Belief – Page 9 – Maverick Philosopher

Do You Really Believe in an Afterlife?

A correspondent poses this question:

If you believe in an afterlife, one in which things are presumably a lot better than here, why not be eager to "move on"? I can understand the wicked fearing judgment, but why are the righteous not eager to shuffle off?

To put the challenge in a sharper form: "You say you believe you will survive your bodily death, and that death will be a liberation from the woes of this world. And yet you behave like everyone else: you fret over threats large and small and do all in your power to prolong your bodily life. I have to wonder whether you really believe what you profess to believe."

I'll try to give an honest answer.

1. Belief in an afterlife is not like the belief that I am sitting in a chair. The latter belief is either knowledge or very close to it. The will does not come into the formation or maintenance of this belief. With respect to massive perceptual beliefs we are all doxastic involuntarists. But no one this side of the Great Divide knows whether we survive our bodily deaths. The considerations, both empirical and dialectical, in favor of survival are not conclusive, but neither are the considerations against it. (Which is not to deny that the world is filled with dogmatists who think they know what they do not know.) One must therefore decide what one will believe in this matter all the while knowing that one could be 'dead' wrong. In this predicament, it is perfectly understandable why one would not be eager to hurry off into what is presently unknown.

To this I would add that, unless one is in the grip of childish conceptions, of the sort rampant among militant atheists, the encounter with the Lord of the universe can be expected to be terrifying. Fear and trembling, Timor domini initium sapientiae, etc. The exact opposite of a comforting illusion. You might get more than you bargained for. It is easily understandable that the believer, though at one level wanting to enter the divine presence, may prefer to put it off a while, especially if things are going well here below. Do babies want to leave the womb?

2. Another aspect of the above challenge is the veiled accusation that one is professing what one does not really believe. People on opposite sides of ideological divides are wont to taunt one another with You can't really believe that! or You don't really believe what you ar saying! Well, how do we know whether or not a person really believes something? From behavior. Applied to the case before us: does he pursue the afterlife question, think about it, research it, talk about it, write about it? If he does, then it is a Jamesian live option for him. Does he live in any way differently than those who do not hold the belief? Does his belief that he will be judged for his actions and omissions (a belief that Wittgenstein apparently could not shake) hold him back from any morally reprehensible actions? If the answers to these questions are in the affirmative, then the person does really believe what he professes to believe.

3. On many religious conceptions, this world is, in the words of John Keats, a vale of soul-making. That is "the use of the world" as Keats says. As one of my aphorisms has it, we are not here to improve the world, but to be improved by it. It is by our sojourn through it, by our experience of its trials and tribulations, agonies and ecstasies, that we develop an identity, actualize ourselves, become full-fledged persons. Identity is not a given but a task. Nicht gegeben sondern aufgegeben. We are all sparks of the divine intelligence, but only some of us becomes souls because only some of us acquire an identity. The rest fall back into the divine fire. Embodiment, on this scheme, is thus a necessary condition of coming to acquire an identity, an haecceity and ipseity. We come from God and we return to God. But the trick is to return to God as individuals capable of enjoying the Beatific Vision. If we merely return to God by a sort of Hindu reabsorption of the soul into the ocean of Brahman, then we will not be able to enjoy God. As Ramanuja puts it contra the Advaitins, "I Iwant to taste sugar, not become sugar!" If the use of the world is to be a vale of soul-making, then the return to God is not a loss of identity in God but a fellowship with God.

Now if the use of this world is to be a vale of soul-making, then one would have a good reason to not want to "shuffle off" (in the words of my correspondent) too soon. The reason is that there is work to be done in the development of one's personhood, and this work needs to be done in a place and predicament such as the one we are in.

Of Berkeley’s Stones and the Eliminativist’s Beliefs

I lately endorsed William Lycan's Moorean refutation of eliminative materialism (EM). But I disagreed with Lycan on one point. Lycan thinks that Moorean arguments refute Bradley and McTaggart and that there is no essential difference between the characteristic claims of the British Idealists and the characteristic claims of eliminativists in the philosophy of mind: both deny what common sense must affirm. I believe he is wrong about this, and I will now try to show why. It seems that there are three main positions on this issue. To have some handy labels, I will call them R, L, and V.

R. Just as Berkeley cannot be refuted by kicking a stone, the eliminativist cannot be refuted in any simple Moorean manner. Idealist and eliminativist claims are in the same logical boat, a boat that cannot be sunk by Moorean torpedoes.

L. British and other idealists can be refuted in Moorean ways, and so can eliminativists in the philosophy of mind. Idealist and eliminativist claims are in the same logical boat, a boat that is exposed to Moorean attack.

V. The 'same logical boat' assumption made by R and V must be rejected. There is a crucial difference between what eliminativists are doing and what idealists are doing. The idealist does not deny the existence of physical objects, or time, or relations. Berkeley, for example, does not deny the existence of stones and other meso-particulars. He offers a theory of their ontological constitution. His question is not whether they are, but what they are. His answer, roughly, is that stones and trees and the like are bundles or collections of ideas. Thus he gives an immaterialist account of ordinary particulars. They exist all right, but their status is mind-dependent, the ultimate mind in question being God's.

