Notion Of Belief Research Articles

Beliefs-oriented subject-matter didactics

This paper presents a modified approach to subject-matter didactics, in which the focus is not on the content itself, but on the students' view of the content. The introduction deals with an overview of subject-matter didactics and the notion of beliefs used in this paper. The main portion of the paper deals with presenting the concepts of a book and a seminar based on the student-centered subject-matter didactics approach. For the first qualitative evaluation, selected reflections of students are analyzed. Finally, initial findings are summarized and an outlook is provided.

Assertion, Lying and the Norm of Truth

In chapter four of Truth and Truthfulness Bernard Williams presents an account of assertion that relies heavily on the ‘psychological’ notions of belief and intention. In chapter five his definition of lying similarly relies on such notions. For Williams, insofar as there are norms governing assertion as such or norms broken by lying as such, these norms relate to saying what you think to be true, as distinct from saying what is true. I argue that this ‘psychologized’ account of assertion (and lying) is for various reasons mistaken. A consequence of Williams’s approach is that ‘Shall I tell the truth here?’ is presented as a much more open question for an agent than it possibly can be. Only by adverting to the language-game presupposed by that question’s having any sense at all can we arrive at a fair picture of when and how the answer ‘No’ might be reasonable.

Religious School Education in Brazilian Supreme Federal Court Voting

Abstract This article examines the arguments made by the eleven Justices of the Supreme Federal Court who, in 2017, decided on the constitutionality of offering confessional education in public schools. We will explore how long-term disputed ethical and legal values are rearticulated in these votes concerning the notion of belief, almost 40 years after defining Religious Education as a fundamental human right by the Constitution. It is not a matter of harking back to the topic of secularism, as a social process or as a legal norm or political doctrine. The discursive analysis of the ministers’ votes formulations aims, on the contrary, to unveil the different religious constructions implied in their uses of the terms religion and rights and to understand how they operate when putting forward an idea of citizenship and/or the nation. The aim is to clarify, from this systematic examination of the votes, the configuration of common legal sense when issuing value judgments about religion and its protection. Therefore, our primary focus will be to circumscribe what counts as religion in these legal narratives.

The relationship between strong belief and assumption

We define two maps, one map from the set of conditional probability systems (CPS’s) onto the set of lexicographic probability systems (LPS’s), and another map from the set of LPS’s with full support onto the set of CPS’s. We use these maps to establish a relationship between strong belief (defined on CPS’s) and assumption (defined on LPS’s). This establishes a relationship at the abstract level between these two widely used notions of belief in an extended probability-theoretic setting.

Who gets what? Assessing the reincarnation debate

Reincarnation is a death-specific and forward-looking philosophico-religious phenomenon that enjoys a cross-cultural appeal. It represents the theory that when the soul separates from the body at death, it informs another body for another round of earthly life. The debate on reincarnation has, so far, revolved around the reality or otherwise of reincarnation and the associated claims. In this article, we undertake a holistic and critical examination and appraisal of the key arguments underlying the reincarnation debate, with emphasis on the nature and structure of reincarnation, as well as the value of reincarnation belief. The aim is to determine who gets what among the contending parties. Although oral interviews were involved in the exercise, textual and doctrinal analysis of extant literatures on reincarnation formed the predominant source of data for the research. Our finding reveals that although the phenomenon of reincarnation is bedeviled by internal contradictions and belief in it hardly justifiable, belief in it has some positive values, including coping and unifying values that could be harnessed for the well-being of people and society. These observed values of reincarnation and the attendant belief in it, the article concludes, do not constitute a conclusive proof of the reality of reincarnation.Contribution: The contributive value of this paper lies in bringing to the fore the fact that contrary to popular assumption, the notion of belief is in reality, epistemically more powerful than knowledge, at least in the context of religion. Considering that HTS Theological Studies focuses on religious issues and that ‘belief’ and ‘knowledge’ are religious concepts, we consider this paper to be suitable to its objectives.

Logic of Justified Beliefs Based on Argumentation

This manuscript presents a topological argumentation framework for modelling notions of evidence-based (i.e., justified) belief. Our framework relies on so-called topological evidence models to represent the pieces of evidence that an agent has at her disposal, and it uses abstract argumentation theory to select the pieces of evidence that the agent will use to define her beliefs. The tools from abstract argumentation theory allow us to model agents who make decisions in the presence of contradictory information. Thanks to this, it is possible to define two new notions of beliefs, grounded beliefs and fully grounded beliefs. These notions are discussed in this paper, analysed and compared with the existing notion of topological justified belief. This comparison revolves around three main issues: closure under conjunction introduction, the level of consistency and their logical strength.

