What to believe? Whom to trust?

What to believe? Whom to trust?

Thesis: All beliefs I hold and whose truth I cannot verify myself, I hold on trust. A further securing of a belief requires a proper understanding of the working the belief expresses This requires observation. At the same time this observation is performed and conceived within a network of beliefs. This requires the analytical and critical dismantling and reassembly of the belief and its conceptual network and a harmonizing of all this with other beliefs I hold.

Definition: Trust is defined as the firm belief in the reliability, truth, or ability of someone or something. In other words a belief I hold on trust, is a belief I believe to be true. A belief is an acceptance that something is true and accurately represented in the belief as it is conceived, especially something that has not been or cannot be proven. To believe is to acquiesce in the truth and accuracy of what you believe.

Elaboration: My frame of reference holds a constellation of concepts linked through inferential paths that together form a space of implications.1 I hold those concepts as beliefs. How is the innocuous phrase “the green grass” a matter for belief? Many beliefs are uncontentious and uncontroversial. The way that the activity of belief interacts with such concepts is to just accept that they refer to what you have been taught they refer to on the basis of normative practices and commitments and that the reference made is correct (that I am indeed looking at grass and that it is indeed green).

So as a child I am initiated into grass and it’s greenness and I accept the reference, connecting the sounds to what I see after a heuristic learning process where I had to learn the significance of pointing and of imitating sounds and – gradually- of making sentences. I acquiesced in the greenness of grass not without qualification. As I grew, I enriched my understanding of the greenness of grass, worrying when it turned brown and understanding -perhaps with some anxiety- that it was dying; loving when it was a fresh bright green, glistening with dew, hesitating before lying on it in case I also meet with dog pooh or a cowpat, or a snake or a beetle, learning to differentiate meadows where the grass was interspersed with dandelions and daisies and meadows planted with supergrasses, that formed a disquieting carpet of dark green.

To call this kind of ‘holding’ of concepts a form of belief is perhaps pushing things a bit, but acceptance that things are thus and so is nevertheless a primitive act of belief. After all belief is the activity of accepting a theory or idea as true. It is primitive because it is uncritical. This is brought to the fore when such concepts change shape in the constellation of properties attributed to them or indeed our understanding of those properties though inferential exploration.

Beliefs on the basis of my increasingly experienced interaction with things of the sort, “wooden beams are hard and you do not want to knock your head against them”, “Hot coffee can scald your tongue”, “cake is nice and sweet”, “Mum is angry”, “the mainsail is backing a bit, could you ease the gib?”It is a world of interactions whereby I acquire the necessary vocabulary as I go along and learn. That vocabulary is given with immediately relevant and therefore contingently essential properties and gradually, through experience, enriched in terms of its role in my causal and modal musings. To call knowing-the-name-of-something and what-it-is-supposed-to-do a set of beliefs is legitimate. This comes out when what you thought was called A turns out to be called B. If you are learning your way around a sailing boat you will be familiar with the challenge: so many words, each of them with subtly different properties and different uses and purposes. “Oh sorry, I thought it was called the luff” “No, I believe that this part is called the leech”. Once we acquire a body of beliefs in the form of a working vocabulary of concepts whereby we can think about and communicate about our interactions, we can distinguish them as descriptions of what there is and how it works.

In essence for me to trust anything, the description or idea seeking my trust must cohere with everything else I have and must be consistent with it. If it is not then we have two strategies. Either we give up on the offending belief or set of interlocking beliefs we are already committed to and reconstruct our model to accommodate the new belief, or we simply reject the new belief and keep our model as it was. What makes me accept one thing over and above another?

In the acceptance of a reference and in the commitment to a belief there lies the risk of the uncritical acceptance of the familiar. For instance, the grass’s greenness I later discovered to be strangely and rather wonderfully inaccurate. I discovered that greenness does not inhere in objects, however stable its connection with them but that it is a cognitive product of the interaction of electromagnetic waves, the grass and its physical and biochemical structures, the air, as well as the many working parts that make up my cognitive apparatus whereby the greenness appears ‘out there’, but, miraculously, resides exclusively in my brain that generates the image of the grass as a twin of the thing out there! That took me as a learner a while to digest. The implications of it were truly astounding and touched everything I thought I knew about. What was mind-blowing is that this also applied to things I touched. Their texture and sense of shape were products of interactions rather than properties that inhered.

