Battleground God: Part II
1. Why is the justification of the practice of religion dependent on the justification, rationality, and consistency of religious beliefs? Zagzebsky argues that this comes out of the Enlightenment: specifically, foundationalism, together with intellectual egalitarianism and the suspicion of authority. However, she maintains that this need for a type of mental, epistemic justification is contingent and, in her view, even false.
2. Is even the concept of “religion” an Essentially Contested Concept? If so, then there are equally competitive notions, and now becomes a political problem in how to adjudicate these notions.
3. Where does the concept of “religion, “a religion, and “Christianity” even come from? How do we even know that when we refer to a “religious” belief that two or more people are referring to the same thing? And—is there even a clear difference between the religious and non-religious? Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s The Meaning and End of Religion addresses why certain concepts like ‘religion,’ ‘a religion,’ ‘Christianity,’ ‘Buddhism,’ and the like should all be dropped in local and international discourse. This suggestion is because such concepts have historically developed through processes of reification and objectification, there-by becoming entity-like forms that actually mislead and misunderstand the flux of history and religious meaning in individuals. In the West, this process of reification stems from the intellectual tradition of the ancient Greeks (especially Plato), which began the transformation of the Latin religio, which its noun form was an unstable designator of either some relationship between persons and the power of the gods or a taboo obligating persons to some behavior, into what is today ‘religion’—“an objective systematic entity.”
4. If all we can define is the flux of “cumulative traditions”, then can we still define the reality of the mental and personal quality of “faith?” Using the postmodern critique, I argue that this personal quality as a clear datum of scholarly study and public debate is problematic. If the goal is cross-personal or cultural intelligibility, this assumption of the subjective-transcendental does not help.
5. The search for the “psychic mental unity” in homo religiosus has lost its credibility in part due to the Postmodern critique. For one, the search presupposes a sui generis or irreducible phenomenological datum of all religious experience; that is, there is (wrongly supposed) a primordial given in all human experience that is the basis for what we see as the vast diffusion and variety of religion. See J.Z. Smith - Jonestown article, a masterwork. http://faculty.trinity.edu/mbrown/whatisreligion/PDF%20readings/Smith-Devil%20in%20Mr%20Jones-Imagining%20Religion.pdf
6. So to return to our question about the possibility of Smith’s model interrelating to a broader model of socio-scientific understanding: can these usable categories and context related categories be refined as to close the explanatory gap between the reduced special sciences (e.g. psychology, cognitive science or biology) and religious phenomena? Though there exists the element of human agency and creativity, I think it is possible to build connective categories between our special sciences to our particularistic study of religion.
7. Though we cannot ever “be in the mind” of a foreign culture or religious tradition, we can (from the outside) test pragmatic categories of similarity and difference. “Intelligibility” is an earthly phenomenon and means that something has anchored on to the semantics of a specific discourse. “Intelligibility,” by definition, precludes the inclusion of a semantics of “divine.” I believe Jean-Francois Lyotard is correct in saying that the Real, or divine in our case, if it is has any meaning in a working semantics, must be in a way “alluded” to. I believe that within our academic and even western scientific framework, we can include the possibility of a category that is “pointed to” outside the semantics of our closed and “earthly” taxonomies and explanations. Moreover, for intelligibility to be possible, a comparative model is a necessary ingredient: cross-cultural categories (responsive and amendable to context) verify common human experiences and give them more meaning.
We are now ready to unpack and outline recent attempts to explicate the nature of Religion and Religious Belief. In this section I will only cite and outline theorists in their own words, while saving most of the connective analysis and applications to The Philosophy Club Meet Up, and to the reader’s own final synthesis. We will move from where we left off, with Religious Studies, then to Neurobiology, and finally back to Philosophers.
Bruce Lincoln: Defining Religion, finally. So we are back to an attempt to discuss religion, religious belief, religious people, and therefore the social and political implications of/within that debate. Lincoln, in Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11, takes a leap, with a disclaimer: “Any definition that privileges one aspect, dimension, or component of religion necessarily fails, for in so doing it normalized some specific traditions (or tendencies therein), while simultaneously dismissing or stigmatizing others. (5).
Relation of Religion and Culture: “The category of culture has a built-in ambiguity, since it can refer both to a group or community (as when “my culture” = my people) and to some x that is a prime source of collective identity (as when “our culture” = our habits, customs, and so forth) (p. 51).“Culture” is thus the prime instrument through which groups mobilize themselves, construct their collective identity, and effect their solidarity by excluding those whom they identity as outsiders, while simultaneously establishing their own internal hierarchy, based on varying degrees of adherence to those values that define the group and its members. (52).
Bruce Lincoln: Defining Religion, finally. So we are back to an attempt to discuss religion, religious belief, religious people, and therefore the social and political implications of/within that debate. Lincoln, in Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11, takes a leap, with a disclaimer: “Any definition that privileges one aspect, dimension, or component of religion necessarily fails, for in so doing it normalized some specific traditions (or tendencies therein), while simultaneously dismissing or stigmatizing others. (5).
- Discourse: whose concerns transcend the human, temporal, and contingent, and that claims for itself and its authority a similarly transcendent status.
- Set of Practices: whose goal is to produce a proper world and/or human subject—as defined by discourse and renders discourse operational.
- Community: whose members construct their identity with reference to a religious discourse and its practices.
- An institution: that regulates 1, 2, and 3: reproducing them over time and space and modifying as necessary.
Relation of Religion and Culture: “The category of culture has a built-in ambiguity, since it can refer both to a group or community (as when “my culture” = my people) and to some x that is a prime source of collective identity (as when “our culture” = our habits, customs, and so forth) (p. 51).“Culture” is thus the prime instrument through which groups mobilize themselves, construct their collective identity, and effect their solidarity by excluding those whom they identity as outsiders, while simultaneously establishing their own internal hierarchy, based on varying degrees of adherence to those values that define the group and its members. (52).
Distinction/ambiguity of C-Culture/ c-culture - or; high vs. low culture. Capital C culture consists of choice works that enjoy privileged status…It is the subset of culture that most valorized by the faction of society most is most valorized—as the custodian and arbiter of values for the group.
In specifying the x that is the content of culture: aesthetics and ethics: domain in which groups articulate and enact defining preferences and values. Every item of culture offers itself, himself, or herself as an example of what is good (an ethical object) and/or what is pleasing (an aesthetic object). As such, it submits itself to members of the community for their evaluation (and then further meta-evaluation of the evaluators).