Strong knowledge, weak belief?

According to the knowledge norm of belief (Williamson in Knowledge and its limits, Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 47, 2000), one should believe p only if one knows p. However, it can easily seem that the ordinary notion of belief is much weaker than the knowledge norm would have it. It is possible to rationally believe things one knows to be unknown (Hawthorne et al. in Philos Stud 173:1393–1404, 2016; McGlynn in Noûs 47:385–407, 2013, Whiting in Chan (ed) The aim of belief, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013). One response to this observation is to develop a technical notion of ‘outright’ belief. A challenge for this line of response is to find a way of getting a grip on the targeted notion of belief. In order to meet this challenge, I characterize ‘outright’ belief in this paper as the strongest belief state implied by knowledge. I show that outright belief so construed allows this notion to play important theoretical roles in connection with knowledge, assertion and action.

A Puzzle about Belief-about

AbstractI present a puzzle for the standard, propositional semantic account of belief reports by considering novel inferences which it incorrectly predicts to be invalid under assumptions that are plausible by its advocates’ own lights. In response, I propose a conservative departure from the standard view on which certain ‘that’-clauses designate novel devices of semantic type <e,t> that I call open propositions. After outlining some desiderata for a theory of open propositions, I provide some reasons for advocates of the standard view to treat them as properties of a certain kind. Then I give a bridge principle between the core notions of belief and belief-about before showing how the resulting view can be implemented in accordance with formal theories of syntax and semantics. I bring out some of the consequences this investigation has beyond our semantic theorizing and conclude, more generally, that any response to the puzzle requires paying some surprising cost or another.

The Failure of Therapy: Belief, Embodiment and the Limits of Pentecostal Healing in Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT I explore the view that efficacy in Pentecostal healing depends on confidence, or unwavering belief. My focus is on emic notions of failure – how people explain failures of therapy in their own terms – rather than on failures in the procedure employed or the inadequacies of the healer. Although anthropologists have criticised the notion of belief, my ethnographic example suggests that it remains useful, particularly since in this case it is central to the assessment of failure. The Pentecostals discussed here see belief in a more material way, as embodied and intimately bound up with the reformative project of becoming a born again Christian.

MOORE’S PARADOX AND THE LOGIC OF BELIEF

Moore’s Paradox is a test case for any formal theory of belief. In Knowledge and Belief, Hintikka developed a multimodal logic for statements that express sentences containing the epistemic notions of knowledge and belief. His account purports to offer an explanation of the paradox. In this paper I argue that Hintikka’s interpretation of one of the doxastic operators is philosophically problematic and leads to an unnecessarily strong logical system. I offer a weaker alternative that captures in a more accurate way our logical intuitions about the notion of belief without sacrificing the possibility of providing an explanation for problematic cases such as Moore’s Paradox.

Regularity and certainty in Hume’s treatise: a Humean response to Husserl

According to Husserl, Hume’s empirical method was deeply flawed—like all empiricists, Hume did not, and could not adequately justify his method, much less his findings (PRP 113–114, LI 115–117, 406). Instead, Hume gives us a “circular” and “irrational” “psychological explanation” of “mediate judgments of fact,” i.e. of inductive inferences (LI, 117). Yet Husserl was certain that he could justify both his own method and his own findings with an appeal to the phenomenological, pre-theoretical, pre-naturalistic “epoche” (I1 §§59–60). However, whether or not Husserl’s notion of an epoche is justified, or even viable, is not our focus here. Rather, our issue is with Hume, particularly: How could Hume have responded? In this paper, I show that in Book I of the Treatise, Hume did—however implicitly—appeal to a “pre-theoretical” notion of belief, which meets Husserl’s demands for a pre-theoretical grounding, i.e. a justificatory grounding. And so, his method is, at least in this respect, justified. But this belief is by no means “prenaturalistic.” Rather, it is a function of empirical data. In particular, it is a product of the “constant and coherent” impressions that seem to naturally obtain of experience. As a result, Hume’s method, which, in agreement with Husserl, we may characterize as psychology, does admit of a certain degree of regularity, but an empirical regularity. And according to Hume, contra Husserl’s complaints, this is the best that we can hope for; regularity will have to suffice, not certainty. However, it must be noted up front that this justification is implicit—Hume is not nearly as forthright as he could have been. Thus, making his position more explicit is the task of this paper. I am not presenting my own position, where I offer my own arguments. Instead, I present textual evidence, contextualized with ample explication. It is my hope that by doing so, Hume may more effectively make his case.

