Everybody,
Have a look at the link, doxastic logic, that Russ put in his note below. It’s a stunner. Nick
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of ERIC P. CHARLES
Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2012 8:39 AM
To: Russ Abbott
Cc: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] faith - take 2
The faith discussion seemed to fall apart, but might now be pulling itself back together - hence the slight subject change.
One variant of the pragmatic dictum, using James's catchy phrasing, is that "There is no difference that doesn't make a difference." In this particular situation, the there is no "I have faith that" which doesn't have imply "doing y will have z consequence". Now, it is certainly might be possible that the consequence of your faith do not include a particular type of outcome that someone else thinks should be logically consequent; i.e., it is possible your faith that P is true is separate from your faith that a particular event E will happen. However, it is not possible that your "faith that P is true" is completely disconnected from your faith that certain events will occur under certain circumstances. Perhaps the circumstances are unlikely to occur, perhaps the relevant circumstances are so far in the future or past as to be barely worth discussing in the present (outside of conversations like this), but ultimately "There is no difference that doesn't make a difference." People with Faith in P must be different in some set of circumstances from people without Faith in P, or there is no difference between having and not-having such faith.
By the way, one interesting move someone could make in this conversation would be to claim that the crucial difference is that they claim to have Faith in P when asked. (This is, for example, how a subset of Christian's understand their "forgiveness" clause.) If that were accepted as true, then we would have to accept that there was no difference between "having Faith in P" and "claiming-to-have Faith in P" - you know, because if there is no difference then there is no difference. Thus, though that move might be tempting, the consequence is probably unpalatable to most. .
Eric
On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 01:20 AM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:
I've never spent much time studying modal logic. The doxastic logic version of faith that I pointed to in the Stanford Encyc of Phil article is a model logic version. Your example sentences are overflowing with modal modifiers. Personally I don't see why I wouldn't agree to the sentences in your example. But as I've said before, we seem to be mixing a number of different senses of "faith." To have faith that P (is true) is different from to have faith that event E will happen.
-- Russ Abbott
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On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 9:29 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
If it is true that,
"Russ believes that his old and broken down motorcycle "can" take him from A
to B, but he doesn't have faith that it "will""
Can it also be true that Russ doubt whether his ... motorcycle can take him
from A to B? Is it the case that, on your understanding, doubt and belief
can exist in a person at the same time with respect to the same proposition?
Nick
-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf
Of Sarbajit Roy
Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2012 9:37 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] faith
It would take the inverse form
Faith is absolute acceptance whereas Belief is limited/conditional
acceptance.
So Russ may have belief in X without having faith in it.
eg.
"Russ believes that his old and broken down motorcycle "can" take him from A
to B, but he doesn't have faith that it "will""
On 9/24/12, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote: