I was introduced to epistemology through this forum so it seems right posting this here. I’m posting this as epistemology 101 for those interested, I’ve found it a fascinating subject so hopefully I can share some of that. This may become a general introductory series if there’s interest.

Before considering what we can know and how we can know it it is required that we have a definition of what it is to know. Prior to Gettier knowledge was understood in terms of Justified True Belief S knows P if and only if

P is true
S believes P
S is justified in believing P.

In Gettier cases however these three conditions are met and yet our intuition is that the subject does not know the proposition. Gettier’s examples rest on two premises. the first is that a false belief may be justified and the second is that if S is justified in believing P and is justified in believing that P entails Q then S is justified in believing Q.

Take the following case from Gettier

1) Smith and Jones apply for a job, Smith has good reason to believe that Jones will get the job, he also has good reason to believe Jones has 10 coins in his pocket, from this he deduces that the person who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket. Unbeknownst to Smith he not Jones will get the job and he also has 10 coins in his pocket. He has a justified true belief in the proposition; the person who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket, yet it is denied that Smith has knowledge.

If justification truth and belief together aren’t sufficient conditions to guarantee an attribution of knowledge then what else is necessary. Responses to this are varied but they encounter the same type of difficulties. If a subjects warrant does not entail truth then it seems we can exploit the gap between the warrant and the veracity to generate similar examples. If the warrant does entail truth then truth as a condition is redundant because it is implied by the warrant. The problem with this is that our means of acquiring beliefs and the means by which our beliefs may be justified are fallible and so if infallibilism is the standard then we should give up most of what we can claim to know.

Next up the implications of the Argument from Ignorance and the responses to Gettier.

I'm also familiar with Gettier cases and the classical requirements for what it is to 'know' something as a result of posting here.

In the context of religion, and specifically of my atheistic position, I'm not sure how I can give up not knowing something. Seems like I'd simply be where I am now, not knowing which god, if any, are real. This is much more of a challenge for theists I'd imagine since their beliefs have to rely on the assumption that whichever god they believe in is real (which is what 'faith' seems to be for), and then working from there.

So, where does 'faith' fit into epistemology, as a means of knowing something?

I'm looking forward to this, great thread.

The Argument from Ignorance

P1. If I don’t know I am not a disembodied brain in a vat I do not know I have hands
P2. I do not know I am not a disembodied brain in a vat
C. I do not know I have hands.

Straightforward enough? This is a pretty long standing challenge in epistemology to answer this argument seems required if we are to know many of the propositions we ordinarily claim to. The strength of the argument from ignorance is the plausibility of the second premise, sceptical hypothesis are so contrived to be ineliminable, along with the principle of closure under entailment.

The principle of closure has strong intuitive support, it looks very much like Gettier’s second premise which relies on a principle of closure for justification, simply put if S knows P and knows that P entails Q then S knows Q. However if we can not assent to Q and we know that P implies Q then we can’t assent to P. Or can we?

next up responses

I don't think it does. I'm an agnostic for this reason.

This is an interesting question and kind of leads into one of the areas that seems often to be confused. This is the concept of certainty. Certainty can be understood both as a psychological state and an epistemic one. As a psychological state S is certain that P, this is different from it being certain that P.

Often a difference between the psychological certainty and epistemic certainty will result in a subject becoming less than certain that P because P is less than certain.

Now epistemological internalists may wish to hold that S being certain that P is necessary for an attribution of knowledge, if I think something which happens to be true but I have some doubt then it may be argued that I do not know it. This is a result of the internalist holding that the justification for my belief P be reflectively accessible. The externalist doesn't need to hold to this standard, they may replace a concept of internally acceptable justification with a truth tracking clause of the type that, if P wasn't true S would not believe P or hold that if the belief be the product of some reliable, but fallible, belief generating mechanism I can know P even if I don't know why.

An interesting (albeit expensive on amazon) book related to this, from the perspective of the church fathers, is Martin Laird's Gregory of Nyssa and the Grasp of Faith. It was originally a doctoral thesis.

From the intro:

well named, do you have any thoughts on "faith" being not a blind believing in something without evidence( and so not related to knowing or not knowing), but more of a trust, or a intuitive understanding, or something?

I'm sure I do but I'll wait a while. Don't want to derail dereds' thread too early. I'm interested in the responses to Gettier

Work away it's going to be tomorrow before I post anything and I'm okay with whatever derails or siderails that take place. It's an interesting question and there'll be nothing stopping me posting the responses.

What do you know? is a loaded question. It assumes there's a 'you'. What is known? - is a better question.

The answer: something exists.

If the implication is that "we must give up what claim to know" (paraphrased, perhaps unfairly), then the epistemology we used to reach this implication must also be rejected.

So the issue resolves itself fairly neatly.

