Pluralism is a Book, Not a Shelf -or- Why Mine is Better Than Yours
Pluralism and the ‘Belief System’
The term 'belief system' is used a lot these days. When hearing it, we might most often think of religious views, but it need not be limited to that area- philosophical, political and ethical system could be described by this title, even scientific thought. It is loosely understood to be a set of related beliefs and notions that form one's overall outlook of the subject in question. A belief system, then, is not just taken as a collection of things, but as a single unit as well- a whole, that can be discussed, and one compared to another- this belief system vs. that one.
Once we accept that a belief system is something that can be discussed as a single unit, it’s only natural to make certain claims about them. We may talk about what evidence there is for this or that belief system, how they compare to each other, how they ‘describe the world around us’, their psychological origins, and so on. One of the most basic things to point out about belief systems is that they are in conflict with each other by definition - if two systems had no points of conflict, they would be the same system. Since we seem to think we hold our beliefs for good reasons (logic, evidence, perhaps duty), it’s only natural that we would compare those systems that conflict with our own, to see which is superior by those varied standards.
It is here that pluralism enters into it. Pluralism is loosely a response to the above situation, and can take on many forms. The central hub of all of them though is that many various belief systems meet certain standards that make them respectable. Socially, the pluralist may say that we will get along better if we respect people with other systems, because those systems are respectable themselves. Ethically, the pluralist may say that we ought to do so. Philosophically, the pluralist may argue that many belief systems are in fact equally valid- they are in equal positioning with each other, with respect to the truth. It is this last sort of pluralism that I will address directly, but my conclusions will no doubt affect every sort.
Pluralism and Skepticism
The pluralist expresses himself in ways that are at times relativistic or skeptical. The idea that one set of beliefs is no better than another can lead to relativism quite easily, and is perhaps at it's root. It would seem only a natural progression to say that the truth is dependent on the individual or his society once it has been established that a variety of systems are equally viable. In fact, they will be treated as much the same thing in this essay- where they separate from each other is that the pluralist is making a practical or societal claim where the relativist is making an epistemological claim. These will both be addressed as 'pluralism' in this essay, with the distinction being between different sorts of 'belief system' they attempt to address.
What's more important is that pluralism (and relativism) get their foundation in the sort of skepticism I criticized in my previous paper, Preservation of Truth as a Methodology. Pluralism gets it's life from the perceived flaws in multiple systems- flaws that can never fully be exorcised. The presumption of these flaws as ubiquitous, as was as the presumption that they cannot be overcome, is dependent on a view of knowledge that sees everything as suspect until it has been fully [i]proven[/i]. Thus, the pluralist is most often put in the position of saying everybody is wrong, not right, though it generally presented as non-confrontationally as possible.
Belief Systems as Social and Philosophical Phenomenon
Just as there are a couple ways to define pluralism, there are at least two distinct things that we mean when we say 'belief system'. I want to spend some time on this, because I think the distinction is very often missed. The two kinds of belief system I think exist I will from here describe as 'Social' and 'Epistemic'.
A social belief system is first and foremost shared by many people. Capitalism, Christianity, Islam, Liberalism, Humanism can all be considered social belief systems. Insofar as they are defined, the definition is left loose, to incorporate as many people as possible. The majority of people who follow a certain belief system have no problems identifying themselves and each other as being part of it, but there are always fringes- especially with religion, it becomes an important question whether or not certain groups or individuals are really properly classified as being under the title of the belief system they may lay claim to. Another feature of social belief systems is, unsurprisingly, people end up within them for social reasons more often then not. Members of a particular faith or political outlook are often so because of who they were raised by or associate themselves with. Because of these extra-rational concerns, beliefs among the 'common' members of a system may be quite a bit different than among the more scholarly.
An epistemic belief system is unique in itself. It is a particular set of propositions that are either correct or incorrect. While an individual may come to their epistemic belief system based on social considerations, they are not in any way defined by this character, but by their propositional content alone. While two people may both be Catholic with respect to their social belief system, their epistemic belief systems may be quite a bit different- to the degree that the collection ‘Catholicism’ allows for variance within it. There is no variance within an epistemic belief system, since it just the one set of beliefs, though an individual may change from one epistemic system to another over time. That is to say, though I may have many contrary beliefs at different points in my life, and call them call ‘Christianity’ as I have them, each one is epistemically unique. Most directly, we can call identify an epistemic belief system E as “All the beliefs person p has at time t with respect to subject s.” While the beliefs of p about s may be quite a bit different in t+1 and Ât+2, these alternate beliefs at these alternate times are properly known as E+1 and E+2. E, E+1, and E+2 may all be considered “Christianity” by p, however, based on an understanding he has of Christianity as a social belief system. So then, the relationship between all instances of E in a person’s life is analogous to the relationship between different individuals’ beliefs that fall under the same broad social belief system.
Pluralism and Social Belief Systems
The pluralist wants to say that various social belief systems are equally valid. There are several ways this can be meant. Let me deal with them in order of least to most coherent. First, the pluralist may mean to say that multiple distinct social belief systems are completely, factually, true. We can eliminate this right away as a possibility, since by definition, any one social belief system contains within itself views that are contradictory and incongruent. It makes no logical sense to call just one social belief system completely factually correct, much less multiples. To say that Christianity is completely correct is to endorse and condemn infant baptism at the same time and in the same sense. So, the pluralist must mean to say that various social belief systems contain equal amounts of truth within them, along with some falsehoods. There needs to be some clarification on what this means, however.
Presumably, atheists, Jews, Socialists, Libertarians and Neo-Conservatives all believe that the Sun rises in the East and sets in the West. They all believe that Mars is a planet, and that rain tends to fall down rather than up. If this is all the pluralist means, then I have no dispute. However, it would be dubious to say that members sharing these beliefs extends any validity to the social belief system itself. It must rather be those (or some of those) belief unique to the system that are true. Now, as an exclusivist, I think that Mormonism is incorrect. It is easy for me to state this as
“I believe that all epistemic belief systems rightly called Mormon belief systems are incorrect by virtue of some of those qualities that make them uniquely Mormon”.
Now, what is the pluralistic equivalent to this statement? it cannot be
“I believe that all epistemic beliefs systems rightly called Mormon belief systems are intellectually valid by virtue of some of those qualities that make them uniquely Mormon”
for the we have the problem of contradiction within the same system outlined above. To get around this problem, we might word the pluralists’ affirmation as such:
“I believe that some uniquely Mormon claims are valid. I believe that some uniquely Jewish claims are valid. I believe that some uniquely X, Y, and Z claims are valid, and so I believe that many social belief systems are equally, intellectually valid.”
Is this a good claim for the pluralist to make? If the point is about the validity of claims, then it is fair to ask where claims get their validity from. Epistemic disputes aside, what most everyone can agree on is that validity must come in part from the justification the believers provide for them. And here again is a bit of a problem for the pluralist. For, even given the exact same claim, the justifications given for it will be radically different across individuals. Some may justify a belief through reason (and reasoning may vary), someone else may justify the same belief through authority, another through intuition. Some of these may be good or bad. So let me propose one final, strengthened version of what the pluralist means to say about social belief systems:
"Within all these social belief systems, you will find a sufficient number of people who hold the core beliefs for the right reasons."
This is simple, does not contain any obvious incoherence, and even has some intuitive appeal- we do see competent people arguing for a variety of different views on a variety of different situations, after all. But what the pluralist has given us through this kind of statement is grounds for falsifiability. Let us call those people who believe the right things for the right reasons to be paragons of their belief systems. Leaving aside the question of what exactly the 'right reasons' are, the statement above makes claims to quantity. It is no given that there are as many Sikh paragons as Muslim paragons. It seems fair to judge validity of a belief system through per capita paragon instance. But even this is not a given- culturally, there may be all sorts of reasons why Capitalists reach paragon status more often than Socialists- emphasis on the right kinds of education in their societies, easily understood key texts, and so on. What we need is a series of bylaws explaining how Muslim A in society B with education C qualifies as a Paragon if he believes 1, 2, and 3. Then, we need to add up the number of Muslim Paragons and compare it (adjusted for population) with whatever beliefs we wish to claim are equally valid.
Or, the statement may not be comparative. Perhaps there is a certain percentage of paragons, that once reached, gives a social belief system it's validity. 15%, of total believing population, say. Perhaps Taoism enjoys a level of paragon status well above this mark, whereas Communism has classically floated right at the mark, often just a little below. In a case like this, belief systems that sit right on the mark gain or lose their validity from day to day as people die or change their minds, or become converted.
Theoretically, under both of these systems, a belief system could lose it's 'equally valid' status through twists of fate and circumstance. These possible states of affairs combined with an apparent lack of hard figures to settle them with means that when a pluralist is essentially guessing when they say one belief system is as valid as another. Or, it could be a matter of faith- a certain faith that no matter what the circumstances, the statistics will always work out. This faith would be of the most unfounded sort, however, since everything in history points to it being more likely false than true.