Volatility in the social order if ethic/aesthetics were purely the only parts of culture…which usually involves a 3rd component that has the unique capacity to stabilized and buttress the others—religion, which invests specific human preferences with transcendent status by constituting them as reveled truths, ancestral traditions, divine commandments, and the like (55)…The shift from aesthetic or ethical to religious discourse—Human propositions, precepts, and preferences are (mis)represented as distinctly more than human, with the result that they are insulated against criticism by mere mortals.
The Wars of Religion in Europe created a destabilization of the religious institutional paradigm: the Enlightenment attempted to overthrow this prior hegemonic position of religion with “reason, autonomy, and philosophy.” This however, only increased tension and violence (see: tension with the publication of the Encyclopedie in 1751). It was perhaps Kant that brought the campaign of the Enlightenment to a compromise conclusion: He develops the arguments in his main treaties that philosophy can respond with sound judgments to aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological—The good, beautiful, and the True; whereas, religion is best suited for metaphysical questions like the existence of God…where certainty is impossible…religion is thus not overthrown altogether, but given a privileged, if marginal sphere of activity. A new region of truth took shape, and gave rise to a new type of culture: main beneficiaries being the Secular Nation-State, the media of civil society, and commerce/capitalist economy.
But Philosophy did not replace Religion in the West—the Market did—which is not so stabilizing. Hence, revivals and principled opposition have emerged periodically.
Thus: Lincoln’s heuristic-idealized type model of Culture-Religion as in relation to the context of history:
Maximalism: Religion = the central domain of culture, deeply involved in ethical and aesthetic practices constitutive of the community. (Minimalism sees as powerful and intrusive to the order). Destablizing history of post colonial transfer/global crises created openings for movements to “restore” religion as the central domain. Foreign Nation States can be the enemy, but there can also be the enemy within. (e.g. Osama bin Laden; American religious right).
Minimalism: Economy = the central domain of culture; religion restricted to private sphere and metaphysical concerns. (Maximalist system seen as either a quaint diversion; or a resentful atavism, capable of reactionary counterattacks). Modernity, technology, and “progress” —colonization and grand narratives of the western hegemony. Until the destabilizing history of decolonization/post-colonial transfer. (59-60)
This “stablizing theme” also pops up in the evolutionary biology literature: so let’s return to the biology of beliefs and cognition.
Sapolsky uses “buckets of explanation” analogy: “Explanation” itself is an important epistemological concept that pairs with J.Z. Smith’s analysis of a polythetic tool box and the new comparativim that I have outlined. “When you think categorically, you have trouble seeing how similar or different two things are”(p. 6). However, Sapolsky is a neurobiologist and primatologist, and so his approach is solely “scientific”—but using his scholarship to address a debate that automatically challenges the “scientific” lens may not work. However, keep in mind how we got here: making the debate intelligible requires a back and forth of taxonomies, empirical data, redefining concepts and taking seriously experiential epistemology.
Sapolsky uses Frans de Waal definition of “culture:” culture is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means” (271). Though much simpler than Linclon’s outline, cross taxonomies can emerge. The most studied generalization of cultural differences in the world empirically are “Collectivist vs. Individualists” cultures. Visual processing studies demonstrate the power of culture on the very act of “seeing” the world, and/or how that perception is reported.
But what about the reasons as to why “religion” arises in human societies? Because it makes in-group cooperation more cooperative and viable, and because humans need personification and to see agency/causality when facing the unknown (see Micheal Shermer’s TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shermer_the_pattern_behind_self_deception?language=en). Inventing deities is an emergent by-product of the architecture our social brains. (p. 304). However, we are back to the problem of defining and comparing “deities” and “religion.” If we are looking for the “commonalities and patterns” of “religion” in order to philosophically assess beliefs, what are so patterns that have emerged in the empirical literature?:
1. Nomadic Pastoralists’ deities tend to value war and valor in battle as an entree to a good afterlife. Agriculturalists invent gods who alter the weather.
2. Once cultures get large enough that anonymous acts are possible, they start inventing moralizing gods. Gods and religious orthodoxy dominate more in cultures with frequent threats (war, natural disasters), inequality, and high infant mortality rates.
Therefore, again, supporting Lincoln’s analysis of culture and religion: religions distinct between Us and Them, though they differ as to what is required to be an Us and whether the pertinent attributes are immutable. All involve personal and communal ritualized behaviors that comfort in times of anxiety—supporting social cohesion and survival. There is evidence of less ACC activation in religious people (the alarm sounding part of the brain with expectations do not cohere) (622).
Questions to consider that has empirical data:
1. Are religious people nicer than nonreligious ones?
2. Do different religions foster different levels of prosociality and charity (and less cheating)?
3. Does religion cause more violence and war? What about intergroup hostility? (Steven Pinker’s ground shaking books answer these questions, but have major controversies. It does however, make the normative link in evaluating Lincoln’s Max/Min framework: If the Enlightenment, Modernity, Globalization, and Markets are making the world less violent, more prosperous, healthy, equal, and sustainable, then the Maximalist (“The Religious”) are on the “wrong side”).
Belief: Eric Schwitzgebel (From The Routledge Companion to Epistemology)
“Contemporary philosophers generally regard belief as a “propositional attitude,” where a “proposition” is just whatever it is that sentences express, such that two sentences that have the same meaning express the same proposition (e.g., “tigers are dangerous” in English and “los tigres son peligrosos” in Spanish) and sentences with different meanings express different propositions (setting aside some complications about indexical terms such as “I” and “today”). Propositional attitudes are just the types of mental states that possess the following canonical formal structure: S A that P, where S refers to the subject or individual who has the attitude, A refers to the attitude, and P refers to a proposition canonically expressible as a full sentence (though often in ordinary English abbreviated to a phrase with an implied subject).
Probably the majority of contemporary philosophers of mind adhere to some form of representationalism about belief—they hold that believing P involves having in one’s brain or mind a representation with the content P (at least in central, canonical cases of belief; see the discussion of explicit and implicit belief below). This view can be developed in various ways.”