The eliminativist, however, flatly denies the existence of mental items such as pains, desires, and beliefs. It should be obvious, then, that there is an important difference between what idealists do and what eliminativists do. Idealist accounts are not existence-denying, but they do have an ontologically demoting upshot. If physical object are mind-dependent in the Berkeleyan manner, then they cannot exist in themselves, but only in relation to another, God, who exists in himself. Idealism thus reduces the being-status of physical objects from what it would be on a realist approach. The eliminativist, by contrast, is not engaged in ontological demotion, but in flat-out denial. He does not say of beliefs that they are mind-dependent, or mere appearances, or less than ultimately real; what he says is that they don't exist at all. If the eliminativist said that mental items exist as appearances he would be giving up the game. A pain, e.g., is such that to be = to appear. If you admit the appearance of a mental event such as a pain, you admit its reality.

Whatever the objections that can be lodged against Berkeleyan idealism, it cannot be refuted by kicking a stone. But eliminative materialism can be refuted by simply noting that one desires a beer. Moorean arguments are worthless when deployed against the positions of the great idealists, and this for the reason that the prosaic Moore simply did not understand what they were arguing. But when someone denies a plain datum, then he does run up against common sense in an objectionable way.

Eliminative Materialism and Belief: Another Wrinkle

I've made it clear that I think eliminative materialism (EM) is a "lunatic philosophy of mind" to borrow a phrase from A. W. Collins. Peter Lupu basically agrees though he may not care to put the point in such an intemperate way. What follows is an excerpt from a recent e-mail of his. Since I want to be fair to EM-ists, I want to suggest a way they may be able to counter the following objection Peter raises.

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No Beliefs? Then No Truths Either!

Peter Lupu e-mails:

A comment to mull over regarding your premise (A) in your recent post about Eliminative Materialism.

A. If a proposition is true, then it is possibly such that it is believed by someone.

Premise (A) says that in order for a proposition to be true, it is a necessary condition that it can be the content of someone's belief. But there may be true propositions that cannot be for one reason or another the content of our beliefs. For instance, perhaps there are true mathematical propositions that are so complicated or so long or require such a complicated proof that it would be simply impossible for the human mind to believe. Perhaps some other mind, for instance God's mind, can comprehend them, know them, and hence believe them: but no mortal mind can do so. Thus, it seems that premise (A) requires the existence of a deity in order to make it work.

Good point. (A) is subject to scope ambiguity as between:

A*. If a proposition p is true, then there exists a subject S such that, possibly, S believes that p.

A**. If a proposition p is true, then, possibly there exists a subject S and S believes that p.

Given Peter's point above, (A*) would seem to require for its truth that there be a divine mind. But all I need for my argument against eliminative materialism is (A**), which does not require for its truth that there exist any mind, let alone a divine mind. What (A**) says is that a necessary condition of a proposition's being true as that it be possible that there exist a believer of it.

My point was that the concept of truth is the concept of something that cannot be coherently conceived except in relation to the epistemic concepts of belief and knowledge. Now there needn't be any beliefs for there to be true (or false) propositions. But if beliefs are not possible, then neither are true propositions. Now eliminative materialism implies not only that there are no beliefs, but that there cannot be any. But then there cannot be any true propositions either.

Recall the argument against beliefs. It went like this: (1) If beliefs are anything, then they are brain states; (2) beliefs exhibit original intentionality; (3) no physical state, and thus no brain state, exhibits original intentionality; therefore (4) there are no beliefs. Since each of the premises is a necessary truth if it is a truth, the conclusion, which validly follows, is a necessary truth if it is a truth.

Thus the EM-er does not merely claim that, as a matter of fact, there are no beliefs; his claim is that there cannot be any. Of course, that renders his position even more absurd. But that's not my problem!

CORRECTION (12/18): Peter rightly points out that (A**) needs tweaking. Consider its contrapositive which is logically equivalent: If it is not possible that there exist a subject S such that S believes that p, then it is not the case that p is true. Unfortunately, the consequent of the contrapositive conditional could be taken to mean that p is not true, and thus (assuming Bivalence) false, when the idea is rather that p lacks a truth-value. So (A**) ought to be replaced by

A***. If a proposition p has a truth-value, then, possibly there exists a subject S such that S believes (disbelieves, entertains, etc.) that p.

Eliminative Materialism: Can You Believe It?

In an earlier post, I provided a rough characterization of eliminative materialism (EM). Here is a more technical exposition for the stout of heart. If EM is true, then there are no beliefs. But what about the belief that EM is true, a belief that one would expect eliminative materialists to hold? If we exfoliate this question will we find an objection to EM? Let's see.

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Hume on Belief and Existence

Section VII of Book I of David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature is relevant to recent investigations of ours into belief, existence, assertion, and the unity of the proposition. In this section of the Treatise, Hume anticipates Kant's thesis that 'exists' is not a real predicate, and Brentano's claim that the essence of judgment cannot consist in the combining of distinct concepts.

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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

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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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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