Talk:Bad faith

Bad faith in general philosophy - tricky stuff

The following is a thread copied from WikiProject Philosophy, and deserves further comment from folks here. --

• The Bad faith article needs help from any avaiable experienced editor; all bad faith in philosophy content was reverted twice. HkFnsNGA (talk) 07:11, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

Would you give a diff? There have been a *lot* of recent edits to that article. CRGreathouse (t | c) 20:28, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Here's[1] the diff for the revert by Xxanthippie to the NRS and "no philosophy" version (with edit summary - "Reverted 45 edits by HkFnsNGA (talk); ", compared to the recent version. The editor who did the revert is giving time for other editors to contribut under the "construction" tag, so I asked for some help here since the subject crosses so many fields of study outside my area (Sartre and de Beauvoir were influential outside of philosophy). For example, while I was at Stanford for 11 years, and I am friends with SEP chief editor, who told me he mostly wrote the SEP mathematical (realism) article, I will have to do a lot of reading to explain in plain English what "Mathematical philosopher Crispin Wright wrote that J.L. Mackie's view on mathematical realism relegates all discourse on ethics to only be about 'bad faith'." means. PPdd (talk) 20:40, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Even a review under the Wikiproject and a rating of "start class" and "importance low" would help keep the RS content, instead of reverting again to the completely NRS "law only" version. PPdd (talk) 20:49, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

I don't like doing this, but I've semi-protected the page. Hopefully this gives you some breathing room to get the article in order.

The page is clearly within the scope of this project, though it's not terribly important or central. I rated it as Start-class, Low importance on the Talk page; hopefully even that weak claim will lend some force to the (reasonable) request to include philosophy content. (It's crazy to me that this is even an issue!)

Please don't make me regret using my 'powers'. :)

CRGreathouse (t | c) 03:41, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. I wrote this article because I never understood existentialism (or phenomenology), especially bad faith, and it's split of the "I" in the cogito argument. I witnessed an interesting hallway discussion about bad faith between ethicist Philippa Foot, and, interestingly, Alonzo Church, about bad faith (Fregean intentional contexts, etc.). I found a curious and interesting similar dicsussion in SEP's (mathamatical) realism article, which I summed up (with a sentence I don't really understand) - "Mathematical philosopher Crispin Wright wrote that J.L. Mackie's view on mathematical realism relegates moral discourse to bad faith. Do you know who here might be able to explain what I just wrote? PPdd (talk) 04:38, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure. While I have background in both math and philosophy, I have never studied the philosophy of mathematics. That quote seems much more about ethics, though, than bad faith per se. CRGreathouse (t | c) 17:25, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

I have the same math and phil but not much philmath problem.

Thanks for reviewing the article. I would have rated it start class based on numerous subsections with only a single sentence. I could have written it without subsections, but I think each merits expansion. I actually read all of the sources to write the article. So when I read it, it is intelligable to me. Were there other reasons for rating it start class? Is the article intelligable? Did I get the flow from one section to another correct, so that one leads into another, even though they are very diverse fields? PPdd (talk) 21:21, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

It has a lot of sections because, as you said, they merit expansion. So the article has a long way to go, hence Start class. I don't think it's a bad article, just a lot less of article than it would (ideally) be.

Unfortunately I don't know anyone -- Wikipedia or real life -- with background in philosophy of math.

CRGreathouse (t | c) 00:11, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

I do know something about the philosophy of mathematics and have read two of Mackie's books (but not the one about morals). I do not think the philosophy of mathematics has got any connection with bad faith. Looks like somebody has confused Mackie's argument about realism (the doctrine that objects and events have existence independent of the mind) with arguments about mathematical realism (the doctrine that numbers have existence independent of the mind). This seems to have been brought about by a careless reading of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on realism, where Mackie's error-theoretic account of morality is compared with Field's error-theory of arithmetic. I do not believe that Mackie said anything about “mathematical realism relegating moral discourse to bad faith”, but one might say that Mackie's arguments against moral realism relegates moral discourse to bad faith.--Logicalgregory (talk) 03:13, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

It was a careless skimming. I will go back and read it. (My friend, the founder and chief editor of SEP told me he (mostly) wrote that particular article, so its about time I actually read it.) Should I nix the whole section for now? PPdd (talk) 03:21, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

I would guess that Mackie is worth keeping (an excellent philosopher in my opinion) but I have not read his work on morals. Its the connection with the Philosophy of mathematics that I think must be wrong. The SEP article says only that Mackie was using (in the context of morals) the same type of argument that Field had used in the philosophy of mathematics.--Logicalgregory (talk) 05:15, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