Therefore, again, supporting Lincoln’s analysis of culture and religion: religions distinct between Us and Them, though they differ as to what is required to be an Us and whether the pertinent attributes are immutable. All involve personal and communal ritualized behaviors that comfort in times of anxiety—supporting social cohesion and survival. There is evidence of less ACC activation in religious people (the alarm sounding part of the brain with expectations do not cohere) (622).
Questions to consider that has empirical data:
1. Are religious people nicer than nonreligious ones?
2. Do different religions foster different levels of prosociality and charity (and less cheating)?
3. Does religion cause more violence and war? What about intergroup hostility? (Steven Pinker’s ground shaking books answer these questions, but have major controversies. It does however, make the normative link in evaluating Lincoln’s Max/Min framework: If the Enlightenment, Modernity, Globalization, and Markets are making the world less violent, more prosperous, healthy, equal, and sustainable, then the Maximalist (“The Religious”) are on the “wrong side”).
Belief: Eric Schwitzgebel (From The Routledge Companion to Epistemology)
“Contemporary philosophers generally regard belief as a “propositional attitude,” where a “proposition” is just whatever it is that sentences express, such that two sentences that have the same meaning express the same proposition (e.g., “tigers are dangerous” in English and “los tigres son peligrosos” in Spanish) and sentences with different meanings express different propositions (setting aside some complications about indexical terms such as “I” and “today”). Propositional attitudes are just the types of mental states that possess the following canonical formal structure: S A that P, where S refers to the subject or individual who has the attitude, A refers to the attitude, and P refers to a proposition canonically expressible as a full sentence (though often in ordinary English abbreviated to a phrase with an implied subject).
Probably the majority of contemporary philosophers of mind adhere to some form of representationalism about belief—they hold that believing P involves having in one’s brain or mind a representation with the content P (at least in central, canonical cases of belief; see the discussion of explicit and implicit belief below). This view can be developed in various ways.”
- Fodor: internal “language of thought”—“Language-Like”
- Dretsche: On Dretske’s view, an organism represents P just in case it contains a system one of whose functions it is to enter state A only if P holds, and that subsystem is in state A. As organisms grow more complex, they develop multiple overlapping and competing representational systems, and they develop the capacity to learn new representational structures. To have beliefs, on Dretske’s view, is just to have a sophisticated network of such representational systems, some acquired through associative learning, poised to guide behavior.
- David Lewis/Frank Jackson: Map-Like Representations: First, when maps represent something, they generally represent it with a determinate content and in determinate relationships to all the other elements represented. If a to- scale map represents a mountain peak, for instance, it must generally represent it as being in a fairly specific place (to whatever level of precision the mapping system allows) and at various specific distances and directions from all the other map elements. In contrast, linguistic representation much more naturally accommodates high levels of indeterminacy: A language-of-thought sentence might contain the content (“the mountain is north of the river”) without specifying in any way how far north or in exactly what direction, even if other related elements of the scene are more precisely known. Second, language-like representation leaves room at least in principle for inconsistencies or even bald contradictions among representations, while maps cannot (or cannot easily) be self-inconsistent.
Dispositional and interpretational approaches to belief treat believing not principally as a matter of internal cognitive structure but rather as a matter of an individual’s patterns of behavior (or in the case of “liberal dispositionism” something broader than behavior).
Traditional dispositional approaches to belief hold that to believe some particular proposition is to have a certain set of behavioral dispositions. For example, on Ruth Marcus’s (1990) view, to believe that P is just to be disposed to act, in appropriate circumstances, as if P were the case. Interpretational approaches to belief are similar in spirit to traditional dispositional views, in that what matters in the ascription of belief are patterns of behavior rather than internal structure. On an interpretational view, an individual believes that P just in case the best way to make rational sense of her overall pattern of behavior would involve ascribing to her the belief that P. Daniel Dennett (1978, 1987) and Donald Davidson (1984) are the most prominent advocates of interpretational approaches.
Functionalism To be a functionalist about a particular mental state is to hold that possession of that state is possession of a state that plays a particular functional or causal role, where functional or causal role is defined in terms of typical (or normal or actual) causes and effects.
Eliminativism about belief is the view that, literally speaking, people have no beliefs. Just as we now think that the sun does not literally rise up over the horizon (though we still find it convenient to talk that way) and just as we now think that there is no such thing as phlogiston (despite the predictive successes of early chemical theories invok- ing phlogiston), so also when science is far enough advanced we will come to think of belief as a flawed folk-theoretical term despite the convenience of the term for current practical purposes.
Arguments for eliminativism include Paul and Patricia Churchland’s argument that neuroscience has much better long-run promise for predicting and explaining human behavior than does ordinary folk psychology and seems to have no room for concepts like that of belief (P.M. Churchland 1981; P.S. Churchland 1986); Stephen Stich’s argument that folk psychology individuates belief states in ways that match poorly with the real causal powers of cognitive states and thus that a mature computational cogni- tive science will use different mental state individuation principles (Stich 1983; but see Stich 1996 for a partial retraction); and William Ramsey, Stich, and Joseph Garron’s (1991) argument that if the mind is built upon a roughly “connectionist” architecture, involving the massive and widely distributed interaction of subsemantic neuron-like nodes, then folk psychological states like belief cannot exist, for they are too discrete in their architecture to play a causal role in such a system.
Internalism and Externalism An internalist about a mental state holds that whether a being possesses that mental state constitutively depends entirely on facts internal to that being and not at all on facts about the outside world, such that two beings who are internally identical necessarily do not differ with regard to possession of that state. (Of course, the state may causally depend on facts about the outside world.) An externalist about a mental state holds, in contrast, that two internally identical beings could differ with respect to the state in question. A version of the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment can help distinguish internalist from externalist views: Imagine a brain exactly identical to yours, created and sustained in a vat, with its inputs manipulated to exactly mimic the inputs your brain receives—inputs that will of course be conditioned in part on the output signals from the brain, so that over time your and the brain-in-a-vat’s internally-defined brain states remain exactly identical. You and the brain in a vat will share all internally defined mental states and differ in most or all externally defined mental states. Question: Does the brain in the vat have beliefs? If it does, does it have exactly the same beliefs you do?