Critical Observability of Partially Observed Petri Nets

Abstract This paper studies the problem of checking critical observability of discrete event systems modeled by partially observed Petri nets (POPNs) that are measured by sensors associated with both transitions and places. In particular, a POPN is said to be critically observable, if all the markings consistent with any observation of the POPN are included either in a critical set or outside it. To address the problem in the framework of POPNs, we first build a reachability graph that can describe the evolution of the POPN. Based on the reachability graph, we construct an automaton called verifier that permits us to check the critical observability. Then, a notion of belief is introduced to evaluate the possibility of the critical observability of the POPN. Finally, two examples are presented to shed light on the validity of the proposed approach.

Editorial Note

The North American Nietzsche Society held its second biannual conference at Stanford University on October 5–7, 2018. The three-day event featured invited keynotes by Jessica Berry (Georgia State University) and John Richardson (NYU). In addition, the program committee selected seven papers from a pool of over seventy submissions. The conference concluded with a group discussion on Nietzsche's attitude toward empirical science, featuring invited presentations by Maudemarie Clark (UC Riverside) and Tsarina Doyle (Galway).Lanier Anderson deserves special thanks for organizing the conference at Stanford. I would also like to thank Lanier Anderson, Robert Guay, Tom Bailey, Allison Merrick, Andrew Huddleston, Béatrice Han-Pile, and Bernard Reginster for their work on the Program Committee. Finally, Justin Remhof, Rachel Cristy, Richard Elliot, Gudrun von Tevenar, Matt Dill, Matt Meyer, and Gabriel Zamosc-Regueros served as commentators for papers at the conference; their contributions to the lively and insightful discussions were greatly appreciated.Many of the papers from the conference are included as articles in this issue. The first is Jessica Berry's keynote address, in which she develops a position that she terms “doxastic skepticism.” In particular, Berry argues that Nietzsche sees a particular notion of belief, or “faith” (Glaube), as pathological, in part because an exaggerated emphasis on Glaube undermines other cognitive capacities. The second keynote, by John Richardson, was titled “Nietzsche's New Gods.” Richardson argues that although Nietzsche is critical of traditional religion, he nonetheless believes that the notion of gods can be used to cultivate and sustain certain affective states. The text of Richardson's talk is not reprinted here but is forthcoming as a chapter in his new book, provisionally titled Nietzsche's Values.A selection of six papers from the conference follows. These are wide ranging: Kaitlyn Creasy asks how we might overcome a particular form of nihilism; Joel van Fossen analyzes Nietzsche's notion of shame; Tom Hanauer asks how Nietzsche's claim that we are “strangers to ourselves” relates to his critical project in GM; Scott Jenkins looks at the way in which Nietzsche takes up and alters the notion of pessimism; Daisy Laforce distinguishes three modes of history at work in GM; and Avery Snelson examines Nietzsche's notion of conscience and obligation.Further details on the North American Nietzsche Society, including information on past conferences and the upcoming conference, to be held at Georgia State University in Atlanta (October 2020), can be found at www.northamericannietzschesociety.com.

