1. The Predicament of Finite Orientation

We live among people who understand the world differently.

Sometimes the differences are small. Two engineers disagree about the likely cause of a failure. Two friends remember a conversation differently. A doctor and patient assign different weight to the possible side effects of a treatment.

Sometimes the differences reach much further.

Religions disagree about what exists and what ultimately matters. Philosophical traditions disagree about knowledge, morality, mind, freedom, and reality. Political traditions disagree about justice and legitimate authority. Scientific theories can disagree about how observed phenomena should be explained. Cultures and institutions differ in their expectations, categories, and practices. Individual people inherit different histories and develop different ways of understanding what happens around them.

People can disagree about what evidence is, which authorities deserve trust, what constitutes a good explanation, which distinctions matter, what should be regarded as morally relevant, or which procedures are legitimate.

But people with very different comprehensive views also share large regions of practice. They may use the same arithmetic, repair the same machines, recognize the same traffic signs, measure temperatures with the same thermometer, follow the same legal procedure, or discover the same bug in a computer program. A devout Christian, a Buddhist, an atheist, and someone who has never cared much about religion need not develop different methods for determining whether a door is locked.

Some things settle easily between people who disagree deeply elsewhere. Other things remain disputed among people who otherwise understand one another very well.

The practical difficulty is that we cannot first settle all of this.

A person considering whether to leave a marriage cannot postpone the decision until moral philosophy has been completed. A judge cannot wait until philosophers agree on the nature of truth and responsibility. Someone deciding whether to trust a warning must act before possessing a final theory of testimony. A voter cannot inspect every relevant fact and resolve every dispute about political legitimacy before making a choice. A scientist working between competing explanations cannot stand outside all theoretical commitments before interpreting an experiment.

We may have criteria, methods, arguments, and standards that convince us strongly. But their authority is not simply available from a final standpoint outside every further question. They too can be challenged, defended, revised, or rejected.

We believe and doubt. We inquire. We trust and distrust. We decide what deserves attention, make commitments, coordinate with others, and revise our judgments.

We act, and sometimes discover later that we acted badly.

The problem is not merely that human beings lack certainty. It is that finite agents must orient themselves while many of the larger questions that could ground their orientation remain unsettled.

One response would be to search for the correct comprehensive framework first.

That project may be worthwhile.

But it creates a practical problem of its own. For the search itself we already need to judge evidence, understand arguments, trust some procedures, reject others, decide which questions matter, and continue living while the search proceeds. We cannot suspend every conviction in order to investigate conviction from nowhere.

What then can finite agents investigate and do while these larger disputes remain unresolved?

People become convinced of things. Some matters seem obvious to them. Others remain doubtful. Some judgments survive criticism for decades. Others disappear after one conversation. Some ways of reasoning exert enormous force. Some arguments leave one person convinced and another untouched. New experiences reorganize old judgments. Questions reopen matters that had seemed settled.

These processes happen whether or not we possess a final philosophical explanation of them.

A theory that cannot accommodate the fact that people become convinced differently under different orientations would fail to describe the phenomenon it is meant to explain.

Thus instead of first asking what final standard should govern conviction, we can decide to examine how conviction actually forms, acquires force, stabilizes, changes, and participates in orientation and action.

We can ask how far we can proceed before the larger questions are settled.

This does not replace the question, "Is this true?" with the question, "Does this convince me?"

These are different questions and they deserve different treatment.

But choosing a preferred framework of truth, justification, rationality, or inquiry does not make the phenomenon of conviction disappear. Its arguments, standards, and procedures must themselves acquire convincing force for finite agents, and can also become objects of investigation.

Conviction formation can become an object of investigation even while disputes about truth, justification, rationality, and inquiry continue.