| Grammar Of Assent |
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An Essay in Aid of A Grammar of Assent is John Henry Newman 's seminal work. Completed in 1870, Newman revealed to friends that it took him 20 years to write the book after many fits and starts. The Grammar is an apologia for faith. Newman is concerned with defending faith as a legitimate product of rational human activity: to assent to something is not contrary to our nature. He writes this book against the background of the British Empiricist tradition which restricts the scope of an assent to the evidence presented for it. Newman is interested in showing that the scientific standards for evidence and assent are too narrow and inapplicable in concrete life. He argues that logical assent exists in an artificial world and is not transferable to real life. As a result, it is inappropriate to judge the validity of assent in concrete faith by logical standards that are clearly unequal to the task. "Logic is loose at both ends," he says, meaning that logic depends of assumptions to begin and thus produces a result that is ill-equipped to deal with real world events and decisions. The Grammar is divided into two parts: Assent and Apprehension and the second, Assent and Inference. Both parts deal with assent. The first part answers the question, what is assent? The second part clarifies assent further by comparing assent with inference, which in itself is a form of assent. (There is significant development in Newman's notion of inference in the years leading to the Grammar, from 1853 on. These developments can be seen in his notes and writings on faith, certainty and philosophy.) The key difference between assent and inference is that assent is unconditional and inference is conditional, i.e., dependent on other propositions or ideas and unable to stand by itself or be "really" apprehended. In the second part of the Grammar is where Newman introduces a seminal concept that he will be forever associated with, that is, the Illative Sense. The Illative sense is for Newman, the logical counterpart of Aristotle 's Phroenesis . It is the faculty of the human mind that closes the proof gap in cases where assent is called for. While logic has a process that leads to a certain conclusion, Newman maintains that in concrete life, the best we get is a series of converging probabilities, however, we never get the concrete existential equivalent of logical certainty. Nonetheless, Newman observes that we still do close that gap between converging probabilities and evidences and full assent. He thus names the faculty that accomplishes that the Illative sense. |
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