Belief in Kant

Philosophical Review

Volumn 116, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 323-360

  Chignell, Andrew ^a  

^a Department of Obstetrics Gynecology   (United States)

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EID: 34547266300     PISSN: 00318108     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00318108-2007-001     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. Leslie Stevenson is an important exception. I will interact with his article, "Opinion, Belief or Faith, and Knowledge," Kantian Review 7 (2003): 72-101, in what follows.
2. Quotations from Kant's work are from the Akademie Ausgabe, with the first Critique cited by the standard A/B edition pagination, and the other works by volume and page. Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Königlich-Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin [now de Gruyter], 1902-). The English translations here usually differ insubstantially from the translations in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, general editors Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992-).
3. In "Kant's Concepts of Justification," Noûs 41, no. 1 (2007): 33-63. I have drawn on that article for much of the material in this section.
4. Kant usually appears to be a fallibilist about sufficient objective grounds: that is, he usually holds that a subject can have a sufficient objective ground for an assent and the assent still turn out to be false. See his remarks at 9:72 and 24:160, for instance.
5. "If there is even one more degree of truth on the side of the ... ground than there is on the side of the opposite, then the cognition is no longer ambigua but rather probable" (24:144). See also 24:194.
6. "If the will had an immediate influence on our conviction concerning what we wish, we could constantly form for ourselves chimeras of a happy condition, and always hold them to be true, too. But the will cannot struggle against convincing proofs of truths that are contrary to its wishes and inclinations" (9:73-74).
7. Robert Hanna argues that, for Kant, certain kinds of nonconceptual content can justify assents. I'm not committing myself to that thesis here, but rather to the weaker claim that the content of perceptual, introspective, and memorial experiences - conceptual or not - can serve as objective grounds for assent. See Hanna, "Kant on Non-Conceptual Content," European Journal of Philosophy 13 Uuly 2005): 247-90, especially 263ff.
8. Kant uses "Ursache]" rather than "Grund" in the Canon passage quoted above (A820/B848). Perhaps this is supposed to signify that the subjective occasion for the assent may be a nonrational, psychological cause (wishful thinking, self-deception) instead of an appropriate rational ground (recognition that one has good objective grounds). It's also worth noting, however, that the semantic difference between these words in German is less significant than it is in English, and that Kant also sometimes uses "Grund" to refer to nonrational psychological causes (see 5:144n).
9. Suppose that S has sufficient objective grounds (his perceptual experience of his best friend Q drinking a martini) for his assent that Q is drinking a martini, but suppose also that S has a long-standing habit of placing his trust in the communications he receives from fortune cookies. Suppose, finally, that on reflection S would take his ground for that assent to be the fact that a fortune cookie he just opened informed him that his best friend is now enjoying a martini. In such a case, S's assent would be objectively sufficient according to (1) and subjectively sufficient according to (3) - and thus, if true, it would count as Knowledge. Clearly something has gone wrong: the assent is not well founded.
10. Kant does say at A651/B679 that without assuming some sort of systematicity, we can have "no reason, and without that, no coherent use of the understanding, and, lacking that, no sufficient mark of empirical truth." If we take comments like this at face value, then perhaps some sort of systematicity condition should be added to the analysis of Knowledge itself For discussion, see Ido Geiger, "Is the Assumption of a Systematic Whole of Empirical Concepts a Necessary Condition of Knowledge?" Kant-Studien 94, no. 3 (2003): 273-98.
11. Stevenson holds that objective sufficiency in an assent entails its subjective sufficiency ("Opinion, Belief or Faith, and Knowledge," 78). But he doesn't provide an argument for this, and I see no reason to agree. It seems quite possible, conceptually speaking, for there to be an assent for which a subject has sufficient objective grounds but regarding which he or she is in no position to hold that he or she has such grounds.
12. 2 to be the sufficient objective ground for assent.