That's not altogether different from Moore's response who replied he was more certain he was standing up than he was dreaming so used the certainty which he had towards ordinary propositions to defeat the radical sceptical hypothesis.

It's an interesting approach and one that has some merit, albeit through a Neo Moorean approach.

"here is a hand. And here is another hand. Therefore there are at least two external objects. Therefore the external world exists"

neeeeel: I didn't forget you I was just tired yesterday and busy this morning

Of course. the skeptical denies itself and should remain mute. OP and the rest of it is more of the same skeptical approach no matter what clothing or dress is applied ; head in a vat , wow, Dennett ??

A competent complete skeptic would of course not claim that we don't know anything--only that we don't know if we know anything. That is, she suspends judgement on the question of whether she knows anything.

I agree that this is a better approach, but for the "competent skeptic" I would raise another protest. Pain is a very tricky issue for such an epistemological approach.

I'm going to give two different descriptions which I think could be related. The first comes from Paul Tillich's Dynamics of Faith. Tillich describes faith as a centered act of one's whole being, oriented existentially towards an ultimate concern. That probably seems a bit hard to parse, but some of the most useful clarifications he gives are in what faith is not and how it is often distorted:

1) the "intellectualist" distortion of faith as belief without evidence, or even "faith" in the knowledge of another authority.

The emphasis on participation is important. It indicates awareness and an ontological "touch" which is yet not abstract belief of a subject about an object. The abstraction from the "touch" into beliefs may render "beliefs without evidence" but the beliefs are not the experience of faith itself.

2) The "voluntaristic" distortion: an idea, following Thomas Aquinas, that begins with the idea of faith as belief with insufficient evidence, and then posits the "gap" between belief and certainty must be made up by an act of will.

3) The "emotionalistic" distortion. The reduction of faith to a matter of only subjective emotions, which ignores the existential and mystical dimension.

Tillich also speaks of the relationship between faith and doubt in a way which I think is useful:

Another way of expressing a similar idea is found in Richard of St. Victor (a 12th century mystical theologian), and is a framing that Panikkar uses a lot. It is an attempt to give some structure to the relation between the capacity for that "ontological touch" of faith and our other faculties: sense and intellect (αισθησις and νοησις), corresponding to a traditional anthropology of Man as body, soul, and spirit. So Richard speaks of the "eye" of the senses, the eye of reason, and the eye of faith.

It has to be recognized that this framing is not some ontologically real and objective thing. It's not a scientific theory. It's just a way of describing and relating these faculties which do not exist separately but are always inter-related, without any attempt at a biological grounding. Or, as Tillich says, faith is an act of one's whole being, including the senses and intellect, but it is more than just the experience of the senses interpreted by the lens of reason.

The experience of Beauty (an aesthetic experience) can include a perception of the Divine, and something of the Divine can be perceived in the ordering (or nomos: laws) of reality understood by the intellect. In the same way, the fruit of that ontological touch of the Spirit is "distilled" (Gregory of Nyssa describes it like drops of dew condensing on one's skin) into necessary but insufficient aesthetic and intellectual categories: beliefs, sensations, and also religious practices and rituals intended to evoke those experiences.

Going back to Tillich, there is an element of "community" which he mentions which I think is also important:

Peter Unger is pretty specific in suggesting that he only wants to argue that we may suppose his defence of scepticism is true not know it.

tame_d I'm going to swerve the epistemology of direct phenomenal experience for now, David Chalmers in particular has some interesting stuff and I may come back to this.

For now I'm going to briefly summarise Nozicks response to Gettier and the Argument from Ignorance. Nozick's move is interesting he's an externalist which in terms of epistemology means that the justification for a subject's belief does not need to be reflectively accessible, this allows him to jettison justification as a necessary condition and replace it with a sensitivity clause for Nozick an attribution of knowledge requires that the belief track the truth he does this by replacing the traditional 3rd clause of S is justified in believing P with the following

C) If p weren’t true, S wouldn’t believe p.

Hence the belief P is sensitive to the veracity of P. This deals with the Gettier cases where there is some misstep but there are other cases that I'll look at that aren't so easily dealt with. The case of the fake barns I think is a problem for Nozick despite his argument that he addresses this. In the case of Smith and Jones Smith would still believe the person who would get the job had 10 coins in his pocket even if he did not have 10 coins in his pocket hence the belief is not sensitive to the truth.

However C) isn't sufficient to answer the Argument from Ignorance and it is this question I'll return to next.

By the way this is kinda me talking to myself, I have absolutely no concerns with any discussions that take place irrespective of the relevance to my posts, this isn't a blog.

thanks WN. I cant pretend I really understood what they are saying though.

"ontological touch"?

It seems like they are saying that faith is a sense, like hearing, or balance?

