An Inductive Risk Account of the Ethics of Belief

This seems to be the case with culturally nurtured beliefs in particular. That we hold a belief seems often as something we can't help doing, and James affirms this through the often-unconscious influence of our willing nature. Cooler reflection and revision often only comes later, and philosophers such as Socrates and Descartes and many others bid us at least once in life to take an inventory of the beliefs we acquired at an earlier age, and then methodically to decide which of these are worth continuing to hold, and why. What James affirms of theistic belief's origins for most people in “Reflex Action and Theism” are elaborated in the class notes of a noted student of James, W. E. B. Du Bois: “Man spontaneously believes and spontaneously acts.

But as acts and beliefs multiply, they grow inconsistent. To escape bellum omnium contra omnes, reasonable principles, fit for all to agree upon, must be sought”I have been unable to track reference for this quotation, but thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting the relevance of this passage to my own argument that to locate and articulate such common, reasonable principles, we should go beyond Rawls' “burdens” to markers of inductive riskiness in the etiology of belief or the rhetorical defense of held beliefs.. As we have seen, a broad way to describe the substance of the reasonable principles James says are needed is in connection with the Rawlsian “burdens of judgment” that undergird what he terms reasonable pluralism. But a more specific way to describe them is as principles that support inductive norms and at the same time censure counter-inductive thinking, or the self-exemption of oneself or ingroup from attributions one applies to others. We turn to this directly in the final section.

6. INDUCTIVE RISK AND ITS MANY MARKERS

To begin, let me offer definitions for some terms which are central to the account. Then we can describe how they differently inform epistemology and the ethics of belief.

« Inductive risk : the risk of “getting it wrong” in an inductive context of inquiry.

« Inductive context of inquiry: any context of inquiry dependent upon reasoning by analogy, generalization or applied generalization, or cause-and-effect.

« Counter-inductive thinking : counter-induction is a strategy that whether self-consciously or not reverses the normal logic of induction. As such it should be distinguished from merely weak inductive reasoning and seen instead as thinking or belief uptake that carry especially high inductive risk.

« Aetiological symmetries: naturalistically salient factors in belief-formation that are similar for people across time and culture; for example, the “proximate” causes of early childhood education are often salient in development of a religious identity / affiliation irrespective of the particular religion or sect.

« Bias mirroring : the agent ascribes praise or blame, virtue or vice, etc. to others in ways that “mirror” known personal biases such as confirmation bias, or known social, us-them biases. That these ascriptions find support in the scripture, tradition, or other perceived religious authority are set aside in order to focus on the formal features of the agent's manner of making attributions about persons.

When we attribute traits to others, the attributions we make depend upon the drawing and applying of generalizations, the drawing of analogies and disanalogies, and the drawing of causes from perceived effects, and predicted outcomes or consequences from perceived causes.

When trait-attributions are given theological backing, the emphasis is typically on the uniqueness of the “true” religion vis-а-vis all the remaining religions. From an epistemological perspective, however, the relevance of proximate, naturalistically-accessible causes of belief, such as early childhood exposure to and submersion in one particular faith tradition (typically that of one's family or broader culture) cannot be easily dismissed in favor of theological, “final cause” explanations for having come into just the beliefs that one has. A strong “etiological challenge” to the well-foundedness of belief does not come merely from the belief's apparent contingency upon the agent's epistemic location (i. e., their family, culture, or time in history). On the present account, etiological challenges gain strength from particular markers of inductive riskiness. Many of these markers focus on the individual, but some draw attention to how strongly fideistic is the model of faith which the agent is appropriating in their way of dealing with evidence, and with the broader relationship between reason and faith.

The inductive risk account tells us that additional markers of risk beyond the contingency of beliefs on the agent's epistemic location will motivate a stronger etiological challenge. Clifford and James both seem to have recognized that when matters are deeply underdetermined by evidence, one's coming to belief is typically overdetermined by trait-dependent factors. They differed mainly in their assessment of the “right” to such temperamentally-guided beliefs. While attribution theory in psychology meshes well with these points that Clifford and James share, contemporary epistemology of disagreement and contemporary epistemology of testimony seem to me to ignore the study of trait-dependent belief in favor of some “universal” prescription, whether conformist or steadfast.