13. As opposed to Persuasion, which always involves a mistake. This difference seems sufficient to undermine Stevenson's suggestion that Persuasion is a species of Opinion. See "Opinion, Belief or Faith, and Knowledge," 82.
14. See, for example: A305/B362; A309/B365; A450/B478; Critique of Practical Reason 5:144n;
15. Critique of Judgment 5:402;
16. "Orientation" 8:136-41;
17. "Real Progress" 20:287, 291.
18. It will become obvious in what follows that for Kant the term " Glaube" has a much more restricted meaning than the term "belief" does in English and a somewhat different meaning from our word "faith." I suspect that the standard practice of rendering "Glaube" as "faith" has caused many readers of English to miss the facts that (a) the object of Glaube is not always something religious (e.g., God, the afterlife) and (b) that there are different types of Glaube, some of which are quite different from the "moral faith" for which Kant is famous. In an effort to avoid confusion, then, I simply capitalize the first letter of the word 'Belief' when referring to the Kantian notion. Kant's term (like its predecessors in Aquinas, Locke, and Leibniz) is irredeemably technical, and often has little to do with the everyday notion of "believe" (glauben, croire, credere, etc.).
19. In "Kant's Concepts of Justification" I argue that for Kant there is both Belief simpliciter and also the more demanding state of "Reflective Belief." The latter has sufficient nonepistemic merits and is such that the subject is in a position, on reflection, to cite those merits. Presumably there are nonreflective and reflective versions of each of the three types of Belief discussed below. I'll leave this complication aside here for the sake of simplicity.
20. Kant was accused of sanctioning assent based on mere inclination by Wizenmann in a 1787 article in the Deutsches Museum. In the second Critique, Kant summarizes Wizenmann's criticism as follows: "he disputes the authorization to conclude from a need to the objective reality of its object and illustrates the point by the example of a man in love, who, having fooled himself into an idea of beauty that is merely a chimera of his own brain, would like to conclude that such an object really exists somewhere." Kant responds to the criticism by distinguishing between assent to a proposition on the basis of mere inclinations, and the assent based on needs of reason. "I grant that he [i.e., Wizenmann] is perfectly correct in this, in all cases where the need is based upon inclination, which cannot necessarily postulate the existence of its object even for the one affected by it, much less can it contain a requirement valid for everyone, and therefore it is a merely subjective ground (Grund) of the wish. But in the present case [i.e., the moral proof of God's existence] it is a need of reason arising from an objective determining ground of the will, namely the moral law, which necessarily binds every rational being and therefore justifies him a priori in presupposing in nature the conditions benefiting it and makes the latter inseparable from the complete practical use of reason" (5:144n).
21. Alternatively, Kant might be suggesting that the doctor's actions, together with the presumption that he is rational, imply that he has a firm Belief toward the relevant proposition, or in any case justify the ascription of such an attitude to him. For him to act so decisively in a life-or-death situation without having a firm assent about the disease would involve him in some sort of practical contradiction.
22. A similar case of a "merchant" who has to have a firm assent about how the crops will turn out this year in order to motivate his decision to "husband his supplies" now is found in the "Real Progress" essay at 20:298.
23. 2 for him or her and thus Belief rather than mere Opinion.
24. See, for example, 20:297, 305, 309; 5:160; 5:348; 5:460; 5:125-26; KrVB592. Kant defines Annehmung in the Dohna-Wundlacken lectures as "a contingent approval that has sufficient ground in regard to a certain purpose" (24:735). For contemporary accounts of the distinction between (involuntary) "belief" and (voluntary) "acceptance," see L. Jonathan Cohen, An Essay on Belief and Acceptance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992);
25. Michael Bratman, "Practical Reasoning and Acceptance in a Context," Mind 101 January 1992): 1-15;
26. William Alston, "Belief, Acceptance, and Religious Faith" in Freedom and Rationality, ed. Jeff Jordan (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 3-27.