Can you fix the sentence into something intelligable? I "wrote" it by essentially taking words out of the SEP article, which I believed was a correct procedure, but without understanding what I "wrote", like I was a Searle Chinese Room spitting out good Chinese without knowing Chinese. (In fact the whole bad faith article suffers from the same problem, since I wrote it, it likely passes muster, but I don't understand it.) PPdd (talk) 05:28, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes I can put in a quick fix by using material from the SEP article. I will need to change the heading. I need to read the SEP article properly first, but this is interesting because of the highly methodological approach taken by the author. Having read some of it, I am now of the opinion that Mackie's ideas on moral statements are important and well worth including.--Logicalgregory (talk) 06:39, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. I look forward to reading your take on it. PPdd (talk) 07:10, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

Quick fix done. Phil of Math removed. Mackie put in context and linked to bad faith. --Logicalgregory (talk) 09:42, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the help. The accuracy has been improved, but I still don't understand the concluding connection to bad faith. PPdd (talk) 15:54, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

Just that if you believe that moral judgments are false and you make them you're making intentionally false statements, I think. CRGreathouse (t | c) 17:37, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

I will add your " , I think" to my list of tools. Pretty tricky stuff, bad faith, huh? PPdd (talk) 18:28, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

Oh, certainly tricky stuff.

One of my friends taught me that 'trick' long ago: "As long as I add, 'If I'm not mistaken' to everything I say, it's always right!". :)

CRGreathouse (t | c) 18:31, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

Workover needed

What this article needs is a complete workover. As it stands, it is messy, fragmented, and confusing: Why is there one heading for the question of the possibility of Bad Faith (in Sartre's ontology), one for Phenomenology and Existentialism, and then another, separate heading for Existentialism? I suggest a more unitary approach where one could start with Freud and move on to existentialist accounts through Sartres criticism of Freudian psychoanalysis. The feminist perspective could then easily be introduced through Beauvoir.Der Zeitgeist (talk) 13:00, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

I'm merging phenom and existentlsm sections. Use in feminism started in exististentialism, but is now outside of it. The "problem of bad faith" is considered inside and outside of existentialism; Sartre is quoted only because he stated the problem so well. Some psychologists look at psychoanalysis without looking at existentialism, so it is difficult to blend psychoanalysis with only existentialist response to it. As to workover, I add that the article also needs section expansions. Especially the section on Mackie, for making it more clear what and why he is saying this. PPdd (talk) 15:43, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Cleanup

Tags

Sorry, I went a bit tag crazy. This article is reading more and more like a very complicated essay rather than a clear encyclopedic overview. Very aware of the effort that's gone into improving it. Hopefully this will just provide some notes on which direction might be next. Ocaasi (talk) 15:33, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Lead

I reworked the definition to mean what it means in a common dictionary or legal text. We can't synthesize our own complicated, nuanced, or novel formulations (even if they are useful). Ocaasi (talk) 16:00, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Problems with sources

The reason this article reads like an essay, is that it primarily relies on philosophical primary texts. These may be authoritative and seminal, but we should be using secondary articles which describe and summarize the points made in these texts. The only place "Being and Nothingness" should be used is in a quotation box, and it's significance should be supported by a secondary RS. In this context, no primary philosophical source should be used, except to augment a secondary source. Boring, yes. Distant from the original works, yes. How encyclopedias necessarily function, yes. One caveat is that occasionally primary sources are secondary sources for material contained therein. For example, if Satre wrote a comprehensive history of an idea dating back to Aristotle, then maybe that info could be sourced directly. Still, given how old many of these great texts are, we should be able to find more current cites for anything like that. Ocaasi (talk) 16:00, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

General reply

The article was organized roughly as the expression was used chronologically, with forks as its use in one feild influenced other fields. It is highly fragmented in to sections so people with expertise in the fields into which it is framented can easily make edits, without reading other sections in too much detail. This can be undone if no other editors contribute after a while, giving it a more encylopedia like style. I like a highly fragmented style, but I was a student of PoS Ian Hacking, and found that his fragmented outline writing style in his many books made difficult topics easier to read. (Aside- Hacking was chair of the phil dept at stanford, and got drunk at some social function, and fell asleep in his office. Some prankster called the cops and reported that a drunk had fallen asleep in the phil dept. chair's office. The rumor was that when the cops tried to throw Hacking out of his own office, he punched one of him, and shortly thereafter left stanford.)

