The Will to Believe

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" The Will to Believe " is a discourse by William James, first published in 1896, defending, in certain cases, the adoption of faith without prior proof of its truth. In particular, James is concerned in this lecture about defending the rationality of the religious faith even lacking sufficient evidence of religious truth. James states in the introduction: "I have brought me tonight [...] an essay in the justification of faith, the defense of our right to adopt a belief in religious matters, despite the fact that our logical intellect may not be imposed. Will to Believe, 'is the title of my paper. "

James's main argument in "The Will to Believe" depends on the idea that access to evidence of whether a particular belief is true or not depends on first adopting it without evidence. For example, James argues that it can be rational to have an unsupported belief in one's own ability to accomplish a task that requires self-confidence. Importantly, James pointed out that this is the case even to pursue a scientific inquiry. James then argues that as belief in his own ability to accomplish difficult tasks, religious beliefs can also be rational even if a person at that time has no evidence of the truth of one's religious beliefs.

Video The Will to Believe

The lecture

James "The Will to Believe" and William K. Clifford's essay "The Ethics of Belief" are touchstones for many contemporary debates about evidence, faith, and distrust. James "The Will to Believe" consists of a preface followed by ten numbered but untitled sections. In his introduction, James characterizes his lecture by stating that he has "brought this evening to me [...] an essay on the justification of faith, the defense of our right to adopt a belief in religious matters, regardless of our logical intelligence alone. not forced. "" The Will to Believe ", is the title of my paper. "At the end of his opening speech, James took the lead to his first part by stating that he" had to start by setting some technical differences ".

Part I-III: Preliminaries

In Part I, James began the task of defining a number of important terms he would rely on throughout the lecture:

• The life and death hypothesis - "death and liveness [...] is measured by the desire to act." Maximum liveness in the hypothesis means the willingness to act can not be canceled "
• OptionÃ, - "decision between two hypotheses"
• Choice of life and death - "live option is the place where both hypotheses are living"
• Push and avoid options - existing options "no possibility of not selecting"
• Important and trivial choices - "options are trivial when opportunities are not unique, when bets are insignificant, or when a decision can be reversed if it later proves unwise"
• The original option - "we can call the original option option when it is forced, live, and very important"
• Trust - "A chemist finds the hypothesis alive to spend a year in verification: he believes that far."

In part II, James begins by saying he will consider "the real psychology of human opinion". Here James considers and most agree with criticism of Pascal's Wager that we should not or can not believe or distrust willpower. Namely, James here seems to reject a doxastic voluntarism, "the philosophical doctrine that he thinks people have voluntary control over their beliefs." In Part III, however, James qualifies his endorsement of Pascal's Wager's criticism by stating that "only our dead hypothesis is that the nature of our willingness can not revive". By which James means that only things we already do not believe that we can not believe in will.

Part IV: Thesis

In its very short section IV, James introduced the main thesis of the work:

"Our nature is not only legitimately but must determine the choice between propositions, whenever it is a genuine choice that can not be determined by intellectual reasoning, for to say in such circumstances," Does not decide, but let the question open, "is itself a passive decision - like deciding yes or no - and attended to the risk of losing the same truth."

However, instead of giving an argument for this thesis, James quickly ended this section by stating that he still had to "enjoy a little more early work".

Section V-VII: More preliminaries

In section V, James makes the distinction between skepticism about truth and its accomplishment and what he calls "dogmatism": "the truth exists, and that our minds can find it". Regarding dogmatism, James states that he has two forms; that there are "absolute ways" and "empirical ways" to believe in the truth. James states: "The absolutists in this matter say that we can not only know the truth, but we can know when we have attained that knowledge, while the empiricists think that although we can achieve it, we can not without doubt know when." James then goes on to state that "empirical tendencies have prevailed in science, while in philosophy the absolute tendency has everything in its own way".

James ends section V by stating that empiricists are no longer tentative about their beliefs and conclusions than absolutists: "The greatest empiricists among us are the empiricists on reflection: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible whales. Cliffords tells us how sinful to be Christians to such "insufficient evidence," insufficiency is the last thing they think about, for the evidence is sufficient, only that it makes another way, they believe in anti-Christianity. the order of the universe with no choice of life: Christianity is a dead hypothesis from the beginning. "

James began section VI with the following question: "But now, since we are all like absolutists by instinct, what should we do about the quality of our philosophy of fact? Should we support and support it?" He then replied: "I truly believe that the final course is the only one we can follow as a reflective man. [...] I, therefore, am a complete empiricist as far as my theory of human knowledge."

James ends section VI by emphasizing what he finds as the "big difference" of the empirical way of the absolute way: "The power of the system lies in the principles, originally, the terminus a quo [the starting point] of his thinking, our power is on the outcome, outcome,

James starts section VII by stating that there is "one more point, small but important, and our introduction is done". However, in fact James gave this piece a bit of an important argument:

"There are two ways to look at our task in terms of opinion - a completely different way, but the way in which differences in the theory of knowledge seem to have so far shown so little attention.We must know the truth, and we must avoid mistakes - these are our first and foremost commands as people who know, but they are not two ways of expressing the same command, they are two separate laws.Although it may indeed happen that when we believe in Truth A, we run away as a consequence incidental from believing in B's lies, it almost never happens that only with B's unbelief we must believe A. We may in escape B fall into believing another falsehood, C or D, as bad as B, or we can escape from B by trusting anything, even A.

Believe the truth! Shun error! - this, we see, are two materially different laws; and by choosing between them we can end by coloring differently our entire intellectual life. We can regard the pursuit of truth as the most important, and the avoidance of error as a secondary matter; or we may, on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more important, and let the truth take its chances. Clifford, in the instructive passage I have quoted, urges us to the last resort. Believing anything, he tells us, keeps your mind in suspense forever, rather than by closing it on proof that does not quite raise the terrible risk of believing lies. You, on the other hand, may think that the risk of error is a very small matter when compared to the blessing of real knowledge, and is ready to be duped repeatedly in your investigation rather than delaying indefinitely the chance to guess right. I myself can not possibly go with Clifford. We must remember that the feeling of our duty of righteousness or error is merely the expression of our ordinary life. Considered biologically, our mind is ready to break the lie as truth, and he who says, "It's better to go away without faith forever than to believe in lies!" just show a greater personal horror to become a victim of fraud. He may be critical of many of his desires and fears, but this fear he obeys. She could not imagine anyone questioning her binding strength. For my own part, I am also afraid of being deceived; but I can believe that things worse than being cheated can happen to a man in this world: so Clifford's advice to my ears really sounds fantastic. It's like a general telling his soldiers that it's better to survive the battle forever than to risk one wound. Not so is the victory either over the enemy or over the natural gained. Our mistake is certainly not a very serious thing. In a world where we are so sure to carry them out of all our warnings, certain lighter hearts seem healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf. However, it seems the most suitable thing for empirical philosophers. "

One possible way to interpret James's words here is to bring him to argue that while we must avoid falsehood, there is nothing wrong if we do so while pursuing the truth. That is, James firmly agrees that we must hold faith until we have sufficient evidence when the evidence comes . Not doing so is to completely ignore the task of avoiding falsehood. However, as James would argue, where the truth of the faith comes only after something is believed or where the evidence of truth or falsehood is accessible only to the believer, the search for the truth seems to require us to believe in insufficient evidence.. Section VIII-X: The main argument

In part VIII, James finally moves beyond what he considers a mere introduction. Here James first identifies the area of ​​belief in which he holds that to believe without evidence will be justified: "Wherever the choice between losing the truth and obtaining it is unimportant, we can discard the opportunity to gain the truth, and nevertheless save ourselves from every opportunity to believe in a lie , by not making our minds altogether until objective evidence has come in. In scientific questions, this is almost always the case [...] The question here is always a trivial choice, the hypothesis is barely alive (in every number that is not alive for our audience) the choice between belief in truth or falsehood is seldom forced. "James sums up this passage by asking us to agree" that wherever there is no forced choice, a blind judicature without a hypothesis about pets, saves us, as from fraud, also, should be our ideal ".

In section IX, James moves to investigate whether there is an area of ​​belief in which unwarranted beliefs will be justified. James gives a self-fulfilling belief as one example of such a belief:

"Do you like me or not?" Whether you do it or not depends, in many instances, if I meet you halfway, I want to assume that you should like me, and show my trust and hope. The previous belief on my part in the whereabouts of your wish is in what kind of cases make you love to come. But if I stand aloof, and refuse to move a bit until I have objective evidence, until you will do something apt [... ] the ten to one you love never comes. [...] The desire for certain kinds of truths here brings about the existence of that special truth, and so in countless other cases. "

