Belief, knowledge and epistemology

Belief as a psychological theory

• Our common-sense understanding of belief is correct - Sometimes called the ‘mental sentence theory’, in this conception, beliefs exist as coherent entities and the way we talk about them in everyday life is a valid basis for scientific endeavour. Jerry Fodor is one of the principal defenders of this point of view.
• Our common-sense understanding of belief may not be entirely correct, but it is close enough to make some useful predictions - This view argues that we will eventually reject the idea of belief as we use it now, but that there may be a correlation between what we take to be a belief when someone says 'I believe that snow is white' and how a future theory of psychology will explain this behaviour. Most notably philosopher Stephen Stich has argued for this particular understanding of belief.
• Our common-sense understanding of belief is entirely wrong and will be completely superseded by a radically different theory that will have no use for the concept of belief as we know it - Known as eliminativism, this view, (most notably proposed by Paul and Patricia Churchland), argues that the concept of belief is like obsolete theories of times past such as the four humours theory of medicine, or the phlogiston theory of combustion. In these cases science hasn’t provided us with a more detailed account of these theories, but completely rejected them as valid scientific concepts to be replaced by entirely different accounts. The Churchlands argue that our common-sense concept of belief is similar, in that as we discover more about neuroscience and the brain, the inevitable conclusion will be to reject the belief hypothesis in its entirety.
• Our common-sense understanding of belief is entirely wrong; however, treating people, animals and even computers as if they had beliefs, is often a successful strategy - The major proponents of this view, Daniel Dennett and Lynne Rudder Baker, are both eliminativists in that they believe that beliefs are not a scientifically valid concept, but they don’t go as far as rejecting the concept of belief as a predictive device. Dennett gives the example of playing a computer at chess. While few people would agree that the computer held beliefs, treating the computer as if it did (e.g. that the computer believes that taking the opposition’s queen will give it a considerable advantage) is likely to be a successful and predictive strategy. In this understanding of belief, named by Dennett the intentional stance, belief based explanations of mind and behaviour are at a different level of explanation and are not reducible to those based on fundamental neuroscience although both may be explanatory at their own level.

How beliefs are formed

• We tend to internalize the beliefs of the people around us during childhood. Albert Einstein is often quoted as having said that "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." Political beliefs depend most strongly on the political beliefs most common in the community where we live.(5) Most individuals believe the religion they were taught in childhood.(6)

• People may adopt the beliefs of a charismatic leader, even if those beliefs fly in the face of all previous beliefs, and produce actions that are clearly not in their own self-interest.(7) Is belief voluntary? Rational individuals need to reconcile their direct reality with any said belief; therefore, if belief is not present or possible, it reflects the fact that contradictions were necessarily overcome using cognitive dissonance.

• The primary thrust of the advertising industry is that repetition forms beliefs, as do associations of beliefs with images of sex, love, and other strong positive emotions.(8)

• Physical trauma, especially to the head, can radically alter a person's beliefs.(9)

Belief-in

• Commendatory - an expression of confidence in a person or entity, as in, "I believe in his abililty to do the job".

• Existential claim - to claim belief in the existence of an entity or phenomenon with the implied need to justify its claim to existence. It is often used when the entity is not real, or its existence is in doubt. "He believes in witches and ghosts" or "many children believe in fairies" are typical examples.(11)

Delusional beliefs

Notes

1. Gettier, EL 1963, 'Is justified true belief knowledge?', Analysis, vol. 23, no. 6, pp. 121-123



2. Goldman, AI 1967, 'A causal theory of knowing', The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 64, no. 12, pp. 357-372



3. Bell, V., Halligan, P.W. & Ellis, H.D. (2006) A Cognitive Neuroscience of Belief. In Peter W. Halligan & Mansel Aylward (eds.) The Power of Belief: Psychological Influence on Illness, Disability, and Medicine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-853010-2



4. Lynne Rudder Baker, Saving Belief, Princeton University Press, 1989, ISBN 978-0-691-02050-1



5. Andrew Gelman, David Park, Boris Shor, Joseph Bafumi, Jeronimo Cortina, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do, Princeton University Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-691-13927-2



6. Michael Argyle, The Psychology of Religious Belief, Behavior, and Experience, Routledge, 1997, ISBN 978-0-415-12331-0, p.25 "Religion, in most cultures, is ascribed, not chosen."



7. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2002, ISBN 978-0-06-050591-2



8. Jane Kilbourne, Mary Pipher, Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel, Free Press, 2000, ISBN 978-0-684-86600-0



9. Babette Rothschild, The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment, W. W. Norton & Company, 2000, ISBN 978-0-393-70327-6



10. MacIntosh, J. J. 1994. "Belief-in Revisited: A Reply to Williams". Religious Studies, 30, no. 4: 487-503. {{DOI|10.1017/S0034412500023131}}



11. Macintosh, Jack. "Belief-in", The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, p. 86. ISBN 978-0-19-926479-7

See also

• Charm
• Cognitive dissonance
• Collective belief
• Conversational intolerance (Sam Harris)
• Culture-specific syndrome
• Delusion
• Doxastic logic
• Evil eye
• Expectation
• Faith
• Folk psychology
• Gettier problem
• Idea
• Life stance
• Moore's paradox
• Nocebo
• Observer-expectancy effect
• Opinion
• Placebo
• Propositional attitude
• Propositional knowledge
• Psychosomatic illness
• Religion
• Self-deception
• Spell (paranormal)
• Spirituality
• Subject-expectancy effect
• Sugar pill
• Suggestibility
• Suggestion
• Subjective validation
• Truth
• Thomas theorem
• Ultimate importance
• Unbelieving
• Unintended consequence
• Value (personal and cultural)
• List of sociology topics
• Sociology

External links

• {{sep entry|belief|Belief|Eric Schwitzgebel}}
• Think without Beliefs Does rational thinking require the adherence to beliefs at all?
• Ethics of Belief Classic WK Clifford essay that belief by its nature is unethical, with counterpoint by William James