Daniel Everett entered Brazil as a Christian missionary. Then he encountered the Piraha people, a community that is indigenous to Brazil, and lived among them for a while. And as a result of encountering the Piraha, he lost his faith.
The Piraha are interesting for a great many reasons, foremost among them being that their culture is based on immediate experience. Everett describes them as “the ultimate empiricists”, because they have no respect for explanations of remote facts. For example, when Everett attempted to convey stories of Jesus and the sermon on the mount, his efforts were laughed off as credulous or delusional, since Everett had not witnessed the sermon firsthand.
This is just to say that, for all intents and purposes, the Piraha endorse a kind of evidentialism. Evidentialism is the idea that we have a responsibility to only believe things in proportion to the evidence. Compare that to the missionary Everett, who was a fideist — meaning, he believed certain religious claims were true on the basis of choice, commitment, and faith.
In a sense, the difference between the missionary Everett and the Piraha echoes an argument in epistemology. W.K. Clifford, a sabre-rattling epistemologist from yesteryear, argued that it is a sin against humankind to believe something on insufficient evidence: to be deluded is to be irrational, and worse. Pragmatist philosophers like William James bemoaned Clifford’s hellfire, and defended the idea that an ethical belief can be supported by force of will. Contemporary evidentialists like Richard Feldman and Earl Conee have goals that are slightly more modest than those Clifford had. Feldman and Conee argue that it is epistemically mistaken to believe out of proportion to the evidence.
I am an evidentialist, in the sense that I think evidentialism is platitudinous – it is surely correct to say that all objective knowers ought to apportion their beliefs to the evidence. But I also think that evidentialism is relatively trivial – evidence and volition are not mutually exclusive. Following the constructionism of John Searle, it turns out that sometimes you can believe in a proposition, and — bizarrely – trust counts as strong evidence in favor of the truth of the belief.
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A pastor stands before his assembled flock at mass. The pastor has noticed that over the past few weeks donations in the collection plate have been diminishing. For a brief moment, he suspects there may be a thief around. On this particular day, the pastor has privately observed that a particular teenage boy has snatched some donations from the plate as it makes its rounds. A calm immediately passes over the pastor’s mind. For though the pastor knows that the boy is prone to mischief, the pastor also knows that they are otherwise impressionable and pious. Now suppose the pastor, in his sermon, mentions the mystery of the diminishing funds. In the midst of his speech, he sincerely endorses this proposition:
- I know that no-one who is part of this congregation is a thief in their heart.
The pastor says this with all appropriate showmanship – credulous intonations, sweeping gestures – in order to convey his belief that the congregation is made up of virtuous souls. But since the pastor has observed the boy taking the money, we should say that the pastor has made an utterance that is contrary to the external evidence, and is unjustified.
Let (t-1) be the belief in (1) prior to the utterance, and let (t-2) be the belief in (1) after the utterance.
Insofar as we think that (1) is the expression of the pastor’s own sincere beliefs, we might think that the utterance is faulty. Strictly speaking, his prior belief (t-1) is a delusion, since it is a belief that is directly contrary to the external evidence.
Yet the effect of the pastor’s words and bearing is as if it had conveyed a secret message to the boy: I know what you have done, and now you know that I know. As a result of the pastor’s utterance, the boy quietly defers to the pastor. Ashamed at his petty crime, the boy resolves to never steal again, and immediately returns the funds to the plate.
What is remarkable about this case is that simply by uttering (1), the pastor has at the very same moment (with the cooperation of the intended audience) brought about the state of affairs described by (1). The pastor’s prior delusion (t-1) suddenly transformed into an objective fact of the matter after it had been expressed (t-2). The utterance (1) is very much like what John Searle called a status function declaration. The assertion is true because the pastor represented it as true, and it was taken as true by the boy.
In short, the pastor made up the facts — and he got away with it. And “getting away with it” for the right sorts of reasons is all that is required to make the claim true.
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In the above example, trust is the thing that makes (1) true. But of course, this is not a feature of all — or even most — evidential claims. No matter how much you trust a homeopath, trust alone will not make their snake oil work.
I think there is quite a lot to recommend the idea that trust can make some claims true. For one thing, it makes sense of the tenaciousness of systematic illusions — the illusions involved in organized religion, for instance — in such a way that we are capable of attributing rationality to them at some level. (Since the presumption of rationality is essential to social scientific explanations, this is only bad news for the cynic.) For another thing, it gives an account of how effective threats to those institutions pose a rational existential crisis in those who buy into them. As the Catholic Church has learned in Ireland, breaches of trust can be both morally outrageous and world-breaking.
(And to their credit, some ancient institutions will occasionally recognize the theoretical limits of their supposed magesteria. For instance, according to Catholic dogma, even the Catholic Pope’s infallibility is limited to its use ex cathedra. So if Mr. Ratzinger were to declare that the Earth has sixteen moons, then he would not be speaking from the chair of Peter, and hence not saying something true.)
So there’s no need to worry that recognizing trust as a truth-maker will lead to an epistemic disaster, and there are some good reasons to think that it makes sense of how the social world works. But even so, this is still a disturbing line of argument. For any free-thinking person who is not dead from the neck down, the idea that authorities can just make facts up from out of nowhere is a complete and utter scandal. And the above argument confounds the initial motivation for evidentialism, which is to reject the idea that wishful thinking can be conducive to rationality.
So the disturbed evidentialist might explain the pastor’s story by saying that at any particular moment in time, trust is never a part of the evidence. The idea is that the prior belief (t-1) and the subsequent belief (t-2) can only be judged on their own terms, and not compared to one another. As such, it would turn out that (t-1) is just the pastor’s delusion, and (t-2) is made true by the decision of the boy — in both cases, trust is not the truth-maker. In other words, the account would have to be synchronic (at one time), not diachronic (across time). This is consistent with what Feldman suggests in his essay “The Ethics of Belief”, when he claims that evidentialism is best seen as a synchronic theory of rationality, not a diachronic one.
If we don’t believe that trust counts as evidence at the level of the diachronic, then we’d have to say that trust is (at worst) a merely sociological event that is of no philosophical interest, and (at best) involves a non-epistemic sense of justification (e.g., as Feldman suggests, a prudential one).
And while I agree that trust is a prudential notion about how we ought to pursue our personal projects as human beings, it seems that trust is also a conception of how we ought to conduct ourselves as responsible knowers. Trust is the causal link between (t-1) and (t-2) that made the boy acquiesce; furthermore, trust is the boy’s evidence for accepting the testimony of the pastor as true, and not just as the pastor’s interesting opinion; and trust is the reason why (1) really is true, since (1) is only true through deference, and there cannot be any genuine deference without trust. And, finally, if either the pastor or the boy had lacked trust, but all other events had remained the same, then we would have grounds to think that the pastor simply was not warranted in asserting (1).
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In antiquity, the word “truth” (derived from “troth”) meant faithfulness, good faith, or loyalty. I’ve suggested here that there is one special context in which truth has retained its initial connotations.
I only worry that the Piraha would not approve.
—–
(Corrected Feb 20: it’s the “chair of Peter”, not the “chair of David”. Apologies.)
If the pastor had sincerely held, prior to uttering (1) that (a) “no-one who is part of this congregation is a thief” he would be deluded. But he didn’t, if he believed in a proposition it was that (b) “no-one who is part of this congregation is a thief in their heart”. If we are going to talk about the truth or falsity of the proposition it seems the caveat “in their heart” would have to be unpacked because something does seem to hang on it. Certainly it seems you could plausibly interpret proposition (b) in such a way that it was true (though only warranted by trust) before the uttering of (1).
