Rights and Wrongs of Belief
Clifford, James
W.K. Clifford
• 1845-1879
• This short essay
remains quite famous
today.
• Clifford is worried
about cases it’s
wrong to hold a
certain belief.
• Sometimes a belief is
irresponsible.
The Ship-Owner
• What’s wrong with the ship-owner’s belief?
• W.K.C. talks here in terms of what we
have (and haven’t) got a right to believe.
• Does it make a difference, to Clifford,
whether the belief turns out to be correct
or not?
• A second example: What happens in the
‘agitating society’ case?
One reading of the problem
• Is it the actions, rather than the beliefs,
that are wrong here?
• Would an absolute freedom of belief,
limited by constraints on how we may act
in response to different beliefs, do the job?
• What does Clifford think?
• Can we really separate beliefs from what
they lead us to do?
Other worries about ill-founded
beliefs
• Having such beliefs leads to confirmation
bias (see p. 103): we are more apt to
accept further beliefs that reinforce what
we already believe, and less apt to
respond fairly to evidence against our
beliefs.
• No belief is truly private: they are
contagious, spread by means of word and
deed. (103-104)
The upshot for Clifford
• The duty to question our beliefs.
• Beliefs based on insufficient evidence risk not
just a personal mistake, but a spreading ‘plague’
of error.
• The danger of credulity: losing the habit of
testing and inquiry. (104-105)
• Summing up (105):
(I)t is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone
to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
William James’ “Will to Believe”
• An even more famous
essay.
• Defends a conditional
freedom to believe
without what WKC
would call sufficient
evidence.
• But watch the
conditions carefully!
Live and Dead Hypotheses
• What makes a hypothesis live for James?
• The distinction is (what philosophers call)
pragmatic: what is live (or dead) for you, in
this sense, depends on who you are, how
you were raised, etc.
• That is, it turns on a relation between an
individual and a hypothesis, not on the
hypothesis alone.
On Options
• Live or dead: Here we have things that we
are both able to do or not to do.
• Forced (vs. avoidable): Here we must
either do one or the other. What’s the key
example here?
• Momentous (vs. trivial): Some options
matter to us, while others are relatively
trivial.
Intellect vs. Passion and Volition
• Some opinions are driven by intellectual
issues: No choice is really open to us,
here. (Can I really choose to believe that
Stephen Harper doesn’t exist?)
• Another case: Pascal’s wager. Can it
have any effect on someone for whom
Christianity is not a live option?
• Here talk of volitional belief seems empty!
Our Willing Nature
• James holds that the limits on our beliefs
are rooted in our ‘willing nature’ (= our
non-intellectual nature?)
• Not just deliberate choices are involved.
• All other factors contributing to belief: fear
and hope, prejudice and passion…
• “We find ourselves believing, we hardly
know how or why.”
The main thesis
• P. 109: “Our passional nature not only
may, but must, decide an option between
propositions, whenever it is a genuine
option that cannot by its nature be decided
on intellectual grounds…”
• Two goals: know the truth, avoid error.
These are distinct, and even in tension!
• James sees Clifford as worrying more
about avoiding error: what do you think?
Where does this demand come in?
• Not generally in science. (why?)
• But yes, in the courts.
• Even in science, it’s often OK to have a leaning,
which guides how we investigate (without some
hypothesis to guide our work, our observations
are pointless, as Darwin said).
• Balance between eager interest and an equally
eager desire to avoid being deceived.
• But can we always be this patient in waiting for
evidence?
Morals and Attitudes
• Can we just wait to decide what is or isn’t
morally acceptable?
• What about options where what we
believe has an influence on what comes to
be true?
• When ‘faith in a fact can help create the
fact’, then it seems belief could be
legitimate prior to our knowing the fact to
be true…
Religion
A. The ‘best’ things are the most eternal
ones.
B. We are better off, now, if we believe this.
We must accept or refuse this, so religion is
a momentous and forced option.
C. Further, most religions make this
personal: The demand for a generous
response to the religious impulse is very
strong, a matter, if you like, of politeness.
A Big Claim
• “(A) rule of thinking which would absolutely
prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of
truths if those kinds of truths were really there,
would be an irrational rule.”
• Says this applies “no matter what the kinds of
truth might materially be”.
• James expresses great confidence in this view,
and suggests resistance is due to a focus on
religious beliefs we find unacceptable.