Editorial Note

The North American Nietzsche Society held its second biannual conference at Stanford University on October 5–7, 2018. The three-day event featured invited keynotes by Jessica Berry (Georgia State University) and John Richardson (NYU). In addition, the program committee selected seven papers from a pool of over seventy submissions. The conference concluded with a group discussion on Nietzsche's attitude toward empirical science, featuring invited presentations by Maudemarie Clark (UC Riverside) and Tsarina Doyle (Galway).Lanier Anderson deserves special thanks for organizing the conference at Stanford. I would also like to thank Lanier Anderson, Robert Guay, Tom Bailey, Allison Merrick, Andrew Huddleston, Béatrice Han-Pile, and Bernard Reginster for their work on the Program Committee. Finally, Justin Remhof, Rachel Cristy, Richard Elliot, Gudrun von Tevenar, Matt Dill, Matt Meyer, and Gabriel Zamosc-Regueros served as commentators for papers at the conference; their contributions to the lively and insightful discussions were greatly appreciated.Many of the papers from the conference are included as articles in this issue. The first is Jessica Berry's keynote address, in which she develops a position that she terms “doxastic skepticism.” In particular, Berry argues that Nietzsche sees a particular notion of belief, or “faith” (Glaube), as pathological, in part because an exaggerated emphasis on Glaube undermines other cognitive capacities. The second keynote, by John Richardson, was titled “Nietzsche's New Gods.” Richardson argues that although Nietzsche is critical of traditional religion, he nonetheless believes that the notion of gods can be used to cultivate and sustain certain affective states. The text of Richardson's talk is not reprinted here but is forthcoming as a chapter in his new book, provisionally titled Nietzsche's Values.A selection of six papers from the conference follows. These are wide ranging: Kaitlyn Creasy asks how we might overcome a particular form of nihilism; Joel van Fossen analyzes Nietzsche's notion of shame; Tom Hanauer asks how Nietzsche's claim that we are “strangers to ourselves” relates to his critical project in GM; Scott Jenkins looks at the way in which Nietzsche takes up and alters the notion of pessimism; Daisy Laforce distinguishes three modes of history at work in GM; and Avery Snelson examines Nietzsche's notion of conscience and obligation.Further details on the North American Nietzsche Society, including information on past conferences and the upcoming conference, to be held at Georgia State University in Atlanta (October 2020), can be found at www.northamericannietzschesociety.com.

Normativity and Naturalism in “The Fixation of Belief”

Cheryl Misak has presented a reading of Peirce's "The Fixation of Belief " that preserves both the essay's ambitious naturalism (reflected in the thesis that inquiry aims only at the settlement of opinion) and its sensible normativism (reflected in the thesis that belief aims at the truth in some important sense). This essay fleshes out Misak's proposal, formulates some challenges to it, and articulates an alternative. Misak's argument rests on the plausible claim that "it is very hard really to settle beliefs." As she interprets this claim, it could also be expressed as "it is very hard really to settle beliefs." Misak extracts a potentially strong source of normativity from Peirce's notion of belief; that concept, she argues, has sensitivity to experience and argumentation built into it. This paper criticizes Misak's interpretation and proposes to do without the sensitivity condition on which she relies. It instead proposes to stick closely to the surface reading of Peirce's paper, according to which the needed normativity can and must be drawn from the notion of stable or settled belief.

The Dissolution of Bar-Hillel-Carnap Paradox by Semantic Information Theory Based on a Paraconsistent Logic

Several logical puzzles, riddles and problems are defined based on the notion of games in informative contexts. Hintikka argues that epistemology or the theory of knowledge must be considered from the notion of information. So, knowledge cannot just be based on the notions of belief and justification. The present proposal will focus on the logical structure of information, and not only on the quantification of information as suggested by Claude A. Shannon (1916-2001) (Shannon 1948). In many cases, the information bits, although seemingly or factually contradictory, are quite relevant. The paraconsistent systems of logic offer a formalization of reasoning that can support certain contradictions. The well-known “Bar-Hillel–Carnap Paradox” (Bar-Hillel, 1964) causes embarrassment when it concludes that the informational content of a contradiction would be maximum, opposing the traditional notion that the semantic information must be true, and that contradictions are necessarily false.

Characterization of the Earth's Surface State by Unsupervised Classification: Case of Vegetated, Aquatic and Mineral Surfaces

In this study, we propose an unsupervised classification scheme based on the Dempster-Shafer Theory (TDS) and the Dezert-Smarandache Theory (DSmT) to characterize vegetated, aquatic and mineral surfaces. From pre-processed ASTER satellite images (georeferencing, geometric correction and 15 m re-sampling), neo-channels were produced by determining the spectral indices NDVI, MNDWI and NDBaI, considered as sources of information for classification of a given pixel. NDVI is a contrast function to highlight vegetation. By account, the MNDWI makes it possible to characterize the water and the NDBaI makes it possible to recognize the mineral resources. Then, we modeled respectively the formalisms of the DST and the DSmT, these formalisms are modeling tools close to advanced probabilities based on the notions of belief and fusion functions to take into account certain imperfections (uncertainty, ignorance, etc.) encountered in the acquisition of images. In addition, the DST manages a formalism of disjunction between the sources during the DSmT simultaneously manages a disjunction and a conjunction between the sources. Next we realized the algorithms and related codes that we implemented in the MATLAB environment. Our contribution lies in taking into account the imperfections (inaccuracies and uncertainties) linked to source information through the use of mass functions based on a simple Gaussian distribution support model in order to model each focal element independently of the others and to evaluate the belonging of a pixel to a class with respect to the majority of elements representing said class. The resulting results show that the DST approach is relatively satisfactory for the unsupervised classification of mineral surfaces and aquatic surfaces while it is not satisfactory for vegetated surfaces according to all proposed models. As for the DSmT, it presents satisfactory results for all the models proposed. The model with the exclusion integrity constraint E∩V ∩ M = φ was selected as the best model because having, in addition to an average rate of well-graded pixels of 93.34%, a compliance rate (96, 37%) with the terrain higher than those of the other models implemented.

