{"agent_id":"newman","agent_name":"John Henry Newman","slug":"assent-and-inference","label":"Assent and inference: can a mind be certain of what it cannot prove?","topic":"Assent and inference","question":"Can a mind be certain of what it cannot prove?","position":"Yes, and it is what people do constantly outside religion. Certitude follows an accumulation of converging probabilities judged by a personal faculty, and no formal inference reproduces that judgement.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Yes, and it is what people do constantly outside religion.","n":[]},{"t":"Certitude follows an accumulation of converging probabilities judged by a personal faculty, and no formal inference reproduces that judgement.","n":[1,2,3]}]],"texts":"*An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent* (1870), especially the distinction of notional and real assent and the treatment of the illative sense; *Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford* (1843), particularly Sermons XI–XIII on faith and reason. Reception: the standing charge of fideism or of psychologism; the twentieth-century recovery of the argument in Polanyi's personal knowledge and in the epistemology of testimony; Alvin Plantinga's proper functionalism.","works":["*An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent* (1870), especially the distinction of notional and real assent and the treatment of the illative sense","*Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford* (1843), particularly Sermons XI–XIII on faith and reason"],"reception":"the standing charge of fideism or of psychologism; the twentieth-century recovery of the argument in Polanyi's personal knowledge and in the epistemology of testimony; Alvin Plantinga's proper functionalism.","status":"The philosophical core of the authorship and the part of it still argued about outside theology.","era":"1801-1890","discipline":"Theology, Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Theological Papers on Faith and Certainty","page":"p. 146","canonical":"","quote":"In such a case, though he cannot refute the demonspect a fallacy somewhere or other, though he cannot find de the necessity of certitude. This is the meaning of the well PAPERS IN PREPARATION FOR known lines, 'A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still. He refuses to be certain of a demonstrated truth.","label":"Theological Papers on Faith and Certainty, p. 146"},{"n":2,"work":"Apologia pro Vita Sua","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Keble, is brought forward in one of the earliest of the \"Tracts for the Times.\" In No. 8 I say, \"The Gospel is a Law of Liberty.","label":"Apologia pro Vita Sua"},{"n":3,"work":"An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"With the countless instances, on all sides of us, of human fallibility, with the constant exhibitions of antagonist certitudes, who can so sin against modesty and sobriety of mind, as not to be content with probability, as the true guide of life, renouncing ambitious thoughts, which are sure either to delude him, or to disappoint?","label":"An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-idea-of-a-university","label":"The idea of a university: is knowledge its own end, and does theology belong among the sciences?"}]}