The perspectival account of faith

According to the perspectival account of faith, faith is a kind of perspective. To understand what a perspective is, we should first focus on construals. A construal is what Wittgenstein calls ‘seeing as’ or ‘aspect seeing’, such as when someone construes the same image at one time as a duck and another time as a rabbit (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Duck-Rabbit. This is a portion of the image ‘Kaninchen und Ente’ (‘Rabbit and Duck’) from the 23 October 1892 issue of Fliegende Blätter.

When one looks at Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit, one sees bits of ink as making up – or structured in such a way so as to form – a duck or a rabbit. One's perspective involves construing – integrating particulars (bits of ink) into meaningful wholes in order to structure those particulars (e.g. into a picture of a duck) – which in turn gives meaning to the particulars (e.g. this bit of ink is part of a beak). In some cases, we might be able to shift back and forth between construals to create different gestalts, though we do not need to do so in order to see the image as, for example, a duck. Such a construal need not be occurrent to one's mind, but it can be; one can, for example, realize that one is seeing the image as a duck, and one might realize that such an image could be seen as a rabbit, but one need not realize any of this in order to see the image as a duck.

A perspective involves a construal plus the ascription of importance to the construal.Footnote ⁴ For example, an army general might construe troop movements as dangerous to those troops and, seeing such movements as important, order the troops to move differently. As a contrast, one can see Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit as a duck without any ascription of importance to that construal.

We all have perspectives on the world. For example, one has a perspective on the world by construing the world as providentially guided, in which case particulars (e.g. unlikely events) might seem more important (e.g. as acts of God) than were one to construe the world as operating solely on the basis of impersonal forces. Alternatively, one could have a perspective on the world according to which nothing exists besides the materialistic universe, there is nothing to guide the universe, and personal choices are not meaningful. (There are also perspectives that are combinations of these two perspectives.) Someone with the former perspective and someone with the latter perspective might have all the same information about the world; they differ by how they construe that information and the importance that they assign to that construal. In both cases, a complex body of information is construed into a holistic structure that gives meaning or importance to the particular bits of information one has. It is worth noting that one can have a perspective on the world without being aware of such a perspective in much the same way one might act in ways that have been culturally influenced without being aware of the cultural influence on one's behaviour.

Our perspectives are cognitive; they are aimed at representing the world in a particular way and so have a mind-to-world direction of fit. However, perspectives are not beliefs, assumptions, or acceptances; they do not have propositions as their objects, and perspectives, but not beliefs, assumptions, or acceptances, are ways of construing the world. To be sure, one might have a perspective according to which the world is providentially guided, and that subject might also believe that the world is providentially guided, but the cognitive states – one's perspective and one's belief – are nevertheless distinct. Perspectives are, in a way, more fundamental than one's beliefs, providing the subject with reasons for their beliefs, as will be described below. Further, although perspectives are cognitive, one might be able to act in ways that affect one's perspective, as will also be shown below. So, although perspectives are cognitive, they are not immune to (perhaps only indirect) volitional revision.

There are three features of perspectives relevant to faith worth mentioning here. First, faith perspectives are value-oriented. Faith perspectives are value-oriented if they structure particulars so as to indicate significant value in the particulars (where ‘significant’ is here left vague, which accords with the fact that it is sometimes vague whether one's perspective counts as faith). Arguably, duck-rabbit perspectives are not faith perspectives since there is not significant value to some bits of ink being a beak or ears, whereas a perspective according to which the world is providentially guided is a value-oriented perspective, since it is significantly valuable that particular events are divinely guided.

Second, faith perspectives can direct subjects' motivation to act in particular ways. One's perspective alone is insufficient to motivate a subject – cognitive states (like perspectives) alone do not motivate behaviour; the subject also needs desires, cares, or concerns. The subject's perspective directs and orients those desires, cares, or concerns so as to motivate the subject to act in particular ways. This motivational work is achieved by virtue of the fact that one's faith perspective – a construal of the world in ways that are value-oriented and important – affects which values are salient to the subject and what the weights of those values are. Perspectives ‘structure awareness of a kind of intelligible order which can serve as a guide to a way of life’.Footnote ⁵ For example, those who construe the world as having value derived from God might be motivated to seek God when they are endeavouring to attain something valuable, whereas someone without such a perspective might not be so motivated.