THE ARCHETYPAL FOUNDATIONS OF VALUE CHOICE IN THE PROCESS OF ADAPTATION TO THE MODERN SOCIETY

This article explains an importance of archetypal foundations for the value choice in order to adapt the state (system) to the modern society (environment). To provide effectiveness of the system requires maintaining equilibrium between the system and the environment through decision-making process (DMP) that is based on balance system’s ends, ways, and means in the framework of possible permissible risk. Beliefs and values are critical for the DMP. Obsolete beliefs and values can decrease system effectiveness drastically. The main task is to produce decisions based on topical values to adapt the system to the environment and maintain national interests. An archetype can help to find a right set of values in a certain environment as a combination of the past and the future. The paradox of the notions of beliefs and values is the need of their saving and the need of their change for successful system development at the same time. They are fundamental and their complete replacement can create chaos and even destroy the system at all. Thus, values choice is a vital and psychological painful process. At first it is difficult to understand the need of their change. Second, it is problematic to find appropriate values that should facilitate successful system development in the given and future environment. To solve these problems the state authority (SA) and the civil society (CS) together should generate decisions through convergent and divergent processes of thinking. A national archetype, as a relatively stable mental structure, combines these processes together based on the experience. A proper balanced participation of the SA and the CS in the state leadership, based on required values, can make the system effective. Value choice does not mean accepting or copying values of others, it means reconsidering current values in order to remain effective and functional as a nation in the modern society. Applying of archetypal foundations can help to choice proper beliefs and values that can facilitate making decisions that will provide soft adaptation of the system to a new environment without conflicts and revolutions.

A Topological Approach to Full Belief

Stalnaker (Philosophical Studies, 128(1), 169–199 2006) introduced a combined epistemic-doxastic logic that can formally express a strong concept of belief, a concept of belief as ‘subjective certainty’. In this paper, we provide a topological semantics for belief, in particular, for Stalnaker’s notion of belief defined as ‘epistemic possibility of knowledge’, in terms of the closure of the interior operator on extremally disconnected spaces. This semantics extends the standard topological interpretation of knowledge (as the interior operator) with a new topological semantics for belief. We prove that the belief logic KD45 is sound and complete with respect to the class of extremally disconnected spaces and we compare our approach to a different topological setting in which belief is interpreted in terms of the derived set operator. We also study (static) belief revision as well as belief dynamics by providing a topological semantics for conditional belief and belief update modalities, respectively. Our setting based on extremally disconnected spaces, however, encounters problems when extended with dynamic updates. We then propose a solution consisting in interpreting belief in a similar way based on hereditarily extremally disconnected spaces, and axiomatize the belief logic of hereditarily extremally disconnected spaces. Finally, we provide a complete axiomatization of the logic of conditional belief and knowledge, as well as a complete axiomatization of the corresponding dynamic logic.

Knowledge requires belief – and it doesn’t? On belief as such and belief necessary for knowledge

ABSTRACTDoes knowledge entail belief? This paper argues that the answer depends on how one interprets ‘belief’. There are two different notions of belief: belief as such and belief for knowledge. They often differ in their degrees of conviction such that one but not both might be present in a particular case. The core of the paper is dedicated to a defense of this overlooked distinction. The beginning of the paper presents the distinction. It then presents two cases which are supposed to back up the claim that there is an important distinction here; I also offer some explanations concerning the structure of these cases. Finally, I add further considerations in support of the core thesis, and discuss objections. The distinction is important as such but also has interesting implications concerning the much discussed ‘entailment thesis’ according to which knowledge entails belief. It is argued here that even if knowledge entails belief-for-knowledge, it does not entail belief-as-such. This constitutes an interesting middle position and compromise in the philosophical debate about the entailment thesis. One further implication of this paper is that the discussion about the entailment thesis needs to take degrees of conviction seriously. Still another implication is that epistemic contextualists can deal very well with the relevant phenomena.