you think the chances are 10%, but you don't want it very much, then you might not make the effort. If you really really want it, you would surely increase the odds, just because you'd put in more effort. 

(And I know you're not ready for the religious angle yet, but most Christians say that their faith is justified, by experience and by history. We may not buy that, but to them, it's not a matter of total faith in the complete absence of evidence.)

[Neo-Scholastic]

Seems like you are pondering the area of human experience bounded on one side by "being right for the wrong reasons" and self-fulfilling prophesies on the other. And wondering, perhaps, if such things count as knowledge in a philosophical way...Gettier problems, etc. Not sure if you can translate the concepts between the two worlds.

Personally, I think human beings "know" a lot more than we think we do dispite the fact that the means by which know is not transparent to us. The idea that we can even "know" about our cognitive biases tells me more about the robustness of our epistomological ability. I say this because I think there is a very big difference between "folk" knowlege, narratives, and various academic ways of parsing the world of experience. I contend that each epistimological strategies has its own advantages and disadvatages.

[emjay]

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.)

I'm also inclined to think that "verified" may be on the strong side for what you're talking about. To me it has a nuance of certainty. 

If the passengers in the train have verified (by subtle communications among themselves, unheard by the robbers) that all will rise as one, then much less faith is required to act. 

I looked in the dictionary just now, and I see that the definitions for "verify" and "justify" are almost the same, except that it says a "justified decision" may be a "reasonable" one, not simply a proved one. To me, that's the space where it gets interesting -- what is reasonable, despite a lack of total verification. In what cases are we justified in going ahead when we have 51% confidence, rather than 99% confidence. 

At the simplest level, as has been pointed out, a total lack of faith means you won't even try. And if you don't try you're bound to fail. There has to be some adequate feeling that success is at least in the realm of possibility, and then the mere fact that you're making an effort raises the chances above 0%. But we have to factor in desire, also. If you think the chances are 10%, but you don't want it very much, then you might not make the effort. If you really really want it, you would surely increase the odds, just because you'd put in more effort. 

(And I know you're not ready for the religious angle yet, but most Christians say that their faith is justified, by experience and by history. We may not buy that, but to them, it's not a matter of total faith in the complete absence of evidence.)

I'm still trying to parse the general meaning of this thread so don't really have anything meaningful to say about all that, as yet, but to the extent that we're talking about confidence and motivation and their relation to belief, as you seem to be doing, I've always found that little dance kind of interesting. In my experience, confidence and motivation can be very fickle, especially in harder/unfamiliar tasks, and depends an awful lot on almost shifting goalposts and how you frame the task, which can change on a moment by moment basis.

Like for instance when I'm doing my exercise on the treadmill, which at the moment relies on 'high volume, low intensity' it can sometimes be quite hard to keep motivated for the whole 100 minutes I'm trying to do it for... so I end up doing a lot of mental gymnastics whilst I'm doing it to try and keep motivated. One way is by essentially splitting the task into easier tasks... I think of it in terms of four quadrants of twenty five minutes each, which in my experience get progressively easier, with all the muscle pain etc usually being in the first quadrant, and by the last quadrant I feel like I could keep going much longer. So that is one approach; where the mental framing of the actual difficulty of the task is changed, basically in a turning mountains into molehills kind of way. The other approach I have is to put some sort of narrative/story around it and essentially role play... I think of the famous galley scene from Ben Hur; "we keep you alive to serve this ship, so row well and live" I know it doesn't compare to that really but it is all about maintaining a pace (and it wouldn't be the first time I said 'Battle speed, Hortator' if I wanted to increase that pace )... and in a sense you could say that that narrative approach is about giving meaning to the thing, possibly.

So I guess overall I would characterise this as an ongoing sort of cost/benefit analysis or risk/reward analysis, updated moment by moment by how you're currently framing the task, and with a certain delicate balance/tipping point deciding whether you should continue or not, taking into account, like you say, the effects of just trying or not trying on the actual outcome, as well as the contribution of desire. Basically I like the way you've described it there, and it's a pretty interesting subject.

