Coherent Belief Systems Research Articles

Coherentism, Truth, and Witness Agreement

Coherentists on epistemic justification claim that all justification is inferential, and that beliefs, when justified, get their justification together (not in isolation) as members of a coherent belief system. Some recent work in formal epistemology shows that “individual credibility” is needed for “witness agreement” to increase the probability of truth and generate a high probability of truth. It can seem that, from this result in formal epistemology, it follows that coherentist justification is not truth-conducive, that it is not the case that, under the requisite conditions, coherentist justification increases the probability of truth and generates a high probability of truth. I argue that this does not follow.

Culture, spirituality, religion and health: looking at the big picture

Religion provides things that are good for health and wellbeing, including social support, existential meaning, a sense of purpose, a coherent belief system and a clear moral code. But these benefits can also come from other sources. Conversely, religion is shaped by its social context in ways that affect its social role. Religion is no panacea when it comes to improving health. Religion's role in health needs to be examined in a broad context, especially the ways in which culture influences religion's expression of the spiritual.

Lay Beliefs about Treatments for People with Mental Illness and Their Implications for Antistigma Strategies

First, to describe factors influencing the public's attitude toward treatment recommendations for people with mental illness; second, to identify coherent belief systems about the helpfulness of specific interventions; and third, to discuss how to ameliorate mental health literacy and antistigma strategies. Participants of a representative telephone survey in the general population (n = 1737) were presented with a vignette depicting a person with either schizophrenia or depression. From a list of suggestions, they were asked to recommend treatments for this person. We used a factor analysis to group these proposals and used the factors as the dependent variables in a multiple regression analysis. Treatment suggestions are summarized in 4 groups, each characterizing a specific therapeutic approach: 1) psychopharmacological proposals (that is, psychotropic drugs), 2) therapeutic counselling (from a psychologist or psychiatrist or psychotherapy), 3) alternative suggestions (such as homeopathy), and 4) social advice (for example, from a social worker). Medical treatments were proposed by people who had a higher education, who had a positive attitude toward psychopharmacology, who correctly recognized the person depicted in the vignette as being ill, who were presented with the schizophrenia vignette, who kept social distance, and who had contact with mentally ill people. The variables could explain alternative and social treatment proposals only to a small extent. The public's beliefs about treatment for people with mental illness are organized into 4 coherent systems, 2 of which involve evidence-based treatments. Medical treatment proposals are influenced by adequate mental health literacy; however, they are also linked to more social distance toward people with mental illness. Additionally, efforts to better explain nonmedical treatment suggestions are needed. Implications for further antistigma strategies are discussed.

