I have recently been running polls on my Instagram to encourage philosophical thought and to gauge my followers’ beliefs (and because they are fun). I ran the following poll (results are shown alongside options):

Everything is ultimately justified through: (choose best)

• Faith (8 %)
• Logic (8%) 
• Experience (75%)
• Other / show results (8%)

The purpose of this particular poll was to demonstrate that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to separate this triad of faith, logic, and experience when it comes to the justification of propositions. My response would be “Other / show results.” Respectfully, I think that choosing any of the three other options provided is misguided.

Let’s consider each of the three other options in turn.

Faith

By “faith,” I mean a commitment of effort to a belief, or a letting go of the question as to whether a particular proposition is justified. It is, in other words, taking a belief as a basis for action in one’s life, even without ultimate justification.

To say that everything is ultimately justified through faith may therefore be interpreted as meaning that there is no ultimate justification for any proposition to be found in logic or experience (or elsewhere), and that in the last analysis there is some leap of faith in relying on the truth of any proposition.

Faith as I have defined it here factors into human decision-making in essentially all its forms. In interpersonal relations, we (usually) have faith in the good intentions of our loved ones; in traveling we have faith in the soundness of our infrastructure; and in building technology we have faith in the best scientific understanding of our day.

The case for faith as ultimately necessary in the absence of logical or empirical justification of any proposition finds strong support in the Münchhausen trilemma. As I have explained in a previous post:

“The Münchhausen trilemma problematizes ultimate justification. It proposes that the effort to ultimately justify any proposition must terminate with one of three unsatisfactory results: (1) the chain of justification terminates with foundational axioms that are dogmatic and not further justified; or (2) the chain of justification is infinite, with every truth having a prior justification; or (3) the chain of justification closes upon itself, producing logical circularity.”

Unless this trilemma can be resolved, it seems that “buying in” to any proposition involves an unavoidable element of faith. And yet, this trilemma reveals that faith isn’t strictly speaking a “justification” in itself, but rather a necessary response to the problem of lacking the possibility of ultimate justification through logic and experience alone.

At the same time, faith is a relation between a person and an object of faith. Faith is only “faith-in-something,” and the object of faith is only knowable and evaluable at all through experience and logic. Let’s consider logic next.

Logic

While the Münchhausen trilemma suggests that there is an indispensable element of faith in believing any proposition, it does not follow that logic has no role in justification at all. Indeed, logic serves a crucial role, along with experience, as part of the framework by which we decide what to have faith in at all.

Logic is essentially relational. It is not about the absolute truth of propositions themselves, but rather about how the truth value of different propositions relate. Propositions are in turn statements about hypothetical objects’ properties and relations.

For example, logic allows us to say that if “all men are mortal,” and if “Socrates is a man,” then “Socrates is mortal.” This is a statement about how the truth value of these statements relate: they all must be true together, or if the conclusion “Socrates is mortal” is false, then it must either be false that “all men are mortal” or that “Socrates is a man.” Logic says nothing about whether “all men are mortal” or whether “Socrates is a man”; and as such it says nothing about whether “Socrates is mortal” in any absolute sense.

Indeed, the very meaning of the symbols in quotations above are not given in any eternal way. As I covered in a previous post, those symbols are ultimately imbued with meaning by an individual consciousness. Objects with properties and relations are abstracted from the fundamentally processual nature of reality. They are unchanging representations that can be said to exist only “semiotically” or symbolically, as a stand-in for a dynamic underlying reality.

In particular, a collection of imaginations in our mind hypothetically maps at a given moment to a single “concept.” For example, if I say, “grandmother,” you could in principle imagine anything you can possibly imagine and each time say whether it is an instance of the concept “grandmother” or not, and how. But your particular grandmother is or was a dynamic process, not a static, unchanging object. 

The relational nature of logic and the role of consciousness in mapping processual reality to symbolic representation are often overlooked but are fairly obvious once one considers them.

The role of logic in justification, then, is to reveal clearly incompatible beliefs. For example, it is logic that allows one to say, “Whatever you mean by ‘men’, whatever you mean by ‘Socrates,’ and whatever you mean by ‘mortal,’ you cannot simultaneously hold that ‘all men are mortal; Socrates is a man; and Socrates is immortal.’”