“What is familiar and well-known as such is not really known for the very reason that it is familiar and well-known. In the case of cognition, the most common form of self-deception and deception of others is when one presupposes something as well known and then makes one’s peace with it.”2

In the section on ‘Why I believe the universe is one’ I found I had to put my trust in a concept that I could not possibly verify personally. The notion that ‘the universe is one’ is not a necessary conclusion that comes from observation. Instead it is the necessary product of a sophisticated rational exercise whereby the concepts used follow inferential paths through the space of implications by indirect reference and through abstraction. That is a complicated way of saying that the concepts I use and develop have no visible counterpart in the world of behaviour that I observe, but are arrived at indirectly from a personal treasure of experience and accepted beliefs, through abstraction with the help of reasoning.

A universe is a single behavioural complex in perfect harmony. Harmony is a relation-thing that is the product of judgment. I must judge something to be in harmony. How do I do that with regard to the universe?

Well, what I do, is observe and notice that under the same or very similar circumstances I can expect the same outcome of some action.3 This is not easy to observe as few situations are truly similar or analogous. A single change in the constellation of factors can have wildly different outcomes. At the same time I read and hear about science and about how science is able to ‘capture’ the behaviour of the world in majestically accurate mathematical equations with which it is able to do amazing predictions.

Then I see my own plight and that of others who complain about or subsist quietly within the misery and difficulty of their lives and I try to understand how these two seeming contradictions can be made to accord with each other.

I then discover -very slowly mind you, it has taken me a life to get here, but then I am very slow- that human suffering is not in fact a demonstration of the imperfection of the universe, but the result of the fact that our cognitive apparatus is the beautiful product of an evolutionary process allowing us to cope with being mobile, growing, developing creatures in a changeable environment in which we have to learn how to cope. That in itself is demonstration enough that the difficulties and miseries of life are not a problem for the working of the universe, they are a product of its perfect working, however strange that sounds to an anthropocentric thinker who has not yet discovered the philosophical difficulties caused by anthropocentrism.

Pain and suffering are not signs of imperfections in the universe, they are signs of a local, perfectly legitimate disconnect between what there is and what we think there is and what we think there ought to be on the basis of our rather limited understanding of things combined with the possibility of imaging other possible worlds. Subjunctive thinking allows counterfactuals and counterfactuals allow dissatisfaction. I see wealthy people and think “if only I were like that…” and there we are. That is our limitation, not the universe’s. But time and time again I discovered that what people think there ought to be, what people believe needs to be done to improve our lot and make a paradise on earth is naive and poetic at best and horrible and oppressive in most cases. And, what people come up with as ‘ideal’ is mostly… rather stupid. Their ideals are the product of their perfectly human limitations.

Not much is needed to bring ourselves into a happier harmony with ourselves and the universe, but we stubbornly seek solutions where there aren’t any happy ones. That is -apparently- our nature. (not that that is an explanation of anything, it is just an act of acquiescence) For humans to work perfectly is, apparently, for them to breed their own dissatisfaction with their lot and to make their environment suffer for it. It is part of what creates the problem but also part of what makes humanity such a wonderful object for itself to study and contemplate rapturously in literature and art. I am not trying to appear better than others here. It is not as if I have any answers. There is no answer. The human condition is not a problem for the universe, it is a given. It might be a problem for us, but all that shows is again our limited understanding of things, it needn’t be. We do not have to make a hell for ourselves, we can, each of us for ourselves, learn to behave differently. However, our limited knowing cannot be seen as a sign of imperfection of the universe.

Having cleared that up, I am now ready to revisit the notion of the universe as a single movement, univocal, harmonious and….very beautiful in all its manifestations. (yes that is a contentious statement . I shall get back to that in another section) The concept of oneness I need to learn through counting fingers and holding apples, its strange magic only reveals itself once I am made to realize that oneness automatically implies twoness, in that if you have one thing, you must automatically has a second thing that is not that one thing.4 And now we need to see the universe as a unique thing that does not generate twoness, or if it does that second must of necessity dictated by the definition, be something that can have no effect on the universe that is one. But perhaps oneness and its necessary counterpart twoness, is an a priori idea in us with no necessary counterpart in reality. Hmmm. Anyway, all this amounts to mind-bending. But what remains is this: How could I possibly know from observation whether the universe I am part of is one? With me smack in the middle, it extends at least from 10-34 all the way to at least 1034 , that is far too great a spectrum of scales for me to say anything useful about and there is no good reason to assume that the universe stops at either of these two extremes. So, like many with me, and on the advice of people I trust, I chose instead to define the universe in the way I did, following Spinoza and later Kant, and to commit to it as a useful and increasingly robust belief.5

The belief was strengthened, becoming more and more attractive by the fact that observation has not yet been able to credibly contradict such a position. If it ever does, I shall have to abandon my belief as such an observation would after all falsify such a position. So while the theory of the universe that forms my belief stands, I shall remain fully committed to it, even though it cannot be proven, until such time as a better theory presents itself.

