Belief Change And Forms Of Life

The papers in this collection are concerned with the epistemology of religious belief. The contributors disagree on such issues as whether philosophers have a role to play in determining the reasonableness or intelligibility of religious beliefs, or whether philosophy properly understood is a descriptive task. But all the papers are informed by the belief that philosophical discussion should proceed by giving attention to the character of the religious beliefs and practices under consideration.

This volume brings together Nicholas Wolterstorff's essays on epistemology written between 1983 and 2008.

Hidden deep within the darkest recesses of your mind lie dormant seeds - beliefs - that spring to life when you set a goal, make a wish or aspire to something greater. Alive, they become barrier energy that sabotage, literally repel, your hopes and dreams. Good news is that they serve a purpose ' your soul's greater good. Better news, now in 10 simple Steps contained in this book, The Belief Change Exercise (BCE) surfaces those beliefs that limit or hold you back in some negative way and enables you to reconcile and align them with your wants and needs.

This book examines the human proclivity to resist changing our beliefs. Drawing on psychological, neurological, and philosophical research, and integrating topics as wide ranging as emotion, cognition, social (and physical) context, and learning theory, Lao and Young explore why this resistance to change impedes our learning and progression. They also suggest that failure to adapt our beliefs to available and informed evidence can incur costs that may be seen in personal growth, politics, science, law, medicine, education, and business. Resistance to Belief Change explores the various manifestations of resistance, including overt, discursive, and especially inertial forms of resistance. As well as the influential factors that can impact upon them, the book also examines how the self-directed learner, as well as teachers, may structure the learning experience to overcome resistance and facilitate progressive and adaptive learning. Lao and Young find that the impediments to learning and resistance to change are far more prevalent and costly than previously suggested in research, and so this book will be of interest to a range of people in cognitive development, social psychology, and clinical and educational psychology.

This book draws together a distinguished group of philosophers and theologians to present new thinking on realism and religion. The religious realism/antirealism debate concerns the questions of God’s independence from human beings, the nature of religious truth and our access to religious truths. Although both philosophers and theologians have written on these subjects, there has been little sustained investigation into these issues akin to that found in comparable areas of research such as ethics or the philosophy of science. In addition, the absence of any agreed approach to the problem underlines both the need for fresh thought on it and the fruitfulness of this area for further research. The editors’ introduction sets the context of the realism debate, traces connections amongst the essays which follow, and proposes lines for future development and enquiry. The contributors present a variety of contrasting positions on key issues in the religious realism debate and each opens up new and important themes. Gordon Kaufman, Peter Lipton and Simon Blackburn provide the opening chapters and the context for the collection; Alexander Bird, John Hare, Graham Oppy and Nick Trakakis, Merold Westphal, and John Webster explore topics that are central to the debate. This volume of original essays will both introduce newcomers to the field and suggest new lines of research for those already familiar with it.

Belief change lies at the heart of all human aspirations. From career progression, weight loss, spiritual commitment, and ideological passion, to love, grief, war, identity, and sport, beliefs guide our lives and to a great extent, determine our success, satisfaction and happiness. Cognitive Mechanisms of Belief Change is relevant to anyone interested in the machinations of how this occurs. It explains how certain ideas and concepts steal a place in the mind because they latch on to hardwired ways of thinking, experiencing, and behaving. Concepts throw light upon the mind’s desires, which in turn casts a kaleidoscope of silhouettes against the walls of thought, with those taking distinct shape forging the outlines for beliefs to inhabit. Beliefs infiltrate our minds, and this book shows how they arrive and change in ways critical to our sense of meaning and identity.