A Horse Called NCLB

WHEN the horse dies, many school reformers advise riders to dismount. Don't buy a new whip, don't form a committee to study the horse, and don't blame horses. In other words, when things are not working, change them. The same advice should be given to those who are riding a crazy horse that is galloping at full speed toward a cliff. Get off and find a mount that will get you where you want to go -- presumably not the bottom of a precipice, with you in a mangled heap. The trouble is that one particularly crazy horse -- test-based accountability under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act -- is being ridden by advocates for poor children and guardians of rigorous for all as if it were a Kentucky Derby winner instead of a maniac steed bent on self-destruction. Let's be brutally honest. The early evidence of the impact of NCLB's test-based accountability on the states indicates that it is undermining many good policies, fostering some bad ones, and creating resentments that will not ease until better policies are developed and put in place. The growing criticism of the policies does not mean that people reject the goals of the legislation or the goals of accountability per se. Rather, the criticism stems from a realization that current standardized, high-stakes testing narrows the whole enterprise of education and could halt the development of truly significant improvements in teaching and learning. Undoubtedly, Richard Elmore of the Harvard Graduate School of Education speaks for many when he contends that internal accountability must precede external accountability. That is, the people inside a low- performing school, for example, must know what to do to improve student achievement and have a coherent system of beliefs and practices before any significant change can take place. Without substantial investments in schools' capacity, test-based accountability will probably aggravate existing inequalities, Elmore wrote in the spring 2002 issue of Education Next. High-performing schools essentially reflect the social capital students bring to school. Low-performing schools most often cannot rely on these supports but, instead, must turn to their own organizational capacity, Elmore notes. While NCLB provides more money for these low-performing schools, it cannot match the intensity of effort applied to the accountability side of the issue, so the low-income schools will slip even further behind. Once, when fairness was considered important, the movement for higher standards and better assessments was coupled with opportunity-to-learn standards. This last item dropped off the agenda when state governors realized that it came with a hefty price tag, especially in the form of increased investment in teacher quality and improved working conditions that few state leaders were willing to support. Nor were local leaders altogether willing to work with teacher unions to find a way to distribute experienced and highly qualified teachers to the neediest schools. There is a reason why educators who don't know what to do are clustered in low-income schools. It is because policy makers have put them there -- and now are demanding that they be held more accountable for improvement than those who teach in more affluent schools. At the same time, NCLB assumes -- falsely -- that states have the capacity to fulfill its testing requirements. Not even half the states came close to meeting the NCLB mandate of testing every year at grades 3 through 8 when the legislation was passed. As the Clinton Administration was leaving office, it had found fewer than half of the states in compliance with the 1994 changes in Title I, changes that nudged, rather than bludgeoned, the states toward performance standards and assessments. Some states were doing quite well, but NCLB created new demands. Maryland, for example, could not afford to keep making improvements in its performance-based system of testing and still comply with NCLB. …

Postcolonial Guilt in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing

Think of being parent or child of a concentration camp guard. One would want to say: `This person is not my own,' and yet one could not. The facts of birth are inescapable. So are very facts of belonging to civilisation that has made one. is this inevitability which leads to degree of alienation and disgust which some people feel present situation. George Grant, Technology and Empire (76) In a 1972 interview with Graeme Gibson, Margaret Atwood comments of narrator's psychic trauma Surfacing that [s]he wishes to be not and prefaces statement by linking guilt and self-knowledge novel: It depends on whether you define as intrinsically innocent, and if you do, then you have a lot of problems, because fact you aren't. She wishes to be not human, because being human inevitably involves being guilty (13). What is source of this guilt? Despite many provocative and theoretically sophisticated studies of Surfacing to date, narrator's guilt remains underexamined, with critics content to assume that it stems from her abortion, a resolvable moral and textual problem.(1) Or, do they see it as part of human condition generally?(2) Yet narrator's extreme self-revulsion, which leads her to confess that trouble some people have being German ... I have being (130), is fundamental to novel's examination of what Atwood calls the Canadian stance towards world (Gibson 13). Although many critics have made connection between narrator's personal journey and Canada's postcolonial anxieties, they have not always recognized complexity of Atwood's representation of national psyche. In this paper, I will suggest some of postcolonial dimensions of narrator's guilt as it relates to Canadian predicament. Atwood has written that by discovering your place you discover yourself (Second 113) and Surfacing brings subject of Canadian national space insistently forward. The novel is filled with references to competing territorial claims. The narrator's family is located border country (26), presumably an area of northern Quebec near Ontario border, and her admission that her home ground is also foreign territory (11) alludes to Canada's history of struggle between English and French colonists. Although humorous image of her mother and Madame trying with great goodwill to make conversation (21) is a domesticated version of English-French non-communication, narrator is conscious that Quebecois resentment of [l]es maudits anglais has some justification (56). Such references indicate narrator's latent consciousness of Canadian space as fought for and conquered rather than peacefully discovered. Aware of herself as an outsider, even an intruder, Quebec society, narrator expresses no affinity for Quebec culture. In fact, just as her father scorned :irrationality of Catholicism, so narrator and her friends replay Anglophone prejudices against French, emphasizing their antiquity and simplicity: `They must fuck a lot here,' Anna says, `I guess it's Church' (13). The narrator is disappointed when she discovers that Paul's wife has traded her wood range for an electric stove (20) yet continues to insist on couple's status as living stereotypes, originals of habitant carvings sold in tourist handicraft shops (20). Moreover, as is revealed David's complacent reference to `[n]ine beavers pissing on a frog' (39), these ideas are not harmless misperceptions of one society about another, but a coherent system of beliefs to justify and consolidate anglophone dominance. As Carole Gerson notes, signs of continued territorial conquest are everywhere, improved road, commercialization, and tourism: [w]herever she looks, narrator finds signs that her childhood version of Quebec is being violated by Americans and Canadians who have assimilated `American' values of material progress and self-centred ecological destruction (118-19). …

