The Nature of Faith vs. Acts of Faith and the Role of Prudence

Sliwa (2018)[1] offers a descriptive project about the nature of faith. She hopes to show that faith is a complex mental state requiring both the traditionally recognized doxastic element and a previously unconsidered know-how. She clarifies the latter as knowledge “how to have faith in others or their abilities” (p. 6). The author derives this understanding from her examination of acts of faith. Because faith is often exhibited through acts of faith, she believes those acts are a gateway to understanding the nature of faith more broadly. Sliwa’s argument reduces to something like this: since faith is partly constituted by acts of faith, and acts of faith require a particular know-how, having faith entails having that particular kind of know-how.

I am sympathetic to Sliwa’s (2018) observations about the know-how necessary for faithful acts. However, I will argue that this know-how is a component of intentional actions generally, not necessarily a component of faith itself. As a result, the examples offered by Sliwa are only coherent in a normative—not descriptive—framework. To that end, I will proceed as follows. In section one, I will outline the most relevant explanations and evidence that Sliwa offers to support her argument. In section two, I will detail the first part of my objection and its foundation in existing scholarship on action, intention, and know-how. In section three, I will address the second part of my objection alongside the implications for Sliwa’s argument. I will conclude that Sliwa’s observations are still relevant to acts of faith and that she makes a valid normative argument for differentiating prudent acts of faith from less-prudent acts of faith.

I. Acts of Faith and the Analogy to Acts of Virtue

Sliwa (2018) argues that the nature of faith can be better understood by examining acts of faith. She motivates this strategy by comparing that relationship to the close ties between moral virtue and acts of virtue, holding that they are roughly analogous to faith in the following way. For an action to be morally virtuous, she notes that it must be (1) properly motivated and (2) “guided by knowledge how to do the right thing” (p. 4). In a nod to her examples, I can be motivated to donate money to a charitable cause merely because it is the morally right thing to do; however, that is not enough to constitute moral virtue. I must also know how to carry out that deed properly. For example, if I have poor discretion as to which groups should receive my money and I donate to an amoral cause as a result, then my actions are not morally virtuous. I would have met the first criterion but failed to meet the second criterion. Sliwa (2018) notes that it is generally accepted that I would need both the proper motivation and the proper know-how for my action to constitute moral virtue.

Likewise, Sliwa (2018) argues that for an action to constitute an act of faith, it must be (1) properly motivated and (2) guided by knowledge of how to exhibit faith. We can understand this comparison with a nod to another of Sliwa’s examples. Let us say that I am a professor and that I believe my students are listening while I am lecturing. I am unquestioningly trusting of my students’ engagement during class. As such, I don not check in to see if they are following along or test them in any way on whether they were listening to what I was teaching (much less comprehending it) until the final exam at the end of the semester. Sliwa (2018) would argue that this is not faith. As with the moral virtue example, she would acknowledge that it satisfies the first criterion—it is motivated by a genuine belief that my students are paying attention instead of, perhaps, disinterest in proctoring a quiz. However, she would deny that I satisfied the second criterion. She would argue that my unmetered, indiscriminate willingness to trust my students indicates that I lack “knowledge how to rely on others…how to recognize whether someone is trustworthy” (p. 6). For Sliwa, this lack of know-how is disqualifying for an act of faith in the same way that lack of know-how is disqualifying for an act of virtue.

This relationship between faith and faithful act directly fuels the author’s conclusions about the nature of faith in the following way, taken directly from Sliwa (2018):

P1. “Faith is, in part, a matter of having the ability to perform acts of faith” (p. 9);
P2. “Acts of faith require the right kinds of desires along with the relevant know how” (p. 9);
∴     “[T]his suggests that having faith is, in part, a matter of having the right kinds of desires along with the right kind of know how” (p. 9).

As indicated above, Sliwa is not suggesting that she has offered a comprehensive understanding of the nature of faith. But she is arguing that the know-how required to perform acts of faith is undoubtedly one of the elements of the nature of faith.

II. The Missing Link: Faith vs. Action

The heart of my objection is that Sliwa (2018) conflates the necessary components of an act of faith with the necessary components of the nature of faith. This produces some unexpected and odd results. Central to this objection is the popularly accepted notion that an agent’s ability to perform any intentional action entails that the agent possesses the know-how relevant to that particular action. This was summarized recently by Kirley (forthcoming) in the following principle: “Necessarily, if S φs intentionally, then S knows how to φ” (p. 13). I readily accept that the relevant know-how is necessary for carrying out acts of faith, but not because that know-how is a component of the nature of faith; rather, because know-how is required—as noted above—to carry out any intentional acts. Since know-how is a necessary component of all intentional acts, it is not clear either prima facie or from Sliwa’s work whether know-how is also, separately, a component of faith or other related mental states.

As mentioned, some issues arise when we apply Sliwa’s (2018) argument to other mental attitudes. Like faith, hunger is an attitude. Accordingly, you might call eating an act of hunger. The logic above cogently suggests that hunger, combined with knowing how to satisfy hunger, results in eating or the disposition to eat. However, it is unclear what our knowing how to eat says about the nature of hunger. Indeed, observing what we eat or that we eat may shed some light on the nature of hunger, but our knowing how to eat—a technical skill—does not. Whether we know how to eat tells us about the likelihood that we will be able to perform hunger acts. Still, those skills and actions are secondary to the propositional attitude and nature of hunger. Insisting otherwise leads to unexpected results, as in Sliwa’s example below.