What has been involved in the creation of this rather grand belief?

  1. the community of knowers/believers who first gave me norms and values to accept on face value.
  2. the further interaction with my environment made up of people, creatures and things that qualified the beliefs I had accepted and added yet more
  3. the analysis of beliefs as wholes made up of working parts (properties allowing inferences)
  4. the analysis of beliefs as working parts making up greater wholes and the inferences this allowed within the space of implications
  5. the negotiation of those beliefs to make them perform reliably in discursive practices and other activities (such as kicking stones, doing sums, learning how to sail, learning Dutch and English, watching movies, reading books, you name it)
  6. the critique of my beliefs when relating them to myself and my environment and evaluating them for use and purpose.
  7. …

The issue with concepts like the oneness, coherence and consistency of the universe is that I need some such grand concept to give a secure foundation to my thinking. Doing science and philosophy become very difficult if we start assuming a heterogeneous, inconsistent, incoherent, arbitrary, willful, chaotic universe in which each pattern that emerges for us to observe were to disappear without scrutable reason or possible explanation.

Until the maturity of science, and for me personally, until my realization how the surprises and contingencies of daily life and how the suffering and horribleness of life could be accorded with this concept, I much preferred the concept of God. God was/and to a great extent still is a wonderful way to explain stuff that appeared heterogenous, incoherent, inconsistent, arbitrary, willful and chaotic, precisely because we can impute reason to God for the stuff we not understand. God allows a universe that is fully coherent and consistent within his inscrutable purpose, which therefore sometimes appears angry, resentful, scary, disappointing, vengeful and so forth. And for many people God is still the concept against which they ground their thinking. I can fully respect that and hope such people can respect my attempt to explore another path. The God they believe in has as the advantage that it will allow inconsistencies in the fabric of the universe which can then be easily dealt with by the phrase ‘God works in mysterious ways’. The interesting thing is that to impute inscrutable reason to God, still allows for a universe that is one and whole. After all, if miracles are possible, anything is possible.

Good science has been found to be able to cope with what appeared to be inconsistencies, showing them to be inconsistencies in our understanding of a fully consistent universe, in which even Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and Quantum Mechanics have their perfectly harmonious place. And there is still an important place for God. Instead of attributing mysterious ways to God, we should understand our limitations and not pretend to know God fully, even though we need not assume his ways to be inscrutable. The beauty of the universe – or God- is precisely its scrutability. There is no way that science is able to get rid of the idea of God. ALl science has been able to do is to show how God works beautifully. There is still room for a Spinozist God, as I have just illustrated and I am sure that there are people within all religions who have been able to happily reconcile their own beliefs with the immensely satisfying and beautiful explanations of good science.6

So the intelligibility and scrutability of the universe is essential to my understanding even though there is a kind of circularity to such a belief. I believe it because I cannot function without just such a belief. Although that is not really fair. The belief has gone through the mill and the mangle of thorough analysis and critique and I certainly do not derive the compelling nature of that belief (its suspected intimacy with the idea of truth) from the fact that I need it to be getting on with.

But all this leads to a very scary conclusion: My ability to observe (as a subject for whom things matter because I have to be able to act in the world) and verify is very limited. Every concept I accept and commit to as a belief that shapes my doings and which I cannot observe myself to be the case, I need to accept and commit to on trust. That is, I have to commit to, and acquiesce in believing my belief. There appears to be no other way. Let’s face it, if I cannot observe something to be the case, conceive it accurately and then verify the facts of the case as well as the accuracy of the conception myself, I have only one way out, namely to reason things through with what I have at hand and accept many things on trust. It comes easily, too easily perhaps, because it is how I have been brought up. I was a slow, but good learner. And even if I am hypercritical, what percentage of my conceptual frame of reference do I have the leisure to rigorously verify or indeed reason through myself? Precisely. Very little.