“the effect of the pastor’s words and bearing is as if it had conveyed a secret message”
Indeed, thought of as an illocutionary speech act (1) does indeed seem as if it were an indirect directive that succeeded.
You’re quite right — there is a lot to be unpacked in that phrase.
Suppose that the phrase “x in their heart” means that people are reliably disposed to act in a thief-like way. That’s a behaviorist style of reading of the phrase. If we think that the best evidence for the future is evidence of the present or the past, then (t-1) would be an unwarranted belief, but not a delusion. Then a lot of the magic will have been lost, and also we’ll have lost most of the language of intentions.
Suppose instead that the phrase “x in their heart” means that people intend to act in a thief-like way. If we think that the best way of understanding the intentions in other minds is by understanding their present or the past behavior as rational acts, then (t-1) would be a delusion. The intention of the boy flipped between (t-1) and (t-2) –he was psyched out.
It might be thought of as a perlocutionary speech act, so to speak — for the indirect directive is merely apparent. That’s why it is only “as if” the pastor’s words and bearing conveyed a directive.
A perlocutionary speech act – yes that is a better level of description in your scenario thank you.
I think you are quite right to say that there is “lot to recommend the idea that trust can make some claims true”. The trainer says to the boxer: “you will beat your opponent”, the doctor says (of a placebo) to his patient “this will make you feel better”. Without the trust the hearer places in the speaker, the utterances themselves would be insufficient to make the propositions they express true. But, assuming the trainer is warranted to trust in the trust the boxer has in her, is she deluded about anything prior to the utterance?
Possibly: if the boxer overestimates the probability of successfully beating her opponent it seems possible, in a certain sense, that her delusion/faith can be a truth maker. Perhaps the trainer overestimates the boxer’s chances too? The trainer’s trusted utterances cause the boxer to do the same and thus a chain of unwarranted beliefs ends up through trust – or faith – making the proposition “you will beat your opponent” true because it is believed in.
Of course, despite – or because – of the unwarranted beliefs, the boxer could end up getting beaten to a rather bloody pulp…
Interesting post, thank you.
Good point. I think there are a few different problems in saying that (t-1) is a delusion. The first problem is that the belief is not strictly about the indirect speech act — it’s about (1), the fact of the matter. It’s as if trust smuggles in truth by the back-door.
And the second problem is that interlocutors must have a presumption of
autonomyagency when they communicate. As the philosopher Gloria Origgi put it in Episteme (2004), there’s no such thing as blind trust — or, at least, we can’t suppose that people have this reflex to automatically accept what others say. And sure enough, it could have been otherwise — the boy could’ve thumbed his nose at the pastor.Perhaps the fact that the boy could have felt otherwise shows that the pastor’s trust was not warranted. But I’m not sure about that. Sometimes you justifiably trust people and they let you down. That’s the sting of betrayal.
The boxer’s case is of a similar sort, though the effects are less immediate, which makes it less powerful. To use another sports example, Tug McGraw’s slogan for the Mets — “Ya Gotta Believe!” — which drove them into the 1973 World Series. Well, we think that there’s more than just trust that makes it so — there’s also athletic skill, coordination, etc. Trust is still a crucial mechanism, but there are more intermediate steps between McGraw’s declaration and the outcome.
Ben, thank you for the food for thought…
“The fact that the boy could have felt otherwise” does not make the pastor’s trust unwarranted, in fact it seems necessary for it to be a case of trust. If the pastor knew the boy could do no other, it seems there would be no space for trust – or faith if you like – to come into the picture at his end.
“Sometimes you justifiably trust people and they let you down.” Certainly we do trust people, and sometimes they let us down. What would ‘justify’ trust though? Indeed what is Trust? If the pastor was ‘betting’ on the boy’s fear of punishment that doesn’t seem like a case of ‘trust’. And presumably the pastor’s ‘trust’ is not based on the boy’s past reliability – at least not in a simple way. Indeed given that we can trust strangers, past reliability of the ‘trusted’ individual does not seem necessary for trust generally. Perhaps the pastor would describe his trust as ‘a leap of faith’? But others might feel an account of Trust and what, if anything, ‘justifies’ it seems wanting.
