Author: Bill Vallicella

On Belief

I have been thinking about belief and whether it is under the control of the will. This question is important since it lies at the foundation of the very possibility of an 'ethics of belief.' People believe all sorts of things, and it is quite natural to suppose that some of the things they believe they are not entitled to believe, they have no right to believe, they are not justified in believing, they ought not believe. The characteristic beliefs of Holocaust deniers, for example, are not only demonstrably false, but also such that their holding by these nimrods is morally censurable. One has the strong sense that these people are flouting their epistemic duties.

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Knowledge Without Belief: A Dallas Willard-Josef Pieper Connection

A commenter on the Pieper post notes that Dallas Willard has a understanding of the belief-knowledge relation (or lack of relation) similar to that of Pieper. A little searching brought me to the following passage in Willard's Knowledge and Naturalism which substantiates the commenter's suggestion (I have bolded the parts relevant to my current concerns):

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A Pieperian Argument for Doxastic Voluntarism

Pieper-Joseph Josef Pieper (1904-1997) is a 20th century German Thomist. I read his Belief and Faith as an undergraduate and am now [December 2007] re-reading it very carefully. It is an excellent counterbalance to a lot of the current analytic stuff on belief and doxastic voluntarism. What follows is my reconstruction of Pieper's argument for doxastic voluntarism in Belief and Faith. His thesis, to be found in Augustine and Aquinas, is that "Belief rests upon volition." (p. 27. Augustine, De praedestinatione Sanctorum, cap. 5, 10: [Fides] quae in voluntate est . . . .) I shall first present the argument in outline, and then comment on the premises and inferences.

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Against William Alston Against Doxastic Voluntarism

The following remarks are based on the first two sections of Chapter Four, "Deontological Desiderata," of William P. Alston's Beyond "Justification": Dimensions of Epistemic Evaluation (Cornell UP, 2005), pp. 58-67.

1. It makes sense to apply deontological predicates to actions. Thus it makes sense to say of a voluntary action that it is obligatory or permissible or impermissible. But does it make sense to apply such predicates to beliefs and related propositional attitudes? If I withhold my assent to proposition p, does it make sense to say that the withholding is obligatory or permissible or impermissible? Suppose someone passes on a nasty unsubstantiated rumor concerning a mutual acquaintance. Is believing it blameworthy? Is suspending judgment required? Or is deontological evaluation simply out of place in a case like this?

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Locke, James, Doxastic Voluntarism and Two Bases of Toleration

The topic of doxastic voluntarism is proving to be fascinating indeed. It is interestingly related to the topic of toleration about which I have something to say in On Toleration: With a Little Help from Kolakowski, in The Danger of Appeasing the Intolerant, and in Toleration and its Limits.

Let us begin today's meditation with a passage from John Locke's A Letter Concerning Toleration:

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Toleration and its Limits

Henry V. e-mails:

I have a question. Is there a technical philosophical term for the case when a principle, applied consistently, leads to its own negation? I have in mind the example of the principle of civic tolerance, that when consistently applied to groups such as Muslims who wish to see Sharia law instituted in the West, would lead to the destruction of tolerance. Many other examples can be found in contemporary politics.

This is a good question, Henry, and while I thank you for it, I am not sure of the answer, though 'fallacy of accident' is in the ball park as I explain below. You don't tell me what you mean by 'civic tolerance,' or how the principle of civic tolerance should read, and without a statement of the principle, it is hard to have a disciplined discussion. So let me extract a principle from the following UNESCO paragraph:

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The Danger of Appeasing the Intolerant

Should we tolerate the intolerant? Should we, in the words of Leszek Kolakowski,

. . . tolerate political or religious movements which are hostile to tolerance and seek to destroy all the mechanisms which protect it, totalitarian movements which aim to impose their own despotic regime? Such movements may not be dangerous as long as they are small; then they can be tolerated. But when they expand and increase in strength, they must be tolerated, for by then they are invincible, and in the end an entire society can fall victim to the worst sort of tyranny. Thus it is that unlimited tolerance turns against itself and destroys the conditions of its own existence. (Freedom, Fame, Lying, and Betrayal, p. 39.)

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Are There Any Beliefs Over Which We Have Direct Voluntary Control? Doxastic Voluntarism and Epoché

I suppose I am a limited doxastic voluntarist: though I haven't thought about this question in much depth my tendency is to say that there are some beliefs over the formation of which I have direct voluntary control. That is, there are some believable contents — call them propositions — that I can bring myself to believe at will, others that I can bring myself to disbelieve at will, and still others about which I can suspend judgment, thereby enacting something like the epoché (ἐποχή) of such ancient skeptics as Sextus Empiricus.

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Are Any Beliefs Acquired At Will? Any Room for an ‘Ethics of Belief’?

William P. Alston boldly maintains that "no one ever acquires a belief at will." (Beyond Justification, Cornell 2005, 67) This blanket rejection of doxastic voluntarism — the view that some belief-formation is under the  control of the will — sounds extreme. What about beliefs that one acquires as a result of reasoning? Are not some of the beliefs acquired in this manner acquired at will? And if so, then is it not right to talk deontically of the permissibility and impermissibility of some beliefs?

