An overview of logical access control"The Will to Believe" is a lecture by William James, first published in 1896, which defends, in certain cases, the adoption of a belief without prior evidence of its truth. In particular, James is concerned in this lecture about defending the rationality of religious faith even lacking sufficient evidence of religious truth. James states in his introduction: "I have brought with me tonight [...] an essay in justification of faith, a defense of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced. 'The Will to Believe,' accordingly, is the title of my paper."
James' central argument in "The Will to Believe" hinges on the idea that access to the evidence for whether or not certain beliefs are true depends crucially upon first adopting those beliefs without evidence. As an example, James argues that it can be rational to have unsupported faith in one's own ability to accomplish tasks that require confidence. Importantly, James points out that this is the case even for pursuing scientific inquiry. James then argues that like belief in one's own ability to accomplish a difficult task, religious faith can also be rational even if one at the time lacks evidence for the truth of one's religious belief.
The doctrine of logical access controlThe doctrine James argues for in "The Will to Believe" appears often in both his earlier and later work. James himself changed the name of the doctrine several times. First appearing as "the duty to believe", then "the subjective method", then "the will to believe", it was finally recast by James as "the right to believe". Whatever the name, the doctrine always concerned the rationality of believing without evidence in certain instances. Specifically, James is defending the violation of evidentialism in two instances:
Hypothesis venturing (see hypothetico-deductivism) beliefs whose evidence becomes available only after they are believed
Self-fulfilling beliefs beliefs that by existing make themselves true.After arguing that for hypothesis venturing and with self-fulfilling beliefs a person is rational to believe without evidence, James argues that a belief in a number of philosophical topics qualifies as one or other of his two allowed violations of evidentialism (e.g. free will, God, and immortality). The reason James takes himself as able to rationally justify positions often not believed to be verifiable under any method, is how important he thinks believing something can be for the verifying of that belief. That is to say, in these cases James is arguing that the reason evidence for a belief seems to be unavailable to us is because the evidence for its truth or falsity comes only after it is believed rather than before. For example, in the following passage James utilizes his doctrine to justify a belief that "this is a moral world":
It cannot then be said that the question, "Is this a moral world?" is a meaningless and unverifiable question because it deals with something non-phenomenal. Any question is full of meaning to which, as here, contrary answers lead to contrary behavior. And it seems as if in answering such a question as this we might proceed exactly as does the physical philosopher in testing an hypothesis. [...] So here: the verification of the theory which you may hold as to the objectively moral character of the world can consist only in thisthat if you proceed to act upon your theory it will be reversed by nothing that later turns up as your action's fruits; it will harmonize so well with the entire drift of experience that the latter will, as it were, adopt it. [...] If this be an objectively moral universe, all acts that I make on that assumption, all expectations that I ground on it, will tend more and more completely to interdigitate with the phenomena already existing. [...] While if it be not such a moral universe, and I mistakenly assume that it is, the course of experience will throw ever new impediments in the way of my belief, and become more and more difficult to express in its language. Epicycle upon epicycle of subsidiary hypothesis will have to be invoked to give to the discrepant terms a temporary appearance of squaring with each other; but at last even this resource will fail. (William James, "The Sentiment of Rationality")The doctrine James developed in his "The Will to Believe" lecture was later extended by his protg F.C.S. Schiller in his lengthy essay "Axioms as Postulates". In this work, Schiller downplays the connection between James' doctrine and religious positions like God and immortality. Instead, Schiller stresses the doctrine's ability to justify our beliefs in the uniformity of nature, causality, space, time, and other philosophic doctrines that have generally been considered to be empirically unverifiable.Criticism of logical access controlJames' doctrine has taken a lot of criticism. In 1907 University of Michigan Professor Alfred Henry Lloyd published "The Will to Doubt" in response, claiming that doubt was essential to true belief.
C.S. Peirce ends his 1908 paper "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God" complaining generally about what other philosophers had done with pragmatism, and ends with a criticism specifically of James' will to believe:
It seems to me a pity they [pragmatists like James, Schiller] should allow a philosophy so instinct with life to become infected with seeds of death in such notions as that of the unreality of all ideas of infinity and that of the mutability of truth, and in such confusions of thought as that of active willing (willing to control thought, to doubt, and to weigh reasons) with willing not to exert the will (willing to believe).Bertrand Russell in "Free Thought and Official Propaganda" argued that one must always adhere to fallibilism, recognizing of all human knowledge that "None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error", and that the only means of progressing ever-closer to the truth is to never assume certainty, but always examine all sides and try to reach a conclusion objectively.
Walter Kaufmann wrote:
Instead of admitting that some traditional beliefs are comforting, James argued that "the risk of being in error is a very small matter when compared with the blessing of real knowledge", and implied that those who did not accept religious beliefs were cowards, afraid of risking anything: "It is like a general informing soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound" (Section VII).
James' appeal depends entirely on blurring the distinction between those who hold out for 100 percent proof in a matter in which any reasonable person rests content with, let us say, 90 percent, and those who refuse to indulge in a belief which is supported only by the argument that after all it could conceivably be true.Some specific objections to James' doctrine include:
the necessity of positing a hypothesis without personally adopting it as a belief
the epistemological problems of belief voluntarism
success in the world verifies a belief, rather than restricting verification to predictive success
the separation of belief adoption from truth and epistemic justificationJames addresses objection (1) in a footnote of his "The Will to Believe" essay where he argues that for a chemist to devote years of his life to verifying a hypothesis, the chemist must also believe his hypothesis. However, the chemist adopting a hypothesis to guide years of study is certainly only a special case of hypothesis adoption. A more general defense of (1) could also be constructed from James' behaviorist theory of belief. James takes believing a proposition to consist in acting as if it were true, so if James considers testing a proposition as acting as if it were true to see if it leads to successful action, then James would be committed to seeing an act of hypothesis adoption as necessarily an act of belief adoption as well.
Objection (2) seems to presuppose the ability to will a belief. James believed that when evidence was insufficient to determine the truth or falsehood of a proposition, this uncertainty allowed a person to be able to will a belief by acting as if that belief were true. Objection (2) warrants further discussion over "voluntarism".
Objection (3) strikes at James' pragmatic theory of truth, which his will to believe doctrine seems to presume. James' main defense of his theory of truth is his claim that no other account of "truth" or "correspondence" or "agreement with reality" can be given except for the pragmatist account. James sees traditional accounts of truth as explaining one mysterious term ("truth") with nothing more than equally mysterious terms (e.g. "correspondence"). The only sense James believes we can make of the concept of "truth" is if we count as true the beliefs that lead us to perform actions that "agree" with the world. Those that fit with the world will lead to successful action, those that do not agree with the world will entail actions that lead to failure (e.g. if one believes he can fly, he'll jump off a building). With truth analyzed in this way, James sees no reason to restrict success to predictive success (objection (3)) and is fully comfortable with the fact that certain beliefs will lead one person to success in the world while failing someone else (objection (4)). However, this reply to both objections is not open to James since he explicitly claims that his will to believe doctrine does not depend on his pragmatist theory of truth.