Re: dhw--Epistemological Framework (Belief) (Humans)

by dhw, Tuesday, January 25, 2011, 09:24 (5050 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: In view of the comments I have selected above, I still feel that a belief is an acceptance of unproven information, and without general acceptance as truth, it requires faith.-Faith has too many religious connotations for my taste, but even in a broader sense, it involves confidence or trust in something or someone. Personally, I wouldn't associate faith with, for example, the belief that organisms have a common ancestor, that animals communicate complex messages, that the universe began with a big bang. -I like the conciseness of "acceptance of unproven information", but "unproven" raises a similar problem to your earlier "unsubstantiated" ... individuals have different standards of "proof". Talk to any religious fundamentalist. Matt has also been campaigning for "acceptance", and "possession" is probably the wrong word anyway. I was looking for a word that would convey personal internalization as well as stability. Perhaps "acceptance" is better. That would give us: "Acceptance of information which is thought to be true by some but not all individuals who are aware of it." I can't see that this contradicts anything in your own proposal.-Matt opened this thread because many of our disagreements have been due to the lack of an epistemological framework. His initial focus lay on defining knowledge, but I think the main cause of confusion was that we had philosophical discourse undermining what I call common-sense discourse. We seem now to have reached agreement that the philosophical approach will get us nowhere, so we've already made progress! The rest is a matter of detail ... particularly drawing a clear dividing line between knowledge and belief, which I think we've also done through definitions. For me the final phase is to understand the nature of belief, so that each of us is aware of his own subjectivity ... for instance, with regard to priorities. But I'm feeling my way, just like the rest of us, and I expect my last post to spark off discussion, not put an end to it!