27. For related discussion, see Philip Pettit, "Practical Belief and Philosophical Theory," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 76 (March 1998): 15-33,
28. and Edna Ullman-Margalit and Avishai Margalit, "Holding True and Holding as True," Synthese 92 (1992): 167-87. Not all concepts of acceptance are the same, of course. Robert Stalnaker develops a concept of "acceptance" that is much broader than Kant's: in fact, it seems quite close to Kant's concept of "assent," of which "acceptance" is of course just a species.
29. See chapter 5 of Inquiry (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books, 1984).
30. For passages in which Kant explicitly associates Belief with assertion, presupposition, and deliberation, see A826/B854; Jäsche 9:66-69; Critique of Practical Reason 5:146; Wien 24:851.
31. One might wonder whether S's evidence has to render p more probable than the disjunction of all the relevant alternatives to p. Most of the time, of course, the relevant alternative is just the negation, not-p. But in the doctor case, for instance, there is more than one relevant alternative: the disease could be consumption, or it could be emphysema, or it could be bronchitis, and so forth. The probability of the disjunction could be quite high, and thus the condition as I have laid it out here is intended to require only that the evidence for p be stronger than the evidence for any other single alternative. It needn't be stronger than the evidence for the disjunction of all the other alternatives. Thanks to Daniel Sutherland for a question that prompted this clarification.
32. For Kant, there are three "modes" of judging that p: "assertoric" judgment that p; "problematic" judgment that p is possible; and "apodictic" judgment that p is necessary (A70/B95).
33. Or, at least, no full-blown positive attitude toward p itself. It might be suggested that the Conviction that p is probable to some degree less than 50 percent can still be construed as a partial Conviction that p. So to have the full-blown Conviction that (q) "It is 40 percent probable that the patient has consumption" is tantamount to having a partial Conviction that (p) "The patient has consumption." My own view, undefended here, is that it is better to analyze such cases in terms of full-blown Convictions toward propositions involving objective probabilities less than .5; thus, the object of the doctor's Conviction would be q and not p. Subjective probability presumably has to be greater than .5 in order for the attitude to count as a full-blown Conviction.
34. There is a related discussion in recent literature about the apparent conflict that sometimes arises between norms of friendship and epistemic norms. See Simon Keller, "Friendship and Belief," Philosophical Papers 33 (November 2004): 329-51,
35. and Sarah Stroud, "Epistemic Partiality in Friendship," Ethics 116 (April 2006): 498-524. Both of these writers suggest that friendship norms sometimes make (what Kant calls) Pragmatic Beliefs regarding our friends rational in some broad sense, even though they are not epistemically rational.
36. Here I disagree with Stevenson, who says that Doctrinal Belief "does not seem to be a stable conception in [Kant's] thought, and as far as I know does not recur in the Critical philosophy" ("Opinion, Belief or Faith, Knowledge," 95).
37. A full account of Kant's view here would say more about why such inferences to best explanation don't comprise sufficient objective grounds and thus don't underwrite Knowledge. I hope to take up this issue elsewhere.
38. Also, Kant may have changed his views on teleology by the time he wrote the third Critique such that he is less hospitable to the notion of Theoretical Belief in intelligent design. See section 90, for instance.
39. See Mark Bedau, "Against Mentalism in Teleology," American Philosophical Quarterly 27 (January 1990): 61-70.
40. "To cognize an object, it is required that I be able to prove its possibility (whether by the testimony of experience from its actuality or a priori through reason). But I can think (denken) whatever I like, as long as I do not contradict myself, i.e., as long as my concept is a possible thought, even if I cannot give any assurance whether or not there is a corresponding object (Object) somewhere within the sum total of all possibilities" (Bxxvin). For the principle of ground-consequence, see, for example, A73/B98 and 20:292.
41. Here is another passage, this time from the Reflexionen on logic, in which Kant explicitly says that theoretical considerations can ground rational Belief: "The principle of the self-preservation of reason is the basis of rational Belief, in which assent has the same degree as Knowledge (das Fürwahrhalten eben den Grad hat als beym Wissen), but is of another kind which comes not from the cognition of grounds in the object but rather from the true needs of the subject in respect to theoretical as well as practical applications" (16:371-72; my emphasis).
