David Hume (Scottish, 1711-1776) found the fact that many people believe in miracles a problem for his theory of knowledge.
Hume was arguably the first modern cognitive psychologist in that he reduced what we call “inductive reasoning” to a species of trained or conditioned response. What we tend to think of as a prediction based on empirical evidence, he recast as an expectation or anticipation based on a series of reinforcing regular experiences. What this did was to make our “predicting,” say, who will win a race no different in kind from our ducking spontaneously when a ball is thrown at us.
The mechanism he posited can be described quite simply. Consider the pair A (antecedent event) and B (consequent event). Consider the number of times that B was experienced as preceded by A and subtract the number of times that it was not. The sum of that calculation will be the strength of the expectation that B will occur the next time A is perceived to occur.
Now, earthly miracles, such as a man walking on water, a man rising from the dead, a man turning water into wine, healing the blind, etc always take place in an earthly environment or context. If we apply the Humean account of the formation of belief, this context is the A, the miracle is the B. But, Hume asks, how many times have the believers in miracles actually perceived a miracle emerging from the kind of context described by the miracle purveyors? The answer is, of course, never. BUT, if people have never seen a miracle (B) emerge from an earthly normal context (A), and they nonetheless believe, and believe strongly, that miracles can occur, what does that say about Hume’s cognitive psychology? The belief in miracles appears to be a counter-example to the theory that our beliefs about events outside the scope of our immediate perceptions are fully determined in degree by our prior experiences of such events.
Here’s the problem in other words. According to Hume’s theory of belief, the strength of our belief about an unperceived event should vary with the net number of reinforcing experiences. I say the “net” number to indicate that we subtract the non-reinforcing experiences. This means that as the net number decreases, our belief (expectation or anticipation) should also diminish. Thus, the net number of reinforcers and the level of expectation should directly vary together. This principle seems to hold for the most part or, more precisely, it seems to hold until the point at which there is no reinforcement at all. For it is at precisely that point, that many people suddenly violate the Humean principle and not only believe in a miracle, but believe in it with the highest certainty, the certainty usually reserved for the best beliefs, e.g. laws of nature. Well! Ain’t this a revoltin’ development!
Hume introduces a qualification on his theory to accommodate the inconvenient fact of miracle-belief, and it is that there exist psychological “over-riders” that can take priority over conditioned response. The over-riders he identifies are the pleasure we take in the emotions of “surprise” and “wonder.” In his own words:
“The passion of surprize and wonder, arising from miracles, being an agreeable emotion, gives a sensible tendency towards the belief of those events, from which it is derived.”
I think that Hume’s account of the belief in miracles is plausible, but that there are more passions that can over-ride the effects of experience in belief formation.
I have always been struck by the cinematic hoary convention in which the hero says: “We’re in real trouble here, baby, but I’ve got an idea. It’s crazy, but it might just work!”
This hackneyed script device, while aesthetically reprehensible, is actually interesting and illuminating. I think it captures a psychological inclination that might have been intriguing to Hume.
Hume thought that just as reinforcing experience is exhausted, the passions of the love of surprise and wonder come flooding into the vacuum to command belief. But it seems to me that even more powerful emotional belief determinants can be readily discovered. Two such are 1) an infatuation with either a person (divine or mundane) or an idea, and 2) fear and desperation. All of these can help to explain why so many otherwise intelligent and educated people voted for Obama.
The first point to make is that voting for Obama to lead the U.S.A. was very similar to believing in a miracle. Just as in the case of miracles, there was nothing in Obama’s background to provide grounds for voting for him. He had virtually no experience relevant to the office, there was no “track record,” he was, for all intents and purposes, an experiential “tabula rasa.”
But, further, there was a real sense of desperation at the time of the vote, though nothing compared with what people feel today. Fear and desperation trumps evidence, I think, and it is captured in the phrase “clutching at straws.”
But it was not just a matter of clutching at straws, it was also the other factor of infatuation. For some, it was just celebrity worship along the lines of Diana worship, a definite kind of infatuation. But, for others, it was an infatuation with the “idea” of a white/black amalgam entering the white house, a real life instance of the idea made flesh. This is not the first time in history that such an infatuation has trumped experience.
Samuel Johnson coined the phrase, “the triumph of hope over experience,” but, as it turns out, hope is not the only victor. Hume found that a love of surprise and wonder often triumphs over experience. And I am suggesting that equally often, it can be love of a person, love of an idea, or fear and desperation.
Experience may be a far more fragile force in the competition for belief than Hume imagined.
The tragic thing about all this is that of all the itemized determinants of belief, the only one that yields a hope for success is that of prior experience. When the hero says, it’s a crazy idea, he should just stop there. If it’s a crazy idea, it will work only in a movie script, and it is only in a movie script that electing a “long shot” like Obama will lead to anything other than a spiralling descent into ever more depressing, debilitating, deteriorating economic and military chaos.
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