I usually look for some novel texts to use for my classes in addition to texts I think every grad student ought to know. Reading this book today, I decided that this brief Peircean passage is going to form the basis for discussion for the first day in my Moral Dimensions of Public Policy (Normative Analysis) seminar this Fall. It's the Prelude to Daniel Bromley's terrific new book, Sufficient Reason: Volitional Pragmatism and the Meaning of Economic Institutions (Princeton UP), which we're reading in full a bit later in the semester.
"It may be supposed that the most fundamental of human needs concerns food, water, and staying warm. This supposition would be mistaken. The most fundamental human need concerns what to believe. Believing is precedential to eating and drinking (and staying warm) for the simple reason that even the seemingly basic acts of eating and drinking require a concept about surviving and thereby experiencing the future. This attribution of value to the future is what renders survival a conceptual rather than a physical matter. Without the idea of the future, and without the attribution of value to the future, eating is not an obvious or compelling activity. Eating requires the will to live.
With the future driving actions in the present, believing becomes the predicate for all action. What should I eat? What should I drink? How might I stay warm? From this one may further suppose that believing is an individual enterprise. This supposition, too, would be mistaken.
As social beings, we tend toward - indeed, we are defined by - social beliefs. The essence of socialization is precisely the stabilization of beliefs. And stabilized beliefs define for us what is normal, natural, correct, right. It could not be otherwise.
And from this spare beginning, one can begin to make out the ground beneath the social arrangements - the institutions - that define our very being as social creatures."
26 comments:
"The most fundamental human need concerns what to believe."
Methinks this is exaggeration for effect. All life forms engage in these biological activities, nay, imperatives, including many that it can not be assumed have any sense of "past" and "future." And when I eat, I do not think, "I do this because I wish to live," but usually because of a deeply wired response to hunger (and being an American, I do not associate hunger with death). Many people eat to satisfy hunger even when they know the consequences are dire - those with serious weight problems. Is the alcoholic really thinking about what he believes he should become as he takes the next drink and the next?
I thought about that when I read it. But there are two ways in which this isn't only a question of biological imperative or always entirely rational. I'd still like to try defend the claim.
First, even given that humans have to eat/drink like other living things, we also can't get away with not planning to some degree on how we are going to eat/drink - that is, we imagine various options in the future and choose from among them. This may be entirely unconsonscious, rooted in various social practices we've inherited. Our bodies certainly let us know when we need food and water and shelter, but our bodies themselves don't deliver food and water and shelter. We have to conceptualize the source of biological satisfaction before we can act.
And, second, even then, one may choose to eat Snickers bars over granola. There's nothing necessarily rational or genuinely in one's interests about the choices made. But the fact is that the choice is made by projecting into the future. So, the alcoholic and the obese person may still have beliefs about how to acquire what they want, but that's still what is basic. The alcoholic plans to go to the bar, or to rummage through the change drawer to buy a pint or goes to the garage and drinks intifreeze, whatever. All of these actions require believing something about the future, even if the consequent action is ultimately harmful.
Helmut: I hear what you're saying. Some of the same thoughts went through my head as I wrote my previous comment. But "most fundamental human need" is a very strong statement. It needs to obliterate all other claims. It's got to be rock smashing scissors, not paper wrapping rock. I mean, what about oxygen? So I could concede belief precedes hunger on technical grounds, but not on “cosmic,” “higher order” ones.
Eating requires the will to live.
Tell my wife that.
The suckling infant isnt thinking about the future, he just believes he'll have a drink.
"Believing becomes the predicate for all action."
This is the core claim. Beliefs are chaotic until they're worked out through evolving socialization and become more or less stable. Then beliefs are habits of action.
The suckling child proves the point, actually. Without its mother caring for it, a human child dies until a certain age in which it can figure out what it needs to do to eat and drink in the absence of its mother. The infant is entirely dependent and a biological feeding unit until it develops beliefs and some means of evaluation about the future. That arises through the social and through experience.
The child will die without its mother because it has no beliefs, and therefore no habits of action, in the pragmatic sense used here.
I think it's a broader mistake - a "higher order" one too - to reduce humans to merely biological functions. They're obviously a major part of any organism. But it's pretty clear that the use of intelligence, sets of beliefs, habits, conceptions, evaluation and valuation, are all integral to being anything other than one bundled mass of reductively biological functions. The reason this move worries me is because it's often used in a looser way to say that human beings are basically "animals" - i.e., fundamentally and exclusively competitive and self-interested, driven by basic physical desires - when it's clear that humans are much more complex than this. But the "animal" characterization fits well with certain forms of economic and political thought that prove over and over to put us in positions and institutions where we're not able to act as intelligently as we could.
