Faith is when one acts on a belief without having any rational reason for it. My rational reason for believing in science is simply: it works!
Argumentum ad consequentiam or appeal to consequences.
Once you let go of thinking that truth is knowable you'll realize that there is some faith that you have.
It's not in science per-se; but it might be faith that you exist. That you can reasonably conceive of thoughts. That those thoughts order the world and that the world that you perceive is a representation not unduly clouded. That the actions of your being are guided by your own will.
Truth might not be knowable in an absolute sense, but you can use these little starting points of faith then come to appreciate that there is a truth continuum and science is a good approach to discovering knowledge.
Philosophy seems so stupid before you start learning it, but it really is beautiful and I regret not being able to pour over it more.
I'm arguing that mere truth is unknowable without faith. We have evidence of derangement all around us and it takes faith to proceed as though our actions are our own and are unclouded. From a bayesian perspective, one of our priors must be that there is some probability that the very mind that is doing the thinking may be of a nature that is unable to effectively reason. But there is no escape because the mind is the centre of all investigation.
Could you please define "mere" truth?
>From a bayesian perspective, one of our priors must be that there is some probability that the very mind that is doing the thinking may be of a nature that is unable to effectively reason.
Nonetheless, that probability can be very low, putting us firmly in normal epistemological territory and not requiring any "faith". In fact, millions of people regularly make the rational, but clouded, assessment that they are too drunk to drive, and take a taxi home.
(Also, from a Bayesian perspective, the form of the generative model and priors is up to the experimenter. From a formal epistemology perspective, you can either try to designate some optimal universal prior, or you can take a variational approach and simply say you want to minimize KL divergence of your predictive posterior from your available data.)
Does the infantry man's faith in ballistic charts affect where a mortar will land? Yes it turned out that Newtonian physics doesn't describe absolute truth, but it sure is useful if you need to blow that enemy up over on that hill.
> one of our priors must be that there is some probability that the very mind that is doing the thinking may be of a nature that is unable to effectively reason.
An interesting thought experiment, but what practical use can I apply it to?
btw I'm not implying that only lines of inquiry that result in practical uses are worthwhile, but, science for the most part is related to this.
I guess there is a distinction to be drawn between faith and blind faith. "Faith" in the atomic model allowed prediction of elements that had not yet been discovered. That faith was rewarded when the elements turned up exactly where expected (even though the orbital model of electrons turned out not to be the absolute truth). "Faith" in Einsteins theories required a belief in time dilation. Turns out we can't have GPS without accounting for it.
This is quite different to, for example, religious faith which so far has not had any of these predictive powers.
What characterizes an AaC is the following structure: if X were true then the consequences would be good/bad; therefore X is (probably) true/false.
So if eli_gottlieb were saying "I believe in science because it would be lovely if science were right", that would be an AaC. But that's not at all what he's saying.
The form of his argument is more like this: "by assuming X we can arrive at a bunch of conclusions, and they consistently seem to be correct ones; therefore X is probably true". And that is (a rough sketch of) a pretty good argument.
(There are nits to pick -- more with my paraphrase than with Eli's original. For instance, science isn't a bunch of propositions so much as it's a way of trying to find truths, so "believing in science" isn't so much "believing that X" as "endorsing X as a method". And "... therefore X is probably true" isn't quite the right thing; "... and this constitutes evidence for X" is better. Etc.)
In the seems.
But: If you define "faith" broadly enough then sure, everything with any element of belief to it involves "faith". Derive everything rigorously from axioms? That means having "faith" in your axioms! Do literally anything else at all? That means taking a step at some point that doesn't have a watertight logical justification, so it's "faith"! -- So, sure, Eli's argument (or at least my sketchy reconstruction of it) involves an element of "faith", just like literally every other argument anyone could ever possibly make.
I guess this is what you mean by denying "that truth is knowable". If by "knowable" you mean "... with literally no room for any sort of uncertainty" then I vigorously agree with you -- but I have the impression (perhaps wrongly) that you were offering this as some sort of correction or education for eli_gottlieb, and I see no reason to think he needs it. All he's said is that he believes in science because it works, and that is perfectly consistent with taking "believe" to mean "accept as our current best approximation, to the best of our knowledge, to the truth, with the understanding that later discoveries might change our opinions greatly" or something of the sort.
But my core argument here is that we have no starting point. If you want to call them axioms that's fine, but I'm not here to quibble about language. Even if we had no experience of senses and minds leading to erroneous perceptions and thoughts, we would still have no way to prove that our minds are reliable. At best we would have smaller priors. But quite the opposite, we routinely encounter evidence of erroneous perceptions and thoughts. In dreams, lunatics shouting on the street, or our seemingly invisible optic nerve.
The problem with saying:
> Faith is when one acts on a belief without having any rational reason for it. My rational reason for believing in science is simply: it works!
Is first defining faith incorrectly[0] and then second by appealing to its outcome as a measure for its justification. Theologians manipulate their mental state with their own methods. When they say they encounter manifestations of the divine and say they have a rational reason for their religious beliefs by saying "it works!" they're doing the same thing.
Only by humbly admitting that our starting point requires some first acceptance can we then make progress. If you want to take it as an axiom that your mind is reliable, that's fine for you, but it isn't something that's necessarily true. I love Russell, but when he tries to break out of this by calling solipsism a self-refuting idea he's being intellectually dishonest. He was more honest when he was younger and he said solipsism is boring. And there[1] we fully agree.
[0] Faith is about mental state, not action. From Google dictionary: "Complete trust or confidence in someone or something."
[1] With the axiomatic qualifications / faith.
And the rest of us are saying: you don't need a foundationalist epistemology to have an epistemology.
My great grandmother's nickname was, apparently, Jennie. No official records note this fact. But it's something told to me by my mother, who knew her. And because of everything I know about my mother, I have faith that she is telling me the truth. Without any evidence except my mother's word, I can't prove it, but I don't think it's irrational for me to believe it.
It's not irrational because it was never particularly implausible in the first place. If there was an apparent law of the universe saying your great grandmother's nickname cannot possibly be Jennie, and you insisted that your mother told you and that's that, you'd be talking about "faith" on the level usually addressed in the disputes between religious and nonreligious epistemologies.
Knowing your great grandmother's nickname doesn't significantly affect your life, and assuming your mother isn't a compulsive liar, there's little reason to doubt her. Furthermore, it also strikes me as the kind of information that would probably be passed down intact because it's easy to remember.
faith /feɪθ/Submit noun 1. complete trust or confidence in someone or something. "this restores one's faith in politicians"
So you may reconsider whether you are using a different definition of "faith" to the one you were reading