Belief Questions Research Articles

WITTGENSTEIN AND ANTHROPOLOGY

▪ Abstract This essay explores the theme of Wittgenstein as a philosopher of culture. The primary text on which the essay is based is Philosophical Investigations; it treats Stanley Cavell's work as a major guide for the understanding and reception of Wittgenstein into anthropology. Some Wittgensteinian themes explored in the essay are the idea of culture as capability, horizontal and vertical limits to forms of life, concepts of everyday life in the face of skepticism, and the complexity of the inner in relation to questions of belief and pain. While an attempt has been made to relate these ideas to ethnographic descriptions, the emphasis in this essay is on the question of how anthropology may receive Wittgenstein.

The Shattering of Christianity and the Articulation of Belief

This article is based on a number of texts written by Michel de Certeau between around 1969 and 1974. These texts all explore the ways in which a lucid Christian belief may endure as a resource in contemporary societies. They also indicate a form of transition. In comparison to the probing but orthodoxly circumscribed analyses of L’Etranger, ou Bunion dans la différence (1969), we see the emergence of a more open (more exposed but also freer) mode of reflection. Although Certeau would rarely return in his writings after the mid-1970’s to the question of contemporary Christian belief as such, the analytic and figurative frameworks generated by this reflection continue to inform his thought. They help us to make sense of the apparently disparate heterogeneity of his subsequent publications, taking us as they do in a series of significant zigzags between, say, The Writing of History, The Mystic Fable and The Practice of Everyday Life.Christianity was, in Certeau’s view, in the process of ‘shattering’. While this may have seemed a provocative diagnosis in 1974, it appears today as a basic premiss for a scrupulous sociological analysis. Moreover, Certeau suggests that there is nothing intrinsically new about this process. He recalls elsewhere the major scissions already at work in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Christendom broke ‘into pieces’, producing here and there new generations of believers ‘without a church’. What is unprecedented, he argues, is now the sheer extent and scale of this shattering. This development is not necessarily synonymous with an imminent extinction of Christian belief, but does modify radically the conditions in which such belief must find a voice and a horizon for action.

Can We Interpret Figurines?

Figurines—miniature human representations modelled in clay or stone — are one of those key categories of prehistoric material which no archaeologist who finds one can ignore. Whether working in central America or southeast Europe, or in any of the many other contexts in which figurines abound, they form a central class of material which generates a heightened level of interest and attention. But however numerous and how-ever intriguing, prehistoric figurines have another crucial quality — that of ambiguity. Without the help of textual evidence, can prehistoric figurines be confidently interpreted or understood? Can we ever hope to know what an individual figurine was meant to represent, or why it was modelled in the way it was? Yet the challenge of interpretation can hardly be refiised. For figurines illustrate self-awareness, which is a unique human characteristic. It is this dilemma — the impulse to interpret, but the difficulty of doing so convincingly — which is the focus of the present Viewpoint.Figurines are found in many (though not all) regions and periods of prehistory. The earliest — the female forms once referred to as ‘Venus figurines’ — date back to the Upper Palaeolithic. At the other end of the scale, figurines are still in active production today, in the form of dolls, models and statues. In a prehistoric context, figurines have multiple dimensions of interest and meaning. In first place, there is the issue of sex and gender. Many figurines are clearly female, yet their gender significance, in both social and cognitive terms (rather than in simplistic notions of Mother Goddess or sex object), has only recently begun to be considered in a serious and critical way. Then there is the aspect of human self-awareness which the figurines so vibrantly express. Figurines also encode important cognitive elements in the modelling and representation of the human form, their makers frequently exaggerating some features or concealing others. Nor, ultimately, can we avoid the question of belief, and the ritual context in which so many figurines were made or used.The contributors to this Viewpoint feature all believe that figurines can indeed be interpreted. But they also lay stress on the vital importance of context and definition. Prehistoric figurines cannot be understood as isolated artefacts, but must be seen as products of particular societies. How far we can penetrate into their meanings — and into the minds of their prehistoric makers — is the fundamental question which underpins this discussion. Can we interpret figurines? And if so, how should we go about it?

Test‐Retest Reliability for False‐Belief Tasks

Despite notable variations in children's rate of success on theory of mind tasks and the presumed theoretical implications drawn from a child's success or failure on such tasks, there have been no studies of the test-retest reliability of children's performance on these tasks. Twenty-three children (mean age 49.6 months, SD 8.6) watched three videotaped stories illustrating a false-belief situation: the standard experimenter narrated false-belief task, a minor variant replacing the narration of the story with a dialogue among the characters, and a third version involving a humorous situation. The time elapsed between test and retest was 2-3 weeks and the order of presentation was counterbalanced. Results corroborated previous findings of a developmental trend in the understanding of false-belief questions but, despite a general improvement in children's comprehension of the stories, the test-retest reliability for the false belief questions was poor. Although changes recorded between test-retest sessions frequently occurred in the direction of children answering correctly questions they had previously failed, a subset of children incorrectly answered questions they had initially passed. These findings underscore the need for validation assessments of techniques for studying children's developing theories of mind.