Externalism is often supported by the Twin Earth thought experiment, due to Hilary Putnam (1975; originally intended primarily as a thought experiment about linguistic meaning). Imagine that in another part of the universe there exists a planet molecule- for-molecule identical to Earth, with one exception: Where Earth has water (H2O), this other planet, Twin Earth, has a chemical (XYZ) that behaves outwardly virtually identically to water. It fills the rivers and oceans, is clear and potable, freezes and boils at the same temperature, etc. In 1750, no chemical test is available that can distinguish these substances. Wayne on Earth believes that there is a glass of water in front of him. Twin Wayne is molecule-for-molecule identical to Wayne (except that he has XYZ rather than water in him, but this point is inessential as can be seen by reflecting on parallel examples involving chemicals not present in the human body). He is also looking at a glass of clear, potable liquid and is disposed to utter a sentence that sounds like “There’s a glass of water in front of me.” The majority (but not unanimous) view in contemporary philosophy is that Wayne’s and Twin Wayne’s beliefs differ in their content: One is about water (H2O), the other about twin water (XYZ). For example, if Wayne were teleported to Twin Earth without his knowledge and uttered the sentence “That’s a glass of water” while looking at twin water, his sentence and his corresponding belief would be false, while Twin Wayne’s identical sentence and corresponding belief would be true. (For a rather different but equally influential example see Burge 1979.)
Atomism vs. Holism Alan says that redwoods are trees. He also says that saguaro cactuses are trees. Gincy says that redwoods are trees, but would not say that saguaro cactuses are. Although Alan and Gincy both have beliefs about redwoods that they would express with the sentence “Redwoods are trees,” do they really believe exactly the same thing about redwoods? Or does the fact that they differ about the status of saguaros imply that they have slightly different concepts of “tree” and so slightly different beliefs about redwoods? Holists say that the content of any belief depends on the contents of many nearby beliefs so that people who disagree have for the most part slightly different beliefs even on the topics about which it might seem outwardly that they agree. Atomists, in contrast, say that the content of our beliefs is generally not interrelated in that way. For the atomist, the content of a belief may be constitutively related to the content of a few others—for example, the content of the belief expressed by the sentence “Redwoods are trees” may differ between people who would give radically different definitions of “tree”—but generally, normal fluent speakers inclined to endorse the same sentence share exactly the same belief and not slightly different beliefs.
De Re and De Dicto Belief Ascriptions. Kyle sees a shadowy figure walking quickly through the factory late one night and concludes that that person is a thief. Unbeknownst to him, that shadowy figure is the plant manager, a woman of unquestionably upright character, and Kyle would disagree with anyone who asserted that the plant manager is a thief. Does Kyle believe that the plant manager is a thief? It seems that there’s a sense in which he does and a sense in which he does not. Philosophers sometimes express this ambiguity by saying that Kyle believes, de re, of the plant manager that she is a thief but does not believe, de dicto, that the plant manager is a thief (Quine 1956).
Future Directions:
1. Self-Knowledge: It seems that we typically know what we believe. How is this possible?
2. Dissociations between Implicit Reactions and Explicit Endorsements
A person might sincerely (or for all she can tell sincerely) affirm the proposition “all the races are intellectually equal” and yet show persistent racist bias in her everyday implicit reactions. Another person might in some sense be well aware that she moved her kitchen trashcan from one location to another and yet still find herself going to the old location to dispose of trash (Zimmerman 2007). Another person might walk out onto a glass skywalk above the Grand Canyon, saying “I know it’s perfectly safe” yet trembling with fear (Gendler 2008a). In these sorts of cases, the subject’s explicit endorsements conform with one proposition (P, let’s call it) and her implicit reactions seem to conform with its negation (not-P). What should we say about the subject’s belief?
Micheal Lynch: Belief, Commitment, and Conviction
Do people really believe what they believe? Especially when it comes to “religious beliefs”? Dan Dennett has suggested something like meta-beliefs functioning to justify other Implicit reactions or endorsement, a belief about “belief.”
However, Lynch has new work concerning political beliefs that would be instructive here, as we now can see the disassociation between Religion-Culture-Politics is very difficult, and that seeing how self/social Identity is created opens up the possibility of wider dialogue:
Lynch focuses on the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories: However, from this we can see if religious beliefs might be understood in a similar way...
“Do people really believe the misinformation they spread online?” we should be mindful of two distinctions, both of which are relevant to understanding what we might be concerned about when framing this question. The first is between belief and a related propositional attitude, commitment. The second is a distinction between the propositional content of an attitude and what I will call its political meaning. I will suggest that these distinctions not only can help us understand how we communicate online, but they also suggest a lesson about what we should be focusing on when fighting misinformation…
Traditional dispositional approaches to belief hold that to believe some particular proposition is to have a certain set of behavioral dispositions. For example, on Ruth Marcus’s (1990) view, to believe that P is just to be disposed to act, in appropriate circumstances, as if P were the case. Interpretational approaches to belief are similar in spirit to traditional dispositional views, in that what matters in the ascription of belief are patterns of behavior rather than internal structure. On an interpretational view, an individual believes that P just in case the best way to make rational sense of her overall pattern of behavior would involve ascribing to her the belief that P. Daniel Dennett (1978, 1987) and Donald Davidson (1984) are the most prominent advocates of interpretational approaches.
Functionalism To be a functionalist about a particular mental state is to hold that possession of that state is possession of a state that plays a particular functional or causal role, where functional or causal role is defined in terms of typical (or normal or actual) causes and effects.
Eliminativism about belief is the view that, literally speaking, people have no beliefs. Just as we now think that the sun does not literally rise up over the horizon (though we still find it convenient to talk that way) and just as we now think that there is no such thing as phlogiston (despite the predictive successes of early chemical theories invok- ing phlogiston), so also when science is far enough advanced we will come to think of belief as a flawed folk-theoretical term despite the convenience of the term for current practical purposes.
Arguments for eliminativism include Paul and Patricia Churchland’s argument that neuroscience has much better long-run promise for predicting and explaining human behavior than does ordinary folk psychology and seems to have no room for concepts like that of belief (P.M. Churchland 1981; P.S. Churchland 1986); Stephen Stich’s argument that folk psychology individuates belief states in ways that match poorly with the real causal powers of cognitive states and thus that a mature computational cogni- tive science will use different mental state individuation principles (Stich 1983; but see Stich 1996 for a partial retraction); and William Ramsey, Stich, and Joseph Garron’s (1991) argument that if the mind is built upon a roughly “connectionist” architecture, involving the massive and widely distributed interaction of subsemantic neuron-like nodes, then folk psychological states like belief cannot exist, for they are too discrete in their architecture to play a causal role in such a system.
