Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Thu Jul 27, 2023 11:04 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Jul 27, 2023 3:29 pm
I just have, for VA, above. That's a "starting point" definition I have been using in my earlier discussion.
Briefly, "faith" is conviction of things that can only be known probabilstically.
So, if you're a poker player and you weigh your odds of winning, this is faith?
In a manner of speaking, yes. But gambling is an example of
bad faith,
unwarranted faith, since the gambler actually has the odds against him. If he were calculating probabilities accurately, he wouldn't gamble. There's a reason all the casinos are stinking rich: he should do the math.
In "personal knowledge," the key idea is of the investment of a "person" in the thing being known. One might say, one commits to an action or supposition which one does not fully yet understand, often within a field of knowledge in which one is merely 'apprenticing' (so to speak) and then becomes more knowledgeable of it as a result. That's about where Polanyi goes with it, though that's still too little to say of his thesis.
I can relate to this. I've mentioned this in discussions with atheists in relation to demands for online proof, suggesting instead that participation and practice are the route. I think this is more obvious outside mainstream Western theist contexts because there is so much argument in Western Abrahamic traditions. Words.
Words are very important. But words are also more than the Western tradition generally has recognized in them. Words are tied to other things, like personal responsibility, duty to act, morality, truth, the identity and integrity of a speaker, and to reality itself...those are important concerns, to be sure. Words untethered from these things, though, can mislead. And arguments that are purely intellectual are what we call "fruitless," invoking a metaphor that draws attention back for a need of uniting of words with action.
Faith, like personal knowledge, is a commitment of self to the thing being known. But ordinary personal knowledge is merely knowledge of facts and phenomena. There is an exercise of faith in that, but faith is more than that, as well. Faith is a faculty that is relevant to knowing metaphysical truth, as well as physical phenomena. It serves for both: one might suppose personal knowledge to serve primarily for the latter, rather than the former.
I agree with the first sentence as far as the process of investigation, but 'the thing being known' could be a messy abstraction for these two processes. Faith, at least for most theists, when they have it, is in the conclusion. In science faith is in the methodology but the conclusion may not be what one expected. Now a theist could certainly have faith in the process also, but this is generally coupled to the faith that God exists.
I'd say that's not a significant distinctive...at least as far as the process involved goes. The Atheist or Materialist simply takes a different first premise on faith: he has faith that no God exists, and proceeds on that basis.
But faith, rightly understood, is more than something one affixes to a conclusion. One always has to have it in first premises...there's no other way to know anything at all, actually. But then one also must use faith as part of a process: the Christians call it, "the life of faith." Faith is not a one-time, propositional thing, for them; it's a way of orienting oneself to the world, and of choosing one's actions accordingly, and of addressing the vicissitudes of life, as well as an attitude to the hope of certain outcomes. And if that fuller picture of faith has been lost, it's a tragedy. But the fault is not with faith itself, but with the people who have understood it as less than a full pattern of life.
I'm not sure how far Polanyi will let us take personal knowledge into the metaphysical realm. It seems he will, for some distance. So I can't say with a hard line drawn that Polanyi stops at physical phenomena. But I tend to think that faith is the larger category, and personal knowledge is seated within it, and I tend to associate the term personal knowledge primarily with the more "secular" matters, and faith with both the religious and the secular.
It's fine with me if Polyani doesn't explicly or even implicitly think that his idea of personal knoweldge 'works' with what get characterizes as metaphysical claims or explorations. I'm happy to extend his idea into realms he didn't intend.
Well, as I say, he certainly does let it get across the boundary between strictly physical phenomena and metaphysical concerns. I just don't want to speak for him as to
how far he allows.
But I'm balking at a difference. Polyani, with personal knowledge, it seems to me, is arguing that passion and emotion aid the scientist.
"Passion"? "Emotion?" I don't recall him invoking those at all. No, his idea of personal knowledge is not those things, but rather the venture of commitment of a person to a particular proposition. Passion and emotion may or may not be involved in a given case, but they aren't any part of Polanyi's conception of the essence of knowledge.
Now, if you were to say "intuition," I think Polanyi would be on board, particularly when we get to what he calls "tacit knowledge." But even that needs nuancing, I think.
Fine. Agreed. However once the process of performing an experiment is finished and if the results warrent it, a dispassionate process in the scientific community works on confirming or disconfirming the results. Sure, the other scientists may be passionate and curious say, but there is the mechanical process of confirmation.
Yes...?
And I am not sure that the passions and emotions are really a kind of faith as you define it or other theists do - those that focus on faith. Many theists do not think in terms of faith (at least not contrasted with belief).
As I say, neither Polanyi nor I make "passion" or "emotion" any synonyms -- or even any essential feature -- of knowing. So I don't think that's a problem.