42. Again, the question of why they can't count as Knowledge is at the very heart of Kant's critique of rationalism and its claims to synthetic a priori Knowledge disconnected from all possible experience. I have to set this question aside here.
43. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, David Hume über den Glauben, oder Idealismus und Realismus. Ein Gespräch (Breslau, 1787).
44. Thomas Wartenberg, "Reason and the Practice of Science," Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 228-48. See especially 237, 245.
45. I am thus suggesting here that many of the so-called "regulative principles" (especially the ones that Kant sometimes calls "maxims of pure reason") are best interpreted as assertoric Theoretical Beliefs. I don't mean to suggest that everything that Kant calls a regulative principle is best interpreted in that way, however. For some of them are explicitly said to be in the problematic rather than the assertoric mode, whereas Belief is always assertoric.
46. My sense is that the betting scenario Kant invokes in the Canon (in the case of the extraterrestrials) is supposed to act as a generic surrogate for intellectual contexts such as these. Kant is not really concerned with the rationality of assent in gambling contexts; rather, the high-stakes wager plays the role that special intellectual contexts and purposes do in other cases by putting the subject in a situation where it is appropriate for him or her to form a firm assent about a "merely theoretical" proposition. Since very few of us are ever in the position of having to bet many advantages in life on the truth or falsity of a merely theoretical proposition, we will rarely have Theoretical Beliefs that actually arise in this way.
47. For lengthy treatments of Moral Belief, see Allen W. Wood, Kant's Moral Religion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970),
48. and John Hare, The Moral Gap (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996).
49. See Locke, Conduct of the Understanding (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1996), section 8.
50. This thought is perhaps more Hobbesian than Kantian. In chapter 15 of Leviathan, Hobbes concedes that Equality cannot be proved (despite his gestures in that direction at the beginning of chapter 13) but says that it should still be accepted in order to avoid the war of all against all: "If nature therefore have made men equal, that equality is to be acknowledged: or if nature have made men unequal, yet because men that think themselves equal will not enter into conditions of peace, but upon equal terms, such equality must be admitted. And therefore for the ninth law of nature, I put this: that every man acknowledge another for his equal by nature. The breach of this precept is pride." See Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Thanks to Nicholas Sturgeon for pointing out the relevance of Hobbes here.
51. Here is a paradigmatic Hardliner comment: "Kant's basic position does not allow that any sense can be attached to 'real in themselves.' Our only concept of reality is an empirical one, so that for us 'real' has to mean 'related to our experience in such-and-such ways.' Kant has no right to make even agnostic or negative uses of 'real in itself,' which means 'real, whatever its relation may be to our experience." Jonathan Bennett, Kant's Dialectic (New York: Cambridge, 1974), 52.
52. Here are two paradigmatic Moderate comments: (1) "As far as theoretical/speculative reason is concerned, ideas are no more than thinkable possibilities beyond the reach of realizable knowledge. But practical reason shows that with such thinkable things 'the category as a mere form of thought is here not empty but obtains significance through an object which practical reason unquestionably provides though the conception of the good.' Practical reason can go where theoretical reason cannot tread." Nicholas Rescher, Kant and the Reach of Reason (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 62-63;
53. (2) "[Kant] assumes that religious belief [i.e., belief involving transcendental ideas], if it is to be justifiably held, must be based on adequate evidence. Religious belief is not self-justifying. It must receive its justification from elsewhere.... Furthermore, Kant was convinced that morality is the only area of human existence in which there is any hope of finding the adequate evidence. Adequate reasons for religious beliefs will always prove to be moral principles." Nicholas Wolterstorff, "Conundrums in Kant's Rational Religion," in Kant's Philosophy of Religion Reconsidered, ed. Philip Rosse and Michael Wreen (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 41.