Sliwa (2018) argues that actions cannot be classified as acts of faith unless they are made “clear-sightedly” and “guided by know how” (p. 8). To help us understand this, she gives the following example—one from which I loosely borrowed one of my earlier examples. She describes a teacher, Pawel, who is “trusting to the extreme” and “so confident that [his students] will succeed in what they set out to do that it catches him by surprise when they fail” (p. 6). Sliwa asserts that “what’s amiss is a discriminatory ability…knowledge how to rely on others, how to keep an eye on what they are doing, how to recognize whether someone is trustworthy” (p. 6). In short, Sliwa is arguing that Pawel lacks the relevant know-how. Because he lacks this know-how, Sliwa denies that Pawel’s actions are acts of faith.

On first reading, this conclusion struck me as odd. It certainly follows logically from Sliwa’s (2018) argument, but it does not seem to fit our general understanding of faith. Where most would likely accuse Pawel of over-extending faith or of faith-too-broadly-applied, Sliwa is lodging that his is not an example of faith at all. To better illustrate the issue I take with this conclusion, we can compare it to the example of hunger. Suppose Sam grew up in a commune where all food was fair game for anyone who was hungry. Whenever Sam was hungry, they located the nearest source of food and—without asking—ate freely until satiated. As an adult, Sam left the commune and was not provided any instructions for how to satisfy hunger in society at large. Sam passed a farmer’s market on their journey away from the commune. Quite hungry, they roved from stall to stall, taking and eating food without regard for the stunned vendors and marketgoers.

Like Pawel, Sam lacks a discriminatory ability: the proper “know-how” required for acting on hunger. Eating the next reasonable-looking thing in sight is arguably as far from a discriminatory norm as Pawel’s unchecked willingness to trust every person he encounters. So, by Sliwa’s (2018) logic, Sam’s deficient hunger-related know-how indicates that their actions at the farmer’s market were not acts of hunger. This result is clearly not compatible with our everyday understanding of hunger. However, it helps us zero in on where Sliwa’s argument succeeds and where my objection might be resolved by a simple reframing of the argument, as addressed below.

III. The Mislabeled Mission

Assuming this objection holds, what are the implications for Sliwa’s argument? Rather than suggesting that the argument is incomplete or invalid, I propose an alternative solution. To support my argument about what the author is not doing, I believe it helps to identify what she perhaps is doing instead. Rather than differentiating between faith and not-faith, as she purports to do, I find that Sliwa (2018) differentiates between prudent faith and imprudent faith. First, recall that I do not deny the apparent relationship between know-how and intentional actions. Without faith-related know-how, an agent cannot intentionally perform faith-related actions. However, I also do not find that Sliwa has shown any reason why such a lack of practical know-how detracts from the nature of the agent’s faith itself, of which she claims that know-how is a constituent part (Sliwa, 2018). This objection alone would not entirely undo Sliwa’s work but would perhaps limit her findings to acts of faith, not the nature of faith.

My alternative solution is as follows. As I mentioned at the beginning of my paper, Sliwa (2018) offers her argument as a descriptive project aimed at better understanding the nature of faith. Instead, she appears to be presenting a normative argument concerning acts of faith. When reframed in this way, the example of Pawel is perfectly cogent and reasonable. In a descriptive sense, it seems odd to say that Pawel is not exhibiting acts of faith—he appears to be exhibiting an abundance of acts of faith. However, in a normative sense, it seems perfectly reasonable to argue that Pawel’s actions do not constitute what we should expect faith to look like. In other words, Pawel is exhibiting imprudent acts of faith. In Pavese’s (2022) words, “…it is natural to say things such as ‘John may know how to make risotto, but I would not say he is skilled at it’”. Likewise, we might say that Pawel is performing acts of faith, but we would not say he is skilled at it. All of this echoes a normative context.

This reframing would even account for the more-odd finding in Sam’s case. Instead of descriptively arguing that Sam’s actions at the farmer’s market do not constitute acts of hunger, a normative framework would allow the same case and conclude that Sam’s actions do not constitute what we should expect acts of hunger to look like. Reframing the argument from descriptive to normative would account for the odd results I objected to. Moreover, a normative project of this sort is warranted by the complicated nature of what differentiates prudent or reasonable acts of faith from less-prudent, less-reasonable acts of faith. The same warrant exists for other notions worthy of similar exploration, such as grit.

Ultimately, rather than offering a descriptive project illuminating the nature of faith, I find that Sliwa (2018) provides a normative project illuminating the impact of various degrees of know-how on the prudence of acts of faith. The author wishes to show that know-how is a constitutive part of the nature of faith but only succeeds in showing that it is a constitutive part of acts of faith. The failings she notes in her examples stand out as incompatible with our understanding of faith and similar mental states until we exchange the descriptive context for a normative one.

In light of these objections, Sliwa’s (2018) work can be reconstrued as a starting place for examining what separates the good cases of faith from the bad cases of faith. In that normative sense, I find her observations about degrees of know-how and their impact on acts of faith cogent, compelling, and well-warranted.

Kirley, M (forthcoming). Intentional action, know-how, and lucky success. Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.

Pavese, C. (2022). Knowledge how. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2022/entries/knowledge-how/

Sliwa, P. (2018). Know-how and acts of faith. In Oxford University Press eBooks. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198798705.003.0013

[1] Due to the volume of citations, narrative references to Sliwa (2018) following an initial in-text citation will omit the publication year per section 8.16 of the APA 7^th Ed. Publication Manual.