This seems backwards to me. When there is no language, no concepts, no thought, that is when the "religious experience" happens.

I would say faith involves a faculty that is like hearing in some ways but is distinct from the physical senses, and that faculty is the one that is most properly associated with faith (it is the "eye" of faith), but it is not faith. Faith involves ones whole being, including the physical senses and intellect also. The metaphor of the three eyes shouldn't be confused as saying the eyes are separate. The awareness of each is intermingled even though they can be distinguished conceptually. There are not "really" three eyes.

This faculty that belongs to faith is like the senses in that it is aware of (makes contact with; touches) something outside of itself, in an immediate way, but the field of awareness of faith involves reality as a whole, the infinite, the Divine. Not aas a separate "object" from the "parts" of reality or the perception of the senses or intellect, but it perceives the whole in the parts. The three "eyes" are not separate. That is why the language of faith is symbolic. The symbols are concrete and yet symbols of the whole.

I don't actually disagree but I think Tillich is talking about something closely related but slightly distinct. In the other thread in the conversation about experience generally, I think I tried at some point to layout a kind of process from "the experience in itself" to our interpretation of it:

1) the experience itself: the immediate awareness, prior to thought, concepts, interpretation, or any sort of reflective consciousness or understanding. The experience is awareness that is not aware of itself, or even of any conceptual split between "subject" and "object". I believe this is the "religious experience" that you are talking about. It is prior to language.

2) the memory, interpretation, and cultural reception of experience. These could all be distinguished, but in general I mean the process by which we conceptualize the elements of our experience, understand them and give them meaning, and share them with the broader culture which gives shape to our conceptual framework and interpretation. This is what Tillich is talking about.

The experience itself may be in silence, but we can't remember it, interpret it, or in any way understand it apart from the language that shapes our way of thinking and conceiving of it, and that language is not separate from a community and culture. As much for the awareness of faith as the awareness of the senses.

Faith has always seemed to me to be a multi-pronged tool for the acquisition and maintenance of a belief, but one that isn't actually Useful because it can lead to and help sustain any belief at all. A requirement for Truth isn't necessary. It seems that I could choose to open myself to the possiblity of a belief and then begin to see 'evidence' that supports that belief, that I couldn't have seen prior to my acceptence, which seems a little circular or perhaps self-creating and sustaining. My questions though are that if this the case, what can ever cause you to give up on a belief sustained by faith without first giving up the faith? Why are those beliefs not worthy of the claim 'I know' without the tool of simply accepting on faith? And what practical use does it have if it is immune to all tools of analysis and criticism?

I don't really see a problem with faith for this particular reason. We know that virtually everyone has been lead to and sustains all sorts of beliefs for all sorts of reasons.

People who don't have "faith" do this all the time. There's a ton of evidence that you are selective in the way you argue about your beliefs, and selective about the things you take as evidence. Yet you continue to maintain your beliefs at a level that appears to be quite strong and full of "faith." So this seems to be nothing more than the constant label game where you give something that a religious person does explicitly a negative connotation while simultaneously doing essentially the same thing and not holding yourself to those same negative aspects.

You seem to have little concept for how faith generally functions in the life and the mind of the believer. This is unsurprising because you seem to have little concept for how "faith" generally functions in the life and the mind of all people.

The progression of scientific thought advances in a manner similar to what you've described. Full-blown theories of how the universe works starts with someone seeing a kernel of something that they think is there. We did not start off with a full sense of what an electron is. While staring at beams running across cathode ray tubes, JJ Thomson was contemplating how to explain whatever it was that was happening. And he was led to the thought that maybe what he's seeing are a stream of little particles. There was no particular reason for him to think that this was absolutely correct, but there was enough there that he took a leap of faith and began to conceptualize electrons in that manner. Once he (and the rest of the scientific community) was open to that idea, they began to discover more information that reinforced the belief. This belief was built up and refined for about 30 years.

How could they ever change their beliefs about electrons as particles? De Broglie game along and built off of some of Einsteins thoughts on light and took a guess that maybe electrons also behave like waves. And he opened himself up to that possibility and began doing calculations and such.

So I don't think that you have any grounds to make a special accusation against "faith" as you've described it here.

MB: the point of my posts was to argue for an understanding of the word "faith" beyond epistemological categories, but you begin by assuming faith is only a "tool for the acquisition and maintenance of beliefs". Faith as a word has a lot of different usages, so I'm not saying your usage is entirely wrong, but you won't really follow what I'm saying (if it's at all followable :P) if you read the word faith in a way other than I meant. That said, I'll try to relate what I said to the epistemological meaning:

I think the article in front of the word faith, "the" faith, is important here. You quoted a post talking about human faculties, especially comparing faith as a human capacity to the physical senses. You wouldn't ask "what can ever cause you to give up on a belief sustained by observation without first giving up on the capacity for observation?", although you might ask about giving up on the belief in the veracity of an observation, i.e the specific content of some some particular sensory perception. You might disbelieve your prior interpretation of that experience for any number of good epistemological reasons, including an awareness of the fallibility of your own interpretations.