Internalism and Externalism An internalist about a mental state holds that whether a being possesses that mental state constitutively depends entirely on facts internal to that being and not at all on facts about the outside world, such that two beings who are internally identical necessarily do not differ with regard to possession of that state. (Of course, the state may causally depend on facts about the outside world.) An externalist about a mental state holds, in contrast, that two internally identical beings could differ with respect to the state in question. A version of the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment can help distinguish internalist from externalist views: Imagine a brain exactly identical to yours, created and sustained in a vat, with its inputs manipulated to exactly mimic the inputs your brain receives—inputs that will of course be conditioned in part on the output signals from the brain, so that over time your and the brain-in-a-vat’s internally-defined brain states remain exactly identical. You and the brain in a vat will share all internally defined mental states and differ in most or all externally defined mental states. Question: Does the brain in the vat have beliefs? If it does, does it have exactly the same beliefs you do?
Externalism is often supported by the Twin Earth thought experiment, due to Hilary Putnam (1975; originally intended primarily as a thought experiment about linguistic meaning). Imagine that in another part of the universe there exists a planet molecule- for-molecule identical to Earth, with one exception: Where Earth has water (H2O), this other planet, Twin Earth, has a chemical (XYZ) that behaves outwardly virtually identically to water. It fills the rivers and oceans, is clear and potable, freezes and boils at the same temperature, etc. In 1750, no chemical test is available that can distinguish these substances. Wayne on Earth believes that there is a glass of water in front of him. Twin Wayne is molecule-for-molecule identical to Wayne (except that he has XYZ rather than water in him, but this point is inessential as can be seen by reflecting on parallel examples involving chemicals not present in the human body). He is also looking at a glass of clear, potable liquid and is disposed to utter a sentence that sounds like “There’s a glass of water in front of me.” The majority (but not unanimous) view in contemporary philosophy is that Wayne’s and Twin Wayne’s beliefs differ in their content: One is about water (H2O), the other about twin water (XYZ). For example, if Wayne were teleported to Twin Earth without his knowledge and uttered the sentence “That’s a glass of water” while looking at twin water, his sentence and his corresponding belief would be false, while Twin Wayne’s identical sentence and corresponding belief would be true. (For a rather different but equally influential example see Burge 1979.)
Atomism vs. Holism Alan says that redwoods are trees. He also says that saguaro cactuses are trees. Gincy says that redwoods are trees, but would not say that saguaro cactuses are. Although Alan and Gincy both have beliefs about redwoods that they would express with the sentence “Redwoods are trees,” do they really believe exactly the same thing about redwoods? Or does the fact that they differ about the status of saguaros imply that they have slightly different concepts of “tree” and so slightly different beliefs about redwoods? Holists say that the content of any belief depends on the contents of many nearby beliefs so that people who disagree have for the most part slightly different beliefs even on the topics about which it might seem outwardly that they agree. Atomists, in contrast, say that the content of our beliefs is generally not interrelated in that way. For the atomist, the content of a belief may be constitutively related to the content of a few others—for example, the content of the belief expressed by the sentence “Redwoods are trees” may differ between people who would give radically different definitions of “tree”—but generally, normal fluent speakers inclined to endorse the same sentence share exactly the same belief and not slightly different beliefs.
De Re and De Dicto Belief Ascriptions. Kyle sees a shadowy figure walking quickly through the factory late one night and concludes that that person is a thief. Unbeknownst to him, that shadowy figure is the plant manager, a woman of unquestionably upright character, and Kyle would disagree with anyone who asserted that the plant manager is a thief. Does Kyle believe that the plant manager is a thief? It seems that there’s a sense in which he does and a sense in which he does not. Philosophers sometimes express this ambiguity by saying that Kyle believes, de re, of the plant manager that she is a thief but does not believe, de dicto, that the plant manager is a thief (Quine 1956).
Future Directions:
1. Self-Knowledge: It seems that we typically know what we believe. How is this possible?
2. Dissociations between Implicit Reactions and Explicit Endorsements
A person might sincerely (or for all she can tell sincerely) affirm the proposition “all the races are intellectually equal” and yet show persistent racist bias in her everyday implicit reactions. Another person might in some sense be well aware that she moved her kitchen trashcan from one location to another and yet still find herself going to the old location to dispose of trash (Zimmerman 2007). Another person might walk out onto a glass skywalk above the Grand Canyon, saying “I know it’s perfectly safe” yet trembling with fear (Gendler 2008a). In these sorts of cases, the subject’s explicit endorsements conform with one proposition (P, let’s call it) and her implicit reactions seem to conform with its negation (not-P). What should we say about the subject’s belief?
Micheal Lynch: Belief, Commitment, and Conviction
Do people really believe what they believe? Especially when it comes to “religious beliefs”? Dan Dennett has suggested something like meta-beliefs functioning to justify other Implicit reactions or endorsement, a belief about “belief.”
However, Lynch has new work concerning political beliefs that would be instructive here, as we now can see the disassociation between Religion-Culture-Politics is very difficult, and that seeing how self/social Identity is created opens up the possibility of wider dialogue:
Lynch focuses on the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories: However, from this we can see if religious beliefs might be understood in a similar way...
“Do people really believe the misinformation they spread online?” we should be mindful of two distinctions, both of which are relevant to understanding what we might be concerned about when framing this question. The first is between belief and a related propositional attitude, commitment. The second is a distinction between the propositional content of an attitude and what I will call its political meaning. I will suggest that these distinctions not only can help us understand how we communicate online, but they also suggest a lesson about what we should be focusing on when fighting misinformation…
So memes are a chief source of false information on the Internet. It is safe to say that memes have helped to spread all the falsehoods identified at the beginning of this article. But the features of memes just noted also show why it can be difficult to answer whether someone who shares a misleading or “false” meme really believes the information it contains or implies...