This is a way to make sure that any collection of beliefs is “playing by rules” that constitute it a coherent system of truths, rather than a collection of propositions with no consistent relations between them. Clearly, then, logic plays a key role in creating the “thing,” or the system of propositions, in which one can have faith at all; but it does not provide ultimate justification of the content of propositions.

Experience

It is through experience that symbols are imbued with meaning, and it is experience that gives feedback regarding our faith in systems of propositions. Indeed, faith and logic are themselves experiences or aspects of experience. So then we may be tempted to say that experience provides the ultimate justification for propositions. However, providing the meaning of propositions and providing feedback regarding the efficacy of faith therein are not the same as “ultimate justification.”

To see why, consider how much our experience itself comes to us pre-processed through our concepts, or our “semiotic lens,” as I have called it previously. Our perceptions are already laden with meaning. For example, try to look at these words as objects without simultaneously seeing the meaning or sound of the word; or even seeing it as a word. It is very difficult to do for a literate adult.

What this implies is that our logic and our other beliefs and assumptions color our experience itself. Experience is not raw data that we receive objectively, according to which we can decide in an absolute sense between propositions. Rather, there is a bootstrapping or recursion between experience giving meaning to symbols and symbols shaping experience itself. This process begins when we are very young, when for example a parent or guardian points to an image of a truck and repeats “truck,” and then we see a different vehicle and point to it ourselves and say, “Truck!” It doesn’t stop for our whole lives.

At the same time, experience gives us a point of contact with the rest of reality (the “not-me” or the “Other” in my usual parlance). Without experience to provide meaning to systems of logically related symbols, and without experience to give feedback on our commitment to such systems, the whole justification process makes no sense at all. For this reason, it makes sense that 75% of respondents chose “Experience” as the bedrock for justification. What I hope to have shown here is that it is not actually that simple.

If experience is theory-laden, then there is some form of faith that colors experience; while logic filters out collections of incoherent propositions in order to exclude unhelpful objects of faith; and experience provides feedback on both our logical arguments and our articles of faith in order to recursively self-correct the whole process.

Conclusions

What is the ultimate justification for the propositions that I have presented here? I can offer you none. But you can hopefully see that these propositions are logically coherent (or you can try to argue to the contrary, of course, and we can work together to arrive at a logically consistent set of propositions.) Then you can choose to take these ideas on faith. If you do, they can color your experience. For example, once you see the fundamental difference between processual reality and its symbolic representation, or the theory-ladenness of experience itself, you may start to notice differences in your everyday experience. And the results of those changes in experience (perhaps the efficacy of your new beliefs, the way they make you feel, feedback from others, etc.) may lead you to reconsider your belief in its logical coherence or your faith in its truth; or they may reinforce your faith. This may lead you to dialogue with me: to clarify what I meant by one thing or another, since meaning is ultimately ascribed to these symbols by an individual consciousness, or to expand upon something I said. Though I try my best to write unambiguously, I may come up short at times.

This article itself therefore highlights how the meaning-making and belief-formation processes are fundamentally dialogical, pragmatic, and recursively error-correcting without providing ultimate, unassailable justification.

Where does this leave us? What does it mean that justification is a recursively self-correcting and dialogical process involving provisional faith, logic, and experience, rather than an ultimate “yes or no” status granted by experience alone?

Well, for one thing, it encourages us to engage actively in this process of belief formation and meaning-making, in the knowledge of what we are doing. It is also to adopt a stance of intellectual humility. This allows us to meet others in a spirit of genuine intellectual curiosity, with the potential for our minds to be changed. It also encourages collaboration and diversity in institutions of meaning-making and belief formation, such as higher education.

However, some may also find it intuitively unsettling or unsatisfying. To those people, I can only ask whether they have a clearer argumentation of an alternative perspective, which I can consider placing faith in for myself—but then I am led back to my own analysis again. In other words, I find these conclusions quite inescapable; but at the same time I am open to revision of my faith based on better argumentation or feedback from experience. 

All things considered, it strikes me as best to proceed with humility and commitment to the project of developing systems of symbols and propositions that provisionally represent reality in ways that better allow us to navigate life collaboratively and dialogically. That’s what we’re doing anyway.