Note that there are two connected questions.  One concerns whether or not any beliefs are under the control of the will.  The other concerns the legitimacy of  deontic talk in respect of beliefs.  A negative answer to the first question removes the second question, while an affirmative answer to the first question leaves the second question open.  Let's think about this.

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Ataraxia and Non-Contradiction

What is the highest good? To be a bit more precise, what is the highest good attainable by us though our own (individual or collective) efforts? One perennially attractive, if unambitious, answer is that of the Pyrrhonian skeptics: our highest good lies in ataraxia. The term connotes tranquillity, peace of mind, freedom from disturbance, unperturbedness. Other Hellenistic schools also identified the summum bonum with ataraxia, but let us confine ourselves to skepticism as represented by Sextus Empiricus.

The Pyrrhonian skeptic, then, seeks ataraxia as the summum bonum. This freedom from disturbance is supposed to be achieved by an epoché (ἐποχή)  or suspension of doxastic commitments of a certain sort. One is supposed to achieve the happiness of tranquillity by suspending one's belief on a certain range of issues, those issues that typically cause contention, enmity, and bloodshed. Among these will be found philosophical, theological, and political issues. My elite readers can easily supply their own examples.

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Ataraxia and the Tobacco Wacko

Near the end of the 1980's I read a paper at a multi-day philosophy conference in Ancient Olympia, Greece. After one of the sessions, we repaired to a beautiful seaside spot for lunch. We sat in the open air at long tables under a canopy. Directly across from me sat a Greek woman who had read a paper on ataraxia. A concept central to the Greek Sceptics, Stoics, and Epicureans, ataraxia (from the Greek a (not) and taraktos (disturbed)) refers to unperturbedness, tranquillitas animi, tranquillity of soul. Thus Sextus Empiricus (circa 200 A.D.) tells us in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book One, Chapter Six, that “Scepticism has its arche, its inception and cause, in the hope of attaining ataraxia, mental tranquility. (Hallie, p. 35) The goal is not truth, but eudaimonia (happiness, well-being) by way of ataraxia (tranquility of mind). A key method is the suspension (epoché , ἐποχή ) of all doxastic commitments.

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Gratitude: A Thanksgiving Homily

We need spiritual exercises just as we need physical, mental, and moral exercises. A good spiritual exercise, and easy to boot, is daily recollection of just how good one has it, just how rich and full one's life is, just how much is going right despite annoyances and setbacks which for the most part are so petty as not to merit consideration.

Start with the physical side of your life. You slept well, and a beautiful new day is dawning. Your breath comes easy, your intestines are in order. Your mind is clear, and so are your eyes. Move every moving part of your body and note how wonderfully it works, without any pain to speak of.

Brew up some java and enjoy its rich taste, all the while rejoicing over the regularity of nature that allows the water to boil one more time, at the same temperature, and the caffeine to be absorbed once more by those greedy intercranial receptors that activate the adrenalin that makes you eager to grab a notebook and jot down all the new ideas that are beginning to percolate up from who knows where.

Finished with your body, move to your mind and its wonderful workings. Then to the house and its appliances including your trusty old computer that reliably, day after day, connects you to the sphere of Nous, the noosphere, to hijack a term of Teilhard de Chardin. And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.

A quotidian enactment of something like the foregoing meditation should do wonders for you.

Politics and Religion Over Thanksgiving Dinner?

Here is a dilemma some of you will face. You are eating dinner with relatives, and one of the merry crew displays signs of Palin Derangement Syndrome. If you are a conservative, what do you do? Sit there and listen to the drivel? Or stand up for what's right? Start a food fight, literally or figuratively?

It's a dilemma in the strict, as opposed to the Dr. Laura, sense of the term: a situation in which there are exactly two alternatives, both of which are unacceptable. If you let the cretin escape, you do truth and justice a disservice. But if you oppose him or her, then you may ruin the conviviality of the occasion — to put it mildly.

You will have to work this out for yourself. The problem won't arise for me. My dinner party will consist of me, my wife, and my cat. Any offensive opinions will emanate from the television, against which I will be well-armed: fork in one hand, remote control in the other.

In the Interests of Prandial Harmony

Some of you will be at table with relatives today. Experientia docet: Such occasions of putative conviviality can easily degenerate into nastiness. A prophylactic to consider is the avoidance of all talk of politics and religion. But to paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, What else is there to talk about? An exaggeration, no doubt, but God and Man in relation to the State does cover a lot of ground.

Fiction and Philosophy: Does Fiction Do it Better?

John Gardner, On Writers and Writing, p. 225:

. . . at their best, both fiction and philosophy do the same thing, only fiction does it better — though slower. Philosophy by essence is abstract, a sequence of general argument controlled in its profluence by either logic (in old-fashioned systematic philosophy) or emotional coherence (in the intuitive philosophies of say, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard). We read the argument and it seems to flow along okay, make sense, but what we ask is, "Is this true of my mailman?" . . .

Fiction comes at questions from the other end. It traces or explores some general argument by examining a particular case in which the universal case seems implied; and in place of logic or emotional coherence — the philosopher's stepping stones — fictional argument is controlled by mimesis: we are persuaded that the characters would indeed do exactly what we are told they do and say . . . . If the mimesis convinces us, then the question we ask is opposite to that we ask of philosophical argument; that is, we ask, "Is this true in general?"

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