Absolutely right that those are live issues, and I’m not sure I have satisfying or considered opinions about the lot of them. Much of the character and constitution of trust is not entirely clear to me. And the literature on trust is fairly scattershot (though there is of course a whole related literature that is focused on norms of assertion and testimony and which follows some kind of coherent thread).
So here’s one thing I can say something about. You suggest that trust is a cognate of faith, and hence there’s a sense in which justification is just not the sort of thing we attach to trust.
When people talk about faith, they might mean either one of two things: either they’re talking about belief without evidence, or they’re talking about belief with relative confidence. Religious examples are helpful to illustrate the difference. For instance, in debate and in print Richard Dawkins accuses religious folks of endorsing faith in the first sense, while John Lennox uses the term “faith” in the second sense. You seem to be likening trust to faith in the first sense. (Call them faith-1 and faith-2.)
But I’m not sure trust and faith-1 are very close cognates at all. After all, we have words like “trustworthy” which seem to indicate that there are standards by which we ought to apportion trust. But there are no words in common use — at least, none that come to mind at the moment — that would allow us to have similar justificatory expectations for faith. (Faithable? Devotable? Faithworthy?)
(Of course, there are complex phrases, like “worthy of our faith”, but they tend to be uttered either by non-believers or by believers who are only compelled by facts about the brute authority of the deity.)
So trust must be justifiable, in *some* sense. The question is then — what kind of justification is that? How does trust relate to justification?
In order to answer that, you need to clarify what trust *is*. And there are maybe a few different ways you can do that. You could claim that trust simply is a prudential concept. (I don’t find this claim attractive.) Or you could claim that trust is, at base, a pragmatic-linguistic concept which can support various construals. For instance, Origgi (mentioned above) suggests that trust is a matter of common ground, or a shared cognitive environment (echoing Sperber and Wilson). Speaking for myself, for a long while I have been running with this rough idea that trust has a bifurcated structure: there is an instrumental sense of trust (trusting in people for particular purposes and in particular contexts) and an expressive sense of trust (trusting in people categorically). Etc.
But the details may not matter. The one thing that I’m committed to is the idea that trust is in some sense epistemic, and that you can justify trust on roughly evidential grounds. (Not necessarily reliabilist grounds — just evidential.)
Ben,
I should make clear that my suggestion is that an account of Trust is wanting generally – as you seem to acknowledge – rather than wanting from your thesis as such. These were more ponderings prompted by your post than objections to its argument.
‘Trust’ and ‘faith’ are cognates in the non-technical sense, they are related terms and in some contexts it seems they are pretty much interchangeable or, at least, that propositions using one term could be rephrased using the other without loss (or addition) of meaning. You are quite right to point out that this does not hold across the board though. And the moral of the story – that thinking clearly about Trust is not aided by bringing ‘faith’ and all its religious denotations and connotations into the equation – is learnt.
I was not asserting that justification is not the sort of thing we attach to trust, but yes I was questioning whether it is. Given the apparent difficulty in pinning down what justifies trust, some might be drawn to the idea that trust is an irreducible feeling about a person. Your mention of the quality of being ‘trustworthy’ might reasonably cast some doubt on that particular retreat. Though I suppose somebody committed to an ‘irreducible’ view of Trust could claim you are not using ‘trust’ in the sense they are interested in, I think you do flag up something important. Though faith and trust both seem to be things that can be misplaced, it does seem trust is distinct in that it is something that can be found with epistemic warrant (if not proof).
Thank you again for your thoughts.
“Often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true” (William James).
Thanks for the clarification and the quote. Quite right!