By contrast, the inductive risk account rejects overgeneralized guidance, formulated these “oughts” and “ought nots” only for individuals and on the basis of finding evidence of trait-dependent factors in the etiology of belief, evidence of rhetorical as opposed to robust (well-motivated) vice-charging, etcOn distinguishing robust from rhetorical vice-charging, see Kidd, 2016.. Attribution theory makes central the connections between chronic evidential underdetermination in domains of controversial views and the trait-dependent overdetermination of belief in adopted faith ventures.

The study of trait-dependence is vital to the epistemology of controversial views, since it appears to be indicative of the overdetermination of belief by temperamental factors. Pairing underdetermination concerns with the empirically-informed study of the marks of temperamentally “overdetermined” judgments on the parts of agents, puts us in better stead.

This pairing allows us to see that where there is etiological symmetry (meaning that people acquire their beliefs in much the same way similar strategies or environmental factors functioning as proximate causes of belief), yet substantial contrariety or disagreement in the content of these agents' beliefs, etiological challenges to their well-foundedness gain in strength.

Relatedly, the inductive risk account does a good job of explaining how and why self-same doxastic strategies (etiological symmetries) predictably give rise to contrary belief systems in testimonial faith traditions.

This I term symmetrical contrariety, using the polarized and polemical apologetics of religious fundamentalists as the prime example and target of my normative critique. But more generally, the inductive risk account works like this: The reliable etiology of belief is shown especially suspect and the agents open to censure (both normative claims) when the belief can be shown descriptively (a) to result from counter-inductive thinking on the part of the agent (the agent makes their own case an exemption from a pattern recognized as applying to others), and (b) to mirror the kinds of judgments that biased individuals would make.

Problems of Religious Luck (Axtell, 2019) develops specific, an inductive risk-based challenge to the reasonableness of religious exclusivist (a) conceptions of faith and (b) responses to religious multiplicity.

The adherent of exclusivist religious faith, I argue, suspends inductive norms, or norms that govern strong and cogent analogical reasoning, cause-effect reasoning, or generalization / applied generalization. The moral and epistemic risk of suspending inductive norms as tied to exclusivist responses to religious multiplicity, and to asymmetric religious trait-attributions between religious insiders and outsiders.

This specific criticism need not be repeated here, but the riskiness of ascribing traits to group insiders and outsiders in sharply asymmetric fashion can be brought into view by several thought experiments developed in the book. First, though, the skeptical force of inductive risk is compounded when, remaining neutral to the agent's high theological explanation for the difference in truth-status, we find that the proximate causes of belief are actually pretty symmetrical in the case of the home religion affirmed as true and the alien religions treated as false.

That God “made it so” that the attributed asymmetries obtain between in-group and outgroup, as a faith-based assumption, is now directly confronted by markers of bias and inductive risk.

In order to make the confrontation of fideistic faith with the evidence of social psychology and inductive norms more salient for individuals, I develop a number of thought experiments. In religious belief uptake, counter-inductive thinking is often the result of: (a) Self / ingroup assumption that “the pattern stops here” in their own case, and thus of exceptionalism with regard to the truth or religious value of the home religion; or (b) implicit rejection of any inductive pattern or etiological symmetries between proponents of testimonial faith traditions one needs to take account of. So, the thought experiments are ones that prime things like bias mirroring, or contingency anxiety.

What would a person given to my-side bias, or us-them bias, judge, and how different is this from the religious differences you are attributing? What would you believe about the religious system of belief you have, if you were born into a different religious community?

In thought experiments, such as these the respondent may find cause to take disagreement more seriously than they previously had, leading to greater intellectual humility and open-mindedness about religious aliens.

Even if not, the focus on inductive risk leads into a dilemma that forces one of two responses that can then be pursued in dialogue: The response that aapparent aetiological symmetries between home and alien religious systems of belief are genuine but unimportant ; and the response that one's own beliefs were acquired by an altogether unique process, so that the purported etiological symmetries are misleading / false.

Neither response is likely to prove very successful; the reasons for this should be apparent: both involve the agent only in further fideistic circularity. The suspension of inductive norms is made apparent in such thought experiments, and the violation of norms has a strong connection to criticism.

A tight connection between norm violation and the appropriateness of censure indeed seems apparent in all normative practices.

A tight connection between norm violation and the appropriateness of censure (criticism) indeed seems apparent in all normative practices. Still, as permissivists who grant others a good deal of “epistemic slack”, we should be careful about the sense or senses of responsibility we attribute to agents. And we should try to be clear to distinguish the kind of criticism and censure that inductively-risky belief invite, and “blame” in some sense moral or epistemic.