"The" faith, the articles of faith of a particular religion, are as distinct from faith-as-capacity or faith-as-ultimate-concern as the content of an observation is distinct from your capacity to observe. I might come to disbelieve some particular interpretation of the experience I have "through faith" for similar reasons as I might come to disbelieve an interpretation of what I saw with my eyes. I disagree with the assertion that such are immune to analysis and criticism. The belief-forming interpretation of the experience of the "eye of faith" may be analyzed and criticized just as the analogous process of "the eye of the senses" may be.

I should clarify that I don't think many of the specific historical beliefs of Christian orthodoxy, for example, are "sustained" by the kind of experience of faith that I was talking about. To the extent that I am comparing an experience of the eye of faith to the direct evidence of my senses, I don't directly experience that a man named Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate or rose from the dead, or that he was born of a virgin. Those beliefs aren't sustained by "faith" in the way I'm describing it.

Those beliefs may be sustained by trust (another definition of faith) in the traditions conveyed by those who claim to have directly experienced certain things, and trust in those traditions may be sustained by a belief that my own awareness through "the eye of faith" corresponds to the way those others have described their own experiences, but that is several steps removed, and each step is open to criticism. There are many sound reasons to doubt how much trust should be placed in tradition, both in the sense of doubting the veracity of claims to certain experiences, and in doubting whether those experiences have been preserved and conveyed to us reliably.

You should take a look at Aaron's post, assuming you have him on ignore. In short, to reiterate: "Knowledge" as justified belief doesn't describe the process by which people come to believe something, especially provisionally, it describes an after-the-fact assessment. A rationalization of belief. This is as true for the scientific process as for anything else. There are any number of examples of scientists arriving at ideas to test through very novel means. What makes science scientific isn't that the ideation of hypotheses happens in an approved way, but the rigor with which hypotheses are put to the test. Religious beliefs should also be criticized, and "having faith" doesn't mean avoiding doing so, or at least it shouldn't.

That said, the experience of faith (in the sense I originally used) is an experience in which something like the fundamental ineffability (infinity?) of reality is felt. Most religious worldviews are more open to what can't be known because of that experience. Apart from specific beliefs or traditions, I think that experience is universal, and not just in a religious context. If you've ever sat in awe of the reality of the universe after contemplating its sheer size and scale, that is the kind of experience I'm talking about. It is part of being human. It does not constitute a logical proof of the existence of God. But the point of talking about faith beyond epistemology is in rejecting an assumption about the primacy of epistemology which is so fundamental to a particular worldview that its status as an assumption is often overlooked. The assumption is that what can't be rationally known simply can't be real. Cannot be. Treating faith as "unjustified belief" makes the same assumption, which misses the point. The experience of faith isn't an experience of being beyond doubt, or an experience of epistemic certainty.

I don't know if faith will end up derailing this topic, or if it is actually a good place to discuss its meaning. The problem as I see it is the meaning, and unintentional equivocation. Christians do not even agree amongst themselves the meaning of the word, some admit that it is close enough to the meaning many atheists ascribe (belief with insufficient evidence), while others dismiss that and consider it to be more like one of the alternate meanings, like trust (that is justified).

Because of this problem, I don't use the word 'faith' unless I'm referring to the 'insufficient evidence' meaning. If I mean 'trust', I would use the word 'trust'.

The example of scientific progress is not one that I would attribute to faith (as I use it), not just because it is based on snippets of verifiable data rather than a hope, but also because the scientist does not (well, should not) believe it to be true, just that it might end up being true after verification. Faith would necessitate the person believing something to be true before verified, would it not?

One last comment: often, Christian apologists seem to already accept that faith has a negative connotation (despite the core nature within the theology) - why else would they make comments about not having enough faith to believe atheism / evolution / the Big Bang etc?

dereds told me I could do what I wanted! I'm happy to take that conversation elsewhere though.

I don't think there's a problem so much with disagreeing about what the word means, as much as just recognizing that it's a word that is used in lots of different ways and being careful.

I would not say the scientist "has faith" in her hypotheses either, but that was regarding a specific question MB raised around belief formation rather than justification. He was criticizing the role of faith in the formation of beliefs but describing belief formation in a way that is just as applicable in a scientific context, and that was the point, rather than attributing "faith" in some religious sense to science.

But under well named ( and aarons) definition of faith, this is not what they are talking about. its more following an intuition or hunch , like in aarons examples, rather than just accepting something is true.

Not that I necessarily agree with their definition.