Third, one's perspectival faith affects one's evidence, providing subjects with reasons for beliefs.Footnote ⁶ Perspectives do so in two ways. The first is direct, by making it so that things appear to subjects in certain ways. If things appear to one in certain ways, one thereby has a reason to believe that those things are the way in which they appear. Just as seeing an object as blue provides one with a reason for believing that the object is blue, the world's appearing in a particular way due to one's construal of it (one's perspective) gives one evidence that provides one with a reason for believing the world is that way. For example, construing Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit as a duck makes it so that the image appears to one as if it is a duck, and one thereby has a reason to believe that the image is of a duck. Similarly, someone who construes the world as guided by God is appeared to as if the world is guided by God and thereby has a reason to believe that the world is guided by God.Footnote ⁷

Faith also affects one's evidence indirectly.Footnote ⁸ By affecting which values are salient to the subject and what the weights of those values are, a perspective makes it so that there is different evidence for a subject's inferential belief to certain propositions than there would be were the subject to have a different perspective, one in which different values of the world would have appeared to the subject with different weights. For example, if a subject with the providential guidance perspective were to observe someone come to life after believing that the person had been dead for several hours, that subject might have strong reasons to believe that the event is an instance of miraculous divine action in the world, as evidenced in part by the world's appearing to the theist as being providentially guided. Someone without such a perspective might not have that reason for believing that the event was an instance of miraculous intervention. In fact, the subject without the providential guidance perspective might even have reason to believe that the appearance of resurrection was a hallucination.Footnote ⁹ Of course, even if one's perspective provides one with reason to believe p by influencing what counts as one's evidence, one might have additional reasons against p and/or doubt whether one's perspective is accurate. The fact that a subject has a perspective according to which p does not, then, ultima facie justify the subject in believing p.

For some examples of perspectives other than the providential guidance perspective, one could see the world as divinely created (or the result of solely materialistic forces), as broken (or operating as it should), as improving (or wasting away), part of a larger purpose (or all there is), or as redeemable (or hopeless). Several of these perspectives might convalesce into a more complex perspective, which one could call a ‘theistic perspective’, which David Holley describes as ‘experiencing things in the world as creations, construing particular impressions as vehicles of divine guidance, and viewing significant personal choices as contributing to or interfering with God's redemptive purposes’.Footnote ¹⁰

Each of the above examples of perspectives are value-oriented; they are ways of construing the world as valuable solely in itself or as having its value derived from God, as being more valuable now or being more valuable later, or as containing all value or as containing only some value in light of beings or events beyond this world.Footnote ¹¹ These various perspectives can also direct motivation to pursue particular courses of action. Those who see the world as having value derived from God might be motivated to seek God when they are endeavouring to attain something valuable, whereas someone without such a perspective might not be so motivated. Those who see the world as being more valuable later might not be as concerned about what happens now than those who see the greatest value as being present, and those who see the world as having value only in light of beings or events beyond this world might be motivated to act for the sake of something outside this world rather than to act for the sake of something occurring here and now. Finally, such perspectives provide reasons for beliefs. Someone with the perspective that the world contains value only in light of beings or events beyond this world might have reasons to believe that fortuitous events are instances of divine intervention, whereas those who do not have such a perspective might not have such reasons, and those who see the world as being more valuable now might have reasons to think that we all should act to protect what we have in the world now, whereas someone without such a perspective might not have those reasons.

It is worth noting that although most of the examples above are about global perspectives, one's perspective can be more local, such that one sees a football game as one that will ultimately culminate in their team's win. This subject's perspective might motivate one to continue watching and cheering louder and provide one with reasons for various beliefs: there's still hope, the game is not yet over, it is worth staying to watch longer, I should cheer even louder.

According to the perspectival account, faith comes in degrees on at least two scales. The first scale is how central one's perspective is. The centrality of a perspective is a matter of how influential the perspective is to the subject's psychology. A central perspective is more likely to influence the subject's behaviour than a peripheral perspective. For subjects for whom a theistic perspective is central, those subjects characterize the world as created by God and as serving a larger purpose but can also, in a way less influential to the subject, characterize some parts of the world as a way to, for example, advance one's career. The second scale is how resistant to co-option or dissolution one's perspective is.Footnote ¹² Someone might have central faith that is overtaken easily by a competing perspective, in which case it has low resistance. Alternatively, someone could have non-central faith that is very resistant to being changed or overtaken, for example, a resistant faith that one's favoured political party will win the next election, even though that faith is not very influential to one's psychology and so is not central.