…Moreover, beliefs, in this traditional view, are not inherently motivational: they can cause action but only in conjunction with some desire-like state. Just believing that climate change is a crisis, for example, does not all by itself mean that you will do something about it. You have to want to. I have no quarrel per se with defining belief in this way. But doing so can obscure the fact that there are similar but distinct propositional attitudes in play in the cognitive economy, attitudes that we sometimes also call “beliefs” (see Schwitzgebel 2001; Funkhouser 2017). One of these other attitudes, and one I think is particularly important in the political realm, is what I call “commitment” (Lynch 2012). Often when we ask whether someone believes something, we are actually, I think, wondering whether they are committed to it…So when we ask whether someone really believes that, for example, COVID-19 is not real, what we may be asking is whether they represent the world as being a certain way, or we may be asking whether they are committed to that proposition—whether they are willing to act on it and defend it...
Convictions, as I am using the term, are those commitments (either to people, plans of action, or propositions) that play a particularly central role in our lives by reflecting, and partly composing, our self-identities. A person’s self-identity in general is their aspirational self, or what is sometimes called their self-image; it is the kind of person they aspire to be, even if they do not always live up to that aspiration (Frankfurt 1988; Flanagan 1996). This aspect of my overall identity is determined by several factors, chief among them an interplay of my social identity and my values. That is because the kind of person I want to be is also a factor in what I care about, my values, and my deepest commitments. Caring about something means identifying with it and investing in it to the point where I thrive when it flourishes and suffer when it is diminished…
But our convictions also have a kind of epistemic authority—or authority over what else we believe, or at least say we believe. One reason for that is that our political convictions ground our political worldview. They become part of the landscape, our frame of reference, our political “picture of the world” that is the very “background against which [we] distinguish between what is true and what is false” (Wittgenstein 1969, §94). But another reason is that when something becomes a political conviction, it is difficult for us, from a psychological standpoint, to doubt it. That is because doubting it would be doubting who we say we are. As a result, our own self-interest motivates us to hold convictions fixed and be willing to make all sorts of sacrifices on their behalf. Convictions cause us to engage in “identity- protective reasoning” (See Kahan et al. 2007; Kahan 2013).We often are willing to explain away contrary evidence, even if doing so flies in the face of the facts or logic itself. And we do that precisely because of the authority we give convictions over our life by virtue of their connection to our self- identity. That is why I am so reluctant to give them up and why I may feel bad or guilty for not having the courage to live up to them. It is because they are commitments central to my self-identity that giving up a conviction can feel like an act of self-betrayal and a betrayal of one’s community.
And of course, our political community may well agree. As a result, our convictions often make it pragmatically rational to be epistemically irrational—to ignore the evidence and stick to your convictions come what may. No one wants to crush their self-image. And few want to risk the approbation of the community."
Political Meaning
“Anyone who has engaged in public political discourse—including simply sharing a political news story online—eventually becomes aware that what one says often conveys different political information to different political audiences. It is not for nothing that political experts are paid to determine how a policy will play in Peoria as opposed to New York City. And most of us can remember, wincingly, when we inadvertently said something that turned out to be politically offensive to someone in the conversation. Our judgments and assertions, in other words, can have political meanings that go beyond their content.
Political meaning, as I will use the term here, is a kind of social mean- ing. Lawrence Lessig influentially defined social meaning as “the semiotic content attached to various actions, or inactions, or statuses, within a particular context” (1995). This idea has been generalized by feminist philosophers, among others, and Sally Haslanger notes that things such as food, money, jewelry all have social meanings: “Pink means girl and blue means boy, no?” (2014, 18). Haslanger sees social meanings as constituted by the conceptual schemes and beliefs we use to interpret the world around us and the objects and actions within it that we take to have some value, positive or negative: “They guide our interaction with each other and the material world” (18).
Social meaning is a broad category and includes the artistic, religious, and cultural significance we attach to various “vehicles” of meaning. Political meaning concerns only what I will call the political contributions of the vehicle. Like other kinds of social meaning, political meaning can attach to all sorts of vehicles, and in many parts of our lives, it washes over everything—just as we noted at the outset. This is particularly true in visual culture. Almost every visual product of our cultural lives—from the clothes we wear to the Netflix shows we watch and the color of paints we choose for our children’s bedrooms—send political signals and contribute to political debates (Boylan 2020). Thus, political meaning captures some of the ideas behind the feminist slogan that the “personal is political.” That slogan notes the ways in which personal aspects of a woman’s life—her body, her job, her status as a mother (or not as one)—are all politicized and thus the subject of political debate and judgment. What the concept of political meaning shows is that this idea generalizes: whatever we say or do can come to have political meaning.
What is responsible for something—some action, object, or judgment— having political meaning? In large part, it depends on the responses that we make to the relevant action or judgment and the associations that we draw from them. To put it differently, things have political meaning depending on how they are perceived to contribute to politics. Examining how this happens in any particular case is, of course, a complex and largely empirical matter. But a few short observations can give us the general gist.
One factor concerns what the object, action, or judgment is taken to expressively communicate—that is, the sorts of convictions and values it is associated with. Wearing a red hat of a particular color in the United States will be taken by most people to express political sympathies to the Right. Likewise with the judgment “All Lives Matter”; no matter what the person themselves intend to mean by the hat or that phrase, they will be taken to expressively communicate certain convictions.
Another way a judgment can contribute to politics is by being collectively action-guiding within a community. Waving a flag can do that or carrying a sign. But so can voicing a judgment. Judgments, too, can motivate us to donate, organize, vote, petition, and protest—that is, to engage in political activities. And in making such a judgment, I am typically looking, at least indirectly, at engaging in some group activity, coaxing someone to join us in doing so, or illustrating that I am part of the team. Finally, judgments in particular have the political meanings they do in part because of how they are perceived epistemically—specifically, whether they are counted by the community as epistemic “wins” for one side or the other. The claim that mask-wearing lowers infection rates, for example, was widely seen by both the Left and the Right in the U.S. during 2020 as a counter for some opinions (“mask-wearing doesn’t correlate with any change in the rate of infection”) and as a reason for other relevant judgments (“we should adopt a national mask-wearing mandate”). Its acceptance was seen as making a difference to the political problem of whether to impose mask mandates in the face of a pandemic. Hence, some people who opposed mask mandates in 2020 argued that there was not enough evidence to think that mask-wearing lowers infection rates precisely because they recognized that accepting that there was would undermine their political position.
In short, the political meanings of some vehicles consist in the contributions a community perceives them as making to politics. This includes their perceived epistemic effects, the convictions and identities they are understood as expressing, and the actions they potentially guide. To grasp a judgment’s political meanings is to understand how that judgment or claim contributes to politics differently within the various relevant communities.
