Belief

An expert on the psychology of belief examines how our thoughts and feelings, actions and reactions, respond not to the world as it actually is but to the world as we believe it to be. This book explores the psychology of belief - how beliefs are formed, how they are influenced both by internal factors, such as perception, memory, reason, emotion, and prior beliefs, as well as external factors, such as experience, identification with a group, social pressure, and manipulation. It also reveals how vulnerable beliefs are to error, and how they can be held with great confidence even when factually false. The author, a social psychologist who specializes in the psychology of belief, elucidates how the brain and nervous system function to create the perceptions, memories, and emotions that shape belief. He explains how and why distorted perceptions, false memories, and inappropriate emotional reactions that sometimes lead us to embrace false beliefs are natural products of mental functioning. He also shows why it is so difficult to change our beliefs when they collide with contradictions. Covering a wide range -- from self-perception and the perceived validity of everyday experience to paranormal, religious, and even fatal beliefs--the book demonstrates how crucial beliefs are to molding our experience and why they have such a powerful hold on our behavior.

A book about "religions and gods and beliefs in general, [which] also [examines] something called The Scientific Method, which is how we learn new things about the world. By the time you're done reading you will know the answers to some of life's biggest questions, but more importantly you will see why your questions, and all questions for that matter, are so important"--Amazon.com.

Knowledge, from Plato onwards, has been considered in relation to justified belief. Current debate has centred around the nature of the justification and whether justified belief can be considered an internal or extenal matter. Epistemological internalists argue that the subject must be able to reflect upon a belief to complete the process of justification. The externalists, on the other hand, claim that it is only necessary to consider whether the belief is reliably formed, and argue that the ability to know by reflection is not required for a justified belief. In the historical section of this book the three most important epistemologists, Plato, Descartes and Hume, as well as the ancient epistemologies of the stoics, Academics and Pyrhonians, are considered. In reconsidering the history of epistemology the author is led to argue against hte view that internalism is historically dominant. His critique of internalism is then developed into a sustained argument against many of its forms, and he goes onto defend an externalist, reliabilist epistemology.

Describes the notion of warrant as that which distinguishes knowledge from true belief. This volume examines warrant's role in theistic belief, tackling the questions of whether it is rational, reasonable, justifiable, and warranted to accept Christian belief and whether there is something epistemically unacceptable in doing so.

A groundbreaking reinterpretation that draws on cognitive theory to show that belief wasn’t absent from—but rather was at the heart of—Roman religion Belief and Cult argues that belief isn’t uniquely Christian but was central to ancient Roman religion. Drawing on cognitive theory, Jacob Mackey shows that despite having nothing to do with salvation or faith, belief underlay every aspect of Roman religious practices—emotions, individual and collective cult action, ritual norms, social reality, and social power. In doing so, he also offers a thorough argument for the importance of belief to other non-Christian religions. At the individual level, the book argues, belief played an indispensable role in the genesis of cult action and religious emotion. However, belief also had a collective dimension. The cognitive theory of Shared Intentionality shows how beliefs may be shared among individuals, accounting for the existence of written, unwritten, or even unspoken ritual norms. Shared beliefs permitted the choreography of collective cult action and gave cult acts their social meanings. The book also elucidates the role of shared belief in creating and maintaining Roman social reality. Shared belief allowed the Romans to endow agents, actions, and artifacts with socio-religious status and power. In a deep sense, no man could count as an augur and no act of animal slaughter as a successful offering to the gods, unless Romans collectively shared appropriate beliefs about these things. Closely examining augury, prayer, the religious enculturation of children, and the Romans’ own theories of cognition and cult, Belief and Cult promises to revolutionize the understanding of Roman religion by demonstrating that none of its features makes sense without Roman belief.

Impassioned Belief presents an original expressivist theory of normative judgments. According to his Ecumenical Expressivism normative judgements are hybrid states partly constituted by ordinary beliefs and partly constituted by desire-like states. Michael Ridge builds on a series of articles in which he has developed this theory, but moves beyond them in the following key respects. First, Ridge now more sharply distinguishes semantics from meta-semantics, situating Ecumenical Expressivism firmly on the meta-semantic side of this divide, thus enabling Ecumenical Expressivism to accommodate a fully truth-conditional approach to first-order semantics. Second, this distinction allows Ridge to offer a distinctive contextualist semantic framework for normative discourse. Contra orthodox presuppositions, a contextualist semantics does not entail cognitivism-at least not if we carefully heed the semantics/meta-semantics distinction. Third, because this contextualist framework is couched in terms of standards, Ridge now rejects his previous 'ideal advisor' approach and instead adopts a theory couched in terms of acceptable standards of practical reasoning. This has interesting consequences for longstanding debates over the context-sensitivity of reasons, the so-called 'buck-passing' theory of value, and the role of principles in normative thought ('particularism' versus 'generalism'). Fourth, drawing on the work of Scott Soames, Ridge develops a novel theory of normative propositions, according to which they are a certain kind of cognitive event type. Somewhat surprisingly, this conception allows that there can be irreducible normative propositions, even given expressivism. Fifth, Ridge offers a novel approach to talk of truth which enables expressivists to accommodate truth-aptness without committing themselves to deflationism about truth. In fact, the theory is flexible enough that it can elegantly be combined even with a robust correspondence conception of truth. In addition, Ridge offers an improved solution to the dreaded 'Frege-Geach' problem (one which better preserves the formal nature of logic than his previous account), a novel theory of disagreement itself, a rather different sort of 'hybrid' treatment of rationality discourse, and an independently useful taxonomy and critical survey of the bewildering variety of other 'hybrid' approaches in the literature.

Reliabilist accounts of knowledge are widely seen as having the resources for blocking sceptical arguments, since these arguments appear to rely on assumptions about the nature of knowledge that are rendered illegitimate by reliabilist accounts. In Scepticism and Reliable Belief José L. Zalabardo assesses the main arguments against the possibility of knowledge, and challenges their consensus. He articulates and defends a reliabilist theory of knowledge that belongs firmly in the truth-tracking tradition. Zalabardo's main analytic tool in the account of knowledge he provides is the theory of probability: he analyses both truth tracking and evidence in these terms, and argues that this account of knowledge has the resources for blocking the main standard lines of sceptical reasoning—including the regress argument, arguments based on sceptical hypotheses, and the problem of the criterion. But although Zalabardo's theory can be used to refute the standard lines of sceptical reasoning, there is a sceptical argument against which his account offers no defence, as it does not rely on any assumptions that he renders illegitimate. According to this argument, we might have considerable success in the enterprise of forming true beliefs: if this is so, we have knowledge of the world. However, we cannot know that we are successful, even if we are. Beliefs to this effect cannot be knowledge on Zalabardo's reliabilist account, since these beliefs do not track the truth and we cannot obtain adequate evidence in their support. Zalabardo ends with the suggestion that the problem might have a metaphysical solution: although the sceptical argument may make no illegitimate epistemological assumptions, it does rest on a questionable account of the nature of cognition.

This is a collection of classic research papers on the Dempster-Shafer theory of belief functions. The book is the authoritative reference in the field of evidential reasoning and an important archival reference in a wide range of areas including uncertainty reasoning in artificial intelligence and decision making in economics, engineering, and management. The book includes a foreword reflecting the development of the theory in the last forty years.