Teet sucking must be wired and primed in utero to judge from the learning curve, which is non-existent. All kinds of mammals will suck at a bottle. They'll suck on your finger too. Pierce is facing a much tougher case to prove than he implies,because behavior is not wholly conscious and rational. If you want to talk about our conscious rational processes, I think you need to be able to trace them and disentangle them from the others with regard to the behaviors that interest you. Pierce seemingly hasn't done that even for eating, and I think since Freud we know this disentanglement is all but impossible. Another thing that rubs me wrongly stands out in "Believing becomes the predicate for all action." Tell that to a scientist. It's absurd, if we understand "believe" narrowly and assume the claim is general. Scientific progress illustrates it's not general: More likely it applies to the morning commute and to the familiar, but not to the new. So I guess we need to understand "believe" less narrowly. How are we to understand it? Why should I care? Pierce isn't impressing me yet with this line of argument. Not that that matters so much for registered students taking the course for a grade.
This thought I had in the shower recently overlaps a little and suggests my personal bent toward such questions. This one too a bit.
This isn't Peirce here, but Bromley.
The idea of belief here seems to be the point of confusion. We tend to read too much into the notion of belief, what with fundamentalists all around us. Fundamentalist thinking or even the common view of belief suggests that there's some firm package of discernible bliefs based in an inherited collection of relatively static traditions, customs, etc. If the future has much at all to do with belief in this case, it's that present experience is supposedly organized so that we go to heaven or whatever when we die or that present experience would fall apart without the stable set of beliefs of action.
But the idea of belief Bromley is using is a Peircean one, I think. Beliefs are of the sort "if I run head first into this wall, I'll hurt myself" or "balancing the checkbook keeps me from overdrawing my account" or "one shouldn't use a cellphone while driving in traffic" etc. Belief, for Peirce, is basically a habit of action - that we're prepared to act in a certain way should the occasion arise. Philosophers have never understood belief by itself to be synonymous with knowledge or representation of truth or the product of reasonable inference (the old Platonic definition of knowledge is justified true belief). We're always fallible in our beliefs and so may act in ways that don't achieve what we think we want or get us into trouble or produce unexpected outcomes, etc. Furthermore, you don't need to disentangle belief and desire in this account. There's nothing here that separates the two - in fact, the notion of desire also makes the case about future determining present. There is an object of desire; it is not yet attained; we look for ways to attain it. If we do so simply randomly (like the infant sucking the finger), we don't have a well-formed belief about how to achieve the objects of our desires. We're foiled, this causes doubt, and we have to readjust our beliefs (fingers don't yield milk).
But the key here is that human action is predicated on belief (and, sure, desire), and that this is a function of the various options the future holds. Developed adult minds engage in imaginary inferences in order to choose among various options in the future, give them degrees of probability, and even prepare for contingencies. When we talk about eating in this context, you can see the reason for farming and markets.
Another point: I think what goes above is also crucial for an evolutionary view of human intelligence. Discarding defunct beliefs is indeed a matter of what has worked in the past, but the "what has worked" and the discarding have the future as their referent in the sense that there would be no reason to discard defunct, failed beliefs if we did not seek to have things work better, more smoothly in the future. Thus, the future guides our present beliefs and habits of action. We can certainly be wrong once again. But we're figuring it out as we go, adapting, making choices among various options, etc. If everything is about what came before, we're mere reactionary animals.
I hope that somewhere in the first minute or so of this discussion the notion of "faith" (as opposed to "belief") will be trotted out into the coliseum and torn to pieces by lions.
Oops...forgot to mention. "Belief" seems like a rather broad term. I ate a banana. It was good. The next day, I saw another long, yellow, thick-skinned thing growing in a bunch, and, believing it to also be a banana, I ate it as well. Yep, that was a banana alrighty. I now have knowledge, at least about bananas.
By the same token, after I ate banana #1, I felt better. Next day, feeling a little peaked, I ate banana #2. Felt better again. I now have knowledge about satisfying my nutritional needs, in addition to my aforementioned banana expertise, both of which seem to me to be independent of experiencing the future. (Although I'll grant the point that I might at some point engage in pre-emptive banana eating in order to avoid experiencing hunger in the future, but to me, that still looks like applied knowledge as opposed to belief.)
Oh, faith is another question. We have "faith" in lots of things (that the sun will rise, etc.). But religious faith is of another unprovable type unless it simply makes you convinced that you're happy.