However we cash out the details about how trust is justified, reducible, or irreducible, I think I’ve hung the epistemic import of trust all on one idea: that there cannot be any genuine deference without trust. Since deference is a notion that is capable of supporting epistemic claims, then we have some reason to expect that trust should also be epistemic in some relevant way.
But yeah — nothing I’ve said is decisive. Certainly something worth further study!
Ben,
I liked your story of the pastor. Is it your own or did you make it up? Anyway I would take a different and more pastoral view of the case. In effect the priest is saying to the boy that his actions were the result of impulse and that he was now at the point of becoming a commited thief. He could turn back. The boy’s shame at being presented with this image of himself, a quasi Sartrean experience, is the impetus that allows him to step back from his being a thief, back from alienation.
The rest of your disquisition on trust roved across the territories of the empirical and the theological without attempting to distinguish clearly between them. It seemed to me that you were sabotaging your own hunt drawing red herrings and aniseed bags across the trail.
By the way, it’s the chair of Peter and the House of David. This did not affect my trust of your judgment on religious matters.
It’s definitely a made-up story! I’m not religious, and in some respects a pretty severe critic of organized religion. And while I’m interested in what people believe, I would never claim to have robust knowledge of religious doctrine. (Apologies and thanks about the “chair of David” point. I’ll correct it!)
I think the pastor example is useful, to help situate the debate over speech acts and evidence in a wider debate about religion, spheres of knowledge, magesteria, and so on.
But in principle I could have used non-religious examples in order to make the same point. Essentially, the point is preserved for any case where a person is (to use the colloquial phrase) “psyched out” — i.e., a complete (typically spontaneous) inversion of intentions and beliefs.
To use a personal example, I was once in conversation with an assistant professor and we were discussing the phenomenon of “impostor syndrome” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome) which is rife within academia. I said, sincerely, that I didn’t feel anything like “impostor syndrome”. (My reasoning was because I knew for a fact that there really were impostors in power and that they had self-confidence, so I might as well too). The interlocutor coolly replied, without a beat: “I don’t believe you.” Hours later, I had a panic attack, and began to doubt myself in maudlin ways: “oh, I’m a fraud, a fool, a horrible monster and I pray for death”, etc. That’s what it means to be psyched out, and an implicit trust in the statement and the speaker is what made it true.
In your revised example, it seems as though trust is not the truth-maker. Instead, it is a fully autonomous choice on behalf of the boy — the boy looks at his life-prospects and says, “I don’t want this to be me”. That’s not deference, it’s coincidence. That’s why it might seem like I’m drawing red herrings… but actually I’m not, I don’t think, because I think your posited mechanism is a different sort of case that involves a different style of deliberation on behalf of the boy.
Cher Ben,
Once your text is out there it is free. Vive le texte libre! What you meant is a rumour. You must stand back and let it be.
The vedantins (Advaita) have 6 means of knowledge (pramanas) which are valid. One of them is sabda pramana which is equivalent to the word of a reliable source. This can range from the guru to the quantum physicist. The one assurance is private and the other is public. One might well take the view that there is a range and that there is no strict congruence between the publically verifiable and the purely inward assured conviction. Your spectrum of trust is not another’s.
Guru: There’s an afterlife
Chela: Can I have that in writing?
Fascinating discussion. I am not sure what to say about it – most of the points seem to have been covered somehow…
The case is much like Wm James example of the passenger who takes on the highwayman, trusting his fellows to back him up. (Tahrir Square, anyone?) It has always seemed to me that James’ conclusion is a bit forced – as quoted above, that “our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true” – because it is really our action that causes the result, and the belief beforehand is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the action – and this applies to the pastor’s case as well. What we have here may be nothing more than the trivial truth that words and actions can make changes in the world, and beliefs are simply possible elements in the chain of causation. But I am not a trained philosopher and don’t feel competent to put this feeling of mine into proper form.