In order to be an instance of faith, the subject must have a pro-attitude towards the target of one's faith, as construed according to the subject's faith perspective. For the providential guidance perspective to be an instance of faith, then, the subject needs to have a pro-attitude towards the world as providentially guided. A subject cannot, for example, have faith that leads one to see the universe as pointless and resolving to ruin (unless the subject has a pro-attitude towards the world as seen that way), and one cannot have faith that leads one to see the world as involving frequent terrorism, even if one does see the world as involving increasing amounts of terrorism, given that the subject does not have a pro-attitude towards the world as involving frequent terrorism.Footnote ¹³

I have thus far described faith and its relevant upshots: faith is a value-oriented perspective on the world towards which the subject has a pro-attitude. Faith directs subjects' motivation to act in certain ways and provides subjects with reasons for beliefs (either by affecting whether the target proposition appears to the subject or whether the proposition can be inferred from what appears to the subject). Faith can be global or local and can be more or less central and resilient. In the following section, I describe what it is to have faith on the perspectival account.

What it is to have faith

Above I have described what faith perspectives are. In this section, I describe what it is to have a faith perspective. To have faith, I argue, is to adopt a faith perspective. Adoption is distinct from consideration of or the trying on of a perspective. To make this distinction, suppose two people have different and incompatible perspectives. One person, an atheist materialist, sees the universe as wholly material and all there is, and the other, a theist, sees the world as oriented towards divine fulfilment of a mission, just part of a larger picture that involves a powerful, immaterial God. The atheist can consider the other's perspective by examining it from the outside, as it were, offering criticisms, perhaps by showing the theist's perspective to contain internal inconsistencies or clashes with other perspectives and/or beliefs/credences that the theist should reasonably (in the mind of the atheist) endorse.

Distinct from this external consideration is one's trying on the perspective. By trying on the perspective, the atheist attempts to see the world from the theist's perspective, even if the atheist never endorses that perspective nor incorporates that perspective into their life. Despite the atheist's lack of ownership of the perspective, the atheist might nevertheless be able to view the world as oriented towards divine fulfilment of a mission in order to understand how the theist views the world from the inside.Footnote ¹⁴ The atheist might even think fondly of such a perspective (so have a pro-attitude towards that perspective) but for other reasons cannot take oneself to endorse the perspective.

To adopt a perspective, however, is to own the perspective, to incorporate it into one's life, to endorse that perspective as one's own. To adopt the perspective is not merely to try on a perspective; it is to buy it. We can use an analogy involving clothes: to consider some clothes is to look at the clothes from the outside to think about whether the clothes would fit were they to be worn – perhaps the outfit is not the right size or unsuitable for one's wearing in a particular context. To try on the clothes is to wear the clothes to see if they fit. To own the clothes (adopt them) is to purchase them and to wear them as one's own. One might try on clothes that one might have a pro-attitude towards but decide, for some reason or other, not to make them one's own. To do so with a faith perspective is not to have that faith.

To have faith is to adopt a perspective. This is because part of the value of one's faith is the orientation and unity that such faith brings to one's life, and merely considering or trying on a perspective does not bring orientation or unity to one's life. To have faith thus satisfies a desideratum on what it takes to be a person of faith, as articulated by Daniel Howard-Snyder:

To try on a perspective without adopting it would not be to take up an overall stance towards matters that govern important aspects of the subject's life, to unify or structure the subject's life, or to dispose the subject to retain the perspective in the face of difficulties.

Lara Buchak states a weaker desideratum on having faith, that it requires that one is disposed to act on that faith:

Unification of one's life and the disposition to act thus seem to be desiderata for one's having faith, and one cannot achieve this kind of unification and integration by merely considering or trying on various perspectives. One achieves a unified life and a disposition to act by owning, or adopting, a perspective.

Given this account of having faith, we can describe how one can be taught to have a particular faith. Sometimes having a particular perspective requires learning, trusting others' expertise, and a willingness to attend to what others point out as significant.Footnote ¹⁷ Of course, one can learn how to develop a construal by listening to others. For example, someone can point to the ears of the rabbit and say, ‘This makes up the beak of the duck’. This might help the learner undergo a gestalt shift, seeing the image as a duck for the first time. One can also learn how to develop a perspective by learning from an expert about what is important. A general can point to particular troop movement patterns in a video presentation, indicating that those movements are important, which leads the learner to see those movements as not only dangerous but importantly dangerous. Similarly, one can point several events in the world and say, ‘These are happening for the sake of a divine mission’, or ‘These actions have such-and-such potential’, or ‘This is an instance of the brokenness of the world’. By learning how to see bits of information from a perspective different from one's own, one can thereby be in a better position to try on that perspective. By repetitiously trying on the perspective, one might learn how to make the perspective more central to one's psychology (the perspective ‘grows on me’ or ‘just starts to make sense’ or ‘seems fitting’), and as a consequence one might come to adopt the perspective and thus have that faith.Footnote ¹⁸ Aside from pointing out what is important or significant, someone who is trying to lead another to have faith could tell a story, where the narrative indicates what is important about the world. One of the values of myths and learning from others' narrated life experiences is that they orient us towards what matters and indicates what is valuable, inviting us to try on a perspective, which can in turn lead to the adoption of a new perspective.Footnote ¹⁹ Myths and narratives thus help us to have faith.

