Eric Peterson is an Instructor of Business Ethics at Creighton University. He is interested in imagination, ethics (especially business ethics), and philosophy of religion. He is also the Managing Editor of this blog and has enjoyed seeing how it has grown over the first five years. He also gets too much enjoyment out of watching his kids play sports.
A post by Eric Peterson
What is the relation between faith and imagination? Naturally, questions abound as to what faith is and what imagination is. I am particular to an account of faith developed by Daniel Howard-Snyder (2013). On his view, faith is a propositional attitude – he is concerned with cases where we have faith that such and such, rather than faith in such and such. Howard-Snyder takes faith to be a complex attitude that has at least three dimensions: an evaluative dimension, a conative dimension, and a cognitive dimension. Interestingly, he argues that the cognitive dimension need not be that of belief, but it does need to be an attitude that takes a positive cognitive stance towards its object. As examples of attitudes that might substitute for belief, he suggests acceptance or assuming. In this post, I want to explore whether imagining might also fit this bill.
A few caveats: In this post, I intend to think of ‘faith’ in a very general and broad sense glossing over distinctions between ordinary faith, (what some might call) extraordinary faith, and religious and secular faith. If you are religious-averse, then just read my use of ‘faith’ as picking out the attitude you have when you express faith that your friend will keep their promise. I am inclined to think that there is only one attitude of faith regardless of its contents, but I do not need to develop or defend that in this post. Additionally, I will not directly be addressing questions that concern whether or not faith can be rational although if imagining can fit the bill of Snyder’s account, then this might have implications for those epistemological questions.
According to Snyder, a person has faith that p only if that person is for p in the sense that the person considers p to be good or desirable. Faith that p requires a positive evaluation of p. This seems intuitively correct; when someone has faith that a given outcome will occur, this attitude is incompatible with indifference about the desirability of that outcome.. Additionally, faith that p requires a positive conative orientation. That is one must desire that p be true and faith that p must motivate certain behaviors. If I claim to have faith that my struggling marriage will survive, but I refuse to do anything to work on saving the marriage, then one could rightly question if I actually do have faith that my marriage will survive. Finally, according to Snyder, faith that p requires a positive cognitive stance towards p. What exactly is a ‘positive cognitive stance’? Here, Snyder only gestures at an analysis, but a closer look at what he proposes will bring us to the possible connection between faith and imagination.
First, Snyder rightly claims that faith and belief come apart due to their different dispositional profiles. For instance, he claims that faith that p is compatible with a lack of surprise upon finding that ~p; whereas, belief that p is not compatible with a lack of surprise upon finding that ~p. If faith and belief come apart, one might wonder whether faith that p is compatible with disbelieving that p. Snyder suggests the answer is no. Disbelieving that p would bring tendencies of behavior and feeling that would be at odds with having faith that p. Hence, it is not just any cognitive stance that can fit the bill for propositional faith; the cognitive stance must have a positive valence. Other than this gesture, Snyder simply lists a few folk psychological terms which would count as positive cognitive stances: “acceptance”, “acknowledgement”, “affirmation”, and so on.
It seems, then, what does the heavy lifting for ‘positive cognitive stance’ is some kind of affirming or confirming. That is, to take a positive cognitive stance towards p is to affirm in some truth or reality-constitutive manner that p. We might, then, think of positive cognitive stances as belonging to a spectrum. At one far end is full-stop belief and then moving away would be degrees of credence, affirming for some practical purpose such as in cases of acceptance, temporary judgements, and so on. Basically, it seems possible that propositional faith might be compatible with any sort of positive cognitive stance.
So can imagining be one such cognitive stance? Initially, you might say no. If anything, the cognitive stance of imagining would be neutral—neither affirming nor disaffirming its content. One is not inclined to believe the content of one’s imagining and one frequently might be inclined to disbelieve the content of one’s imagining. However, this seems to be only focusing on one particular use of imagining, what Kind and Kung (2016) call transcendent use of imagining. This is a mostly unconstrained use of the imagination where we are free to imagine just about anything. But, as is no doubt familiar to readers of The Junkyard, there is also what Kind and Kung call the instructive use of imagining. This would be imagining under certain constraints that are epistemically significant. Kind (2016a) gives us two examples of constraints that would allow for epistemically significant imaginings. These are the reality and the change constraints. The former requires that our imaginings be reality-guided and the latter requires that changes in our imaginings follow the logical consequences of our reality-guided imaginings. Imaginings abiding by such constraints can be epistemically significant—we learn something about the world from our imaginings. Imaginings that are epistemically significant would arguably count as taking a positive cognitive stance towards its content. When imaginings are guided by the reality constraint such imaginings affirm the content in some reality-constitutive manner.
So it seems that this is one way of seeing the relation between imagining and (propositional) faith. Imagining under the right constraints can be a stand-in for the positive cognitive stance that is required for an attitude to count as faith. Perhaps an example can help illustrate this. Suppose I have a close friend who I have confided in at past times. Recently, she uncharacteristically disclosed a secret that I shared with her to another person. We have a history and so one small breach of faith will not end our friendship, but it might affect the degree of faith that I have in sharing certain secrets with her in the future. I still have faith that she is a friend which seems to entail that I have faith that she will be trustworthy, and so on. Can we say that I have faith that she will keep my secrets? It is easy to see how the positive evaluative and conative stances are present: I still value her keeping my secrets as being a good and I desire that she keep them. What about the positive cognitive stance? Well full-stop belief would be too strong here. After all, her minor breach has caused me to doubt that she will keep my secrets. Full-stop belief that p is at odds with doubt that p. However, faith that p is not at odds with doubt that p. Weaker attitudes such as degrees of credence or acceptance could work here, but there does not seem to be any reason to suppose that reality-guided imaginings couldn’t also do the work. So when I have faith that my friend will keep my secret the positive cognitive stance might involve my imagining that she will keep my secret, where this imagining is constrained by the relevant worldly facts about her, our friendship, and so on.
Many questions abound. What does this account mean for the norms of faith? Does it inform whether or not faith can be rational? Would this account only apply in cases of what might be characterized as weak or misplaced faith? Further, can this account actually work as an account for faith as one distinct attitude? What I mean is can this account be made to work for ordinary faith as well as extraordinary faith (i.e. religious faith)? Neil Van Leeuwen’s (2014) excellent piece in Cognition argues that the cognitive attitude for religious faith is what he calls religious credence. He characterizes religious credence as a secondary cognitive attitude along with fictional imaginings and acceptance. One of the properties of religious credence is what Van Leeuwen calls free elaboration:
A class of cognitive attitudes X is susceptible to free elaboration if and only if the agent imaginatively elaborates on elements of X to generate further elements of X in ways that cannot be supported by induction, deduction, or other rational inference patterns.
Interestingly, this property would preclude religious credence from qualifying as an instance of instructive imagining as such elaborations would violate both the reality and the change constraints. And this would put pressure either on my account of imagining standing in as a positive cognitive stance for faith or on my desire to see only one attitude of faith for the ordinary and the extraordinary. Unfortunately, space prevents me from sorting all this out here.
Perhaps friends of The Junkyard can help me make some further progress?
Reference
Howard-Snyder, D. (2013). Propositional Faith: What It is and What It is Not. American Philosophical Quarterly, 50(4), 357–372.
Kind, A. (2016a). Imagination under Constraints. In A. Kind & P. Kung (Eds.), Knowledge through Imagination. Oxford University Press.
Kind, A., & Kung, P. (2016). Knowledge Through Imagination. Oxford University Press Uk.
Van Leeuwen, N. (2014). Religious Credence is Not Factual Belief. Cognition, 133(3), 698–715.