Credition and Justification

Abstract

When it comes to subjective beliefs (including religious ones), we tend to be interested in or even skeptical about what others believe. We may ask, “what makes you believe this or that?” What we ask is “how did you come to believe this or that; can you justify your belief?” Differently it is with scientific beliefs, which are considered to be real due to the sensations external objects bring about are consistent. Hence, such beliefs do not need to be justified by the believing person. For example, the belief that particles are real is justified, because, in Henri Poincaré’s words, regardless of there being scientific paradigm shifts or competitive theories, there is always some-thing essential that remained and will remain through time. It is assumed that subjective beliefs do not possess or seldom possess such consistency. Indeed, analytic philosophers have been concerned mostly with processes of knowing, “how do we know?”, which may include belief but only in the sense of “justified belief”. For instance, René Descartes (1596–650) (2008) and John Locke’s (1632–1704) (1836) aim was to provide a secure foundation for knowledge, which implied that since then we have tend to conceive knowledge and belief as two antithetic poles. Furthermore, a distinction was made between faith and belief in the sense that faith might include knowledge when it is based on empirical experiences. For example, take the postulation “having faith that the sun will rise tomorrow”, which is based on the experience that the sun actually rises every morning. Belief, on the other hand, has been seen as something that is personal, subjective, and in need of justification. One problem is that knowledge, faith and belief are nouns. Focusing on nouns has the consequence that important aspects of the mental status of belief are lost, for example, the aspect concerned with what happens when one believes, knows, has faith? In this chapter, the verbal brother of the noun belief, namely, to believe is studied. In other words, the processes of believing, or the processes’ character is put on a philosophical table of research. In order to do so, the problematic static notions such as belief and knowledge are avoided. Instead the focus lies on a novel understanding using the dynamic term coined by Hans-Ferdinand Angel, credition (the processes of believing) (Angel et al. 2006). The aim is to show that the argument given by Poincaré can be challenged. This means, however, having to depart from the traditional epistemic way of thinking. This can be done because, when focusing on the processes of believing rather than on the noun “belief”, it could be argued that “there always will be something essential” in that process of believing that remains and probably will do so over time, even if the whole of the process of believing may and most probably will, include changes due to the different functions of the processes involved. This means that, regardless of the type of process of believing (credition), religious, secular or scientific, it might be justified, not on the basis of its epistemic value but on the basis of its process.