The Clifford-James debate
William Clifford claims that, “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”
Is he right? Is it ever OK to believe without sufficient evidence?
Is there a proper role for the will in believing?
We are faced with opposing epistemological directives—to believe truth and to avoid error. Each is embraced at the expense of the other.
Which is the more important? to believe truth or to avoid error?
William K. Clifford, “The Ethics ofBelief” (1877)
A shipowner sends a ship to sea loaded with passengers. He has good reason to doubt its seaworthiness. But, wanting to spare the expense of a proper refitting, he has allowed himself to be convinced by a dubious set of reasons that all will be well. He sends off the passengers in confidence of the soundness of his ship. The ship sinks. They all die.
“[the shipowner] was verily guilty of the death of those men.”
Why was he guilty for their deaths? What was his sin? He based his belief that all would be well on insufficient evidence: “he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him.”
We will revisit to this case later on.
If a belief
is not realized immediately in open deeds, it is stored up for the guidance of
the future… No real belief… is ever truly insignificant; it prepares us to
receive more of its like, confirms those which resembled it before, and weakens
others; and so gradually it lays a stealthy train in our inmost thoughts, which
may someday explode into overt action…
What we believe affects others for good or ill. We have a moral duty to our community and our posterity.
Every
rustic who delivers in the village alehouse his slow… may help to kill or keep
alive the fatal superstitions which clog his race. Every hard-worked wife of an
artisan may transmit to her children beliefs which shall knit society together,
or rend it in pieces. No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can
escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe.
Every time we let ourselves believe for unworthy reasons, we weaken our powers of self control, of doubting, of judicially and fairly weighing evidence… But a greater and wider evil arises when the credulous character is maintained and supported… The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things… but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.
William James, “The Will to Believe” (1896)
William James disagrees with Clifford. Yes, there are situations where it is appropriate to refrain from believing until the evidence comes in. But there are also cases where it cannot be avoided, and it is appropriate to allow one's passions to play a role in the formation of belief.
Hypotheses and options
A "hypothesis" is a proposition proposed for belief.
A hypothesis is either live or dead.
“A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed.”
This fact about a given hypothesis—whether it is live or dead—is relative to the individual thinker. Moreover, the liveness of a live proposition will come in degrees.
The tiny spaceship illistration
A decision between two hypotheses is an “option.”
Options, says James, are
living or
dead,
forced or
avoidable,
ommentous or
trivial.
A living option is one such that
both hypotheses are live to some degree.
A forced option is one such that
one cannot help but adopt one or the other.
To love me
or to hate me is not forced. One can remain indifferent.
To believe
P or not believe P is forced. Agnosticism is not believing.
A momentous option is existential. One’s decision has serious implications.
James uses an analogy involving a north pole expedition. We can update this...
He thus arrives at a definition that he will later put to use.
An option is a genuine option when it is live, forced, and momentous.
The role of the will in belief
Can we, by an act of the will alone,
come to believe propositions that we haven’t the slightest reason to believe?
It would seem that we cannot.
James considers Pascal’s “wager,” a purely pragmatic argument for belief in God.
No one for whom ‘God exists’ is a dead hypothesis would be moved by this pragmatic argument. Consider the response of a Christian, should this be used on behalf of Islam.
James shows some
sympathy for the man of science (think Clifford) who eschews the role of
non-evidential factors in determining belief.
Nevertheless, he means to upset
this view.
Yet if any
one should thereupon assume that intellectual insight is what remains after
wish and will and sentimental preference have taken wing, or that pure reason
is what then settles our opinions, he would fly quite as directly in the teeth
of the facts.
Even our evidential reasoning is governed by the will.
The liveness of hypotheses is determined by our intellectual climate. We have faith in the faith of our epistemic community. James gives a striking instance.
Our reason is quite satisfied, in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of every thousand of us, if it can find a few arguments that will do to recite in case our credulity is criticized by some one else. Our faith is faith in some one else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case. Our belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other,—what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up? We want to have a truth; we want to believe that our experiments and studies and discussions must put us in a continually better and better position towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out our thinking lives. But if a pyrrhonistic sceptic asks us how we know all this, can our logic find a reply? No! certainly it cannot. It is just one volition against another,—we willing to go in for life upon a trust or assumption which he, for his part, does not care to make.
The proposition ‘God exists’ is dismissed without due consideration by Clifford and others for the same reason that scientists do not generally investigate evidence for telepathy, namely, that the fact of telepathy would upset their enterprise.
Evidently, then, our non-intellectual nature does influence our convictions.
Is this fact pathological?
The thesis I defend is, briefly stated, this: Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, “Do not decide, but leave the question open,” is itself a passional decision,-just like deciding yes or no,--and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth.
Opposing directives
There are two opposing epistemological directives:
Believe truth.
Shun error.
Choosing one or the other colors the whole of our intellectual life. To embrace one or the other as one’s directive always comes at the expense of the other.
Whether one goes one way or the
other is an expression of one’s passions. It comes down to whether one’s desire to believe truth more
powerful than one’s fear of believing falsehood.
James chastizes Clifford for adopting the latter as his
prime directive.
Clifford's
exhortation… is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep
out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either
over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such awfully
solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all
our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive
nervousness on their behalf.
Application
Wherever the option between gaining
truth and avoiding error is not momentous, “we can throw the chance of gaining
truth away” and refrain from making up our minds until more evidence arrives.
This is most often true in the case of scientific questions. Prompt judgement
for judgement’s sake is inappropriate. It's better top remain aloof.
The situation is different when the option is momentous.
Application to the matter of the
existence of God.
For some the proposition ‘God exits’
is live. It appears to them as a possibility worth considering. And the
option of believing that God exists and not believing this is forced. Moreover, the question is
understood by individuals for which it is live as momentous.
To preach skepticism in such cases is passional rather than rational.
To preach scepticism to us as a duty until 'sufficient evidence' for religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear of its being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may be true. It is not intellect against all passions, then; it is only intellect with one passion laying down its law.
James hammers the point home...
It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married some one else? Scepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than chance of error…
He concludes...
I, therefore, for one, cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth seeking, or wilfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.
Revisiting the shipowner case
We can revisit the shipowner case.
If James is right then...
The moral failing of the shipowner is not that he believed without sufficient evidence per se, but that, in so doing, he failed in his duty, not as a believer, but as a shipowner.
As a shipowner he had a special duty to see to the upkeep and seaworthiness of his vessel. He permitted himself to be deluded by by dubious reasonings for the sake of profit and without care for others.