I have thus far described what faith is and what it is to have faith. Faith is a perspective that is value-oriented, directs motivation, and provides reasons for beliefs, where the subject has a pro-attitude towards the target of one's faith, as construed according to the subject's perspective. To have faith is to adopt a faith perspective rather than merely to consider or try on the perspective. In the next section, I show that the perspectival account of faith (with the accompanying account of having faith) meets methodological criteria for an account of faith. Then, in the following section, I show how the account can be used to unite and provide an account of various faith locutions.

Perspectival faith meets methodological criteria

Jonathan Kvanvig explicitly argues for a methodology for developing an account of faith. He begins this argument by considering the method of linguistic analysis, in which we discover what faith is by tracking how people use the word ‘faith’. Such a method, Kvanvig argues, is unsatisfactory: ‘We can engage philosophically in an analysis of anything in the dictionary, but we don't, and the reason we don't, when it is justifying of our practice, is because we presuppose the value or importance or significance of what we focus on in our philosophical explorations.’Footnote ²⁰ Kvanvig's reason for not engaging in linguistic analysis is that the goal of philosophical theorizing is to discover what is valuable, and we do not have reason to think that linguistic use will track the value of what we aim to analyse. The same can be said for a method that aims to track the history of a concept to be analysed: neither the history of thought about the concept nor the history of the use of the term to denote the concept is itself sufficient for an understanding of the value of the concept itself. Although such a study might help one to discover some valuable features of the concept, such a method is insufficient for developing an account of a concept.

Kvanvig's positive proposal is that when one is developing an account of faith, one should aim to develop an account of faith worth having. This axiomatic approach is what makes philosophy worth doing, and it reveals what is valuable about what is being analysed – faith, in this case. Of course, one cannot identify just any valuable concept with faith; one needs parameters to discover which of the myriad valuable concepts is faith. Here, Kvanvig assigns a role for the use of the term ‘faith’; he avers that when we are developing an account of faith, we need to look for a valuable state ‘in the neighborhood of things pointed to’ by the word ‘faith’.Footnote ²¹ This method seems to be widely endorsed in the contemporary literature on faith. For example, although some people might use ‘faith’ to mean trust, many faith theorists nevertheless do not identify faith with trust, maintaining that faith is something else entirely, such as a belief of a certain kind or formed in a certain way,Footnote ²² a commitment of some kind,Footnote ²³ resilience,Footnote ²⁴ pursuit of an ideal,Footnote ²⁵ a passion,Footnote ²⁶ or a complex attitude.Footnote ²⁷

I am adopting the same methodology in this article. In the previous section, I have indicated a valuable state – having a value-oriented perspective – in the neighbourhood of things pointed to by the word ‘faith’. Not only is having a value-oriented perspective a valuable state in the neighbourhood of what is pointed to by ‘faith’; a perspective is also a valuable state in the neighbourhood of what is pointed to by various faith locutions (various locutions in which ‘faith’ is used), which I show in the next section.

Perspectival faith unifies faith locutions

Accounts of faith simpliciter and having faith have been given, but there are many other faith locutions. These locutions include having faith that p (propositional faith), having faith in something (attitudinal faith), being a person of faith (global faith), articles of faith (creedal faith), and acts of faith (praxical faith). It is possible that there are many different accounts of faith, perhaps even one for each faith locution,Footnote ²⁸ but the aim here is to show that the perspectival account of faith can unify all of these faith locutions. Although the perspectival account of faith could perhaps stand on its own merely as an account of faith simpliciter, a view is more powerful to the extent that it can do more work, and for the purpose of showing the power of the account, I will show how the account extends to other faith locutions.

In what follows, I argue that the valuable state in the neighbourhood of what is pointed to by the word ‘faith’ – having a value-oriented perspective – is the same across various faith locutions. To show how the various faith locutions are united, I show that these locutions are focally connected in much the same way Aristotle holds that ‘a healthy body’, ‘healthy food’, and ‘a healthy heart rate’ are focally connected. According to Aristotle, health of a body is the core, or focal, use of ‘health’ (a kind of well-functioning), and other health locutions are defined in terms of it – for example, broccoli is healthy insofar as it confers bodily health, and certain heart rates are healthy insofar as they express bodily health.Footnote ²⁹ Similarly, as I describe below, propositional faith, attitudinal faith, global faith, articles of faith, and acts of faith are all defined in terms of perspectival faith.

