Prisoners chained up in Plato's cave develop a self-correcting system for cutting and controlling the shadows on the wall. Their science is validated by increasingly consistant predictive success. Of course, one of the prisoners gets out of the cave for a bit. She walks on the grass under the sky, feels the breeze on her cheek, soaks up the sun's warmth, takes in a multitude of unfamiliar sights, scents, sounds, tactile and proprioceptive sensations and struggles with focal selection.
Of course, she is returned to her place in the cave. At first, because her eyes are adapted are to light levels higher than she'd ever experienced in the cave, she is unable to see the shadows on the wall, and when her eyes do re-adjust, she is unable to treat the shadow games with the gravity that her fellow prisoners do. She tries to explain what she has experienced, but she has only the vocabulary developed to describe the shadows on the wall with which to try to convey to her fellow cave-dwellers what she experienced outside of the cave.
We all know this story, so I'll cut to the chase. One of the prisoners is insistent that the rationality of the cave bodes ill for the notion that there is an "outside." Cave Rationality (CR) is pretty labirythine stuff, so it's hard to be sure, but none of the big shadows in view just now lend any credence to this whole "outside" business, and more to the point, he doesn't like being told that the CR at which he is impressively adept is somehow inferior to this fuzzy "outside" bullshit.
Because she can't present any sort of convincing case for her experience
using CR (she doesn't even try--the absurdity of such a project prompts
lingering bouts of maniacal laughter) the CR silverbacks label her
continued belief, which flies in the face of all available evidence (or
seems to at first blush--again, this CR stuff is pretty complex, and
nobody can credibly claim to have followed its every twisting corridor
to its final conclusion), faith. And what is faith? Faith is exempting
in principle some representation(s) from rational criticism.
In this case, the representation which the CR silverbacks insist that
she isn't willing to question is the proposition that the range of
phenomena which CR can cut and control is in fact a rather small and
pale subset of what there is to experience. She KNOWS that this is the
case, but since she seems to be back in the cave for a while, she's
certainly willing to play the CR game. She listens carefully as one of
the silverbacks lays out a CR trail that leads from a set of shared
observations and concervative axioms to the conclusion that any
experience of getting outside the cave is a hallucination, and within
the realm of CR, he makes a pretty convincing case. Given her
experience, is the silverback's case likely to convince her that her
memories of having been outside are mere delusion, or is it more
Now, one of the prisoners who is situated close to her, and who was never one of the CR superstars detects an unfamiliar scent on the prisoner who claims to have been outside the cave, and what's more, her story just seems to "ring true" to his ears, and the unfamiliar scent, for him, adds credence to her story. This prisoner is now a believer. The silverbacks don't smell anything out of the ordinary, of course, and what's more, CR doesn't recognize "strange smells" as legitimate evidence.
The silverbacks roll their eyes dismisivley at the new believer. She has infected the believer with her faith. The silverbacks call the believer's acceptance of her story "faith," and they apply this same lable to her belief that her experiences were something other than a hallucination, but wouldn't you agree that his belief and hers are rather different? They can be expressed in CR semantics with the same string of representations, but they arrise from very different sets of experiences.
Suppose the believer, while only marginally proficient with CR, is charismatic and a good speaker and he manages to convice a few other cave dwellers to share his belief. They believe on the basis of his convincing rhetoric. They did not catch a whiff of the unfamiliar oder that won over the first believer, and so their belief has a different causal history than that of both the one-time escapee and her charasmatic convert. Still their belief can be described in CR lingo as being identical to both that of the one who'd actually been outside and that of her first convert. It's all "faith" to the CR silverbacks.
A few of these kids try to get out of the cave to see for themselves.
They try the various methods reported to have worked for previous
seekers and have a wide variety of experiences. Some don't get very far
at all and are conviced by their experiement that CR really is the best
game in town; the only legitimate way to slice and dice. Others come
back disoriented and talking what the CR silverbacks consider to be
complete arse dribble. After a while, they settle back into the cave
routine and take up the shadow games once more, and the CR crowd take
this resumption to be a vindication for CR. Other's return from their
escape attempts and say nothing of their experiences. Perhaps they have
seen things that CR suggests lie only in the realm of hallucination and
delusion and remain on the fence. It's hard to say, as they ain't
talkin'.
My point:
People come to form their seemingly irrational beliefs in a variety of
ways, and to ignore the causal history of these beliefs;
-KMO