But I do want to say something, so I will simply leave you with a joke I once heard: a pastor’s umbrella has gone missing. He is convinced that one of his parishioners has stolen it, so he preaches a sermon on the Ten Commandments, intending that when he gets to “Thou shalt not steal” he will thoroughly lambaste the thief and shame him into repentance. But while he is still on the previous commandment he remembers where he left the umbrella.
If you don’t get the joke, look up the Commandments.
Michael, there are surely different sources of opinion, but that is not to say that these are sources of knowledge. In most cases, trust is simply not sufficient for justified true belief. That’s why we have words like “trustworthy”, which (usually) imply that trust alone is not enough.
Allogenes, thanks for the reference. It’s true that some worldly interventions are trivial and uninteresting. So, for instance:
(2) I am writing a sentence right now.
This was a sentence that was made true just by writing it. But it’s a trivial intervention in the world, made true just by doing it.
There’s no doubt, I think, that (2) differs from the highwayman and pastor cases. (2) is trivial in a way that they are not — the act of writing a sentence is sufficient to bring about justified belief in the action, and the belief in the act coincides with the act itself. There’s no air of hocus-pocus, no plausible attribution of a prior delusion. But this is very different from (1), where there’s a gap from one moment to the next.
Benjamin,
Thank you for the reply! It helps me sort out my thinking on the subject, or at least I think it’se better sorted…
What I don’t get is this. It seems to me that in both James’ case and yours, we have a sequence consisting of
a) the entertainment of a proposition in the mind of an agent,
b) an action by the agent somehow expressing or in accordance with the proposition,
c) a result which makes the proposition “true,” which it hadn’t been before or wouldn’t have been otherwise.
What I suggest is that the agent’s belief in the proposition is irrelevant except to the extent that it motivates the action, which could have been undertaken without the belief (though it would have been less likely). The pastor’s trick would have worked just as well, if he had reasoned simply “Well, there’s a 1% chance that this will get the money back without an embarrassing confrontation; but there’s nothing to lose in trying, so why not go for it.” Similarly, James’ hero may have been willing to die under the circumstances, may indeed have wanted to because of other things going wrong in his life; or, he may have had the delusion that his speed and strength alone would have enabled him to take on the robbers unscathed. As you yourself indicate, the same observable events could have occurred with different mental states. So where’s the hocus-pocus, if the “prior delusion” has no necessary causative force?
I am of course emboldened to write by my belief in proposition (3), “Benjamin S. Nelson is a good-hearted philosopher who is never bothered by muddled questions from the untrained and always does his best to respond to them in an informed and interesting manner…”
Ben,
There are perhaps positions which are justified but not justifiable in any sense that you would accept. For instance I may state that ‘if Hitler had invaded after Dunkirk then Britain would have been defeated and occupied’. It’s an interesting proposition at least involving elements of, knowledge in your sense, opinion and speculation. It adds to the totality of rational discourse if that’s not a portentous way of putting it. Restricting our ‘trust’ to what could be demonstrated is unduly restrictive and merely verificationism by another name. Are there art or book critics that you trust? Is this not a private commitment?
Allogenes, good points. I think I should make clear that trust is a “truth-maker” in the sense that it can be sufficient to bring about the truth. It’s not necessary to bring about the truth — as you point out, it could’ve just been a gamble that paid off.
Suppose that both parties could have arrived at similar behavioral outcomes on more Hobbesian grounds (e.g., through mutual distrust — if both treated the utterance as a covert threat). The wild card, in this case, is that this would not have involved deference, because deference necessarily involves trust. But without deference it would not be clear that the utterance of (1) was made true at all, because without deference it isn’t plausible to say anything about what is in the boy’s heart.
Michael, I don’t doubt that your alternative history proposal is reasonable. I have a pretty liberal view of what constitutes reasonable discourse.
But I don’t have a very relaxed view of what makes for trustworthy claims. Usually, you can’t just defer to people without independent reason. e.g., we shouldn’t defer science to entymologists just because; we should defer to them (or, rather, defer to the process of peer review) because they’re in a better position to study ants than we are.
