Strength of Belief

Posted on September 24, 2008
Filed Under Peirce, Philosophy |

OK, I didn’t quite get the post on Blake’s book finished as I’d hoped to. In the meantime Splintered Mind had a thought provoking post on in-between believing. The situation is the well known case where someone answers that they aren’t racist yet in subtle ways acts in a racist manner.There are two ways to deal with this.

One, mentioned by Brandon in the comments, is by appealing to weakness of will. That is we want to act in a certain way (say work out daily) but don’t. We don’t want to say we don’t have a particular desire just that our will is too weak to act properly on the desire. I’m not sure this works well here since the kind of racism Eric discusses appears to be manifest from our unconscious. That’s why it is such a subtle and perniciously difficult kind of racism to eliminate.

I suggested in the comments the notion of degree of belief. This is a Pericean view. For Peirce our beliefs are found in our potential habits of action. That is a belief is roughly how we would act on the belief. (This is itself a manifestation of Peirce’s famous pragmatic maxim) But this then admits to matters of degree. So a person who acts in answer to any questioning by asserting the races are equal but acts in some circumstances as if they are not has the belief that the races are equal. They just don’t believe to the same degree as someone who would answer that the races are equal but also acts in all circumstances as if they were.

Comments

3 Responses to “Strength of Belief”

“They just don’t believe to the same degree as someone who would answer that the races are equal but also acts in all circumstances as if they were.”

Sure but no one does.

We are commanded to love one another; to love the other as ourselves. But in practice we don’t, we tend to sort people into two categories “like me/us” or “not like me/us” rejecting or ignoring the latter group. Society is enlightened enough to recognize this as a problem among easily defined groups so we have called it “racism”, but it exists on all levels, race has nothing to do with it. Actually the term “racism” is racist.

The underlying problem is an issue of perception; do we view others as ourselves and treat them accordingly? Do we recognize and celebrate the spirit residing in literally everyone as God’s creation?

Just a note, in case it wasn’t clear. By “degree of belief” I don’t mean anything like what Bayesians mean by it. Beliefs have an ideal (or perfect) meaning in terms of potential behaviors, each behavior being verifiable. But anyone holding a belief won’t necessarily have all those behaviors. So we can talk about degree of belief in terms of how close the the ideal their potential behaviors are.

I say potential since a habit need not be manifest. To use Peirce’s example, a diamond’s hardness is wrapped up in all the ways we’d verify that it is hard. (Say hitting it) Yet we don’t have to actually hit a diamond for the diamond to be hard. It is hard because we could verify that it is hard.

Howard, certainly no one does. The question is more the philosophical one of whether such a person actually believes or if they hold to an “in-between” sort of belief. The example of racism was just that, an example to illustrate a deeper philosophical point.

Just a followup to the above that came out of the comments at Eric’s. One implication of Peirce’s position is that our knowledge of others beliefs is highly vague.

There are two senses of vague. One is the kind of vagueness that is entailed by what are called Sorites examples. Think of say plucking out hair from someone’s head. How much hair can they have left and be called vague? Some might say that there’s a blurry area and no truth about the matter. Others (such as Williamson) would say that there is a truth about the matter but we don’t know it.

The other sense of vagueness is just a statement where for some property of an entity we refer to we don’t know but there is a truth of the matter. So if I say, “the man Jim is thinking of is late” I know many predicates about the entity (such as they are a man) but I don’t know which man it is. So I have vague knowledge. Whenever Peirce speaks of vagueness this is the sense he means. One can quickly see that Williamson is arguing that the two senses of vague are the same.

Well getting back to the ascription of belief one implication of Peirce’s position is we can’t do all the potential verifications necessary to test every implication in behavior that having a belief entails. So this means our knowledge of anyone’s belief (or degree of belief) is vague and perhaps very mistaken.

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