I'm not ready to give up on the belief thing. Your choice of banana #1 was random. Why not tasting a rock? Your choice of banana #2 was based on the belief that, as an hypothesized inductive generalization, bananas are good, hunger-quelching, energy-providing, etc.
But remember also that we hardly ever encounter these kinds of situations. We're all already embedded in complex social situations so that we believe, say, that the things provided in the produce section at the market will be okay to eat (setting aside pesticide issues, etc.), that markets are the place to go for produce, that markets often carry bananas, etc. All these things are predictions about the future, beliefs we have about how the future will unfold (go to market, buy a banana, eat it, satisfy hunger). Yes, they're based on past experience, having previous bananas and liking them and thus claiming some basic knowledge about the relation between bananas and hunger/taste. But you nor I nor hardly anyone else ever had to wander the jungle picking up things to eat before we found the banana through trial and error. But in the first instance, the choice of a banana, minus any prior knowledge, is simply empty. We couldn't distinguish between a rock and a banana. Our next choice of the banana over the rock is based on experience, but projecting that experience into the future as predictive of satisfactory outcomes.
Try that one on, qzdboy.
Grabbing a banana hardly deserves to be called "random." Roxtar's line has been grabbing bananas for tens of millions of years. Roxtar was born inclined toward bananas and like the suckling at the finger he may have had no rational basis for any "belief" either in what would transpire or that what transpired would serve his interests (except to the extent indulging inclinations has served him in the past). BTW, since we're talking about intentions and the future, shouldn't we be talking about "expectation" rather than "belief"?
No, dammit! Again, if belief is what we're prepared to act upon, it looks towards the future and imagines various outcomes. Yes, I suppose expectation is involved here in that it's another way of saying "belief." The point is that one acts given a hypothesized future scenario, which is the very meaning of belief. To act otherwise is unintelligent.
Much as I like the idea, Roxtar is not genetically wired to like bananas. He was wired to eat in the basic biological sense of the continuation of life. When he was an infant, Roxtar didn't look around for bananas, avoiding the chocolate pudding, tacos, and others delicious options. The options didn't even exist. He only had the impulse to eat. He couldn't plan where it would come from, what he would eat, etc. Those are based in believing and judgment.
But, again, the continuation of life, survival, is not merely a function of EAT. The body has a mind, and that mind figures out how to eat. It figures it out by accumulating beliefs that are then tested for their validity by hypothesizing about the future and having outcomes arrive as expected or predicted.
Not "wired for bananas," but for qualities that bananas and other fruits share, such as color and size and heft and context. I think a naive hungry human will reach for and sample the fruit before he or she reaches for and samples the leaves, even though it means reaching past the leaves. I wouldn't be surprised if that's part of why babies swing at mobiles. Re: "Belief" if you'll accept "hypothesis" I'll go with that. It's exactly the word I had in mind when I said the behavior of scientists and the progress of science challenges use of the word "belief." Typically a scientist does an experiment based on a hypothesized outcome while considering it likely that something more boring and unpublishable will result. What does this scientist believe? Things about the experiment that enable her to infer from the results implications for the theory or theories she has designed her experiment to test.It's like rolling dice. Based on what belief does a gambler roll dice? Clearly the act is contingent on beliefs, but these are peripheral to what we focus on--how many dots are facing upward from the die after the dice come to a halt. We don't know what they will be. In that sense "belief" misled me.
I take it as a given that belief is fallible. As such, it functions as hypothesis in reference to the future. But we have better or worse hypotheses. The better ones are those we're prepared to act upon. The woprse ones are those we have to dress up in the raiments of authority.
It's a usage issue, I think, regarding "belief" and "believe." "I believe it will rain tomorrow" suggests that I would not stake my life on it, though I might wager a dollar or a hundred if I were a sport. "I believe all men are created equal" suggests I would stake my life on it. It wouldn't surprise me if philosophy made a lot of use of "belief" in a narrow technical sense that connotes no "valence" or intensity of conviction. Meanwhile in experimental science I somehow came to see "believe" as totemic: something you bring out when you have finally embraced a theory. I might say "I think we live on a brane," but I wouldn't say "I believe we live on a brane," unless I was very drunk and vying for attention at a party (instead of sulking in the kitchen as usual). So may have been predestined to confuse each other around this word.
There are different degrees to various kinds of statements about the future and there are inherently different kinds of statements. "I think it's going to rain" has a certain usual small-ish degree of certainty, but "I think the sun will rise tomorrow" has a pretty high degree of certainty. There is, however, no such thing as absolute certainty except rhetorically.
