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Reading group: Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief” and James’s “The Will to Believe” side by side

Dana Whitfield Fellow
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Rationality & probabilityAmericanModern EuropeanPragmatismBlaise PascalW. K. Clifford#ethics-of-belief#evidentialism#reading-group#will-to-believe
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These two essays are a classic pairing and they are both short, so I'd like to read them together over four weeks. The question they share is the one at the center of debates about rationality: should you believe only what the evidence supports, or are there cases where it is rational, even right, to believe beyond the evidence?

Texts. W. K. Clifford, "The Ethics of Belief" (1877). William James, "The Will to Believe" (1896), first given as an address to philosophy clubs at Yale and Brown. Both are in the public domain and widely anthologized.

Plan.

  • Week 1. Clifford, part one, "The Duty of Inquiry": the shipowner who sends out an unseaworthy ship, sincerely believing it safe. Clifford's verdict on him, and the famous principle that ends the section.
  • Week 2. Clifford's parts on the weight of authority and the limits of inference. When is believing on testimony permitted?
  • Week 3. James's opening sections: live, forced and momentous options, and his comments on Pascal's wager.
  • Week 4. James's argument that in some cases faith in a fact can help create the fact, and his social examples.

I'll be reading James with organizing in mind. Bring whatever you bring.

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6 replies

  1. Aoife Kilbride

    Fellow

    Week 1. The shipowner case is brilliant and also, for a believer, uncomfortable. Clifford says the shipowner is guilty even if the ship happens to arrive safely, because he had no right to believe on such evidence. Then he generalizes: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

    I agree about the shipowner. But the generalization would make me guilty for my faith, and also, I suspect, would make most people guilty for most of what they believe about history or medicine. I'll wait for week 2 to see how he handles authority.

    Helpful · 2
    1. Arvind Poojary

      Fellow

      Week 1, from Clifford's corner. I spend weekends exposing miracle tricks in villages, and I think Clifford's principle is right precisely because of the shipowner's sincerity. The man selling holy ash is often sincere too. Sincerity is not a defence when other people pay for your belief. Clifford's insight is that belief is never private: we pass it on, and others build on it.

      Aoife, I don't think Clifford would call you guilty for trusting a historian. Week 2 shows he allows belief on authority when we have reason to think the authority knows. Faith is the hard case, and he means it to be.

      Helpful · 3
  2. Dana Whitfield

    Fellow

    Week 3. James's frame is the key to the whole essay. An option is live if both possibilities are real candidates for you; forced if you can't avoid choosing (refusing to choose is itself a choice); momentous if it is unique, high-stakes and irreversible. His claim is narrow: only when an option is genuine in all three ways, and the evidence cannot decide it, may our passional nature decide.

    He is quite dismissive of Pascal's wager, by the way. He thinks belief adopted by calculation would be hollow, and that the wager only has force for someone for whom faith is already a live option. People who cite James as "believe whatever helps" have not read this part.

  3. Bilal Rashid

    Fellow

    Week 3, from a man of faith. I am grateful to James and also a little wary. He defends the right to believe, but he grounds it in the believer's passional nature, as if faith were a temperament. In my tradition faith includes the claim that it is knowledge of a kind, not a permissible wager made in the dark. James protects the believer by making faith less than the believer thinks it is.

    Helpful · 1
  4. Hugo Marchetti

    Fellow

    Week 4. I am a union delegate at the port, and James's train example could have been written about my work. A whole train of passengers can be robbed by a few bandits, he says, simply because each passenger, though brave, fears that if he resists, nobody else will. If each believed the others would stand with him, the robbery would fail.

    That is solidarity exactly. The fact, "we will hold together", only becomes true if enough of us believe it first. Clifford's principle would forbid that belief until the evidence was in. But the evidence only comes in after the belief. James is right that some facts need faith before they exist.

    Helpful · 2
  5. Tsion Bekele

    Fellow

    Week 4. Patients who insist they will recover against the odds sometimes cite James, so I read this closely. Their confidence may be his case: a belief that is partly self-fulfilling. But Hugo's example shows the limit. The train passengers' faith is in each other, and each one's belief changes what the others will do. A patient's belief doesn't change the tumour, or not much. James's argument is strongest where the fact is social.

    Helpful · 3