That's some insightful stuff, but Karen Armstrong promised religious 'truth'. How are we to understand a meaning of 'truth' which doesn't have a truthmaker?

But can it be said that the ordinary daily struggle for survival really is about acting in bad faith?

If we accept the Theory of Evolution, and with it, the idea of the evolutionary struggle for suvival, and along with that, Social Darwinism, then doing whatever one can in order to get the upper hand isn't acting in bad faith anymore. It's a necessity and it's normal. — baker

It's a bit complicated. If the person is tricking another person for sake of power, it's not good. On the other hand, some people tend to believe almost anything, so they're getting what they seek.

But knowingly bamboozling someone feels off and can also be quite dangerous leading to cults and the like.

The whole Social Darwinism is one angle in which to interpret the theory, there are others, such as Kropotkin's idea of "mutual aid", which is at its most basic: you help me, I'll help you, we all benefit as much as possible given what we have. This type of framework, as well as evidence given to support such claims, is given by John Hands' in his magisterial Cosmosapiens.

Yes. It's takes a while for cognitive biases to develop and to become firm. The man who cut in front of me in the waiting line said, among other things, "Who do you think you are?!" I'm guessing he operated from the bias that he's not going to allow a person visibly younger than himself and a woman at that tell him "how things really are". I never stood a chance. Showing him that there were still items on the counter from the customer before me was irrelevant — baker

Damn.

Cases such as these, besides being annoying, are intriguing in that one would think a person with such an attitude would've encountered people telling him to calm down and confronting him for having such beliefs. It's just very hard to navigate these issues....

And the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 did not want to believe in the existence of atoms. — Tom Storm

Regardless of belief and/or faith, our experiences have very close approximations. — BrianW

Also,

The working hypotheses about atoms give close approximations for the reality in our closest (hence relevant) environment/proximity — BrianW

The information we have about atoms only provides working hypotheses not absolute truth (if it exists).

That's some insightful stuff, but Karen Armstrong promised religious 'truth'. How are we to understand a meaning of 'truth' which doesn't have a truthmaker? — Isaac

By having confidence in yourself, believing that you exist for a reason, that you're a worthy person, and so on. Yes, cheap self-help slogans, I know. But I'm earnest about this. It's a contextual reply to your question.
A philosophical quest for the truth, for "knowing how things really are" can sometimes turn into a self-perpetuating obsession that makes one's life miserable. It can start off out of a poor self-image, or it can result in one (and then further perpetuate it and itself).

As they say, Even though one might stand on the brink of a deep chasm of disaster, one is still obliged to dress for dinner.

So knowledge is an objectification of belief. — Pantagruel

That is written as a conclusion..."So..."; but it doesn't follow. Indeed, it's unclear what objectification
of belief might amount to.

The question is, is there a difference in the subjective experience of the believer who tends to believe in true beliefs, versus one who tends to believe in false beliefs? — Pantagruel

To believe some statement is to believe that statement to be true... Those who believe things that are not true are what we in the trade call "wrong"...

That's the trouble with talk of objectivity and of subjective experience: it doesn't help anything.

I enjoyed that post.

A bit of a shame that it is posed in religious terms, though. What Armstrong is describing is a 'world-picture" which can be understood in a more general sense.

But in addition, any belief that is sufficiently coherent will be expressible as a proposition. If it isn't cohernt, it's not so much a belief as a sentiment.

Doing a religious practice can never convince a person who doesn't already believe. — baker

I lean toward agreeing with you, but I can imagine exceptions to this rule, depending on the practice.

That is written as a conclusion..."So..."; but it doesn't follow. Indeed, it's unclear what objectification
of belief might amount to. — Banno

It is a belief which has been evaluated against intersubjectively validated constraints or condition, which is one usual way of describing objectivity. So 'objectified belief.'

But in addition, any belief that is sufficiently coherent will be expressible as a proposition — Banno

What criterion measures the coherency of a belief? If a belief realizes itself in an appropriate action then it is coherent. The fact that it can also be propositionally expressed is irrelevant to the coherency of a belief, unless it is fundamental to the enactment of that belief.

And the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 did not want to believe in the existence of atoms. — Tom Storm

While it does seem a little silly to doubt atoms, an instrumentalist view of them isn't obviously absurd.

Mach, in the introductory chapter of his book Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen (1886; Contributions to the Analysis of the Sensations), reviving Humean antimetaphysics, contended that all factual knowledge consists of a conceptual organization and elaboration of what is given in the elements—i.e., in the data of immediate experience. Very much in keeping with the spirit of Comte, he repudiated the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant. For Mach, the most objectionable feature in Kant’s philosophy was the doctrine of the Dinge an sich—i.e., of the “thing in itself”—the ultimate entities underlying phenomena, which Kant had declared to be absolutely unknowable though they must nevertheless be conceived as partial causes of human perceptions. By contrast, Hermann von Helmholtz, a wide-ranging scientist and philosopher and one of the great minds of the 19th century, held that the theoretical entities of physics are, precisely, the things-in-themselves—a view which, though generally empiricist, was thus clearly opposed to positivist doctrine. Theories and theoretical concepts, according to positivist understanding, were merely instruments of prediction. From one set of observable data, theories formed a bridge over which the investigator could pass to another set of observable data. Positivists generally maintained that theories might come and go, whereas the facts of observation and their empirical regularities constituted a firm ground from which scientific reasoning could start and to which it must always return in order to test its validity. In consequence, most positivists were reluctant to call theories true or false but preferred to consider them merely as more or less useful.
...
Mach and, along with him, Wilhelm Ostwald, the originator of physical chemistry, were the most prominent opponents of the atomic theory in physics and chemistry. Ostwald even attempted to derive the basic chemical laws of constant and multiple proportions without the help of the atomic hypothesis. To the positivist the atom, since it could not be seen, was to be considered at best a “convenient fiction” and at worst an illegitimate ad hoc hypothesis. — link

https://www.britannica.com/topic/positivism/The-critical-positivism-of-Mach-and-Avenarius


My view is something like: it really doesn't matter whether one decides to call atoms 'really real' or 'damn good models.' The practical issue involves enacting the trust of certain predictions and technologies. I like Mach's lifeworld-theory-lifeworld structure. I'd just replace 'sensation' with uncontroversial observation statements (sensations are 'mystical' entities just like atoms.)

But, she says, in other cultures, and even in earlier Christianity, religious belief was not intended as propositional knowledge, which is part of what she calls 'logos', logic and science. It's properly part of 'mythos', which is the mythical re-telling of human existence, encompassing suffering, redemption, mystery, and many other felt realities which can't be incorporated by logos.
— Wayfarer

Isn't this just a fancy way of saying that religion traffics in myths and feelings? — j0e

No. It's an existential statement. Consider the mythos behind Christianity - that the universe is the creation of an intelligent being with whom the believer has a personal relationship mediated by faith in Christ. So from the Christian perspective, belief in Jesus Christ is instrumental in realising the higher life which they say that this belief is the entry to. It is of course taken for granted ('believed') in secular culture that this is a myth, but if it were true then the implications would be considerable.

I didn't find much to comment on in the Carnap passage. I simply referred to Carnap and Ayer as exemplars of positivism.

There's a Philosophy Now OP on the Wittgenstein and the folly of logical positivism which outlines pretty clearly what logical positivism ignored about Wittgenstein:

when Wittgenstein risked his life in battle day after day, he found solace in Tolstoy’s version of the Gospels: hence his prayer ‘May God enlighten me’. By 1916 his experience of war had made him a different man to the one whom Russell had met in 1911.

The scope of the Tractatus, too, had broadened: it was no longer just about the possibility of language being logically and pictorially connected to the world. Wittgenstein had begun to feel that logic and what he strangely called ‘mysticism’ sprang from the same root. This explains the second big idea in the Tractatus – which the logical positivists ignored: the thought of there being an unutterable kind of truth that ‘makes itself manifest’. Hence the key paragraph 6.522 in the Tractatus:

“There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.”

In other words, there is a categorically different kind of truth from that which we can state in empirically or logically verifiable propositions. These different truths fall on the other side of the demarcation line of the principle of verification.

Wittgenstein’s intention in asserting this is precisely to protect matters of value from being disparaged or debunked by scientifically-minded people such as the Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle. He put his view beyond doubt in this sequence of paragraphs:

“6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value – and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is value which is of value, it must lie outside of all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental. It must lie outside the world.”

In other words, all worldly actions and events are contingent (‘accidental’), but matters of value are necessarily so, for they are ‘higher’ or too important to be accidental, and so must be outside the world of empirical propositions:

“6.42 Hence also there can be no ethical propositions. Propositions cannot express anything higher.

6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is transcendental.”

(‘Transcendental’ here is not to be confused with ‘transcendent’. ‘Transcendental’ is used here in a technical philosophical sense to mean that which is incapable of being experienced by any of the senses – and is therefore beyond the reach of science, which deals in what can be observed.)

I'm not saying there is no value in the study of propositional beliefs and knowledge, but it isn't fundamental to the basic nature of beliefs. They are performative. The primitive hunter who throws a stone has a "belief" about the trajectory of an object in a gravitational field. — Pantagruel

I would say a hunter knows how to fire an arrow, or set a trap, through experience and by imitation of those already skilled in it. What science brings to the picture is an immense amplification of such felt knowledge by representing the forces involved in symbolic form so it can be used to fire an artillery round or a rocket.

any belief that is sufficiently coherent will be expressible as a proposition. If it isn't coherent, it's not so much a belief as a sentiment. — Banno

I dispute that. This is the shortcoming of 'plain language' philosophy in a nutshell - it reduces philosophy to the language of insurance contracts or legal statutes.

For Mach, the most objectionable feature in Kant’s philosophy was the doctrine of the Dinge an sich — link

Notice that Kant's violently opposed notion of the noumenal world is objected to most vociferously by those who insist that there is nothing about an object which cannot be known. In other words, those aspiring to omniscience.

intersubjectively validated constraints or condition, — Pantagruel

Yeah - so that's a fancy way to say "the stuff we agree on".

But knowledge is not just the stuff we agree on.

If a belief realizes itself in an appropriate action then it is coherent. — Pantagruel

...not if those acts are inconsistent - hence the need to add "appropriate".

any belief that is sufficiently coherent will be expressible as a proposition. If it isn't coherent, it's not so much a belief as a sentiment.
— Banno

I dispute that. This is the shortcoming of 'plain language' philosophy in a nutshell - it reduces philosophy to the language of insurance contracts or legal statutes. — Wayfarer

An objection that amounts to nothing.

I dispute that. This is the shortcoming of 'plain language' philosophy in a nutshell - it reduces philosophy to the language of insurance contracts or legal statutes. — Wayfarer

Digression: That does make me laugh and I have sometimes said similar things. But the way it's presented is also highly tendentious, using the word 'reduces' and making a comparison to unsexy legalese is a rhetorical stunt. A good one. And not necessarily wrong. But it does suggest a strong bias and the assumption that truth can only be captured in more elaborately decorative and 'received' wording.

It often seems to me, that belief or disbelief in anything transcendental (by scientific notions, say) partly boils down to a person's aesthetic preferences. Often I hear in the words used and sentiments expressed, descriptions that fundamentally come down to what appeals as a more beautiful or tasteful explanation. Sometimes these debates remind me of heated art discussions I used to overhear about the merits of figurative versus abstract art.

Hence, a clear distinction might be made between a belief and a sentiment, using "belief" for what may be stated and "sentiment" for what is not so clear.

No. It's an existential statement. Consider the mythos behind Christianity - that the universe is the creation of an intelligent being with whom the believer has a personal relationship mediated by faith in Christ. So from the Christian perspective, belief in Jesus Christ is instrumental in realising the higher life which they say that this belief is the entry to. — Wayfarer

To begin to truly believe (ignoring the ambiguity for a moment) in a benevolent creator would indeed seem to be an entry into a different kind of life. It would feel good, very good even. Songs about the joy of it would make a special kind of 'sense' within the community of believers.

I think we both agree that a such a belief is typically not metaphorical.

There's a Philosophy Now OP on the Wittgenstein and the folly of logical positivism which outlines pretty clearly what logical positivism ignored about Wittgenstein: — Wayfarer

Sure. I don't see the relevance unless I'm supposed to go easy on spiritual claims just because Wittgenstein was moved by certain spiritual writers. FWIW, I think positivism was/is interesting but is hardly the last word (I don't expect the arrival of the last word.)

Notice that Kant's violently opposed notion of the noumenal world is objected to most vociferously by those who insist that there is nothing about an object which cannot be known. In other words, those aspiring to omniscience. — Wayfarer

You make a good point. Hegel was explicitly annoyed by Kantian skepticism as a cowardly retreat from the manifest destiny of philosophy. But I think humans generally want a stable picture of the world. Both 'spiritual ' and 'anti-spiritual' people are biased. IMO, everyone is biased. No one likes big changes in their worldview, with the possible exception of joyful visions (if I was visited by God and he filled my heart with joy and belief in the goodness of all things...)

Witti also concluded that there was nothing to be said about such mysteries.

They are not so much stated beliefs as sentiments; to be seen in music and art, not dissected by philosophers.

That excerpt was relevant to the discussion of the attitude of positivism to matters of belief, which is why I mentioned positivism in the first place.

using the word 'reduces' and making a comparison to unsexy legalese is a rhetorical stunt. — Tom Storm

:point:

To be fair, half of philosophy perhaps is rhetorical stunts.

