| Abstract |
In his posthumous "Pensees", Pascal offered an argument which compares belief in God to a wager, and demonstrated believing in God is the better option. His argument, known as Pascal's wager or Pascal...'s gambit, has, since early days, stimulated a considerable volume of discussions from a various points of view, i.e., theological, philosophical, and more recently from decision theoretical points of view. This paper picks up two of main objections posited against Pascal's wager, so called 'many gods objections' and ethical objections, and show these objections are unfounded and off the mark. First, I argue that Pascal's wager makes no sense except it be located in a particular discursive space where Pascal and his opponents (religious skeptics) lived. Second, I show that Pascal never confounded the cause of religious belief, which he thought depends on God's willingness and not the matter of voluntary decision, with its outcomes or the eventual consequences of one's belief, which his arguments on wager are all about. Most decision theorists do not appreciate this distinction. For from their point of view the expected outcomes of a belief 'is' the cause of an actor having that belief, as their basic assumption implies an actor always tends to make a choice that maximizes its expected utility(outcomes). Next I will show that the same distinction plays a very important role in William James' pragmatic theory of belief. By rereading his short essay, "the will to believe" with a specific focus on his distinction between the causes and the consequences, we will obtain a perspective leading to construct a revised ecological theory of discursive space of a society. This paper is a sequel to my previous essay, "Describing Other People's Belief: a pseudo-problem in anthropology"(Hamamoto 2007a).show more
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