The Dead Sea Poems

Simon Armitage is the most widely and unreservedly praised poet of his generation. The Dead Sea Poems, his fourth collection, culminates in a long visionary poem, 'Five Eleven Ninety Nine'. Elsewhere, questions of belief and trust, of identity and knowledge, dealt with as they occur in everyday domestic life, contribute to a picture of our contemporary world that is at once realistic and touched with a unique imaginative intensity.

Children′s Memory for Actions Based on a False Belief

In four investigations, 3- and 4-year-olds were asked to recall their own or another person′s actions, as well as acknowledge the false belief upon which the action was based. Recalling that somebody else went to a wrong location was easier than acknowledging that that person had a false belief. Similarly, children could recall the wrong location where they themselves had searched, but still made realist errors in answer to a belief question. The results suggest that behavioral clues in the form of actions do not help children to reason to false belief, for either self or other, but on the other hand, neither do children misrecall their own inappropriate actions in the same way as they misrecall their own false utterances.

Use of the Quality Improvement Process to Standardize Menu Correction Procedures

Dietitian Assistants (DAs) correct the menus and Registered Dietitians (RDs) audit the menus for accurracy on a quarterly basts at a large tertiary care hospital with a selective patient menu and more than 40 therapeutic diets. A quality improvement team (QIT) was chartered for the following reasons: 1) DAs stated audit results varied depending on the RD who completed the audit, 2) DAs who worked on several patient care units recognized inconsistent menu correction practices, and 3) some patients who transferred from one unit to another were confused about menu marking guidelines and practices. The team identified that most of the therapeutic diets had well denned guidelines for menu correction. However, three of the most commonly used diets (low sodium, diabetic and cardiac) had loosely denned, unwritten guidelines. The QIT decided to address the low sodium diet. A survey was developed and sent to staff RDs and DAs. The survey contained “practice” and “belief questions concerning the sodium restricted diet. The highest level of agreement of staff (3 out of 8 questions) was 80%. The remaining 5 questions showed less than 67% of staff agreement. The QIT then proceeded to use staff input to establish a set of guidelines for sodium menu correction. They presented the guidelines to RDs and DAs for review and approval. It was decided that any deviation from these accepted guidelines required RD acknowledgement and accompanying documentation in the DA's kardex. The guidelines were incorporated into an existing menu audit policy/procedure. Data from regular and blind menu audits showed that compliance exceeds 95%. Clinical practitioners and support staff can use the quality improvement process in order to reduce variation in daily work practices, resulting in less patient confusion and enhanced job satisfaction of dietetic support personnel.

“The question of belief”: writing poststructural ethnography

This article engages current poststructural debates over ethnographic representation. It questions three types of ethnographic authority: the authority of empiricism, the authority of language, and the authority of reading. In performing a form of self‐speculative critique, the author moves behind the scenes of her own ethnography, Practice Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach, to consider the problem of what poststructural theories “do” to ethnographic writing. Two related themes are elaborated in relation to how poststructural debates fashioned interpretive efforts: conceptual issues in the poststructural study of teaching and theoretical issues in the production of ethnographic narratives. Can there be an educational ethnography that exceeds the constraints of humanism? What if the ethnographer began not just to question the discourse of others but to engage the relation between the discourses that render ethnography intelligible and the ethnographic report?

Wrist splints in rheumatoid arthritis: A question of belief?

Wrist splints are often used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). We applied a questionnaire to RA patients and rheumatologists to assess wrist splint use and to assess the policy of prescription. We related the reported use to patient satisfaction, severity of disease and physician's advice. Of 44 RA patients admitted to our hospital in 1990, 32 received one or more splints. Most patients (23) had both a wrist immobilization splint and a wrist activity splint (Futuro cock-up splint). The response rate to the questionnaire sent to all (n = 109) Dutch rheumatologists was 83%; 89 of 91 rheumatologists prescribed splints. Each rheumatologist prescribed yearly a mean of 30 immobilization splints (min-max: 2-120) and 51 activity splints (min-max: 4-170). Both types were mainly prescribed to relieve pain and reduce inflammation. From the patients' point of view, only the wrist activity splints were worth regular and continued use. Our findings suggest that if one prescribed splints, more attention should be paid to patient education and compliance.

INFANT BONDING AND GUILTY MOTHERS

In "Mother-Infant Bonding: A Scientific Fiction," just published by Yale University Press, Diane E. Eyer examines mother-infant bonding, one theory that turned out to have a short but influential life span, roughly the 1970's. Bonding managed to have a major impact despite slender evidence for its existence: a study by the original researchers of only 28 mothers, analogies from studies of mother-offspring attachment and rejection in nonhuman mammals as well as interpretations drawn from the behavior of infants in pathological situations. Though the early research has largely been dismissed, the theory of bonding continues to have an impact. "One of the things I wanted to see," Ms. Eyer said in a recent interview about her work, "was how research that was so patently untrue was so credible to so many people. I didn't expect to find villains, but it was clear that medicine was benefiting more than women were" ... Ms. Eyer does not argue that all child-rearing experts offer scientifically indefensible advice, simply that consumers of the advice should be skeptical of the science it's based on and treat it more like religion—and therefore a question of belief—than as absolute truth.