Your edit of the first lede paragraph indicates a greater problem with the article. Bad faith is usually unintenitonal, via self deception, as is repeated over and over with RS in the article body. For example, a believer in some pseudoscience or alternative medicine does not realize they are believing in bad faith, and usually has no intention of deceipt. Even in the law section, there are objections even there about bad faith being different than fraud (e.g., as pointed out with RS, fraud is punishable by imprisonment, bad faith is not). If you are unfamiliar with the very difficult concept of bad faith, and could not get this from reading the article, the article needs content adjustment to fix this, since that is the main point of the article. (Take a look at the article lede first paragraph before and after your edits, in the context of the article body.) PPdd (talk) 16:16, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Being and Nothingness is used as a secondary source when discussing bad faith as it was generally understood at the time, in the context of historical use, e.g., in general use, use in prior philosophies, and in psychology and psychoanalysis. When Sartre expressed a new idea of his own, it was quoted - "Sartre said, '...'", or paraphased with a qualificaion - "Sartre said that...". PPdd (talk) 16:16, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

Common usage vs. various more refined usages

Note: This discussion started at my talkpage, and was copied here with approval of participants, so others can contribute I liked your edits to the pseudoscience article. They seemed geared towards presenting a tighter and more coherent overview.

I have to say that I really have no idea what is going on at Bad Faith. There is a very common usage related to behavior and agreements, in which acting in bad faith means acting with the intentall to deceive or mislead. That is very different from the kind of theological bad faith, which you seem to take as a 'poor' faith, literally, a faulty belief. One relates to our behavior towards others, but the latter is about how we relate in our own convictions. I think it is confusing at the least to mix the two together, at least with out very clear differentiation between them. Maybe we just need two separate articles (Bad faith/theology and philosophy vs. Bad faith/behavior and legality).

Glad you picked up the userpage boxes. Have you tried using STiki yet? Really neat tool. Ocaasi (talk) 13:18, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

1. What is STiki?
2. Re bad faith - I'm not sure that bad faith is "acting", but actions can be a product of a bad faith belief ("faith" is a strong "belief", not and "action"; and "act of faith" is an action based on a faith). The "common folks" usage includes both cases of intentional and unintentional (at least not "knowingly intentional"). In one case, the belief is "pretended" (so intentional), as when an insurer's lawyer cites convoluted policy exclusions to deny a claim. In the other case it is not (directly) intentional, as when a creationist, racist euginicist, or acupuncturist argues their position, and really believes what they are saying, no matter what the other side argues, but simply cannot see that they are ignoring facts and logic, so it is not an intent to decieve at all, but is behaviorally identical with a person who is pretending to have that belief. Is the bad faith belief of an acupunturist intentional? Most would say "no".
3. The multi-academic department use (which is more common than ordinary folks usage, as bad faith is kind of an obscure expression except at WP, where the expression is misused because of an ambiguous definition at WP:GF) is not really different than the "common folks" use. Bad faith is usually accused, not when a person pretends to believe something when they do not, but when cases where "you are just kidding yourself" or "you cant be serious about believing that" would be a common language retort. It is not used in cases where one would say, "you are lying". An example is when Anderson Cooper slipped and called Mubarek a liar, when he had no sources for this. Mubarek could be living in a self imposed bubble to such a great extent that he actually believed the false things he was saying, which is classic bad faith, but not lying. That's why the law puts you in jail for fraud, but not for bad faith.
4. The article is based on consistent structure in various lectures on the topic that I have attended, so it should not read like an essay, and if it does, I made an error. I pretty much wrote it from memory of lectures, then put things in the article one by one as I found RS for each line in my original summary, which is an awkward way of doing things, but seemed to be required under a no OR and no Synth policy.
5. Bad faith is such a difficult topic, that entire philosophy texts have been written about it, birthing entire new fields, and instead of clarifying it, it is as difficult as ever.
6. Intentionality and the related intensionality are about the most dificult topics I have come across, and intention is the central problem of the fundamental problem about how bad faith is possible. PPdd
7. There seems to be interesting ideas about all this related to the realism debates in, of all places, phil of math, as User:Logicalgregory wrote in a section, but I am having a hard time understanding either side.
8. PS - Do you mind if I copy this section to the talk page at bad faith, in case others might have thoughts on this stuff? PPdd (talk) 14:34, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