In general I think this is a good direction for theists to go. Call faith 'intuition' and then also a 'doing', so practice is involved. Then demonstrations of God are participation in the practices of the religion rather than propositional arguments.
I hear Marx turning in his grave.
Well, theists and atheists alike tend not to like this. There are theists who get it and I have had atheists acknowledge it's a reasonable response. But it's not popular, especially in philosophy forums, since it more or less is saying: hey, this format is a limited one. I think there is an assumption in philosophy forums (a generalization) that anything that is true can be somehow demonstated online via words on a screen. But that's only one way we learn.
To be honest, I think this is like the relation between all human beings and philosophy. Most people don't bother philosophizing. That's not to say they don't have a tacit philosophy, or a tacit set of beliefs that they use to orient themselves in the world; clearly, everybody has to have that. But what I mean is that they don't make that philosophy so formal and explicit as real philosophers want to do.
Most folks are more pragmatic. They need to live their lives, and they get as much of the philosophy into themselves as they feel they need to function; but rare are the opportunites when they feel they have time or desire to push the boundaries of that much. There are simple Atheists, and simple Theists. There are half-informed Atheists, and half-informed Theists. And there are a few of each who have a taste for pushing the limits of their actual knowledge, or who become teachers or professors of the thing. But there tend to be fewer folks who have the higher-level philosophical knowledge than there are those who are just getting by with the philosophy they already have.
I agree with you that faith and practices are essentially linked, for sure. As the book of James says, "Faith without works is dead, being by itself."
I mean practices more in the practicing the violin sense: as in learning a skill or set of skills: You need to learn by repetition, participation and potentially getting guidance during the apprenticeship. Works or good works in Christianity, at least, seems more focused on being a moral person.
That's a recent innovation, and has much more to do with Western individualism than anything. Historical Christianity is rather communally-concerned. And in fact, even today, you'll find that most social help and social welfare organizations either began with Christianity, or still are dependent on it.
In fact, Christianity has a lot to say about the kind of conduct that is becoming to the community of the faithful. And while it puts the responsibility on the individual for the most part (with some exceptions, like the opening three chapters of Revelation, for example), it reasons and explains these in terms of the duties of the individual to the community and the world.
At the end of the day, making faith strictly individualistic is probably nearly as wrongheaded as to make it dependent on mere cognitive assent rather than on belief-plus-action.
To make this clearer practice is key and explict in the big Eastern religions: Hinduims and Buddhism. It is central to meditate (or chant). You are learning to connect to Shiva or Brahma or the Budda, even if the last is not really a deity.
There are Christian practices, too, of course; but they're rather different from those "practices." One could easily argue that the whole Christian life is, in fact, a practice; but unlike those others, it's not divorced from content or propositional belief. It's got both.
The Eastern meditator tries to vacate his mind. The Christian or Jew tries to occupy it with the Word of God, meditating on the knowledge of God. They're opposite orientations, it's true: but both have their practices, and both use the term "meditation," at least, even if their concepts are different.
Faith must be acted upon, and involve personal commitment, or it is really not faith. But one cannot merely eliminate the faith and take the practices in their place: because one can do the "works" and yet have no faith at all.
This is again where it seems to differ from science. Belief can be the result of practices. But here it seems like faith comes first then practices. I don't think that works.
Well, it certainly "works" in relationships. Take the conversation we're having right now: without some good faith on your part and mine, it would not be possible. Or better still, take the case of a young man considering asking a young woman out for the first time. He has to believe it's possible that something good will happen if he takes that risk. But he does not know. He may have a few indications -- she smiled at him, her friends say she's interested, perhaps -- but he's pretty unsure, all the same. He has to decide whether or not to make that personal investment that is involved in asking her, or he'll never find out. He's got to start with a step of faith.
Once he takes that first risk, though, he finds his faith is justified: she says "Yes," perhaps. And his confidence and knowledge of her increase as he spends time with her -- that's the practice -- and he has more faith in her after a few dates than he had before...and so faith and practice become cyclical and mutually-reinforcing in his experience with her.
I think that's a pretty natural sort of flow.
The same is sometimes even true in science. The experimenter on a genuinely new experiment does not know what his "practice" wiil produce, before he does the "practice." He has to start with faith; but if his experiment works, then the practice informs further confidence. He realizes it's worth doing the experiment again, or in a somewhat different way, so as to strengthen his confirmation. And so again, and again, and again...
YOu may be born into a religion and take it all as true, but if you actually engage in the practices with any passion you will probably realize you didn't know very much at all for a long time.
That is true of everybody. We come into this world knowing practically nothing at all, in fact.
That truism is easy to illustrate. A man may give to charity, yet not be a charitable man. For instance, if I give to charity but only do so that I may make headlines and turn heads, I have done the works but have not personal commitment to the value of charity. Likewise, if I pledge a thousand dollars to charity but never write the cheque, I am also not making the personal commitment to the charity I only say I believe in doing. So the two are tightly linked: but there are two things required by genuine faith. They are (1) an actual, truthful belief in the value as a proposition, and (2) the practical action of following through on that proposition in reality, as much as it's possible for me to do.