If belief is, as Peirce and Bromley have it, what we're prepared to act upon, we have an almost tautological definition. We would not be prepared to act upon a statement of belief such as "purple dinosaurs will roam the earth tomorrow." It would be difficult to find an oddsmaker to give you any odds at all on that statement.
Statements of the normative type of "all men are created equal" can have a kind of provable objectivity to them, but still find broad disagreement as abstract, valuative terms from which various other kinds of propositions are generated ("thus, we all have the same rights," etc.).
But, yes, belief in this sense is similar to how you're using it. A scientist believes a theory if the theory applied in other experiments continues to yield expected, hypothesized results. We can at some point say that the theory yields truth. Of course, people often do not believe things that are actually true or have a high degree of probability, and they often believe things that have very low degrees of probability. So, truth and belief are related, but not one and the same thing or not an action and its object. We try to put the two in harmony because there are good practical results when we do. But we also make lots of mistakes, and that is the nature of belief. I can be wrong about the store having bananas tomorrow, but the belief still drives how I end up behaving tomorrow by going to the store to buy bananas.
But... the key here in Bromley's passage and Peirce's thought is that belief is generally the satisfaction of doubt and that doubt is about what to do. When one acts in a certain way based on hypothesizing into the future about expected or probable outcomes and the action yields those results, then we can say that we're prepared to continue to believe that the action yiel;ds those outcomes. If one day the action doesn't, we're in doubt and have to inquire into where things went wrong in order to stabilize belief.
Bromley's point is that the social is a complex web of relatively stable as well as dynamic beliefs. Since we're socially embedded from birth rather than isolated biological entities, it makes sense to say that we inherit beliefs as well. When we act on those beliefs and find them to yield unepxected results - as we grow - then maybe we reevaluate beliefs in order to achieve greater probability of desired outcomes.
Religious belief, in the back of our minds here, is tricky because there is no external way to prove them right or wrong. One can say that the sun rises because it is God's will and, when observing the sun rise, say that God has worked his will. With religious beliefs, the criteria of their truthiness is internal to the belief. The belief system is thus based in authority, inherited tradition, rather than any experimental application of hypotheses and tests. That's what makes science great - experience provides resistance to hypotheses and beliefs that are wrong.
I like the notion that experience (or knowledge) informs belief, and that belief will lead us to engage in (or refrain from) certain behaviors, but will knowledge and experience trump belief? Was there once a belief (based on unpleasant experience) that pork and shellfish are Not Good To Eat? Orthodox Jews, Muslims and others have hung onto that belief, long after experience should have blown it out of the water. It seems too easy to say that beliefs are so malleable that they change daily, depending on our experiences of that day. But I don't think we can say that dietary restrictions are beliefs based on a concept of the future. Where do "traditions" fit into the matrix? Are they beliefs based on respect for the past?
(I suspect you will have a lively first session......)
If belief is, as Peirce and Bromley have it, what we're prepared to act upon, we have an almost tautological definition.
So it is impossible for you to disbelieve that when the doctor taps the rubber mallet beneath your patella your lower leg will kick without your conscious volition? That's actually a reflex arc that doesn't make it to your brain, so I would have called it a bad counter-example, except this idea of belief seems so profoundly aloof from the practicalities of cognition I thought I'd offer it just to make the point. Then there's sleep walking and what we believe while we're sleep walking and why it's different than what we believe while awake; and the things we can be hypnotized to believe, such as that we're naked in front of an audience. Apparently we're not always ourselves when we act. So whose beliefs are being acted on? What makes us think we're usually ourselves in the first place, or that we are correct in our understanding of why we do what we do? When we're wrong, do we give the conscious or the unconscious motive the belief? I guess there's insight in what Bromley offers, but I tend to resist absorbing anything with mysterious chunks in it. It might not agree with me.
Belief means that you cconsider something to be true so that you're willing to act upon the belief. In this sense, it's a habit of action. But a belief might not be true. Humans have always held beliefs they seemed indubitable but for which the object turned out to be false.
That has never stopped some beliefs from working well enough for some time. Thus, traditions are usually built out of beliefs. But they may also be constructed out of falsities. We might say this about religions or the Earth being the center of the universe or that it brings benefits to observe holidays, whatever. We could also say this about propaganda and other forms of manipulation. Many people believed Iraq had WMDs aimed at Americans. This has turned out to be false. Although there was some evidence it was false in the first place, citizens relied on government information for making their own individual judgments. Many now know their beliefs were based on false and manipulated information.