Should there be a universal philosophy of music education?

The four themes of the Conference focus on the universal dimension of music, claiming that music speaks universally to all generations, times, cultures, and nations. if that is the case, it should also be the case that a universal philosophy of music education – a coherent system of beliefs about the nature and value of music and its role in education and in life, applicable to all generations, times, cultures, and nations – should exist or can exist or does exist. However, no such universal philosophy has been articulated and has been recognized by the world's music educators to be universally acceptable. In fact, many would claim that a universally persuasive philosophy is unlikely if not undesirable. Lacking such a philosophy, claims for the universality of music have no firm foundation. Yet the intuition that there is, indeed, a universal dimension of music and of music education remains persuasive or at least attractive. Is it possible to identify universally accepted values of music and the teaching and learning of music? Would it be useful for the international community of music educators if attempts were made to do so? This paper will argue that it would be extremely useful to make such an attempt, and will suggest some of the strategies by which the attempt might prove fruitful.

A Mile Wide But an Inch Deep(?): The Structure of Democratic Commitments in the Former USSR

Theory: Cultural theories argue that the beliefs, values, and attitudes of ordinary citizens are important for processes of democratization. In order for mass political culture to influence politics, citizens must hold views toward democracy that are temporally stable, impervious to short-term economic failure, and connected to actual political behavior. Hypotheses: 1) To the degree that attitudes toward democracy represent a coherent belief system, there will be a tendency toward attitudinal stability. 2) If support for democracy is instrumental-the primary value being economic prosperitythen economic failure and malaise will cause support for democracy to wither. 3) Based on protest activity taking place during the failed Putsch of 1991, I test the hypothesis that democratic political values are associated with resistance to the

An obligation to provide abortion services: what happens when physicians refuse?

Access to abortion services in the United States continues to decline. It does so not because of significant changes in legislation or court rulings but because fewer and fewer physicians wish to perform abortions and because most states now have "conscientious objection" legislation that makes it easy for physicians to refuse to do so. We argue in this paper that physicians have an obligation to perform all socially sanctioned medical services, including abortions, and thus that the burden of justification lies upon those who wish to be excused from that obligation. That is, such persons should have to show how requiring them to perform abortions would represent a serious threat to their fundamental moral or religious beliefs. We use current California law as an example of legislation that does not take physicians' obligations into account and thus allows them too easily to declare conscientious objection.

Developing An Intuitive Understanding of Substance Kinds

Children observe many different behaviors of various substances in everyday life. An effective way to interpret and organize the information they receive in this way is to develop an intuitive theory of substance kinds. In the three studies reported here, by age 3 or 4, children from both middle class and lower-middle class backgrounds seemed to appreciate the homogeneous structure of substances. They seemed to believe that any arbitrary portion of a chunk/pile of a substance is the same kind of substance as the whole chunk/pile. They would generalize a substance-relevant property (e.g., taste, smell when it bums) across portions that shared either a common origin or a common substance label. By contrast, they would generalize an entity-relevant property (e.g., coarseness, can be blown away when it′s windy) across portions of similar grain size and portion size. Moreover, discussing the concept of "tiny, homogeneous pieces" with 4- and 5-year-olds promoted appropriate inductive inferences about substance-relevant properties across portions. Together, these findings suggest that children′s ideas about substances form a rather coherent belief system. While such a belief system may not qualify as a theory because it may lack an explicit causal mechanism, it nonetheless provides a coherent basis for children to reason about substance kinds.