[vulcanlogician]

I'm also inclined to think that "verified" may be on the strong side for what you're talking about. To me it has a nuance of certainty. 

If the passengers in the train have verified (by subtle communications among themselves, unheard by the robbers) that all will rise as one, then much less faith is required to act. 

I know you were making a point about degrees of certainty. But I just wanna add that I think the thought experiment wants us to accept that no such subtle communications have transpired. Perhaps one of the robbers bends down to tie his shoe. Now's your chance. You can subdue the one robber without him shooting you, but unless the rest of the passengers do their part.

You either have "faith" that the other passengers will act as you have, or you don't. "Faith" here meaning only that you act on something that you are not certain of. I suppose a good objection would be to ask, "What separates this from a calculated risk?" I'm not really sure James can answer that, and I'm all for exploring that question. I think your quote below is a good start in arguing in support of James:

At the simplest level, as has been pointed out, a total lack of faith means you won't even try. And if you don't try you're bound to fail. There has to be some adequate feeling that success is at least in the realm of possibility, and then the mere fact that you're making an effort raises the chances above 0%. But we have to factor in desire, also. If you think the chances are 10%, but you don't want it very much, then you might not make the effort. If you really really want it, you would surely increase the odds, just because you'd put in more effort. 

*********

I looked in the dictionary just now, and I see that the definitions for "verify" and "justify" are almost the same, except that it says a "justified decision" may be a "reasonable" one, not simply a proved one. To me, that's the space where it gets interesting -- what is reasonable, despite a lack of total verification. In what cases are we justified in going ahead when we have 51% confidence, rather than 99% confidence. 

Well, I may as well come out and say: I think James makes the case that some faith, even that of a religious sort, can be considered reasonable. I don't think this is too ambitious of a thesis. But it does challenge the notion that we ought only to believe that which has evidential support. Some hard-nosed atheists will make the claim that any belief or action made on insufficient evidence is foolhardy. If anything, James challenges them... even though I think most atheists already acknowledge what James is saying.

Also, I don't think this is very beneficial for our times. People undervalue skepticism these days. An anti-vaxxer can't really learn anything from James I don't think. I think James is most-appropriately read by people who know the value of skepticism and are ready to put the final nail in faith's coffin. For these folks, James's arguments are a good "Not so fast!" But for the general population, especially in these trying times, James's thesis can only be misunderstood.

The context in which James formulated his arguments was in the wake of Clifford's Ethics of Belief. Many people were swayed by Clifford's notion that it is unethical to act unless one can be reasonably sure of the outcome. We are always to suspend our judgments and actions until we have sufficient information. At the very least, I think James provides a decent refutation of Clifford. But it's possible that he achieves even more.

[Belacqua]

I'm still trying to parse the general meaning of this thread so don't really have anything meaningful to say about all that

It seems to be coming slowly into focus, after a provocative start. What you say here helps, I think.

Like for instance when I'm doing my exercise on the treadmill, which at the moment relies on 'high volume, low intensity' it can sometimes be quite hard to keep motivated for the whole 100 minutes I'm trying to do it for... so I end up doing a lot of mental gymnastics whilst I'm doing it to try and keep motivated. One way is by essentially splitting the task into easier tasks... 

Jeez, man -- I feel proud of myself if I manage 20 minutes on the treadmill. 100 is impressive.

But you know, come to think of it, it is largely about the mental state. I can easily walk an hour and a half at a brisk pace if I'm out and about. In fact I have all the local supermarkets timed -- to Jupiter and back is exactly an hour, if I cut through grounds of the Shinto shrine. Fresta is 45 minutes, not counting shopping time. Downtown to the good cake shop is 50 minutes each way, and I'm allowed to eat the cake if I walk it. 

And last Wednesday I walked the mountain trail just north of town, and went down the wrong way and ended up on the wrong side of the mountain, and walked a solid three hours. That was tiring, but not like I needed an ambulance or anything. Unlike the treadmill, I was motivated to find out where the hell I was, and calculating the best way to find familiar ground. 

