Belief, Credence and Credit

It is fair to say that Western epistemologists have an unhealthy obsession with belief--'unhealthy' not because any obsession with belief is necessarily unhealthy, but because of a mischaracterization of the beliefs over which they obsess.

Prescribing cures for this obsession is hardly something to be handled in a blog post--even a post of unseemly, reader-repelling length (for examples of which, see below). But as the following post's demographic is already infinitesimally small, and the basic idea about how beliefs come to be mischaracterized is, in broad outline, a familiar story, here we go:

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Suppose one has a practice --say, a practice of assuring others. I say, for instance, "Oh don't worry--I assure you that is the best road", or "It can't be as terrible as all that" or "Don't worry so much--you'll do fine"...and so on. Now suppose we come, not merely to assure others, but to talk about the assurances we give. There would seem, at least grammatically, a new subject to discuss: we not only have a practice of assuring, but also 'assurances' and their various properties. The shift here, made in a hundred instances since the West took Plato and ran with him, is from VERB (and the adverbs that describe ways of assuring--e.g. 'poorly', 'quickly', etc.) to NOUN (and the adjectives which describe assurances--e.g. 'solid', 'credible', 'good', etc.). And having made the shift, I may now ask this previously un-tempting question: “I want to give good assurances: what makes an assurance a good one?”

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Note what has happened: the question is framed as a matter, not of assuring well, but of finding out ABOUT or ACCESSING assurances—specifically, whether they are good—and then, having FOUND a good assurance, giving it. The thought seems to be that “Giving a good assurance” insures I am “assuring well.” But note the detached language of ABOUT and FINDING, as if the world were strewn with assurances (some good, some bad) t0 be given or not given. Assuring well begins to appear as a form of DISCOVERY, not of SKILL. And we are now in a position to ask things like, “How can I be sure an assurance is a good one?” And in this way skepticism enters.

What has this to do with belief?

To show how this same story occurs with belief, it is important to get the original practice of believing correct. What sort of practice is it?

I am presently inclined to say this: that the original notion of ‘belief’ is not the name for an item in the world, but a mode of issuing assurances. “I believe…” is making an assurance, to others, or perhaps to oneself. Philosophers are right this far: that belief is a form of commitment. But what must be added (to avoid the disastrous verb-to-noun-ifying arc just sketched) is that belief’s original form is of a commitment to another person.

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You ask me: “Do you believe this rope will hold?” I hesitate. Why? Because my announcement that I do, in fact, believe the rope will hold is not merely an observation of some epistemic state I am in (“I report to you I have the belief ‘This rope will hold’); rather, I make a commitment to you; that rope’s holding is something of which I am willing to assure you, and therefore something upon which I am willing to risk my credibility (something I can hardly lose with objects!). I thereby lend credence—not merely to the idea that the rope will hold—but to you. I literally lend you credence—creed—belief; I issue it like credit, which I promise that you can spend. And when you tell me that you believe something—or even assert something in my presence—you are issuing credit to me, which I may in turn issue another…and so on, in the marvelous market of credit/credence which is the practice from which ‘beliefs’ spring.

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This is a large move to make in so small a space—but note at least three very fine consequences.

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(i) First, the entire, unfortunate, ‘Western’ arc we sketched with respect to assurances is short-circuited. The practice of believing is, at bottom, the practice of issuing credit, NOT the quest of a single subject knowing/getting things right. Beliefs arise in a credit economy—they are its currency. They first appear as nouns in the form of particular declarations of commitment which we make to other people. (This is why the present continuous ‘believing’ is rarely used—because to say “I believe” is to commit—and if we are still ‘believing’ we have not committed, and so have not placed our faith and credit so as to rest it upon some particular advisory/assurance. Similarly: we say, when pressed, “I promise” not “I am promising”—for if we are still promising, we have not yet issued a promise.)

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(ii) Second: if this is right, the very idea that all our beliefs are false is a very strange thought—on our picture, it is the worry that all assurances are vain. But how can this be, if we issue earnest assurances? Of course, we may issue assurances which turn out poorly; the rope, in some cases, may not hold. But the repair for this is not to enhance the credibility of a proposition, but to enhance our credibility with others. And this is not some epistemic circumstance beyond our control; it is something always and at every moment within our power to DO. We can always issue credit; we can always BE credible.

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Finally, and most importantly (iii) this permits a shift from treating of belief as a primarily epistemic, to a primarily ethical matter. The results of this are massive. A sample: (a) it means that wondering whether we can ever trust our beliefs is, at bottom, the question of whether we can trust each other, and whether we ourselves are trustworthy. The ontological question of whether there are any assurances is gone, replaced by the ethical challenge of whether we will assure others, and whether others will assure us (and perhaps, whether we will allow them to). (b) Crippling and unresolveable questions about our belief’s credibility give way to an active interest in enhancing our credibility, issued to others in the form of declarations of belief. The question of whether to give credence to our beliefs becomes the question of whether or not we will issue credit/credence to others, both in the form of accepting their commitments to us, and ensuring our credit is good when issuing creeds to them (“The rope will hold”, “It’s down the road on the right”, “Paris is in France”). (c) By ethicalizing the nature of believing in this way, we make the process of believing intrinsically intersubjective—not merely in a linguistic or collaborative sense, but in the sense that beliefs are issued/oriented to others. And this eliminates entirely a certain brand of skepticism which speaks of ‘my’ and ‘your’ beliefs, envisions beliefs which are ‘internal’ to me, and unaccessible to you, and imagines this to be a problem overcome by gathering MORE beliefs. But if the root use of ‘belief’ is as I have here supposed, the idea that we relate THROUGH belief is simply out of court. Rather, our epistemic relations are built upon the issuing of assurances to each other; our relation to ‘beliefs’ are rooted in our declared commitments to each other. And our concern for belief is, at the end of the day, a function of a form of interpersonal concern, deeper than the epistemic.

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This last point, were it to stand, would eliminate the concern that , without impregnable beliefs about why we should be concerned with our standing with each other, our ethical lives are ‘ungrounded’. For if this sketch of belief were in the ballpark, the very nature and origin of belief destroys this worry. Beliefs exist because we give credence to each other (as gifts exist because we give good things to others). In a world of credit, beliefs are our markers, a currency of interpersonal commitments. Thus to suppose one need believe something about the world in order to accept the original rootedness of interpersonal commitment has things backwards; one needs to make commitments to others in order to believe at all.