Mechanism and Mysticism: The Influence of Science on the Thought and Work of Theodore Dreiser.

In Mechanism and Mysticism, Louis J. Zanine provides the first full-length study of Theodore Dreiser's interest in modern scientific research and of the impact of scientific ideas on the thought and work of a writer who would gain fame as a deterministic naturalist, but who would end his life as a mystic pantheist. Dreiser was raised in a household dominated by the fanatical Catholic faith of his father and the superstitious beliefs of his mother. In 1894, having rejected the orthodox Christianity of his upbringing, he underwent a significant intellectual and spiritual revolution, precipitated by his discover y of the evolutionary writings of Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer. The concept of an evolutionary universe provided Dreiser with the philosophical framework for the pessimistic naturalism of his early novels (Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, The Financier). In the next decades, his discovery of scientific mechanism would reveal a universe that was a well-ordered machine, and it is in the context of Dreiser's reading of the mechanistic philosophy of Jacques Loeb and others that Zanine examines An American Tragedy and The Hand of the Potter. The philosophy of mechanism, combined with his under standing of evolutionary thought, provided Dreiser with a scientific world view that gave him a coherent system of beliefs about human beings' place in the universe, their origins, and the bases of their behavior. Yet Zanine demonstrates that Dreiser never fully adopted the stark materialism or atheism of the mechanists. He continued to have a deeply superstitious side, and a number of experiences with fortune tellers, seances, Ouija boards, and spirit apparitions convinced him of the existence of some controlling supernatural force in the universe. During the same years that he was espousing the principles of mechanistic philosophy in correspondence and conversation with Jacques Loeb, Zanine shows Dreiser was also drawn into speculations about the supernatural through his friendship with the eccentric investigator and author, Charles Fort. In an effort to further his understanding of mechanistic philosophy and to reconcile his faith in the supernatural with the facts of modern science, Dreiser began an intensive period of scientific study in 1927. For the next ten years, he befriended many of America's most eminent scientists, and read numerous works on biology, chemistry, physics, and astronomy. In 1937, at the Carnegie Biological Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor, he experienced a spiritual epiphany in which he was suddenly able to intuit a Divine Being's presence in all of nature. Dreiser's scientific quest had culminated in a mystical conversion that would dominate the remaining eight years of his life. Mechanism and Mysticism offers substantial insight into the character of one of America's leading literary figures. With its unique brand of interdisciplinary research data, it will be of interest to students and scholars of American studies and literature, twentieth-century history, and history of science and religion.

Who has a Problem, the Student or the Teacher? Differences in Teachers' Beliefs About Their Work with At‐risk and Integrated Exceptional Students

In this study, teachers' assumptions and beliefs are explored about the needs of at‐risk and exceptional students, and about their roles and responsibilities in meeting such needs. Teachers appear to hold consistent and coherent belief systems which differ along an ordinal scale. At one end, ‘restorative’ beliefs assume that problems reside largely within the pupil, and therefore the teacher's duty is to refer the pupil for confirmatory assessment as soon as possible. At the other ‘preventive’ end, teachers assume that the environment, including instruction, plays a part in a student's problems. The teacher therefore attempts prereferral interventions, and requests assessment to identify instructional alternatives. This study provides evidence for the validity of the restorative‐preventive construct, reporting the results of both quantitative and qualitative analyses of interviews with 27 regular class elementary teachers. Teachers' ratings on the construct correlated significantly with their self‐ratings...

Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution

How did Buddhism, so prominent in Japanese life for over a thousand years, become the target of severe persecution in the social and political turmoil of the early Meiji era? How did it survive attacks against it and reconstitute itself as an increasingly articulate and coherent belief system and a bastion of the Japanese national heritage? Here James Ketelaar elucidates not only the development of Buddhism in the late nineteenth century but also the strategies of the Meiji state.