Like other kinds of social meanings, political meaning is “in an import- ant way, non-optional” (Lessig 1995). By this, I mean that the political meaning is not something that one can simply decide to forgo or wish away. That is reflected in the above account: a vehicle’s contributions to politics, at least in most cases, are largely external to the agent’s beliefs and intentions. But they are not independent of the beliefs, attitudes, and actions of the community, precisely because they are constituted by those beliefs and actions.
The fact that I cannot determine the political meanings of my judgment is easy to overlook or purposefully ignore. “I didn’t mean it that way!” when exclaimed after some insulting political faux pas may be sincere. But it is not up to the speaker how the community understands the judgment’s political meaning. Claiming, for example, that a Confederate war memorial is “only about preserving history” is itself a claim with different political meanings, all of which identify the speaker as holding certain values and partisan convictions. For those opposed to such monuments, those convictions concern the relative importance of white heritage and the message that we can screen off the racist history of a symbol. But that history and those values exist independently of whether the agents in question do or do not believe their judgments have political meaning in the wider community.
For another example, imagine a climate scientist testifying on Capitol Hill about whether climate change is real. She says it is and adds that she is only stating what the evidence clearly illustrates. In response, a conservative senator retorts that the “witness is playing politics” since the evidence (he says) is “inconclusive.” In most contexts, and especially during a contentious Senate hearing, the judgment that climate change is real has political meaning since it will contribute to the political debate surrounding what to do about climate change. Does that mean we must agree that the senator is right that the scientist is “playing politics?” No. Like in the above case concerning conservative defenders of Confederate symbols, the scientist’s judgment can have political meaning without being made for political reasons even if its truth does not depend on anything other than how the climate actually is.
While political meaning is largely external, it can be internalized. One way of understanding ideologies is to see them as “combinations of political concepts organized in a particular way” (Freeden 1996, 75). Adapted to the present terminology, we can say that ideologies are internalized schemas of networked, interrelated political meanings and concepts that have such meanings. As Haslanger says with regard to social meanings generally, “internalized schemas provide recognitional capacities, store information, and are the basis for various behavioral and emotional dispositions” (2014, 16). These schemas in the political sense are ideologies, ideologies that are in turn reflected in language and in our political actions and choices. Ideologies determine how we interpret the political meanings of our own and others’ actions and judgments; they can determine whether we will even interpret them as having political meaning or whether we will insist (perhaps in face of the facts) that it does not contribute to politics at all. ..
Our distinctions now allow us to state what should be obvious: memes are an effective political tool precisely because they are so useful for both changing and sustaining political meanings. The typical political meme, like the ones just noted, functions by taking an existing image with established social meaning (ironic beer commercial/Holocaust prisoners and victims) and riffs off that meaning by associating it with another. The success of the association rests on the fact that the accompanying image is iconic, or at least immediately recognizable. The social meaning that the image already carries (again, relative to a context and a community) does not exist in isolation, since “no visual object exists in isolation.” Whenever we “see something, we are also seeing what is around it, what it reminds us of that came before, other memories of things that we have seen or once heard of” (Boylan 2020, 30)...
Yet these possibilities do flag the more general lesson I wish to leave you with: when it comes to politics, belief matters less than commitment, and literal meaning matters less than political meaning. For politics is less about representing the world than changing it. This is a lesson we would do well to mind in attempting to combat misinformation online. For if we only worry about whether people really believe what they share, we miss the possibility that they don’t, but are committed to it anyway—not because they think it represents how the world is, but how it should be.”
Now just change “Politics” to “Religion” - what does this say about “religious beliefs and convictions?”
Political Meaning
“Anyone who has engaged in public political discourse—including simply sharing a political news story online—eventually becomes aware that what one says often conveys different political information to different political audiences. It is not for nothing that political experts are paid to determine how a policy will play in Peoria as opposed to New York City. And most of us can remember, wincingly, when we inadvertently said something that turned out to be politically offensive to someone in the conversation. Our judgments and assertions, in other words, can have political meanings that go beyond their content.
Political meaning, as I will use the term here, is a kind of social mean- ing. Lawrence Lessig influentially defined social meaning as “the semiotic content attached to various actions, or inactions, or statuses, within a particular context” (1995). This idea has been generalized by feminist philosophers, among others, and Sally Haslanger notes that things such as food, money, jewelry all have social meanings: “Pink means girl and blue means boy, no?” (2014, 18). Haslanger sees social meanings as constituted by the conceptual schemes and beliefs we use to interpret the world around us and the objects and actions within it that we take to have some value, positive or negative: “They guide our interaction with each other and the material world” (18).
Social meaning is a broad category and includes the artistic, religious, and cultural significance we attach to various “vehicles” of meaning. Political meaning concerns only what I will call the political contributions of the vehicle. Like other kinds of social meaning, political meaning can attach to all sorts of vehicles, and in many parts of our lives, it washes over everything—just as we noted at the outset. This is particularly true in visual culture. Almost every visual product of our cultural lives—from the clothes we wear to the Netflix shows we watch and the color of paints we choose for our children’s bedrooms—send political signals and contribute to political debates (Boylan 2020). Thus, political meaning captures some of the ideas behind the feminist slogan that the “personal is political.” That slogan notes the ways in which personal aspects of a woman’s life—her body, her job, her status as a mother (or not as one)—are all politicized and thus the subject of political debate and judgment. What the concept of political meaning shows is that this idea generalizes: whatever we say or do can come to have political meaning.
What is responsible for something—some action, object, or judgment— having political meaning? In large part, it depends on the responses that we make to the relevant action or judgment and the associations that we draw from them. To put it differently, things have political meaning depending on how they are perceived to contribute to politics. Examining how this happens in any particular case is, of course, a complex and largely empirical matter. But a few short observations can give us the general gist.
One factor concerns what the object, action, or judgment is taken to expressively communicate—that is, the sorts of convictions and values it is associated with. Wearing a red hat of a particular color in the United States will be taken by most people to express political sympathies to the Right. Likewise with the judgment “All Lives Matter”; no matter what the person themselves intend to mean by the hat or that phrase, they will be taken to expressively communicate certain convictions.