If in the overwhelming majority of cases my trust is needed to commit to a belief and if I must not become overconfident of my own ability to verify my observations accurately, the question that pops up is whom and what to trust? Well, that is indeed a very hard question to answer.

The problem is that it cannot be answered wholesale. I cannot say: “I shall invest my trust in science and scholarship” without worrying whether I include ‘badly performed science and scholarship’ under that banner. And if I were to say: “I shall invest my trust only in good science and good scholarship” I would be faced with the question as to how would I be able to distinguish between good science and bad science without investing my trust in those whom I hope will know the difference. And so I am delivered over to the deeply unsatisfying solutions of institutions that, through their purported methods and standards, promise me reliability. The problem with that is that truth, although it is best arrived at through value-free analysis, becomes a highly valued commodity. The pursuit of science thus becomes a vehicle to fame and fortune. These are decidedly extrinsic motivators for good science and lead to practices whereby the purpose of science becomes the means to an apparently more urgent purpose, namely position and career. This is certainly not true for everyone, perhaps only for 20%. But even if only 20 % of science is pursued for the wrong reasons using the wrong methods that is in itself a reason to remain circumspect. I have read nonsense in the most illustrious journals and I have come across nuggets of pure insightfulness in the merest doggerel. (as you will soon see)

What does this mean? It means that reputation is a good reason to take what is offered in its name seriously. But taking something seriously is not yet trusting it. For that the process described above still needs to take place. If that process cannot run its course, I would be taking something on trust without a clear foundation. That happens a lot, with all of us. And that trust is always a deeply personal affair.

I am part of a community of knowers, or rather believers, and we help each other out. But that is not in itself good enough. If I choose to act on some theory that I hold as a belief, I shall have to invest my trust in it, even if I justify my investment with a statement like, “Oh well, if P says it, then it must be true…”. With such a statement I may try to devolve my responsibility to someone else, but that is illusory, the responsibility for trusting P still comes down to me. I invest my trust, no one else can do it for me. The fact that someone I respect trusts that theory too, helps me by making me more confident in its acceptance, but does not alter the fact. Blaming P for getting it wrong is merely expressing your own frustration at having made a wrong investment. That cannot be P’s fault, however much P tugged at you to make you believe them.

I could happily say “I put my trust in God” but that also has its problems. After all, what is it exactly I am then putting my trust in? There are many different versions of God to put your trust in: Catholicism, Lutheranism or Calvinism, C of E, Presbyterianism not to mention the various forms of heresy such as Spinozism or Manicheism. Then there are the many other religions all vying for my trust because they all claim to hold the truth.

To take just one. If I were a Spinozist, and putting my trust in God, I would be putting my trust in Nature. After all Spinoza famously equated God with Nature. In his case it was not some romanticized, sentimental version of nature, but nature as both the process and the product of the universe going about its business. What would be the point of putting my trust in that? The universe just is “everything” (that is according to his own definition) and includes the possibility of me making grave errors of judgment. If a perfectly working universe allows me to make errors of judgment without damage to itself, then what am I putting my trust in? The universe is perfect in its workings and will not let me let me down in its own workings, but those workings include the possibility of my having an accident if I do not watch out or make a grave error of judgment if I do not think carefully. And far from that accident or that error of judgment being proof that the universe is broken, it is in fact a proof that it is working perfectly. The universe contains the possibility of having accidents and making poor judgments. In that sense Oliver Cromwell’s purported advice to his soldiers to “put your trust in God but keep your gunpowder dry” kind of hits the nail on the head.7 Trust in God, or trust in a perfectly working universe for a Spinozist position would be the kind of trust that happily abides in the idea that the universe will do what it does, perfectly, but that if you want to act well within that universe you will need to do more that just put your trust in God; you will need to understand the way the world works so that you can have some control over your interaction with it.

So, where have we got to? We appear to have got into an aporia, a state paralyzing of confusion. To describe how we emerge from this problem I need the activity of Theoria which is a kind of gardening or pottering, a tinkering in the shed, a muddling along whereby you work out a few ideas, and accept many others on trust and, if you have the time and the leisure, you make sure that they all fit together to form a coherent and consistent, harmonious whole from which you can derive the satisfaction of its beauty. But few are accorded that luxury.