Many of the more contentious claims over the epistemic irrationality which follows from the “prescribed certainty” of fideistic belief may by this latter distinction be put aside. Still, as permissivists who grant our peers a decent amount of “epistemic slack”, especially as this is in respect to faith ventures which they consider valuable for their personal perfection. We let them be choosers of the risk insofar as it is free from hermeneutic or epistemic injustice.

This reflects common ground between “friendly” theists and atheists who can each agree with Jefferson (himself echoing the early Church father Tertullian) that “But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg”.

Of course, mirroring personal or social biases, committing rhetorical fallacies, “disowning” beliefs which have no different proximate causes than contrary beliefs one's peers, unsafe and /or insensitive belief in the sense in which they are discussed in epistemology, rhetorical vice charging, and asymmetric moral or religious trait ascriptions lacking principled support, are always grounds for censure. Inductive risk account doesn't cut it slack there; it doesn't exempt unsafe and / or insensitive beliefs from criticism.

Rather, not all rational criticism or censure is “blame”. The point is that we should be careful about the specific sense or senses of responsibility we attribute to agents, and the different kinds of censure that might go with each.

The modal insensitivity of many of our controversial views is a challenge to all of us, not some of us, and if the dialogue between theologians, philosophers, and psychologists is to find common ground in the study of inductive risk, all parties must agree that inductively risky belief invites scrutiny, since it is always directly relevant to what makes for genuinely strong etiological challenges. But this sense of censure has more to do with assessment of the state or standing of an agent's belief.

The position I have sketched out in this paper still seems neutral to many debates on blame and blameworthiness.

Many of the more contentious claims of “epistemic irrationality” are made against adherents of conceptions of religious faith which identify faith with “evidentially underdetermined historicity” of Biblical miracles, and with “prescribed certainty” in these or other tenets of a creed. Certainly, I find such a conception of faith epistemologically paradoxical. But I am with Kierkegaard, James, and many others who would highlight the existential risks we all take in domains of controversial views. I do not set “religion” or religious assertion apart but only seek to understand why and how strong fideism plies on counter-inductive thinking, and how violation of inductive norms relates to assessment on the one hand, and guidance on the other.

REFERENCES

1. Aikin, S. 2014. Evidentialism and the Will to Believe. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Axtell, G. 2011. “From Internalist Evidentialism to Virtue Responsibilism.” In Dougherty 2011, 71-87. . 2013. “Possibility and Permission? Intellectual Character, Inquiry, and

2. the Ethics of Belief.” In William James on Religion, ed. by H. Rydenfelt and S. Pihlstrom, 165-198. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. . 2019. Problems of Religious Luck: Assessing the Limits of Reasonable

3. Religious Disagreement. Lanham: Lexington Books.

4. Baehr, J. 2011. “Evidentialism, Vice, and Virtue.” In Dougherty 2011, 88-102. Bondy, P, and D. Pritchard. 2018. “Propositional Epistemic Luck, Epistemic Risk, and Epistemic Justification.” Synthese 195 (9): 3811-3820.

5. Christian, R. A. 2009. “Restricting the Scope of the Ethics of Belief: Haack's Alternative to Clifford and James.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 77 (3): 461-493.

6. Conee, E., and R. Feldman. 2004. Evidentialism: Essays in Epistemology. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

7. Dougherty, T., ed. 2014. Evidentialism and its Discontents. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

8. Gardiner, G. 2014. “The Commutativity of Evidence: A Problem for Conciliatory Views of Peer Disagreement.” Episteme 11 (1): 83-95.

9. Gerken, M. 2017. Folk Epistemology: How We Think and Talk about Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

10. Haack, S. 1997. “`The Ethics of Belief' Reconsidered.” In The Philosophy of Roderick M. Chisholm,, ed. by L. Hahn, 129-144. Chicago and La Salle (IL): Open Court. Jackman, H. 1999. “Prudential Arguments, Naturalized Epistemology, and the Will to Believe.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society xxxv (1): 1-37. James, W. 1979. Some Problems of Philosophy. With an intro. by P H. Hare. With a forew. by F. Burkhardt. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.

11. Kidd, I. J. 2013. “A Phenomenological Challenge to `Enlightened Secularism'.” Religious Studies 49 (3): 377-398.. 2016. “Charging Others with Epistemic Vice.” The Monist 99 (3): 181-197.