Hopefully, the pluralist reading this is finding the whole notion of counting paragons to reach Valid status to be rather silly, and admittedly, this was my point. It should be clear through this dissection that the pluralist does not, in fact, mean anything so strict when they call a belief system 'valid' compared to another. In fact, it should be clear now that what is intended by the pluralist is not a circumstantially falsifiable statement at all- if all the paragons of capitalism died in a hotel fire tonight, then capitalism would, I take it, still be as valid as the pluralist ever took it to be. So then, either the pluralist is making a non-rational claim, something about how we ought to treat capitalists, or something we should acknowledge about what it's like to be a capitalist, or else they are talking about the absolute value of the key propositions, divorced from the justification of the individuals that support it. I think it's clear that both sorts of pluralists exists. The pluralist who is at root making claims about how people ought to treat each other is guilty only of using slightly misleading language, and will not be a further concern of this essay. However, there are those who would claim that broad sets of discrete propositions are equally valid, even though they have different content. A set of propositions divorced from the concerns of the individual that holds them is an epistemic belief system, and so we must now turn our attention there.
Pluralism and Epistemic Belief Systems
We have seen that the pluralist has little to say about social belief systems- they are too varied to and contradictory to call them 'true', and discussions about intellectual validity boil down to counting scholars. The best the pluralist can do about social belief systems is make claims about how we ought to treat the people who adhere to them. Now, what about epistemic belief systems? Can the pluralist credibly say that this collection of propositions is as intellectually valid as that one?
Let us quickly distinguish between truth and validity. The pluralist that says contradicting belief systems (say, the belief that it is raining and the belief that it is not) can both be literally true is obviously incorrect, and we hardly need concern ourselves further with them- a pluralist for whom contradiction is not a hallmark of incorrectness is playing by different rules we have no capacity to evaluate. But it's not necessary for the pluralist to do so- they can merely make the claim about equal validity. That is, that two contradicting beliefs can both be held for equally good reasons, even though the truth of them is still up in the air. So then. How am I to be convinced that something I believe may be no more or less valid than a contradicting thing which somebody else believes? Through the simple assertion,
“You might be wrong”.
It is this, and rephrasings of this, that are the cornerstone of epistemic pluralism wherever it is encountered. Is this statement true? What does it really say? What is it’s value in philosophical discourse? These are the most important questions I will answer in this section.
Might we really be wrong, in all the situations that the pluralist is likely to say it? I think we have to give them this point. No matter what field we are discussing, and no matter what our level of expertise, we were once an novice making novincial errors. The fact that we have in the past been wrong about things that seem obvious to us now is all we need to see that we still might be, since no level of training is going to be 100% complete, the possibility of such errors creeping forward into our current thinking is always there. So I think that the possibility for us to be wrong about not only highly technical matters, but about things that seem simple to us is definitely there, and a fair point for the pluralist to make. We should consider the fact that we may always be wrong, when approaching a discussion.
What is the complete content of “You might be wrong”, though? There are a lot of times and senses in which the phrase might be used. One of the most common ways to express this is to say “You might be wrong about that”. In other words, a proposition p might be incorrect. Are these really equivalent statements though? Intuitively, it seems so. But let me consider an extreme example. Let us look at logical necessity.
Suppose you took a course in the logic of syllogisms, having no prior experience in such things. Suppose that you are trained to understand that if all A’s are B, and all B’s are C’, then all A’s are C, as most of us have been taught at one point or another. Let us suppose further that this concept is difficult for you for some reason- perhaps you see the truth of each example provided, but do not grasp why it must always be true. Or perhaps the substitution of terms for variables has you confused about the real meaning of the axiom. Either way, you need help in learning this principal. If you’re anything like me, it would be easy to imagine coming up with a mnemonic device to keep the principle in mind. So, you have a principle that you don’t really understand, but at least you have this tool to keep yourself from making errors.
But what if you phrase the tool wrongly? What if the way you use to memorize this principle actually helps you remember “If all A’s are B, and all B’s are C, then all C’s are A”? This isn’t necessarily true at all, and yet it would be easy to overlook. So, because of your mistaken principle you find yourself making arguments of this sort:
“All cats are mammals, are mammals are animals, and so, all animals are cats”. It seems like an obvious error, but substitute the widely-known subjects of cats and animals for something more technical, like say sub-dorsal vertebrae on a certain breeds of tropical fish, and you have a situation that may easily be overlooked, even work it’s way into textbooks. We can imagine the same scenario with any logical axiom, just as easily. The worst thing about this, is the person who believes this wrong principle was taught that it was a matter of logical necessity- that is, not just that it’s correct, but that it’s impossible to be incorrect about such.
