Belief

Abstract

clement of Alexandria remarks that 'not only the Platonists, but the Stoics, say that assent is in our power.' 1 In the opening chapters of Clement's Miscellanies, the voluntariness of faith is of crucial importance, for he maintains that if we have faith, God will then grant us knowledge of himself, and that it is only by faith that we can acquire this knowledge. He takes as literally true the words of the Prophet 'Except ye believe, neither shall ye understand.' Clement unfolds this cryptic statement: 'Faith, by a kind of divine mutual and reciprocal correspondence, becomes characterized by knowledge.' Clement sees love or fear as the foundation of this voluntarily accepted faith, but clearly, from what has already been said, there may be at least one other motive - desire for knowledge of God. Furthermore, according to Clement, faith is the foundation of all knowledge. If anyone should hold that knowledge is founded on demonstration, he should be reminded, says Clement, that first principles are incapable of demonstration. Anyone who believes that philosophical positions are never refuted but only go out of fashion and come back again, will be encouraged to learn that William James virtually reproduces Clement's position in his article The Will to Believe. For James argues that we have a right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, and he suggests pretty strongly that evidence for the existence of God will only be forthcoming after we have believed. And to parallel Clement's point about demonstration it will be found that Hume's skeptical arguments make it appear that certain fundamental propositions cannot be justified, but only accepted. It will be seen that, in direct opposition to these views, both Locke and Hume think it absurd to assert that it is within our power to believe anything. Nevertheless, in recent years R.M. Chisholm has made famous the concept of the ethics of belief. He has contested the ethical point of view put by W.K. Clifford - 'It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence' - with the view that 'we may accept any proposition we would like to accept provided only that we do not have adequate evidence for its contradictory. Quite obviously, this implies that there is a very wide range of propositions that we are at liberty to believe. Chisholm is well aware of this, and argues that our believings are 'acts', since they are characterized by self-control, which, Chisholm argues, is the essence of activity. 5 But other contemporary philosophers, for example, Bernard Williams and Roy Edgley, argue that it is not even a contingent fact that we cannot choose to believe. So it has long been the case, and is still the case, that what some philosophers have offered as a practical proposal, others have seen as a logical impossibility. In order to discover what sort of freedom we have to believe I shall investigate the writings of a succession of philosophers in the empiricist tradition to see what they say about this subject, and, more importantly, to determine whether or not positions they establish commit them to some sort of freedom to believe. As this examination of particular philosophers proceeds, points relevant to the voluntariness of belief suggest themselves, and I shall not hesitate to pursue them. Most of the philosophers selected here are not interested in the freedom to believe per se, or even in belief per se, but in judgment, which is one way of coming to believe. Now it is impossible to explicate Locke's theory of judgment without also explicating his theory of probability, which in turn makes it necessary to discuss his theory of testimony. In the philosophers studied here after Locke, only Hume had a developed theory of probability, and as that theory has received ample discussion in the literature, I have dealt with it quickly. But both Hume and Clifford have expounded views about testimony. Now testimony is a fundamental source of information right across the spectrum of human activities. In our everyday lives we rely on it for the news of the day. In our workaday lives we rely on it to learn what our colleagues are working on and what they have read or heard. Scientists rely on testimony to ascertain whether or not co-workers have made corroborating observations. Individuals outside the pale of religion must, if Clement and James are correct, rely on it to learn if those who believed before them were rewarded with evidence. Yet testimony is not well covered in the literature, so I have made the discussion of it, along with the discussion of the freedom to believe, the main theme of the thesis. When the historical examination is complete, I list the conclusions arrived at and comment on them, and defend them against the arguments of contemporary philosophers. The final chapter is an independent discussion of testimony.