I don’t think this commits me to verificationism. After all, “trust” is not something that can be easily captured by observation-sentences — yet I’ve let it count as evidence in this peculiar case.
I don’t trust many people with art criticism. By default, I’m egocentric when it comes to aesthetics. I’m told that Jane Austen is a wonderful writer, and a great many people have good reasons to think she’s a good writer. I think her works are obnoxious. When it comes to subjective tastes, it takes a long process of teeth-gnashing for me to turn around. To defer to others in these matters would be to pretend that aesthetics is, by default, more objective than it is.
To carry on a bit further: is trust even sufficient? Would the pastor’s statement work (except as a threat) if the boy really were an incorrigible thief? And if he’s not, wasn’t the proposition true to begin with (even if the pastor’s belief in it was not warranted by evidence)?
Aaargh. We have to distinguish more elements than I thought. There is
(a) the proposition itself, existing in a sort of proposition-space I suppose, along with its various truth-values corresponding to various states of reality;
(b) the pastor’s mental attitude towards the proposition;
(c) the pastor’s statement of the proposition;
(d) the boy’s disposition before hearing the pastor’s statement;
(e) the boy’s disposition after hearing it;
(f) the boy’s action in returning the money, or not.
If, say, the boy is not an incorrigible thief, but took the money thoughtlessly, so the proposition was true all along; but the pastor doesn’t actually believe it and doesn’t make the statement, so the boy’s conscience isn’t moved on that occasion and he doesn’t return the money; we have a true proposition even without any tangible result, don’t we?
But if the pastor’s statement really does effect a change in the boy’s inner disposition, then it still looks to me like a trivial case of the truth-value of a proposition changing in accordance with facts on the ground.
Thanks again for bearing with me!
Ben,
You know what you like. Is that a valid position or a philistine’s charter. A humanities education must have a taste forming aspect to it,bringing us into contact with “the best which has been thought and said” (Arnold).
Allogenes,
Very good distinctions to make, and excellent questions. So the timeline looks like this:
(t-1) (b,d) –> (c) –> (t-2) (e) –> (f)
The proposition (a) is context-dependent, and we can interpret the value of the variables in the proposition differently depending on whether we fill them in at (t-1) or (t-2).
You pose a dilemma. On the first horn of the dilemma, you ask, suppose that (e) were very different — suppose, in other words, the boy is an incorrigible thief. I say: if that were the case, then the boy could not be said to have deferred to the pastor. And if trust (in this case) is sufficient for making (a) true at (t-2) only if there’s also deference to the pastor, then it is not the argument’s fault if it turns out there’s no deference. The theory is only wrong if there is deference without trust (and I think that this would be absurd), or if there is both deference and trust but (a) fails to ‘come true’.
On the other horn, you suggest that if the boy is not incorrigible (i.e., beyond redemption), then the pastor’s prior belief (b) is true from the start. But I think that would seem to be a very strange assessment of the boy’s prior dispositions (d). After all, in my scenario he was on-balance disposed to be a thief at (t-1), and then his dispositions completely flipped inside-out at (t-2). As often happens when it comes to trust, he was psyched out.
Then you ask: suppose that the pastor didn’t believe it, and so the boy never inverted his dispositions — what then? I’m not sure, in that case, how we could come to the conclusion that (a) is true. By all appearances, the boy is a thief in his heart.
Michael,
It’s off topic, but — I’m definitely a philistine of sorts, by principle. I need personal autonomy.
I like to think I’m a compassionate and passionate philistine, though. Maybe that lets me off the hook?
am curious to know how daniel everett managed to exchange deep theological discourse to a tribe that does not even have numerical concepts nor the language for numbers beyond two. and he instead got converted by a tribe that has yet to grapple with their maths?
Truth as merely conceptual term.
Truth as a correspondence to how something is related.