My point here is two fold. First, we can be wrong about even matters of logical necessity. “You could be wrong” applies even to what we’ve been told is impossible to be wrong about. Even if you consider the scenario above unlikely, it’s certainly not impossible. However, it is still not possible for ‘If all A’s are B, and all B’s are C, then all A’s are C’ to be wrong, it’s still a matter of logical necessity. So then, what we’re forced to accept is that
“You could be wrong about x”
and
“x may be incorrect”.
do not have the same propositional content.
Now that that point has been established, let us look at how "you might be wrong’ affects philosophical investigations. The two broadest examples of argumentation are the deductive and the inductive, and I will investigate how our modified understanding of the pluralist’s claim affects them both.
Pluralism and Deduction
First, for deductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning seeks to examine the propositional content of claims, to determine through contradiction and necessity whether the claims must be true, must be false, or must be unknown (truth is necessarily not established by the argument). There are no matters of probability or intuition within deduction, in fact reliance on these things is considered fallacious. Inductive reasoning covers these sorts of arguments, and we will address it shortly. For now though, let us consider a corrected version of our cat syllogism.
All cats are mammals,
all mammals are animals,
therefore all cats are animals.
There are a number of ways the pluralist principle of can be applied to such an argument, as usual, let’s deal with the weakest first. The weakest way the argument could be applied would be to say that a person could be wrong about the principle that needs from the premises to the conclusion. We’ve seen that people can be wrong about matters of logical necessity, but we’ve also seen that matters of logical necessity are still just that, and cannot be false. So then, what is the precise difference between the pluralist principle, and a specific claim that a proposition is incorrect? It’s in how the claim is brought into evidence. The claim that people can, in general, be wrong about things is outside the scope of the syllogism, and so evidence for it does not apply deductively. The specific claim that I might be wrong about this can be properly responded to in a deductive argument with “But am I?”, since deduction takes no interest in probability. If the response is to show how a person is wrong in fact about the principle behind the syllogism, that attempt will fail since it’s a matter of logical necessity. If the response is to claim that since people have been wrong about matters of logical necessity in the past, that this might be one of those situations, then that is a clear example of the fallacy of induction, and is flawed reasoning that cannot affect the argument. Essentially, since we have demonstrated that “You might be wrong about X” does not equate to a logical doubting of X, the pluralists claim cannot in any way be introduced to the argument formally.
The stronger way for the pluralist to apply their principle is to say that the premises themselves might be incorrect, even if the relationship between them is grounding in correct principles. Maybe all cats aren’t mammals, or maybe no mammals are animals. This seems to be a much stronger view at first, but I would argue that it only pushes the problem back a step. For, there are fundamentally going to be two kinds of premises in these arguments, the rational and the empirical. If the premises are rational, that is, based on analytic relationships between concepts, then sooner or later the pluralist is going to run aground of the same problems listed above- they must move away from ‘you might be wrong’ to ‘you are wrong’, and that amounts to arguing for a side, not pluralism at all. Alternately, as in this case, the premises could be empirical- products of observation. Empirical premises can only be examined evidentially, not deductively, and so here again the pluralist has been forced out of deductive examination.
Pluralism and Induction
This should suffice to show that pluralism has no place in deductive reasoning. Now, what about induction? Induction relies on premises that are not certain, but have a strong degree of intuitive appeal, or a strong apparent probability of truth. An example of an inductive argument would be
There are catlike pawprints on the hood of my car.
Cats often walk on the hoods of cars, and leave tracks not unlike these.
A cat has recently walked on the hood of my car.
This argument has a great deal of persuasive power, but for reasons completely unlike the deductive argument. Notice that it's entirely possible that somebody with a cat-paw stamping device made prints of little paws all over the hood of my car, and that no actual cat was involved. In fact, there are an indefinitely large number of scenarios that can produce cat-like prints on a car, that do not involve a cat so walking. All inductive arguments have a crucial element wrapped up in [i]who we are[/i], the audience. We find the evidence given as strong indication that a cat walked on the car, because we live in a world with a great many cats, and not so many cat-foot-stamping-machines. If we lived in another society, where stamping cat footprints on the hoods of cars was a common expression of political activism, while at the same time actual cats were nearly extinct, the same evidence would lead us in completely different directions. It would seem in this kind of argument, then, that "You might be wrong" would have much greater impact.