From such examples, James concludes: "There are, then, cases where facts can not come at all unless the earliest faith is in its coming, and where faith in a fact can help create facts, it will be a mad logic who must say that the faith that runs in front of scientific evidence is the "lowest form of evil" in which thinking creatures can fall. "

James started section X with his own self-directed thesis proven: "In truth depends on our personal actions, then, a belief based on desire is of course legal and may be irreplaceable." James then goes on to argue that, like the example he gave in section IX, religious beliefs are also a kind of belief that depends on our personal actions and can therefore also be believed by faith on the basis of desire:

"We also feel as if our religious appeal is made to our own active goodwill, as if evidence may be forever held from us unless we meet a half-way hypothesis.To extract a trivial illustration: just as a man in a gentleman's company made no progress, requested a warrant for every concession, and believed there was no word without proof, would cut himself off by such depravity from all the more credible social awards he would get - so here, the one who has to confine himself in the growling logic and try to make the gods squeeze his confession inevitably, or not get it at all, may cut himself forever from the only chance of making the gods' This acquaintance, imposed on we, we do not know from where, that by constantly believing that there is a god (though not doing it will be sanga t is easy for both our logic and our life) we do the deepest service universe we can, it seems that part of the living essence of the Yigesis religious hypothesis is true in all its parts, including this one, then pure intellectualism, with the veto to make progress we want, will be absurdity; and some participation of our sympathetic nature will be required logically. Therefore, I, for one, can not see my way to accept the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or deliberately agree to keep my nature out of the game. I can not do it for this obvious reason, that the rule of mind that would prevent me from acknowledging certain types of truth if such a truth really exists, would be an irrational rule. For me is the long and short of the formal logic of the situation, no matter what kind of truth may be the material. "

Although James is not here explaining the way the truth or evidence of religious beliefs depends on our first religious beliefs, he argues that it is part of the religious belief itself that its own truth or its own proof of truth depends upon us believing it. In the preface to the published version of "The Will to Believe" James offers different arguments for the manner in which religious proof depends on our beliefs. There he argues that it is through the failure or development of a community of believers that we come to have a proof of the truth of their religious beliefs. In this way, to obtain evidence of religious belief, we must first have a believer who adopts such beliefs without sufficient evidence. Far later, in his book, "Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Thinking Ways", James also mentions the possibility that the existence of God may really depend on our belief in its existence.

Maps The Will to Believe

Doctrine

The doctrine that James proposes in "The Will to Believe" often appears in his past and later works. James himself changed the doctrine's name several times. First emerge as "obligation to believe", then "subjective method", then "desire to believe", finally overhauled by James as "right to believe". Whatever its name, doctrine always observes the rationality of believing without evidence in certain cases. In particular, James defends violations of evidentialism in two examples:

• Adventurous hypotheses (see hypothetical-deductivism) - beliefs whose evidence is available only after they are trusted
• Self-fulfilling beliefs - the belief that by making themselves right there.

Having declared that for the adventurous hypothesis and with a self-satisfying belief of a rational person to believe without proof, James argues that belief in a number of philosophical topics qualifies as one of the two permissible offenses of evidentialism (eg free will, God, and immortality). The reason James took himself to justify a rational position that is often not believed to be verified by any method, is how important he thinks believing something can be to verify that belief. That is, in these cases, James argues that the reason why evidence does not seem to be available to us is because evidence of truth or falsehood comes only after it is believed than ever before. For example, in the following passage, James uses his doctrine to justify the belief that "this is a moral world":

Then it can not be said that the question, "Is this a moral world?" is a question that is meaningless and can not be verified because it deals with something that is not phenomenal. Every question is meaningful, as here, the opposite answer leads to conflicting behavior. And it seems as though answering questions like this, we can go on exactly like the physical philosopher in testing the hypothesis. [...] So here: verify the theory you may hold as a moral character of the world that can objectively only consist of this - that if you act according to your theory, the theory will be reversed by whatever will appear as the fruit of your actions ; it will harmonize well with the whole experience to be adopted, as it is, to adopt it. [...] If this becomes an objective moral world, all the actions I make on that assumption, all the hopes that I understand, will tend to be more and more complete to interdigitate with the existing phenomenon. [...] Although it is not a moral universe like that, and I mistakenly assume that it is, the course of experience will throw new obstacles in the way my beliefs, and become increasingly difficult to express in the language. The epicycle of the epicycle of the subsidiary hypothesis should be imposed to be given to the term discrepant which is a temporary display of squaring with each other; but eventually even these resources will fail. (- William James, "The Sentiment of Rationality")

The doctrine that James developed in his lecture "The Will to Believe" was then extended by his church  © F.C.S. Schiller in his long essay "Axiom as a Postulate". In this work, Schiller belittles the relationship between James's doctrine and religious position like God and immortality. On the other hand, Schiller emphasizes the doctrinal ability to justify our belief in the uniformity of nature, causality, space, time, and other philosophical doctrines that are generally considered unpredictable empirically.