Another way a judgment can contribute to politics is by being collectively action-guiding within a community. Waving a flag can do that or carrying a sign. But so can voicing a judgment. Judgments, too, can motivate us to donate, organize, vote, petition, and protest—that is, to engage in political activities. And in making such a judgment, I am typically looking, at least indirectly, at engaging in some group activity, coaxing someone to join us in doing so, or illustrating that I am part of the team. Finally, judgments in particular have the political meanings they do in part because of how they are perceived epistemically—specifically, whether they are counted by the community as epistemic “wins” for one side or the other. The claim that mask-wearing lowers infection rates, for example, was widely seen by both the Left and the Right in the U.S. during 2020 as a counter for some opinions (“mask-wearing doesn’t correlate with any change in the rate of infection”) and as a reason for other relevant judgments (“we should adopt a national mask-wearing mandate”). Its acceptance was seen as making a difference to the political problem of whether to impose mask mandates in the face of a pandemic. Hence, some people who opposed mask mandates in 2020 argued that there was not enough evidence to think that mask-wearing lowers infection rates precisely because they recognized that accepting that there was would undermine their political position.
In short, the political meanings of some vehicles consist in the contributions a community perceives them as making to politics. This includes their perceived epistemic effects, the convictions and identities they are understood as expressing, and the actions they potentially guide. To grasp a judgment’s political meanings is to understand how that judgment or claim contributes to politics differently within the various relevant communities.
Like other kinds of social meanings, political meaning is “in an import- ant way, non-optional” (Lessig 1995). By this, I mean that the political meaning is not something that one can simply decide to forgo or wish away. That is reflected in the above account: a vehicle’s contributions to politics, at least in most cases, are largely external to the agent’s beliefs and intentions. But they are not independent of the beliefs, attitudes, and actions of the community, precisely because they are constituted by those beliefs and actions.
The fact that I cannot determine the political meanings of my judgment is easy to overlook or purposefully ignore. “I didn’t mean it that way!” when exclaimed after some insulting political faux pas may be sincere. But it is not up to the speaker how the community understands the judgment’s political meaning. Claiming, for example, that a Confederate war memorial is “only about preserving history” is itself a claim with different political meanings, all of which identify the speaker as holding certain values and partisan convictions. For those opposed to such monuments, those convictions concern the relative importance of white heritage and the message that we can screen off the racist history of a symbol. But that history and those values exist independently of whether the agents in question do or do not believe their judgments have political meaning in the wider community.
For another example, imagine a climate scientist testifying on Capitol Hill about whether climate change is real. She says it is and adds that she is only stating what the evidence clearly illustrates. In response, a conservative senator retorts that the “witness is playing politics” since the evidence (he says) is “inconclusive.” In most contexts, and especially during a contentious Senate hearing, the judgment that climate change is real has political meaning since it will contribute to the political debate surrounding what to do about climate change. Does that mean we must agree that the senator is right that the scientist is “playing politics?” No. Like in the above case concerning conservative defenders of Confederate symbols, the scientist’s judgment can have political meaning without being made for political reasons even if its truth does not depend on anything other than how the climate actually is.
While political meaning is largely external, it can be internalized. One way of understanding ideologies is to see them as “combinations of political concepts organized in a particular way” (Freeden 1996, 75). Adapted to the present terminology, we can say that ideologies are internalized schemas of networked, interrelated political meanings and concepts that have such meanings. As Haslanger says with regard to social meanings generally, “internalized schemas provide recognitional capacities, store information, and are the basis for various behavioral and emotional dispositions” (2014, 16). These schemas in the political sense are ideologies, ideologies that are in turn reflected in language and in our political actions and choices. Ideologies determine how we interpret the political meanings of our own and others’ actions and judgments; they can determine whether we will even interpret them as having political meaning or whether we will insist (perhaps in face of the facts) that it does not contribute to politics at all. ..
Our distinctions now allow us to state what should be obvious: memes are an effective political tool precisely because they are so useful for both changing and sustaining political meanings. The typical political meme, like the ones just noted, functions by taking an existing image with established social meaning (ironic beer commercial/Holocaust prisoners and victims) and riffs off that meaning by associating it with another. The success of the association rests on the fact that the accompanying image is iconic, or at least immediately recognizable. The social meaning that the image already carries (again, relative to a context and a community) does not exist in isolation, since “no visual object exists in isolation.” Whenever we “see something, we are also seeing what is around it, what it reminds us of that came before, other memories of things that we have seen or once heard of” (Boylan 2020, 30)...
Yet these possibilities do flag the more general lesson I wish to leave you with: when it comes to politics, belief matters less than commitment, and literal meaning matters less than political meaning. For politics is less about representing the world than changing it. This is a lesson we would do well to mind in attempting to combat misinformation online. For if we only worry about whether people really believe what they share, we miss the possibility that they don’t, but are committed to it anyway—not because they think it represents how the world is, but how it should be.”
Now just change “Politics” to “Religion” - what does this say about “religious beliefs and convictions?”
Related Questions within the History of Philosophy:
1. Existential Theists: Kierkegaard, Buber, Jaspers? Should we look for rational consistency when it comes to existential questions? How did they approach these issues?
2: What about the Kantian challenge?: the deepest of all philosophical questions: Why does the world exist? Or Why is there something rather than nothing? Is there something like “God” and can we articulate a defense in a “space of reasons?” Can Religious/Metaphysical beliefs be justified on the basis of answering that question? See Jim Holt’s interviews of important Theists and Atheists in Why does the World Exist: An Existential Detective Story
Applications:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/supreme-court-sincere-religious-belief-coach-kennedy/629737/
Abortion Debate: what is the relationship between religion and the moral/political/legal issues with abortion (in the US? Catholic dominate countries..)?
Can/Should religions beliefs/practices/institutions be respected? How? Why?
How should we debate about questions of the sort: (Was the United States Founded as a religious/Christian Nation? Which religious beliefs are racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic/ableist…?)
References and Citations:
Lynch, Micheal P. "MEMES, MISINFORMATION, AND POLITICAL MEANING" The Southern Journal of Philosophy Volume 0, Issue 0 (Forthcoming, cited from Academia)
Sapolsky, Robert M. 2017. Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Dest and Worst. New York: Penguin Press.
Schwitzgebel, Eric. 2011. “Belief.” In The Routledge Companion to Epistemology, edited by Sven Bernecker and Duncan Pritchard. New York: Routledge.
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