However, consider the nature of an inductive argument a little more closely. As noted above, with any inductive argument, there are always other alternatives- it is true that we 'could always be wrong'. However, the acceptance of the argument comes from an internal balancing of one conclusion versus all others- a cat walking on the car is the most likely for us of all possibilities. We can't quantify it precisely, but it would be easy to say that we consider no other possibility to be worth considering, the odds of this one are so strong. Other inductive arguments may be more or less strong than this one- there are inductive arguments that we may only be just slightly inclined to accept. An inductive argument about who might be carrying a concealed weapon, based on how they dress and their demeanor, could be very useful to a security guard, but may very rarely rise to the level of certainty to justify actually detaining or accosting someone.
So then, what is the value of “You might be wrong?” It should be clear that it’s precise value is that of how certain we are not about the particular argument in question. That is to say, if we are 90% sure of something, then we are aware of a 10% chance we are wrong. If we are very uncertain of something, we are aware that there is a strong change we are wrong. So then, for the person who is clearly aware of the nature of an inductive argument, the “You might be wrong’” fact seems to be true, but none the less contributes nothing at all. The very nature of something being inductively persuasive involves a mental occurrence like “I might be wrong, but I doubt it”. So, the inductive strength of ‘you might be wrong’ by it’s very nature will always be less than the strength of an inductive argument that has actually convinced someone, and thus has zero power to convince in itself.
Nonetheless, it may be applicable in a few basic situations- for example, it may be instructive to point out ‘you may be wrong’ to someone who has mistaken an inductive argument for a deductive one, or who otherwise mistakes conviction with certainty. This use should not be underestimated, and can be good for keeping egos and arguments in check. However, what’s most important here is that ‘you might be wrong’ has no legitimate function to convince somebody that an inductive argument fails, or to make an argument that doesn’t persuade on it’s own more persuasive. It can only affect our attitude to the facts, not the list of facts we perceive.
Fallibility in Summary
We have seen that pointing out that a person may be wrong is certainly true. It’s true in even the strongest deductive cases, and it’s true more obviously in every case of induction. A truth this widespread does have it’s applications, and it certain needs to be pointed out from time to time. However, it has no value in deductive argument, and only a vanishingly small influence in proper induction, so it’s application to specific cases in limited. So, while “you might be wrong” can and should influence the attitudes we take towards each other, it has no persuasive effect in particular discussions, in which the usual comparisons of argument and evidence must take place to make any progress.
Implications of a new Understanding of Pluralism
The foremost is that pluralism cannot be grounded in, or a catalyst for, skepticism. For example, the argument that a religious person ought not stick to their convictions because there are others with equal and contrary convictions will hold no water. A person can respect other religions, and respect the people in them, but arguments about the truth of them remain completely unaffected by the numbers of loyal believers. Pointing out such is fallacious in deductive arguments, and empty in the inductive. However, pluralism gains more than the usual amount of support when it comes to rhetorical ethics- we have seen even stronger reasons to endorse the polite hearing of other views, even when validity cannot be extended to them by default. What my essay should accomplish is a necessary separation between the sort of validity that the pluralist wants to claim for diverse views, and any claim for or against the truth of those views.
In summary, then, the pluralist has a lot to say about how people with differing views treat each other, and gives a good reason why we always ought to be willing to enter into those discussions and investigations that demonstrate the truth or falsehood of our claims. However, the influence of the pluralist stops where those discussions begin, and one who thinks pluralist claims can affect their outcome is in error.
One Final Note: Purely Affirmative Pluralism
There is a final variety of pluralism that would seem not to be addressed here. That is the pluralist who instead of saying “You might be wrong,” they say “Very good, your arguments seem to be right, and yet, many others have arguments that seem to be right as well”. In this vein, they do not question or cast doubts upon any view, but only uphold many as being as valid as their best proponents say they are. This approach has stronger intuitive appeal, and may be able to be formulated in stronger ways than I have addressed here. However, the confirmation this provides can only be, as always, among those who accept the premises. If someone doubts that a contrary view has equally valid arguments in support of it (say, because they have seen those arguments and found them lacking), then the pluralist has no response they can make without entering into all the problematic situations I described above.