It's not exactly about faith, or about what we're justified in believing, but it certainly shows that what we're capable of changes a lot depending on the aims. I could never manage three hours on a treadmill, but up and down the mountain and then wandering unfamiliar streets was an adventure. 

I have is to put some sort of narrative/story around it and essentially role play... I think of the famous galley scene from Ben Hur

This is very much what I've been thinking about. The role that fiction or other imagery plays in motivation, knowledge, all kinds of functioning. We understand our lives through symbols. Importantly (and I think Neo was saying something like this earlier) there are ways of knowing that are not conceptual. Stories, myths, pictures, are probably more important to life overall than logically-sayable concepts. 

As you say, framing the task is crucial, and we do that largely with pictures.

[Belacqua]

You either have "faith" that the other passengers will act as you have, or you don't. "Faith" here meaning only that you act on something that you are not certain of. I suppose a good objection would be to ask, "What separates this from a calculated risk?" 

On neighborhood clean-up day, I finished my own area and went to clean up a kind of drainage ditch that nobody feels responsible for. Since it was the day for feeling neighborly, I assumed that once I got started other people would see me and join in. But goddamn, nobody helped. I did the whole thing myself. I was pretty pissed about this.

So when my train is getting robbed, I'm not going to be the first one to jump up.

Well, I may as well come out and say: I think James makes the case that some faith, even that of a religious sort, can be considered reasonable. I don't think this is too ambitious of a thesis. But it does challenge the notion that we ought only to believe that which has evidential support. Some hard-nosed atheists will make the claim that any belief or action made on insufficient evidence is foolhardy. If anything, James challenges them... even though I think most atheists already acknowledge what James is saying.

Yes, I think there is a kind of epistemological hardness which is overly strict -- a kind of scientism about how we live, and pretend that what we believe is only what can be demonstrated in some official or logical way. Life isn't like that. 

We know things in different ways, and develop faith for different reasons. 

Also, I don't think this is very beneficial for our times. People undervalue skepticism these days. An anti-vaxxer can't really learn anything from James I don't think. I think James is most-appropriately read by people who know the value of skepticism and are ready to put the final nail in faith's coffin. For these folks, James's arguments are a good "Not so fast!" But for the general population, especially in these trying times, James's thesis can only be misunderstood.

Yes, the right balance is tricky. Faith only in the fully tested is not reasonable. Faith in what one reads on Facebook is not warranted. 

Anti-vaxxers and such people are frustrating, but if we take a step back, I think we can have some sympathy. They have reached wrong conclusions, but not all of their arguments are insane. The government really does lie constantly, and has lied about Covid all along. Pharmaceutical companies really do only care about money, and don't give a hang if we live or die. Parsing just exactly which lies are important to see through becomes a difficult project. In a sense, the anti-vaxxers have overdone the skepticism -- they think that there is too much faith in the unproven. The vaccines really were developed quickly, and I remember when Kamala Harris said she would never trust a vaccine developed by the Trump administration. Then as soon as the President changed the same vaccines became trustworthy. The anti-vaxxers merely disbelieve in one more god than you and I do (figuratively speaking). 

Here we get into questions of elitism, and who controls information. 

On the recent thread about the Book of Job, I was feeling sympathy for the Catholic leaders prior to the Counter-Reformation, who thought that regular people really shouldn't be reading the Bible for themselves. Non-stupid interpretation is something for educated people. There is something to be said for offering carefully selected bits, carefully pre-interpreted, so as not to encourage those who don't know what they're talking about. As with the Church, though, it often turns out that the gatekeepers themselves are not trustworthy. There is a strong movement these days for more censorship to combat anti-vax type people, so that we've suddenly got educated liberal people wanting the government and Zuckermann to control speech. YouTube has taken down or demonetized several good people who depart slightly from the official line on Ukraine. 

So to bring this back on topic: the various things we have faith in are all founded to some degree on reasons. These may not be good reasons, and they may not be logically-stateable concepts. We can't expect scientific-type foundations for all faith, and frustrating as it is sometimes, this is actually a good thing. Fully-realized human convictions have multivalent origins, just because of how our minds work.