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Criticism

The doctrine of James has been heavily criticized. In 1907, University of Michigan Professor Alfred Henry Lloyd published "The Will to Doubt" in reply, claiming that doubt was essential to true beliefs.

C.S. Peirce ended his paper in 1908 "The Neglected Argument for the Reality of God" complained generally about what other philosophers have done with pragmatism, ending with criticism specifically addressed to James's willingness to believe:

It seems to me pity they [pragmatists like James, Schiller] should allow philosophy so instinct with life to become infected with the seed of death in such a sense as the unreality of all the ideas of infinity and that of the transition of truth, and in the confusion of mind like active desire (want to control mind, doubt, and weigh the reasons) by not wanting to exert desire (want to believe).

Bertrand Russell in Free Thought and Official Propaganda argues that one must always adhere to fallibilism, acknowledging all human knowledge that "None of our true beliefs have all had at least a glimpse of ambiguity and error," and that's the only way progress is ever closer the truth is never to assume certainty, but always check all parties and try to reach the conclusion objectively.

Walter Kaufmann Menulis:

Instead of acknowledging that some traditional beliefs are entertaining, James argues that "the risk of error is a very small matter when compared to the real blessing of knowledge", and implies that those who do not accept religious beliefs are cowards, fearing to risk anything: It's like a soldier who tells the public that it's better to prevent fighting forever than to risk one wound "(Part VII). James's fascination is entirely dependent on blurring the distinction between those who hold 100 percent proof in terms where every reasonable person relies on, say, 90 percent, and those who refuse to obey a belief that is supported only by the argument that however it can be conceivably true.

Some specific objections to James's doctrine include:

1. the need to submit a hypothesis without personally adopting it as a belief
2. epistemological problems of voluntary belief
3. success in the world verify beliefs, rather than limiting verification for predictive success
4. separation of adoption beliefs from truth and epistemic justification

James addresses the objection (1) in the footnote of "The Will to Believe" essay in which he argues that for a chemist to devote years of his life to verify hypotheses, the chemist must also believe his hypothesis. However, chemists who adopt hypotheses to guide years of research are of course just special cases of hypothesis adoption. A more general defense of (1) can also be constructed from Jamesis' belief theory. James believes in a proposition to act as if it is true, so if James considers testing the proposition as an act as if it is true to see if it leads to a successful action, then James will commit to seeing the adoption of the hypothesis as an act of adoption of beliefs as well.

Objection (2) seems to require the ability to believe. James believes that when evidence is insufficient to determine the truth or falsity of the proposition, this uncertainty allows one to be able to have faith by acting as if it were true. Objection (2) ensures further discussion of "volunteerism".

Objection (3) strikes on James's pragmatic truth theory, by which his desire to believe doctrine seems to presuppose. James's primary defense of his theory of truth is his claim that there is no other record of "truth" or "correspondence" or "agreement with reality" that can be given except for pragmatic notes. James sees the traditional report of truth as the explanation of a mysterious term ("truth") with nothing more than the same mysterious term (eg "correspondence"). The only understanding that James believes that we can make the concept of "truth" is if we hold true to the belief that leads us to act "agree" with the world. Those who fit the world will lead to successful action, those who disagree with the world will require actions that lead to failure (for example if someone is sure he can fly, he will jump from the building). With the truths analyzed in this way, James sees no reason to limit his success to predicting success (objection (3)) and is entirely at ease with the fact that certain beliefs will lead one person to success in the world while failing with others (objection (4 ))). However, the answer to these two objections is not open to James because he explicitly claims that his desire to believe in doctrine does not depend on his pragmatic theory of truth.

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See also

• American Philosophy
• Fideism
• Pascal Bets
• Pragmatism
• Prudentialism

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Note

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External links

• "The Will to Believe" by William James; URL accessed November 25, 2006
• Expressive analysis of James's essay.
• "James' Will to Believe Argument" entered from Argument Only: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy , edited by Michael Bruce and Steven Barbone. First edition. Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published in 2011.

Source of the article : Wikipedia