1. Stiki is a machine-assisted vandalism fighting tool. It uses a learning algorithm to present edits that are likely unconstructive in a human review interface, and then users can confirm or deny (or pass) as to whether it is vandalism. It's part of how we keep things clean around here. Click the link the in the userbox for more info. You can download the software if you want. Free, open to any users. Neat stuff.
2. I think you are still misusing 'bad faith'. It is not subject-oriented, as in whether or not a person believes correctly or incorrectly. It is agreement-oriented, and a bad-faith action is one which knowingly violates an agreement. That is the very broad common usage. I frankly have no idea what philosophers talk about regarding bad faith, but it's clear to me that the usages are different and that it needs to be thoroughly disambiguated, if included at all. It may be the case that cutting edge philosophers of ethics have taken on the 'internal' side of bad faith, whether or not people are consciously aware of their agreement-breaching, but that discussion should be a subset of the conventional term, not the overarching structure.
3. The way we have it set up now misrepresents an esoteric philosophical debate as the core rather than a layer outside the core. We may be having a debate here over common vs/ academic perspectives, but I think since we write for general readers, unless you want to create a separate article or section about the philosophy component that my approach is consistent with other similar articles. Please consider whether the world of academia is being put forth here in a way that is not consistent with 'what encyclopedias do', namely report old stuff. I don't think that we situate ourselves in the middle of complex philosophical discussions and represent common topics as such. That is a great idea for a philosophical reader, but that is not what we are. Please get some outside opinions on this, possibly from somone at WikiProject:Philosophy.
4. Again, it's not about what ideas are 'current' in philosophy, which is mainly a primary source debate, but about which ideas have been properly synthesized so that we can summarize them further for general readers to reference.
5. It's easy to have a sub-section on how bad faith is determined: is it only something that is perceived from the outside, or does it reflect internal motivation? Is it always intentional, or can it be subconscious? Can a person unknowingly do something in bad faith? Those are interesting questions, but they are not the center of the issues. Maybe for you they are, and for academics, but in an encyclopedia they are at the lower rung due to their originality, recentism, and esoteric-ness.
6. I also think the difference between bad faith and lying is 'not' well represented by Anderson Cooper's statement. If he called Mubarak a liar, then he either had evidence for it or he did not. If he spoke against contradictory evidence, then it is lying as well as bad faith. If he spoke against equal evidence, but only used the negative parts, then it is bad faith but maybe not lying. If he spoke with negative evidence that happened to be incorrect, then he is neither lying nor in bad faith, but he is still factually wrong.
7. You can absolutely copy this discussion wherever you'd like. Ocaasi (talk) 15:19, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

PSS - Another example has just come up in which I commented here[2] at pseudoscience talk. I worked with celebrities in Hollywood who were considered at the top of their profession in abilities. Then I discovered their belief in the pseudoscience of Dianetics, at which point they seemed to turn into real life (or death) zombies. Normally, they appeared highly intelligent, sincere, thoughtful, and no one would ever say they "intentionally" were trying to "deceive or mislead" anyone, regarding their pseudoscience beliefs. This is very clear cut example of the fundamental problem of bad faith belief, and the self deception that leads to it. PPdd (talk) 15:34, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

I think you are correct about some everyday use involving intentional deceipt, although bad faith seems in that usage case to be more than simple intentional deceipt. I the example you give about breaking agreements, while acting like one is not, is also a good one of intention, but where to find RS for this? I may have a problem of over-living in an academic bubble, so what I call "common use" (including outside philosophy, as in discussing pseudoscicne or feminism) may not be considered "common" by all. I rarely hear the expression come up outside academia, but it is very common there. I am having a hard time coming up with "real world" RS in which it is intentional, especially when there is an intentionally faked belief to decieve or mislead.

• Per your OK, I am copying this section to talk at bad faith PPdd (talk) 15:34, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

I think 'bad faith belief' is not what is meant by the term in nearly anyone in the non-academic world's usage. Which to me means we need either a separate section or a separate article to describe that aspect. When people are just idiots, when they are mislead into doing something, when they practice pseudoscience ignorantly--none of that is bad faith. It's incorrect, but it's not bad faith. Again, I'm using the term per its common definition. Please check dictionary.com or OED for standard usage. The problem with writing from personal experience and memory, is that while we are often well-read, we are sometimes overly focused in a specific area and may not be aware of its biases. Ocaasi (talk) 15:49, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Call for RS for general uses

A section is needed for nonspecialized use, and should be the first section. RS is needed so please help out. PPdd (talk) 16:06, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

The funny thing is that the expression "bad faith" only recently degenerated into an ordinary English expression with a different meaning from use in academia, when it was traslated from "mauvaise foi", because Sartre's existentialism was de rigueur; and from a highly inconsistent use in law, where even Black's Law Dicionary's definition is inconsistent with usage in law (you go to jail for fraud, not bad faith.) PPdd (talk) 16:24, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Bad faith according to Aquinas

The part on bad faith according to theology and Aquinas is totally non wp:verifiable. Please add links to specific paragraphs of Summa Theologica, or, even better, secondary sources on the subject. This kind of ref to the hole corpus of the text should not be acceptable. Also generally not acceptable is i think the reference to bible passages, and about these i have the feeling that there may be a "lost in translation" kind of thing going on right now in the article. I mean the phrase "divided loyalties" in one translation of a passage and Webster's Dictionary equating bad faith with "being of two hearts" does not necessarily mean that the biblical passage refers to the same concept, nor that the standard term (if there is such a thing) used for this concept in theology is "bad faith". It may very well be "hyposcisy" for example. Without reliable secondary source it sounds like wp:SYNTH to me. Material not backed by reliable sources may be removed.--Vanakaris (talk) 14:32, 27 February 2011 (UTC)