Perspectival faith escapes objections to cognitive accounts

Although the perspectival account of faith is a cognitive account of faith, the perspectival account of faith escapes extant objections to cognitive accounts. Many objections to cognitive accounts of faith target accounts according to which faith requires belief. However, faith, according to the perspectival account, is general enough to be compatible with the view that faith does not require belief (and it is compatible with the view that faith does require belief). An argument would need to be made that perspectival faith does require belief. Daniel Howard-Snyder, arguably the most ardent advocate of the view that faith does not require belief, nevertheless maintains that faith requires some cognitive component, even if that component is assumption. To assume p is to represent the world as if p, which ‘functions similarly to belief in reasoning and other behavior’.Footnote ⁴² The description of assumption captures one aspect of a perspective – the subject represents the world as if p – but does not quite capture the notion of construal, along with its importance and value-orientation. Howard-Snyder arrives at the conclusion that faith does not require an epistemic state stronger than assumption by giving cases in which one has faith that p but one is in doubt about whether p, one would not tend to assert p if asked, and would not be surprised if p were not to obtain. All of this is compatible with the perspectival account of faith: one might have faith that one's team will win (which is just to have a perspective according to which one's team wins the game plus a pro-attitude towards that proposition) while being in doubt about whether one's team will win, without tending to assert that one's team will win when asked, and without being surprised were one's team not to win. This is because perspectives are not always reflected upon, are not always accessible to those who have them, not always articulable by the subject, and can be weak, or non-resilient. Having a faith perspective in these ways might not be ideal, but it is having faith nonetheless. Having perspectival faith can thus meet Howard-Snyder's criteria even though to have a faith perspective is not merely to make an assumption.

Jonathan Kvanvig also argues against doxastic accounts of faith. Kvanvig maintains that views according to which faith is a belief or the disposition to believe truths supported by the evidence are false because ‘the importance of faith is disproportionate to the intellectual value and virtue of believing truths supported by evidence’.Footnote ⁴³ In fact, Kvanvig says, there is no underlying cognitive attitude held by all people of faith; the exemplars of faith (and other people of faith) do not share any cognitive attitude. Kvanvig adds that rational attitudes are thoroughly perspectival, so we shouldn't expect there to be a particular rational attitude that underlies faith: ‘[R]ationality is always and everywhere sensitive to change in first-person perspective.’Footnote ⁴⁴

The perspectival view of faith escapes Kvanvig's objections to cognitive accounts of faith. Having a perspective that orients the subject towards what is valuable is itself valuable – more valuable than the beliefs or belief dispositions that might result from having the perspective. These perspectives direct the subject's motivation; the perspective according to which God keeps promises is what directed Abraham's motivation to obey God by leaving Mesopotamia, and a little leaguer's perspective according to which he will improve so as never to give up a game-losing home run again can direct the little leaguer's motivation to keep practising. Such perspectives orient and structure lives, which is surely valuable. In fact, the structuring and orienting function of faith is what leads Kvanvig to hold that his own account of affective faith is valuable.Footnote ⁴⁵

Kvanvig might be correct that no two people have the same rational attitude. The perspectival account is compatible with this view. For two people to have faith does not require that each one has the same perspective; it simply requires that each person has a perspective with the features described in the first section. In fact, according to Kvanvig, someone has faith if they are disposed to act in service of an ideal, but there is no requirement that the ideal be the same across those who have faith or that each person's faith is as central or resilient as another's. Nevertheless, two token perspectives might belong to the same perspective-type by virtue of satisfying an expression of the most important feature(s) of the perspectives. Both Abraham and Moses, for example, could have construed the world as one directed by God who rewards those who seek God,Footnote ⁴⁶ thus making their faith of the same type.Footnote ⁴⁷

The perspectival account of faith thus escapes objections to cognitive accounts of faith given by Howard-Snyder and Kvanvig. Those objections are aimed at doxastic accounts by holding that such accounts are too strong for the requirements on faith in some cases (Howard-Snyder) and are not valuable enough (Kvanvig). However, the perspectival account of faith presents a valuable cognitive state that is possessed by someone with faith, and the valuable cognitive state has no belief requirement – at least not without additional argument.