To be fair, half of philosophy perhaps is rhetorical stunts. — j0e

Did I say it wasn't? :smile:

That sounds right, and I haven't seen much philosophy by W on the subject. One can find a few quotes like:

I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)

A hero looks death in the face, real death, not just the image of death. Behaving honourably in a crisis doesn't mean being able to act the part of a hero well, as in the theatre, it means being able to look death itself in the eye.

For an actor may play lots of different roles, but at the end of it all he himself, the human being, is the one who has to die.
— W

There are also spiritual-adjacent quotes in the TLP.

But my response is still (politely, I hope): so what? Why should Wittgenstein be an authority on religion just because he was a great philosopher of language?

You did not. :up:

Why should Wittgenstein be an authority on religion just because he was a great philosopher of language? — j0e

As can bee seen in various other threads hereabouts, he had much to say about belief. Hence his relevance.

According to the positivists, like Carnap and Ayer, they comprise words that might be gramatically coherent but carry no actual meaning as they don't refer to anything observable or testable. — Wayfarer

I was being pedantic or uptight, but just for clarity: the metaphysicians are referring to observable things like chairs but debating whether they are 'made of' or mind or matter. So I read Carnap as criticizing differences that make no difference. Very close to James' pragmatism. Content is identified with practical content, a step that can of course be criticized.

As can bee seen in various other threads hereabouts, he had much to say about belief. Hence his relevance. — Banno

OK, well I grant his relevance. I thought Wayf was using him rhetorically ('well, W was religious.' ), and that's what I was reacting to. I think we both agree that god-talk usually takes itself for propositional knowledge. I'm aware of something like 'cultural religion' where it's taken as myth and ritual. But that's somethng else (sentiment, as you say.)

By having confidence in yourself, believing that you exist for a reason, that you're a worthy person, and so on. Yes, cheap self-help slogans, I know. But I'm earnest about this. It's a contextual reply to your question.
A philosophical quest for the truth, for "knowing how things really are" can sometimes turn into a self-perpetuating obsession that makes one's life miserable. It can start off out of a poor self-image, or it can result in one (and then further perpetuate it and itself). — baker

I've no idea how this addresses what I said. Perhaps you could expand.

I completely agree that for some practices I won't know if they work unless I try them. But that's not an argument that they do in fact work once you try them. It's not, as clearly claimed, an argument for the 'truth' of religious practice.

For that, plenty of people have 'tried them' and found nothing at all, or even become worse people. So unless you just beg the question (they obviously weren't doing it right, because it definitely works!), the evidence we have thus far seems to be that it either fails as a exercise in practical knowledge, or the teachers don't actually know what it is they're teaching - ie the success it appears to have in the few, is not, in fact, the result of the practice they think it is. — Isaac

I see your point, but it's being made from a 'third-party' perspective. In other words, you're making a judgement about what you think are the deficiencies of 'religious practices', based on your knowledge or belief about the shortcomings of other people's endeavours to practice them.

How are we to understand a meaning of 'truth' which doesn't have a truthmaker? — Isaac

I'm not familiar with the expression 'truthmaker'.

I think Armstrong's point is that by immersion in the practice, a different perspective emerges. But it might be difficult or impossible to convey that change in perspective apart from the practice.

ZEN STUDENT: 'I've learned through the practice of Zazen that there's an insight that can't be conveyed in words.'

QUESTIONER: 'Oh yes. And what's that?'

By having confidence in yourself, believing that you exist for a reason, that you're a worthy person, and so on. Yes, cheap self-help slogans, I know. But I'm earnest about this. — baker

I think you are right that religion offers some people these things. Calling this 'truth' still seems to stretch the word too much. Many an atheist would probably agree that religion makes people feel good about themselves (which is not to ignore that atheism makes people feel good about themselves too.)

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society.
...
Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.
— Marx

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism_and_religion#:~:text=19th%2Dcentury%20German%20philosopher%20Karl,economic%20conditions%20and%20their%20alienation.

I don't agree with Marx entirely, and personally I think humans can get just as entangled with conspiracy theory sans the supernatural for the same 'opium.' Perhaps even Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals, etc. I quote this to make the point that 'mythos and ritual that makes us feel good (but only if one really believes and practices a certain lifestyle)' is not so far from what an atheist might say.

A philosophical quest for the truth, for "knowing how things really are" can sometimes turn into a self-perpetuating obsession that makes one's life miserable. It can start off out of a poor self-image, or it can result in one (and then further perpetuate it and itself). — baker

I agree that the Quest can take a sickly form (certain god-and-antinatalism loops come to mind, but also the less offensive stuff Wittgenstein invented therapy for.)

I also like the focus on self-image. I think that's the cornerstone. Which statue am I trying to become?