Over my life then, an ‘I’ builds their model of the universe. Some do it without much care. Others make do with a small frame of reference. Yet others take strange routes and come out in exotic places. The fact is, we all do it. But to do it well is a real challenge. To be human is to think and to think requires building a more or less coherent and more or less consistent set of conceptual stances that allow inferences to lead to judgments. Without that we cannot act intentionally.

That model or frame of reference, is held in beliefs about the universe, from the small to the large from the seemingly trivial to the seemingly existential. The model performs magic as it behaves according to the notion of the infinite. It is always full and yet there is always room for more beliefs to find their place within the whole. This is how we can explain that every subject, every person is responsible for building and maintaining their own frame of reference. It is a purely and rigorously subjective thing. In fact a person’s frame of reference is to a large extent a person’s unique identity. And with every belief added to it, the outcome of some inferential path will be different, which explains why we all think so differently. It is never finished but always ready for use. Which explains why children can act intentionally but do different things very differently to adults. The model is probably never completely adequate but always ‘good enough to be getting on with’. In other words: all people can do is muddle along, some are ambitious, some are modest, some are rigorous, some are careless.8

The quality of the model in the form of specific beliefs that are relevant to what you are doing or intending to do is brought out by your interaction with the world on the basis of those beliefs. Someone open to learning will be on the look out to improve their beliefs as they go. Take the example of the luff and the leech or the greenness of the grass I started this section with. However we go about that, much of our model is based on trust or rather much of it is built in a state of unknowing acceptance and familiarity, accepting what the members of my community of knowers: my mum and dad, my siblings, my wife and children, my friends, colleagues and students as well as the authors I read and the programs I watch and hear tell me. I keep all that I am told and that I remember in a complex chest of drawers called, ‘what-I-have-been-told-and-read-and-have-no-reason-to-mistrust-and-which-is-somehow-useful-to-me’. In one drawer of that chest of drawers I keep a very small treasure of what I have myself experienced and reflected upon in the light of the other, what I have had the time and the leisure to verify. And there is a dynamic collection of ‘things-I-am-told-but-do-not-believe-to-be-true’ some of these I remember because their falsity is true and they are important to keep with me as warnings, or because I am regularly confronted with them in conversations with others; much I forget.

I never have a complete overview of my frame of reference, I tinker with it piecemeal, holding that which is relevant or that which I have in mind in front of me, which obscures the rest. This gives me what I hope to be a little more hold on stuff even though that hope often turns out to be misplaced. As I negotiate between all these sources, that which shows some coherence and consistency, that which harmonizes with the few things I am pretty sure about acquires a securer footing than things that do not.

What I have described essentially is what we do: we muddle along. I shall deal with the subject of muddling with greater precision later on.

  1. This comes from the inferentialist tradition as formulated by William Sellars and Robert Brandom, this particular way of looking at things is so fundamental to my system that you will find it everywhere, For the references please see the bibliography ↩︎
  2. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, transl. by Terry Pinkard, Cambridge University Press, 2018, Pref. § 35. ↩︎
  3. A wonderful instance of this discovery is ithe subject of the opening scenes of the film 2001, A Space Odyssey (1968) by Stanley Kubrick where the ape who had discovered a model of the Seagram Building Outside their cave plays with the bones of a skeletal cow and discovers cause and effect through pattern and repetition ↩︎
  4. On this issue see Plato’s Parmenides, Brouwer and G. Spencer Brown ↩︎
  5. Spinoza Ethica I, and Kant, in the Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755) and later in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787) in the ‘Transcendental Dialectic, especially in the ‘The Ideal of Pure Reason’ (A645/B673) and lastly in the The Critique of Judgment (1790 in the Appendix to the ‘Dialectic of Teleological Judgment’: “We must assume that nature, by virtue of a principle of unity, forms a system…” (5:411) ↩︎
  6. I particularly enjoy Frans Kellendonk’s essay ‘Beeld en Gelijkenis’, over God, in his bundle De veren van de Zwaan, (1987) ↩︎
  7. Apparently, and to my surprise, there is no evidence that Oliver Cromwell actually said such a thing. The quotation comes from a piece of doggerel verse by William Blacker called Oliver’s Advice, originally published in 1834 under his pseudonym, “Fitz Stewart.” Much history is the product of literature and the imagination… ↩︎
  8. I get this from Iris Murdoch, but have forgotten where she says it. In any case I have gratefully adopted it as my life’s motto: “I Muddle Along”. ↩︎

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