Belief
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." --Through the Looking-Glass "Liars when they speak the truth are not believed" "I am going to write about what I never saw myself, nor experienced, nor so much as heard from anybody else, and, what is more, of such things as neither are, nor ever can be. I give my readers warning, therefore, not to believe me." --A True Story (2nd century) by Lucian, Thomas Francklin translation "What happened to the Nihilist whose story is related by that profound thinker Dostoiewsky has quickly happened to the Positivists. Illumined one day by the light of reason he broke the images of divinities and saints that adorned the altar of a chapel, extinguished the candles, and, without losing a moment, replaced the destroyed objects by the works of atheistic philosophers such as Buchner and Moleschott, after which he piously relighted the candles. The object of his religious beliefs had been transformed, but can it be truthfully said that his religious sentiments had changed?"--The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895) by Gustave Le Bon |
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Belief is the state of mind in which a person thinks something to be the case regardless of empirical evidence to prove that something is the case with factual certainty. Another way of defining belief sees it as a mental representation of an attitude positively oriented towards the likelihood of something being true. In the context of Ancient Greek thought, two related concepts were identified with regards to the concept of belief: pistis and doxa. Simplified, we may say that pistis refers to "trust" and "confidence", while doxa refers to "opinion" and "acceptance". The English word "orthodoxy" derives from doxa. Jonathan Leicester suggests that belief has the purpose of guiding action rather than indicating truth.
In epistemology, philosophers use the term "belief" to refer to personal attitudes associated with true or false ideas and concepts. However, "belief" does not require active introspection and circumspection. For example, we never ponder whether or not the sun will rise. We simply assume the sun will rise. Since "belief" is an important aspect of mundane life, according to Eric Schwitzgebel in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a related question asks: "how a physical organism can have beliefs?"
Etymology
From Middle English bileve, from Old English lēafa, from Proto-Germanic *laubô. Compare German Glaube (“faith, belief”).
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
