The Bayesian fallacy: Distinguishing internal motivations and religious beliefs from other beliefs

Abstract

This paper advances the two-axis of information hypothesis. One axis concerns whether one's belief is about the environment as opposed to one's own action (the self). The other axis of information concerns whether the information is about content as opposed to context. Given the two axes, we have four kinds of beliefs: convictions, conceptions, perception, and confidence. The Bayesian fallacy is the failure to observe the differences among the four kinds of beliefs. For instance, convictions are about internal motivations, such as “I can climb this mountain”, which cannot be updated via Bayes's rule as the case with the other three beliefs.