12. Leeuwen, N. V. 2017. “Do Religious `Beliefs' Respond to Evidence?” Philosophical Explorations 20 (1): 52-72.

13. Lightfoot, C. 1997. The Culture of Adolescent Risk-Taking. NY: Guilford Press.

14. McCormick, M. 2020. “Can Beliefs be based on Practical Reasons?” In Well Founded Belief : New Essays on the Epistemic Basing Relation, ed. by P. Bondy and J. A. Carter. London: Routledge.

15. Meylan, A. 2019. “The Normative Ground of the Evidential Ought.” Accessed Sept. 23. https://www.academia.edu/40137383/The_normative_ground_of_the_ev idential_ought.

16. Nottelmann, N., and P. Fessenbecker. 2019. “Honesty and Inquiry: W. K. Clifford's Ethics of Belief.” Taylor & Francis Online. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/ab s/10.1080/09608788.2019.1655389?journalCode=rbjh20.

17. Pritchard, D. 2016. “Epistemic Risk.” The Journal of Philosophy 113 (11): 550-571.

18. Rinard, S. 2018a. “Believing for Practical Reasons.” Accessed Sept. 23, 2019. https: //onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/nous.12253. . 2018b. “Pragmatic Skepticism.” Accessed Sept. 23, 2019. https://philpapers.org/rec/RINPS.. 2019. “Equal Treatment for Belief.” Philosophical Studies 176 (7): 1923-1950.

19. Schwitzgebel, E. 2010. “Acting Contrary to Our Professed Beliefs.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 91:531-553.

20. Welchman, J. 2006. “William James's `The Will to Believe» and the Ethics of Self-Experimentation'.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 42 (2): 229-241.

ABSTRACT

An Inductive Risk Account of the Ethics of Belief. Guy Axtell

From what norms does the ethics of belief derive its virtues and vices, its permissions and censures? Since pragmatists understand epistemology as the theory of inquiry, the paper will try to explain what the aims and tasks are for an ethics of belief, or project of guidance, which best fits with this understanding of epistemology. It will support it with the work of William James and several contemporary pragmatists. This paper approaches the ethics of belief from a focus on responsible risk management, where doxastic responsibility is understood in terms of the degree of riskiness of agents' doxastic strategies, which is in turn most objectively measured through accordance or violation of inductive norms. Doxastic responsibility is attributable to agents on the basis of how epistemically risky was the process or strategies of inquiry salient in the etiology of their belief or in their maintenance of a belief already held. Treating the “doxastic strategies” of individual and collective agents as central to the projects of epistemic assessment results in a significantly different account than either the standard epistemological externalists focus on “processes” in the objectively reliable etiology of belief, or than the standard evidentialist focus on an agent's reflectively available “reasons” which lend the agent a certain kind of personal or subjective justification for her belief. Keywords: Ethics of Belief, Epistemology of Disagreement, Inductive Risk, Risk Epistemology, Permissivism, W. James.

АННОТАЦИЯ

Индуктивное исчисление рисков в этике убеждения. Гай Акстелль PhD, профессор, Университет Радфорда (Вирджиния, США)

Из каких норм этика веры выводит ее добродетели и пороки, дозволения и запреты? Поскольку прагматисты понимают эпистемологию как теорию исследования, в статье будет предпринята попытка объяснить, каковы цели и задачи этики убеждения, или т.н. «руководства», которое наилучшим образом соответствует этому пониманию эпистемологии. Я подкреплю этот тезис ссылками на работы Уильяма Джеймса и некоторых современных прагматистов. В данной статье этика убеждения рассматривается в контексте ответственности управления рисками, где под доксастической ответственностью понимается степень рискованности доксастических стратегий агентов, которая, в свою очередь, наиболее объективно измеряется через соблюдение или несоблюдение индуктивных норм. Доксастическая ответственность приписывается агентам на основе того, насколько эпистемически рискованным был процесс или стратегии исследования, существенные этиологии их убеждений или поддержания уже имеющихся. Рассмотрение «доксастических стратегий» индивидуальных и коллективных агентов в качестве центральных для проектов эпистемической оценки приводит к совершенно иному их объяснению, чем и стандартный эпистемологический ацент на «процессе» объективно достоверной этиологии веры, и стандартный эвиденциалистский акцент на рефлексивно доступных «причинах» действия агента, дающих ему определенный тип обоснования его убеждения, личный/субъективный.

Ключевые слова: У. Джеймс, этика убеждения, эпистемология несогласия, индуктивный риск, эпистемология риска, вседозволенность.

Размещено на Allbest.ru