Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-s22k5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-22T04:11:22.801Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Belief, credence, and faith

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2018

ELIZABETH JACKSON Open the ORCID record for ELIZABETH JACKSON [Opens in a new window]
ELIZABETH JACKSON*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, 100 Malloy Hall, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA
*
e-mail: ejackso9@nd.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this article, I argue that faith's going beyond the evidence need not compromise faith's epistemic rationality. First, I explain how some of the recent literature on belief and credence points to a distinction between what I call B-evidence and C-evidence. Then, I apply this distinction to rational faith. I argue that if faith is more sensitive to B-evidence than to C-evidence, faith can go beyond the evidence and still be epistemically rational.

Type
Articles from the 2018 Postgraduate Essay Prize
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , June 2019 , pp. 153 - 168
Check for updates
Creative Commons
This is a work of the U.S. Government and is not subject to copyright protection in the United States.
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alston, William (1991) Perceiving God (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press).Google Scholar
Alston, William (1996) ‘Belief, acceptance, and religious faith’, in Jordan, Jeff & Howard-Snyder, Daniel (eds) Faith, Freedom, and Rationality (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield), 3–27.Google Scholar
Audi, Robert (1991) ‘Faith, belief, and rationality’, Philosophical Perspectives, 5, 213–239.Google Scholar
Audi, Robert (2011) Rationality and Religious Commitment (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Blome-Tillman, Michael (2015). ‘Sensitivity, causality, and statistical evidence in courts of law’, Thought, 4, 102–112.Google Scholar
Blome-Tillman, Michael (2017) ‘“More likely than not” – knowledge first and the role of statistical evidence in courts of law’, in Carter, Adam, Gordon, Emma, & Jarvis, Benjamin (eds) Knowledge First (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 278–292.Google Scholar
Buchak, Lara (2012) ‘Can it be rational to have faith?’, in Chandler, Jake & Harrison, Victoria (eds) Probability and Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 225–247.Google Scholar
Buchak, Lara (2014) ‘Belief, credence, and norms’, Philosophical Studies, 169, 285–311.Google Scholar
Buchak, Lara (2017) ‘Reason and faith’, in Abraham, William J. & Aquino, Frederick D. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 46–63.Google Scholar
Christensen, David (2004) Putting Logic in its Place (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Cohen, Jonathan (1977) The Probable and the Provable (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Cohen, Jonathan (2010) ‘Rationality’, in Dancy, J., Sosa, E., & Steup, M. (eds) A Companion to Epistemology (Singapore: Wiley-Blackwell), 663–668.Google Scholar
Collins, John (2006) ‘Lotteries and the close shave principle’, in Hetherington, Stephen (ed.) Aspects of Knowing: Epistemological Essays (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science), 83–96.Google Scholar
Colyvan, Mark, Regan, Helen, & Ferson, Scott (2001) ‘Is it a crime to belong to a reference class?’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 9, 168–181.Google Scholar
Dawkins, Richard (2006) The God Delusion (Boston MA: Mariner Books).Google Scholar
Dorst, Kevin (2017) ‘Lockeans maximize expected accuracy’, Mind.Google Scholar
Enoch, David, Spectre, Levi, & Fisher, Talia (2012) ‘Statistical evidence, sensitivity, and the legal value of knowledge’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 40, 197–244.Google Scholar
Fitelson, Branden & Shear, Ted (2018) ‘Two approaches to belief revision’, Erkenntnis, 1–32.Google Scholar
Foley, Richard (1993) Working without a Net (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Friedman, Jane (2013) ‘Rational agnosticism and degrees of belief’, Oxford Studies in Epistemology, 4, 57–82.Google Scholar
Fumerton, Richard (2004) ‘Epistemic probability’, Philosophical Perspectives, 14, 149–164.Google Scholar
Gigerenzer, Gerd & Goldstein, Daniel (1996) ‘Reasoning the fast and frugal way: models of bounded rationality’, Psychological Review, 103, 650–669.Google Scholar
Gigerenzer, Gerd, Todd, Peter, & ABC Research Group (1999) Simple Heuristics that Make Us Smart (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Goldstick, D. (2000) ‘Three epistemic senses of probability’, Philosophical Studies, 101, 59–76.Google Scholar
Harris, Samuel (2004) The End of Faith (New York: W. W. Norton).Google Scholar
Horgan, Terrance (2017) ‘Troubles for Bayesian formal epistemology’, Res Philosophica, 94, 233–255.Google Scholar