Beliefs about things like an allergy to shellfish are individualized. We know that some people are allergic; others aren't. But if you hold a belief generally, you're basically claiming that it is true for all people except in these individualized cases (and taste, etc.). The nature of the allergic reaction belief is that individuals have dofferent reactions to various things in the environment. That is true, and we would seem to be justified in believing it to be true. If we believed - based on our own allaergic reaction to shellfish - that all people are allergic to shellfish, the belief would be false. But our information on these things might be limited, as in the case also of the Earth being the center of the universe.
The point is that belief does not necessarily objectively correspond to the true. But if we hold a belief - unless we are deluded or deluding ourselves - then agent is basically saying that the given object of belief is true even if the agent is wrong. And that is best reflected in willingness to act upon the belief being true.
Humans are bundles of beliefs ranging from the mundane and unquestioned for most people (putting one foot in front of the other makes me mobile; light helps us see better than darkness) to matters of personal taste (mangosteens are the best fruit in the world; Picasso was a better painter than Matisse) to matters of value (taxes are an important part of any well-functioning society; people will go to hell if they don't worship God) to matters of scientific or pragmatic certainty (the sun will rise tomorrow; a diamond is harder than jello). So we can come up with all kinds of seeming counter-examples. but I think the same still holds almost trivially true - that beliefs are things we're prepared to act upon and thus are not merely products of tradition (and thus authority as the means of gaining beliefs), but also of hypothesizing about the future and acting in certain ways in which if we're mistaken in the actyion we take based on a given belief, then we need to adjust our beliefs.
So when I expect the the knee to jerk under the doctor's mallet, that's a belief in a certain kind of physical reaction that people have to this action. I expect it to happen. I belive that's what happens when the doctor strikes my knee with a mallet. If tomorrow I go to the doctor, my knee is struck with a mallet and nothing happens, I have to readjust that belief in some way or another - something like, well it works but this time the mallet strike wasn't done properly or since it is normal that the knee reacts in this way there must be something abnormal here or I might wonder (and investigate) whether there are people whose reflexes change over time, etc.
If I'm an absolutist about my beliefs, I won't be able to make those assessments and adjustments. But usually beliefs are no longer beliefs when they're thrown into doubt by some action or reaction that runs contrary to the expected action/reaction. That doubt prompts investigation into what went wrong with our belief, and we may have to make it a more nuanced one or even go so far as to toss it out as false.
That sounds like a nice and sensible perspective on ratiocination, which I think has to be one of the most important things we humans do.
Interesting to revisit this post from such a different mental place. This time Bromley's theoretical ambition strikes me not as absurd but reasonable, although I see him as taking a swing and a miss in his specifics. Maybe if he simply inverted from "why we eat" to "why we ever stop short of eating everything immediately in front of us" in order to save or share or work--setting traps and sowing seed insure against the threat of scarcity and shortage. I think the "Protestant Work Ethic" falls in the cognitive ballpark of what he may be talking about, or ought to be. I think in the thread above I was initially fixated on individual action in the moment--hands on the plough--whereas the belief and motivation that Bromley is about and seem more germane to policy are a less immediate or instantaneous kind--near to what I might call my plan or intent or purpose in doing something. An intent to murder doesn't imply that you are highly confident you will succeed or even likely to succeed, all things considered, yet it's real enough that we'll punish you for acting on it.
A couple other thoughts on what strikes me as Bromley's wrong turn. It's a common romantic way of speaking but misleading in this context, I think, to question people's "will to live." I think we all have a "fear of death" that guarantees a "will to live" in immediate terms. In his policy context, he should talk instead in terms of "surrender," which a person does when he or she does not find it possible to believe in any future in which the continued investment of his or her efforts does not lead, nevertheless, to a dreadful outcome.
Another way investment might be useful to integrate with belief or future vision here is that bigger investments and greater efforts stereotypically demand a more satisfying future vision. In novels at least, it takes a grand hope or deeply sought revenge, for example, to endure great hardship without surrendering. On the other hand, if you live in a country where it's not too hard or risky to keep yourself comfortable materially, it may not matter too much if you can't see yourself ever falling in love, raising kids, curing cancer--or getting revenge, which modern states deprive of us, as Jared Diamond recently wrote about in the New Yorker. If it doesn't take much of you to keep going on, you need not envision much. Migration takes faith and vision, as does "the American Dream." Both imply big personal investments and involve beliefs that seem to guarantee returns (e.g. that the rules will not change, that cheating will be prevented, that hard-work and merit trump affiliation).
Post a Comment