Carrying Gold to California: "The Will to Believe" as a Work of Philosophy of Science.
William James argued that certain beliefs require a leap of faith before sufficient evidence becomes available—and his paradigm example of such beliefs is taken from science. Scientific knowledge often begins with a weakly supported and underdeveloped proposal, laden with contrary evidence, and plag...
| Publicado en: | Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society Vol. 60; no. 2; pp. 205 - 234 |
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| Formato: | Editorial |
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Indiana University Press
Spring2024
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=180148080&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 180148080 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00091774 2HR jtl: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society issn: 00091774 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Spring2024 vid: 60 iid: 2 pid: 211 pub: Indiana University Press artinfo: ui: 180148080 10.2979/csp.00027 ppf: 205 ppct: 29 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 532KB tig: atl: Carrying Gold to California: "The Will to Believe" as a Work of Philosophy of Science. aug: au: Fyfe, A.T. affil: University of Maryland su: Scientific knowledge Philosophy of science Faith Religious adherents Anarchism Evidentialism sug: subj: Scientific knowledge Philosophy of science Faith Religious adherents Anarchism Evidentialism keyword: Epistemological Anarchism Epistemology Ethics of Belief Paul Feyerabend Philosophy of Science W.K. Clifford Will to Believe William James ab: William James argued that certain beliefs require a leap of faith before sufficient evidence becomes available—and his paradigm example of such beliefs is taken from science. Scientific knowledge often begins with a weakly supported and underdeveloped proposal, laden with contrary evidence, and plagued by internal inconsistencies. Consequently, the proposal often garners limited interest. Initially, a novel scientific proposal only appeals to a small group of scientists who instinctually find something in the proposal that strikes them as profoundly right. Motivated by faith, they are convinced that once the hypothesis has been further developed, revised, and its full promise made good on over the course of years or decades of hard work, that their early belief will ultimately be vindicated. The present paper contends that James' "The Will to Believe" justifies religious faith on precisely the same grounds. James' defense of faith is an attempt to apply his views about belief ahead of sufficient evidence in scientific knowledge formation to defend a religious believer's faith. The relationship between belief and evidence when it comes to the religious hypotheses is—as James puts it—analogous to California's gold. California is where one travels to bring gold back from, carrying gold to California is to get matters backwards; likewise, belief is the means of discovering scientific and religious truth, to demand evidence before belief is the wrong way around. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Editorial src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Copyright of Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society is the property of Indiana University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. item: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society holder: Indiana University Press dt: @attributes: year: 2024 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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