Problems of Content Analysis in Foreign-Policy Research: Notes from the Study of the Origins of Cold War Belief Systems

Why did the U.S. view of the Soviet Union as a difficult but trustworthy ally change to one of a totalitarian state bent on unlimited subversion and conquest? I applied content analysis techniques to historical documents to infer the timing and direction of changes in U.S. policymakers' beliefs about the Soviet Union from 1944 to 1947. This article presents the design, methods, and major findings of the content analysis study. The results showed that Truman did not change his beliefs until after the pressure of events forced him to reorient U.S. foreign policy from cooperation to containment, and that Harriman, Byrnes, and Truman did not have coherent belief systems. I then consider problems likely to be encountered in studies that use verbal content to make inferences about cognitive variables, including the lack of applicable theoretical categories, the difficulty of making both replicable and valid inferences about people's beliefs from instrumental communications, and the task of validating inferences for psychological constructs. I conclude by pointing out the relevance of these reflections for researchers studying related questions.

Belief Publics or Elites?

At first sight, Danish survey data seem to support Philip Converse's theory on (the absence of) coherent belief systems in mass publics. An alternative model is presented, however, accounting for the same data; the existence, within a larger population, of “belief publics’ holding differently structured belief systems, may distort measurement of belief coherence. The data support this model; different belief structures do exist. Finally, there is no sign of ‘elites' with more coherent belief systems within the sample, although such elites should exist according to Converse's theory. Therefore, the model of ‘belief publics' is regarded as the more plausible explanation for the apparent absence of patterned beliefs. The article is primarily concerned with methodological aspects of belief systems analysis, and warns against taking national correlations of opinions at face value; especially the possible existence of ‘split correlations' may seriously distort measurement of, and theorizing on, belief systems.

Russian Piety among Contemporary Russian Orthodox

Soviet sociologists have studied the Russian Orthodox Church from a relatively objective scientific perspective. Reviewing their work indicates that contemporary Orthodox believers do not adhere to any complex and coherent belief system. However, funeral and baptismal rites have persisted as well as Church attendance on religious holidays provided churches are available, although it is not clear if this is primarily due to the older generation. Personal practices such as praying at icons have decreased in recent years. The Orthodox faith seems to have little interaction with secular conduct. Of the several elements of religiosity, practice appears central to the Russian Orthodox.

Psychology: Twentieth century religion? A psychologist's view

In conclusion, then, let me ask again the question: Is psychology our century's religion ? My answer is that psychology is not, and can never be, a full-fledged organized religion with comparable characteristics to Judaism, Catholicism, or Protestantism. Psychology is a modern science and has no coherent system of religious attitudes and beliefs, no conception of ultimate values, no dogmas supernatural in character, and no God. At most psychology is, or can be, a religious-like substitute for religion for a certain subgroup of our population, mainly intellectuals. However, both religion and depth psychology are deeply concerned with modern man's predicament. It is my belief that many people may experience religious — like phenomena within a therapeutic relationship and as a consequence of successful psychotherapy. Therefore, the roles of the clergyman and of the therapist overlap in their efforts to help modern man in his suffering and creative growth. But religion will always have its unique function and so will psychology.

Poetry and Marxism: Three English Poets Take Their Stand

It is about time that poets spoke up for themselves. And to-day the professional monopoly of critics is being seriously threatened by the invasion of poets into the jealously guarded field of criticism. They seem to be increasingly taking over the function usually assigned to the critic. Poets possess an intimate understanding of the difficulties of the creative process and the special requirements and limitations of their craft. Who has a better right, who is better qualified, to speculate on the arcana of aesthetics? In the past poets waged wordy wars in behalf of their convictions. Indeed, one could tentatively advance the thesis that creative writing is an indispensable preparation for the proper exercise of the critical function. Of the leading English critics—Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Pater, Matthew Arnold—only two were not also poets. But the fusion of poetry and criticism that is taking place to-day is of an original, if not altogether unprecedented, kind. Poets who have turned critics are interested not so much in appreciation, or even technique, as in the problem of values. Their major task is to achieve a valid philosophical outlook, a coherent system of beliefs.