Reasons to Believe.

I apologise for the number of big words in this post — I had a post planned that would be much more accessible, on the subject of communication, but I've spent the last few days mostly taking care of Quincy following her surgery and I kind of developed blogger's block partway through writing it. So I've fallen back on this one, which I've adapted from a bunch of notes and which probably contains enough conceptual material for three or four simpler posts (which will probably still happen down the track). Hopefully it's not too dense, and I expect I'll explain my points here much better down the track. In the meantime, the communication post is on track for Thursday.

There is all the difference in the world between a good reason and a true explanation, or a cause, especially when it comes to epistemology. We can come to believe things any number of ways. Most of the things we believe we believe for reasons which are not epistemically good, but which are generally acceptable — it is unreasonable to demand that we refuse to believe anything whose truth we cannot directly demonstrate right now; this is the origin of solipsism. Yet it is reasonable to demand we withhold judgement on things which we suspect there are not sufficient epistemically good reasons for believing. That an intellectual peer disagrees with us is a good enough reason to investigate the issue, but when we do so and come out with good reason to believe our original thesis and (this is equally important) good reason to believe our disagreeing peer is simply mistaken or misled, we are justified in reaffirming our original thesis.

(The concept of the Reservation sidesteps this issue to an extent as regards certain political beliefs, by allowing competing systems to coëxist.)

Religious believers (and followers of certain other non-reality-based doctrines) don’t, of course, want to question their beliefs, but epistemology is a field where desires don’t (or oughtn’t) enter into it. If you really care about the issue, the correct course is to withdraw judgement while investigating the issue and hopefully discovering the truth. If one follows this attitude with intellectual honesty as regards religion, for example, one will wind up withdrawing judgement perpetually, becoming an intellectual agnostic and a practical atheist (which are, by their most common definitions, near-synonymous, or at least nearly exactly correlated), until and unless such time as actual, concrete evidence such that a scientific journal or a court of law would accept comes to light.

When it comes to religious revelation, it is always more likely that the recipient of the revelation is simply mistaken — the very nature of such a miracle includes such improbability, which is why it is never rational to believe in them unless it is even more improbable (and therefore miraculous) that the miracle did not occur. When it comes to other ideas, Edgar Allan Poe writes: “For my own part, I have never had a thought which I could not set down in words, with even more distinctness than that with which I conceived it: — as I have before observed, the thought is logicalized by the effort at (written) expression.” He goes on to discuss “a class of fancies...which are not thoughts, and to which, as yet, I have found it absolutely impossible to adapt language” — but these are feelings, not thoughts, and it is certainly not possible to speak of them in logical terms or use them as premises on which to base rational conclusions. A revelation that is a feeling is inadmissible as evidence of anything other than an electrochemical event in your brain and an emotional one in your mind; one that is not a feeling ought to either be objectively convincing or, as mentioned, so improbable that it is more likely that the subject is merely mistaken. Logically, a feeling can only be equatable to the belief that one is experiencing that feeling. If one is sad, one simply believes it; if one does not believe that one is sad, one is simply not; and vice versa. It is certainly possible to share this fact with others, but the experiential component — how it actually subjectively feels — is impossible to share. But this does not mean one is unable to share any meaningful evidence.