Howard-Snyder, Daniel (2013) ‘Propositional faith: what it is and what it is not’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 50, 357–372.Google Scholar
Howard-Snyder, Daniel (2016) ‘Does faith entail belief?’, Faith and Philosophy, 33, 142–162.Google Scholar
Howard-Snyder, Daniel (2017) ‘Markan faith’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 81, 31–60.Google Scholar
Jackson, Elizabeth (MS) ‘Belief, credence, and evidence’.Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel (1787/1933) Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd edn, Smith, Norman Kemp (tr.) (London: Macmillan).Google Scholar
Kaplan, Mark (1996) Decision Theory as Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Kelp, Christoph (2017) ‘Lotteries and justification’, Synthese, 194, 1233–1244.Google Scholar
Kierkegaard, Søren (1849) Journals (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press).Google Scholar
Kvanvig, Jonathan (2013) ‘Affective theism and people of faith’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 37, 109–128.Google Scholar
Kvanvig, Jonathan (2016) The idea of faith as trust: lessons in noncognitivist approaches to faith’, in Bergmann, Michael & Brower, Jeffrey (eds) Reason and Faith: Themes from Richard Swinburne (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 4–26.Google Scholar
Kyburg, H. E. (1961) Probability and the Logic of Rational Belief (Middleton CT: Wesleyan University Press).Google Scholar
Lewis, David (1996) ‘Elusive knowledge’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 74, 549–567.Google Scholar
Lin, Hanti & Kelly, Kevin (2013) ‘Propositional reasoning that tracks probabilistic reasoning’, Journal of Philosophical Logic, 41, 957–981.Google Scholar
Locke, Dustin (2014) ‘The decision theoretic Lockean thesis’, Inquiry, 57, 28–54.Google Scholar
Maher, Patrick (1993) Betting on Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Malcolm, Finlay & Scott, Michael (2016) ‘Faith, belief, and fictionalism’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 98, 257–274.Google Scholar
McKaughan, Daniel (2016) ‘Action-centered faith, doubt, and rationality’, Journal of Philosophical Research, 41, 71–90. Issue Supplement: Selected Papers in Honor of William P. Alston.Google Scholar
McKaughan, Daniel (2017) ‘On the value of faith and faithfulness’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 81, 7–29.Google Scholar
Moss, Sarah (2018) Probabilistic Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Mugg, Joshua (2016) ‘In defence of the belief-plus model of faith’, European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 8, 201–219.Google Scholar
Nelkin, Dana (2000) ‘The lottery paradox, knowledge, and rationality’, The Philosophical Review, 109, 373–409.Google Scholar
Pasnau, Robert (MS) ‘Belief in a fallen world’.Google Scholar
Payne, John W. & Bettman, James R. (2004) ‘Walking with the scarecrow: the information-processing approach to decision research’, in Koehler, D. & Harvey, N. (eds) The Blackwell Handbook of Judgment and Decision Making (Oxford: Blackwell), 110–131.Google Scholar
Payne, John W., Bettman, James R., & Johnson, Eric J. (1993) The Adaptive Decision Maker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Plantinga, Alvin (1993) Warrant and Proper Function (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Ross, Jacob & Schroder, Mark (2014) ‘Belief, credence, and pragmatic encroachment’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 88, 259–288.Google Scholar
Schauer, Frederick (2003) Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press).Google Scholar
Schwitzgebel, Eric (2015) ‘Belief’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/belief/>..>Google Scholar
Smith, Martin (2010) ‘What else justification could be’, Nous, 44, 10–31.Google Scholar
Smith, Martin (2016) Between Probability and Certainty: What Justifies Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Staffel, Julia (2015) ‘Beliefs, buses, and lotteries: why rational belief can't be stably high credence’, in Philosophical Studies, 173, 1721–1734.Google Scholar
Staffel, Julia (2017) ‘Accuracy for believers’, Episteme, 14, 39–48.Google Scholar
Sturgeon, Scott (2008) ‘Reason and the grain of belief’, Nous, 42, 139–165.Google Scholar
Tang, Weng Hong (2015) ‘Belief and cognitive limitations’, Philosophical Studies, 172, 249–260.Google Scholar
Thomson, Judith (1986) ‘Liability and individualized evidence’, Law and Contemporary Problems, 49, 199–219.Google Scholar
Turri, John (2008) ‘Practical and epistemic justification in Alston's Perceiving God’, Faith and Philosophy, 25, 290–299.Google Scholar
Weisberg, Jonathan (forthcoming) ‘Belief in psyontology’, Philosopher's Imprint, <http://jonathanweisberg.org/pdf/Psyontology.pdf>..>Google Scholar
West, Ryan & Pelser, Adam C. (2015) ‘Perceiving God through natural beauty’, Faith and Philosophy, 32, 293–312.Google Scholar
Williamson, Timothy (2000) Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar