Nature Of Doubt Research Articles

Kierkegaard on belief and credence

AbstractKierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes Climacus famously defines faith as a risky “venture” that requires “holding fast” to “objective uncertainty.” Yet puzzlingly, he emphasizes that faith requires resolute conviction and certainty. Moreover, Climacus claims that all beliefs about contingent propositions about the external world “exclude doubt” and “nullify uncertainty,” but also that uncertainty is “continually present” in these very same beliefs. This paper argues that these apparent contradictions can be resolved by interpreting Climacus as a belief‐credence dualist. That is, Climacus holds that beliefs and credences (i.e., degrees of belief) are two irreducibly distinct types of mental states. Beliefs are resolutions that close inquiry, thereby excluding doubt and reflecting subjective certainty by disregarding the possibility of error. Credences, by contrast, reflect assessments of evidential probabilities, thereby encoding a recognition of “objective uncertainty” by acknowledging the possibility of error. In addition to solving a vexing interpretive puzzle and showing how Kierkegaard anticipates contemporary views about the nature of belief and credence, this paper demonstrates that Kierkegaard developed a sophisticated account of the nature of belief, doubt, and certainty that merits serious philosophical consideration.

A study of doubt in obsessive-compulsive disorder

Background and objectivesObsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) has been referred to as the “doubting disease,” yet there has been little foundational research on its phenomenology and characteristics. Studies of doubt have relied on researchers’ idiosyncratic conceptualizations of the construct, resulting in varied assessment methods and different prevalence rates (11–75%). We examined the nature and characteristics of doubt in people with clinical and subclinical OCD so as to identify its nature and characteristics, and factors that may be unique to OCD. MethodsA semi-structured interview about doubt was administered to people with OCD (N = 44) and with subclinical OCD (N = 21). ResultsDoubt was highly prevalent and manifested as a form of obsession, uncertainty about whether a task was done properly, and/or lack of confidence in memory and perceptions. All participants took action to resolve doubt and/or proactively pre-empt or reduce future doubt. Doubt was deeply connected to negative core beliefs about the self. The groups did not differ on their experience of doubt, except that greater symptom severity was associated with greater interference from doubt, less ability to resist it, and less success of proactive, but not reactive, strategies to manage it. LimitationsWe relied on retrospective report, and the subclinical group was relatively small. ConclusionsIn subclinical and clinical OCD, doubt is pervasive, manifests in three domains, is connected to negative core beliefs, and is highly aversive. Continued empirical study of doubt is essential to proper assessment and to development of theories and treatment of OCD.

Tracing the Threads

While spirituality has emerged as a topic of interest in adult education, much of the current scholarship considers spirituality as distinct from religion. This literature review questions those conclusions, including the use of theistic terminology to describe a concept (spirituality) that many posit is non-theistic. Spirituality is also considered in terms of transformative learning theory and spiritually centred transformation, specifically as a type of non-cognitive transformation. In this way, spirituality is placed alongside other types of affective or emotionally based ways of knowing, learning, and transforming. Finally, experiences of religious doubt—defined as dissonance or uncertainty in one’s religious and faith beliefs—are identified as potential catalysts that launch the transformative learning process. The review concludes by identifying the need for more research into the intersections of religious doubt and transformative learning in terms of what this research might tell us about the nature of both doubt and transformation.

Doubt and Organization

Doubt is an important, yet largely overlooked part of organisational life. In recent years, a small but fragmented literature on the topic has appeared. It treats doubt something largely negative which inhibits action or something positive and ‘generative’. These approaches often overlook the ambivalent nature of doubt. To address this shortcoming, I would like to draw together the fragmented existing research on the topic to explore doubt as double-edged sword which can have both positive and negative outcomes. I will argue organisations are held together by common beliefs. These beliefs are frequently disturbed by breakdowns, anomalies, complexities and outsiders. Most of the time such disturbances are overlooked thanks to our cognitive biases. But when a disturbance is persistent, it can prompt doubt. These doubts are typically explored and amplified through metacognitive processes like meditation, dialogue and experimentation. This can have some positive outcomes such as learning, updating, reframing and neutrality. But it can come at a significant cost such as anxiety, time, resources and creation of conflict. When these costs become too much to carry, people seek to move beyond doubt in four ways: committing themselves to existing beliefs, forging new beliefs, being cynical about all beliefs or remaining sceptical. Each of these different responses has feedback loops and tends to create different types of organisations – dogmatic, sectarian, cynical and sceptical.

The Quest for Certainty

Abstract The aim of this paper is to vindicate the Cartesian quest for certainty by arguing that to aim at certainty is a constitutive feature of cognition. My argument hinges on three observations concerning the nature of doubt and judgment: first, it is always possible to have a doubt as to whether p in so far as one takes the truth of p to be uncertain; second, in so far as one takes the truth of p to be certain, one is no longer able to genuinely wonder whether p is true; third, to ask the question whether p is to desire to receive a true answer. On this ground I clarify in what sense certainty is the aim of cognition. I then argue that in judging that p we commit ourselves to p’s being certain and that certainty is the constitutive norm of judgment. The paper as a whole provides a picture of the interplay between doubt and judgment that aims at vindicating the traditional insight that our ability to doubt testifies our aspiration to know with absolute certainty.

Voice-Based Agents as Personified Things: Assimilation and Accommodation as Equilibration of Doubt

We aim to investigate the nature of doubt regarding voice-based agents by referring to Piaget’s ontological object–subject classification “thing” and “person,” its associated equilibration processes, and influential factors of the situation, the user, and the agent. In two online surveys, we asked 853 and 435 participants, ranging from 17 to 65 years of age, to assess Alexa and the Google Assistant. We discovered that only some people viewed voice-based agents as mere things, whereas the majority classified them into personified things. However, their classification is fragile and depends basically on the imputation of subject-like attributes of agency and mind to the voice-based agents, increased by a dyadic using situation, previous regular interactions, a younger age, and an introverted personality of the user. We discuss these results in a broader context.

The Benefit of the Doubt: On the Relationship Between Doubt and Power

Anthropological studies of doubt have typically highlighted its productivity, pointing to the space that doubt opens to question established frameworks. This article builds on these observations by exploring an instance of doubt that I argue is unproductive. For Pentecostals on the Zambian Copperbelt, the fact that they do not receive the extravagant riches promised by the prosperity gospel—a Christian movement that is central to their faith—is not usually a problem. Most Pentecostal believers are able to reinterpret small gains in terms of a locally redefined prosperity, and therefore manage the doubts that their lack of wealth produces. For the poorest and most socially marginal believers, however, this kind of productive engagement with doubt is not possible. The productivity of doubt is therefore more an expression of structural factors than of the nature of doubt itself. This suggests that doubt—or at least the ability to mobilize doubt effectively—is a key index of power. This article provides an ethnographic exploration of the failure of the prosperity gospel while also expanding anthropological understanding of what makes doubt productive.

The nature of doubt and a new puzzle about belief, doubt, and confidence

In this paper, I present and defend a novel account of doubt. In Sect. 2, I make some preliminary observations about the nature of doubt. In Sect. 3, I introduce a new puzzle about the relationship between three psychological states: doubt, belief, and confidence. I present this puzzle because my account of doubt emerges as a possible solution to it. Lastly, in Sect. 4, I elaborate on and defend my account of doubt. Roughly, one has doubt if and only if one believes one might be wrong; I argue that this is superior to the account that says that one has doubt if and only if one has less than the highest degree of confidence.

Two Poems

Visit the WLT blog to read a bilingual version of “Universidad–Indios Verdes”alongside Dixon’s post about the challenges he encountered while translating it. top photo : himanshu nerurkar dixon photo : sydne gray 14 WLT SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2016 Two Poems by Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza The Ant Let it go back to the anthill. If it brushes inattentively against your fingers climbs them and daydreams in the furrows of your hand, don’t chase it away or squash it. Let it go back, as best it can, to the anthill. Guide it to where it belongs. Surely the others, those smart-asses, will make fun of its new habits, of its stubborn disorientation. Let it go back, if it can, to the anthill, even though it carries no shred of a leaf on its ant’s back. Don’t kill it. There, others, but not many, will welcome it and find it a place in the crowd. Maybe it (just like you in the poem) confuses, without arrogance, the mystery of the world with the palm of your hand. Arturo Gutiérrez Plaza (b. 1962, Caracas) is a poet and essayist. He has published various books of poetry and literary scholarship, and he received the Premio Hispanoamericano de Poesía Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in 1999. Cuidados intensivos (2014) is his latest verse collection. Arthur Dixon works as a translator and as managing editor of WLT’s affiliated journal Latin American Literature Today. Universidad–Indios Verdes Why force out dreams and nightmares if everything here convulses until it tames amazement? This, only in part, is what Breton realized with his naïve eyes as they drifted across the surface of these lands. In those days the subsoil was a depth conquered by water, mud, and ruins more ancient than the gods of Lautréamont. Since half a century ago, without resorting to imagination, the inhabitants of this valley have traveled underneath the streets, excavating, day by day, its foundations. A bustling, flowery market (with special offers and suffering) travels along tunnels and train cars pressing the existence of those who rush by, of those who seek shortcuts underneath everything. A blind man, maybe not watching, plays a melody on an electric piano with his right hand as he keeps the beat sinister with the other, between trip-ups, with a cup that is maraca and collection box; quality chocolates and peanuts are advertised for ten pesos (“they cost what they’re worth”); women in face masks look sideways at couples that embrace and kiss like moles in heat. Every kind of advertiser enters and exits the train cars, station to station: people selling self-help books and biographies of Che; evangelical preachers; vendors of chewing gum and lozenges for the good of throats and mouths; dazed deaf-mutes; paraplegics in casts; DJs with backpacks and singers with electric-acoustic guitars who offer ballads and rock in English and Spanish. All struggle, body against body, like the wounded of extinct battles. The father of surrealism noted none of this in his log, not while visiting these stops nor while marinating his subconscious in the waters of the Seine. Translations from the Spanish By Arthur Dixon editor’s pick Guus Kuijer The Bible for Unbelievers: The Beginning: Genesis Trans. Laura Watkinson Seven Stories Press, 2016 The Bible has occupied a central position in Western culture since Constantine’s conversion to the Christian faith. Once universally recognized as the infallible word of God, the texts that make it up have been incrementally opened up to other modes of reading. Guus Kuijer, better known in his home country of the Netherlands as a prolific author of children’s books, presents a compelling vision of the Bible as a storytelling vehicle to explore the nature of doubt in his book The Bible for Unbelievers: The Beginning: Genesis. The title is somewhat misleading as Kuijer’s reframing is more about uncertainty than disbelief. Nowhere is this more evident than in the opening chapter, leading off with a creation myth wherein the first thing created is God in the form of a word. Kuijer leaves open multiple explanations for God’s creation ex nihilo...

Recontextualizing psychosocial development in young children: a model of environmental identity development

This article presents an Environmental Identity Development model, which considers the progression of young children’s self-cognitions in relation to the natural world. We recontextualize four of Erikson’s psychosocial stages, in order to consider children’s identity development in learning in, about, and for the environment. Beginning with Trust in Nature vs. Mistrust in Nature, we argue that cognitions of comfort in the natural world vs. discomfort, provide the foundation for healthy environmental identity development. This trusting bond/relationship with nature allows children to gain Spatial Autonomy through collectively or independently creating their own sense of place in nature vs. feelings of doubt or Environmental Shame. As children progress, they gain Environmental Competencies, creative innovations to use the environment for both personal and social purposes vs. separation from nature or Environmental Disdain. Such competencies promote children’s agency in exercising Environmental Action, applied care/ethics aimed at building a sustainable future, as opposed to behaviors that cause Environmental Harm. Young children’s environmental identity develops in diverse ways and in distinct sociocultural and geographical contexts. Caregivers/educators play a unique role in recognizing and supporting the needs of individual children as they progress towards healthy environmental identity development.

BEING A NONBELIEVER IN A TIME OF ISLAMIC REVIVAL: TRAJECTORIES OF DOUBT AND CERTAINTY IN CONTEMPORARY EGYPT

AbstractLooking at the trajectories of people of Muslim origin in Egypt who express religious doubts, I argue in this article that doubt and nonreligiosity are not necessarily a child of a Christian genealogy of the secular and definitely not alien to Muslims. Instead, we have to understand them as an intimate moral discontent with the contemporary age of Islamic revival, even if their shape and some of their positive claims are borrowed from notions of Western origin and global currency—most notably, human rights and feminism. There are reasons and ways to become a nonbeliever in a society profoundly affected by a religious revival, and these reasons and ways can be telling about the nature of doubt and certainty in general. They also offer a perspective on the problematic of secularism that focuses on issues of belief and existential trust rather than governmentality and discursive power.

<i>Doubt in an Age of Faith: Uncertainty in the Long Twelfth Century</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Doubt in an Age of Faith: Uncertainty in the Long Twelfth Century Jason Taliadoros Flanagan, Sabina, Doubt in an Age of Faith: Uncertainty in the Long Twelfth Century (Disputatio, 17), Turnhout, Brepols, 2009; hardback; pp. xiv, 216; R.R.P. €60.00; ISBN 9782503527482. Why do we need a history of doubt and uncertainty of the twelfth century? In the first chapter and introduction, 'Sites and Soundings', of her subtle, [End Page 207] elegant and erudite book, Dr Flanagan explains why. Although doubt may be considered an innate characteristic of humankind, whatever the historical period, the Middle Ages is widely considered an 'Age of Faith', one in which the superstitious or credulous medieval mind lacked the rationality to brook doubt, particularly in religious matters. The notion of doubt, further, is one relatively ignored by medievalists: such studies as Robert I. Moore's 'persecuting society' polarize reactions to matters of faith in terms of the stark opposites of tolerance or persecution, ignoring the 'middle ground' of doubt (p. 4). Further, historians of medieval 'mentalities' have inexplicably studied humour, wonder, fear and pain, but not doubt (p. 1). What is doubt? For Flanagan, it is not simply religious scepticism, but 'uncertainty in all its forms'. It covers a broad continuum: at one end is certainty and at the other is denial, with every stage in between occupied by varying levels of uncertainty or doubt (p. 2). Consistently with the study of medieval 'mentalities', Flanagan seeks to examine 'how such uncertainty was experienced, expressed, examined, and in some cases resolved' in selected written sources from the period 1060–1230 ('the long twelfth century') (p. 4). Secular doubt, the subject of Chapter 2, includes reference to the several ways in which doubt is resolved in non-religious contexts, that is concerning 'life choices'. Spiritual doubt, the subject of Chapter 3, concerns uncertainties on 'objective' matters (e.g., the meaning of the Scriptures) or matters of doctrine (e.g., the sacraments) and 'subjective' matters (someone's own worthiness for salvation or uncertainty on doctrine, e.g., Otloh of St. Emmeram). Flanagan concludes, from a close reading of a number of important texts from the twelfth century, that to doubt the existence of medieval 'atheism' is simply untenable (p. 89). Chapter 4, 'Discussions of the Nature of Doubt', then deals with accounts of the nature of doubt in and of itself, which she divides between those taking a 'psychological' point of view and those taking an epistemological approach (p. 91). Chapter 5, 'The Benefits of Doubt', examines the relationship between this 'nature' of doubt just discussed in Chapter 4 with what R. W. Southern called 'the intellectual programme' of the twelfth century (p. 125). Flanagan concludes that the twelfth-century 'formalization of doubt as a method of enquiry presents an "historical irony"' (p. 154) in that, while previous early scholasticism did not permit 'the most profound' questions, since they 'diverged too much from what was commonly held by right-thinking people', later, such questions could be posed, 'in the academic exercises of [End Page 208] the schools, but only because they were not really doubted. One side was known to be true already and they became simply pedagogical exercises' (p. 154). In both chapters, the author relies on her close reading of case studies from Abelard, Anselm and others. Chapter 6, 'Disadvantages of Doubt', considers examples of Christian-Jewish debate or polemic of the twelfth century. In this period, Flanagan notes that 'things took a turn for the worse' regarding the position of Jews in Western Europe, a root cause for which has been identified as anxiety or doubt, in recent studies of Michael Signer, John Van Engen, Anna Sapir Abulafia, Gavin Langmuir and R. I. Moore (pp. 159-60). Flanagan concludes that doubt is not a reliable or workable explanation for such hostility towards the Jews, and other explanations should be sought. A short concluding chapter (Chapter 7: 'A Commendation of Doubt?')–a reversal of the title of Baldwin of Forde's treatise, De commendatione fidei (On the Commendation of Faith) – observes that '[u]ncertainty, and its sharp end, doubt, can be found both implicitly and explicitly in twelfth-century sources. This is...

Método e metafísica: Descartes entre as Regras e as Meditações

O propósito deste artigo é o de discutir em linhas gerais a relação entre método e metafísica na filosofia de Descartes. Pretendemos fazê-lo mediante a contraposição das Meditações de filosofia primeira às Regras para a direção do espírito quanto a alguns temas em comum. Nosso objetivo principal é questionar o papel desempenhado pela evidência intelectual no contexto epistemológico das Regras e no contexto metafísico das Meditações. Retomando, num primeiro momento, algumas interpretações sobre o assunto e discutindo, num segundo momento, a natureza da dúvida e a noção de evidência nas Meditações, procuramos concluir com a sugestão de que no sistema cartesiano tem lugar um conflito de ordem estrutural entre método e metafísica.

Scepticism and the Early Descartes1

For the past thirty years or so, Descartes's treatment of scepticism has become increasingly important to historians of philosophy. They have questioned the nature of Descartes's sceptical doubt, i...

Johannes Climacus as Kierkegaard’s Discourse on Method

Rene Descartes is the author of several excellent jokes, for which he rarely receives credit. For example: Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world: for everyone thinks himself so well endowed with it that even those who are the hardest to please in everything else do not usually desire more of it than they possess. (DM 111)1 Not content with knowing everything which is intelligibly explained in their author's writings, they wish in addition to find there the solution to many problems about which he says nothing and about which perhaps he never thought. . . . In this they seem to resemble a blind man who, in order to fight without disadvantage against someone who can see, lures him into the depths of a very dark cellar. (DM 147) high degree of perfection displayed in some of their actions makes us suspect that animals do not have free will. (CP 5) I have almost never encountered a critic of my views who did not seem to be either less rigorous or less impartial than myself. (DM 146) Philosophy gives us the means of speaking plausibly about any subject and of winning the admiration of the less learned. (DM 113) While Descartes almost never gets the attention he deserves as a writer of comedy, there has been no shortage of recognition for him as a master of methodology. Descartes is the author not only of the Discourse on Method-the quintessential statement of modern philosophy's obsession with method-but also of two other unpublished works which attempt to lay down the law on the practice of philosophy: Rules for the Direction of the Mind and Search for Truth by Means of the Natural Light. Some may doubt that Descartes had a sense of humor, but no one doubts that he was deeply committed to giving philosophy a solid methodological foundation. Soren Kierkegaard is also the author of many excellent jokes. In fact, some have suggested that his entire authorship can be understood as one long and rather complicated joke. Even if one doesn't go to that extreme, it is clear that an author who wrote under more than ten different pseudonyms, who composed an entire book consisting of nothing but prefaces, who wrote no less than five different conclusions to his work as a pseudonymous author,2 whose master's thesis was titled Concept of Irony, and who also penned the immortal lines- Were there no hell, it would have to be made in order to punish the professors, whose crime is such that it can scarcely be punished in this world. (JP 3: 3589) -is someone who cares about comedy. While not everyone has appreciated Kierkegaard's sense of humor, nearly all of his readers have at least acknowledged that he had one. On the other hand, virtually no one has thought of Kierkegaard as someone who had even the slightest interest in philosophical method. In this essay I propose to rectify that fact. I will argue that Johannes Climacus, or, De Omnibus Dubitandum Est can be read as Kierkegaard's statement of methodology, his own version of the Discourse on Method. Johannes Climacus is a strange text-unpublished in Kierkegaard's lifetime-which has been interpreted in many ways, but to my knowledge it has not yet been fully appreciated as something of a methodological manifesto.3 In what follows I will argue for such a reading by focusing on three key issues of methodology: time and its relation to the philosophical investigator; the nature of doubt and its role in philosophy; and the connection between philosophy's method and the philosopher's health. All of these matters of methodology are occasioned for Johannes Climacus by Descartes' attempt to give philosophy a legitimate beginning, so we will begin with that beginning.4 Prelude: Philosophy's Dubious Beginning(s) The Dialectic of Beginning: Scene in the Underworld Characters: Socrates, Hegel Socrates sits in the cool [of the evening] by a fountain, listening. …

Doubt in Search of Understanding

This article argues for a reappraisal of the nature of doubt. Doubt is itself an ambiguous phenomenon: it may signify unbelief but it may also be an expression of faith. Two major theological approaches to doubt are considered, as evidenced in the works of Newman and Tillich. Neither one is adequate to the ambiguity of doubt. The second part of the article explores the significance of doubt as a factor in the Australian religious context, drawing on contemporary Australian literature to illustrate the ambiguity, and possible significance for theology, of that doubt.

What's Difficult about Teaching Technical Writing

The word refers to a way we engage in an activity. Doing something is difficult if we do it with effort and with some doubt as to the eventual outcome. Depending on the nature and degree of doubt, there are three kinds of difficulty. If we are having difficulty with something but expect from the nature of the task or the fact that others can do it that we will eventually learn to do it easily, we are having a transitory difficulty. This is the difficulty of riding a bicycle, the difficulty of getting up in front of a group, the difficulty of choosing between vanilla and chocolate ripple. Other difficulties we do not expect to overcome, though we think in principle that the task admits easy success and we can see that others have overcome the difficulties. These are continuing difficulties. I have difficulty writing, for instance, and I expect to continue to have difficulty, but I know others for whom it is not at all difficult. I think of this sort of difficulty as a failure to call on the right resources. For most of us, selfdiscipline falls into this category, or being honest on our tax forms. The last kind of difficulty inheres in the task itself, given our capacities. These no one does easily: resolving paradoxes or thinking of two things at once, confronting death or remembering dreams. These are inherent difficulties. The transitory difficulties a new teacher of technical writing faces are only too apparent. They include learning a new curriculum, discovering the needs of a new kind of student, making up assignments and grading them, learning the textbooks, gaining a feel for technical style-and, as Maxwell Smart used to say, loving it. These are difficulties we have teaching any new subject; they are not in principle different from those we would encounter if suddenly asked to teach a course on Nigerian paleoliths. Nor are they particularly difficult as these things go, for there is a profession of teaching technical writing, which we find we have inadvertently joined, and the experienced in that profession have sought to ease our difficulties. An association, a little magazine, summer programs, textbooks, and innumerable how-to articles exist which will help any reasonably thorough person construct and teach a course which will indeed help students. The fundamental principles of technical writing (figure out your audience, organize to