And I think you have to practice your way to personal knowledge.
That can happen. But practice actually never comes before faith, because faith is required for even the most rudimentary actions. Once practice is in play, though, it certainly can increase and modify knowledge. That's just what it means to "learn something."
IOW the practices I am talking about in science might be a biologist observing animals, mulling what she is seeing, making guesses and seeing if they come true, ruling out factors in the animal's behavior, perhaps making controlled interventions to see effects - just some practices that they need to practice.
Okay, but those practices have to be organized in some way, because otherwise, the biologist doesn't know what "observations," or "guesses" or "rulings in or out," or "interventions" are relevant, and which are right to exclude from his concerns. He can't include every back scratch or yip the baboons make as determinative of something important; there may be gestures or yips that ARE relevant, but he'll only know that with reference to some goal or hypothesis he's already got.
And where did he get that hypothesis? Not from the observations themselves, obviously; he hadn't even made them, at that point. Something pre-verbal, something hopeful, something speculative motivated him, and made him choose to impose the structure of relevance-non-relevance that now governs his observations and data. Polanyi's interested in that, too; and he has some neat things to say about that. It's a rather spooky process. Something makes it possible for us, tacitly, to set certain data in the background and others in the foreground of our consciousness. But it's not the data itself that does this: it's something else.
In religion there are practices like prayer, contemplation, reading the Bible and contemplating that, participation in rituals, as some examples off the top of my head. Then you get faith. Because you have learned something.
That's certainly one way.
You seem to be saying you have belief first and then express/act from this. I think that happens later, or at the very least is not a complete description.
Well, take a look at what I just said about the biologist, and see if that modifies your thoughts about me on that question.
It's not, however, how most Abrahamists...I'm hust using the term as a shorthand for Islam, Christianity and Judaism.
I know. But it's not a very good term, and it's a really unfortunate conflating of conflicting belief systems. Islam's "Abraham" isn't the Abraham of the
Torah. And Islam, while it's called "a faith" is actually a religion of works. Islam's God is even quite different from the Jewish YHWH, having quite different features and a very different will. It's not by accident that the Islamists hate the Jews and Christians with great enthusiasm: all sides know they're not of-a-piece.
I haven't called faith "tacit." Interesting that you choose that word. That's a new term here.
I think Polyani is better known for his ideas around tacit knowledge than those around his idea of personal knowledge. They are not unrelated, but when you mentioned Polyani without any specifics I immediately went to his ideas on tacit knowledge, which I think are very relevant to 'faith/intuition'.
Yes. He does have a lecture series called "Tacit Knowing, Truthful Knowing." But the concept of "tacit" knowing is somewhat different and distinct from his concept "personal knowing." They have some overlap, but aren't the same.
As far as I can tell Personal knowledge is a specific category of Tacit knowledge.
Well, they're both related to the mechanics of knowlege, as Polanyi sees it, obviously. But whereas the former emphasizes the element of personal, embodied commitment to a particular knowledge-proposition or situation, the latter emphasizes those situations in which the knowledge cannot be articulated easily. Personal knowledge can be made explicit; tacit knowledge, by definition, is not.
I am conviced (I do not merely "feel" it) that one can present an argument for the existence of God that a rational, open person should be convinced to accept.
Which to me puts it outside tacit knowledge and thus personal knowledge.
No, it's still IN the "personal knowledge" category, because the bodily commitment is there. But it's not "tacit," so long as I can articulate it.
You can articulate this proof. You don't need the person to engage in prayer, rituals, etc. They can be convinced via words.
It depends. Who's the person in question?
Polanyi would say it matters. So would I. Some people can be convinced by purely cerebral arguments, perhaps. Some require experiences of the divine. Some find their way to God through prayer, reading, meditation, and so on. But most people find that all these play significant roles in what they come to know as the life of faith. Different folks may find different ones their best entry-point; but they all end up being engaged with all of them, one way or another.
But since knowing is "personal," meaning that it requires a commitment of the person himself in order to know, it's quite possible for such an argument to be presented and the recipient simply to refuse it.
Well, of course. But if you think it should be convincing I don't think that knowledge falls under what Polyani is focusing on.
Oh, it does. One thing Polanyi is adamant about is that you cannot separate the issue of the "knowing" from the "person" who is involved in it. A person who is set not to be convinced will not be convinced, even by the most elaborate of miracles. (Christ Himself said that, actually.)
Why should we care how somebody else chooses to merely "interpret"? What matters is only if it's true for both of us; and you'd need to show it is. In other words, you'd need to show it as an objective truth, which, as below, you've insisted is impossible.