Wallace Stevens and the Question of Belief: Metaphysician in the Dark

Wallace Stevens and the Question of Belief: Metaphysician in the Dark

A. Dynastic Realms and Secular States: Introduction

The conference began with a discussion of law and religion and four days later ended with a discussion of concepts of rights in Southeast Asia. The merging of the two topics in this symposium issue reflects a recognition that both concern questions of social order, political legitimacy, sovereignty, personhood, and belief. It reflects as well a recognition that the topics have a single history. As Frank Reynolds observes (with some understatement) in the essay that begins this part, religion as a cultural system and law as a cultural system “overlap and interact in many very different and complicated ways.”

Three-Year-Olds′ Understanding of Mental States: The Influence of Trickery

This study examined the claim that children under 4 cannot conceptualize false mental states. Fifty-one children between 3;0 and 4;2 were tested in a Standard and a Trick Condition. In the Standard Condition, children were given a modified version of the Smarties task developed by Hogrefe, Wimmer, and Perner (1986). In the Trick Condition, the Smarties task was modified so that children were required to trick another person by switching the contents of a familiar box. Results revealed that a majority of subjects responded correctly to Ignorance and False Belief Questions in the Trick Condition, but not in the Standard Condition. There were no differences in children′s ability to attribute ignorance and false belief. These results suggest that even young 3-year-olds have the ability to attribute mental states that differ from their own, even though this ability has proved elusive and difficult to demonstrate.

Wallace Stevens and the question of belief: metaphysician in the dark

In this groundbreaking study David R. Jarraway considers the perplexing question of belief in Wallace Stevens' poetry. From Stevens' early attempts to address the contradictions inherent in a substitutive humanism to his ultimate transformation of the metaphysical matter of faith into a postmetaphysical question of belief, Jarraway leads us step by step along the evolution of this High Modern icon's genealogy of Belief. By tracing throughout Stevens' career his relentless probing of what suffice the spiritual in man, Jarraway deftly reconstructs the ways in which Stevens tried to reconcile an apparently irreconcilable opposition: his conviction that the major poetic idea in the world is and always has been the idea of God, and the modern imagination's movement away from that idea. At first Stevens suggested that the poetic imagination that created the idea of God will either adapt it to our intelligence, or create a substitute for it, or make it unnecessary. Unlike previous critica studies of Stevens' concern with faith, however, which have tended to stress his various aesthetic replacements for God, Jarraway compellingly argues that these replacements actually had disastrous consequences for Stevens the poet, resulting in the six years of silence that followed his first collection. Stevens, Jarraway contends, finally abandoned such aesthetic theocentrism and, under the influence of philosophers like Nietzsche and Heidegger, tried to adapt his poetry to what he called the different intelligence of our age. Adroitly citing modern thinkers like Derrida, Blanchot, and Levinas, Jarraway shows how Stevens' interest in the transformation from a literal quest to arhetorical question led him to investigate the interaction between faith and language. Jarraway never allows his theoretical sophistication to cloak his admiration for the valor of Stevens' imagination, an imagination that, in a world void of spiritual options, strives to shore up w

" 'His Feet on your Neck'": The New Religion in the Works of Ernest J. Gaines

Central to the work of Ernest J. Gaines is the question of the place of religion in the lives of black people attempting to attain freedom. Although rarely addresses religion explicitly, religion becomes a means through which Gaine's characters are defined or define themselves. While the religious motifs uses tend to have their origins in Christianity, only in Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is a direct tie to Christianity dominant. Previous studies of religiosity in Gaines's work have failed to plumb the depths of the topic. Audrey L. Vinson, for example, has observed of Jimmy's murder in Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman that he is slain for his obedience to a duty which was conferred on him through spirit and intellect. Yet having made the sacrifice, conferred subsequent social gains on the (37). young men whose lives are sacrificed in Gaines's fiction are not simply Christ symbols; for Gaines to adopt this posture would be to acquiesce to the religion forced on the slaves. More complexly, Gaines is concerned with the personal test of religion; his characters reassess and reappropriate religion in order to accept it on their terms, not on terms imposed by the community and through institutional Christianity. For Ernest Gaines's characters, the Christian church exists as a system of white oppression, whereas the denial of the church and the rejuvenation of a personal and communal religion become parts of the route to freedom and the realization of self. Gaines and his characters are creating a new text of religiosity that stands at an opposite pole from traditional Christianity. While I use the word text with some trepidation, the term serves to underscore the use of Christianity to codify a system of oppression, and it also provides a way to relate that codification to Gaines's new text, which expresses the divinity of the people and the Earth, not just of God and heaven. characters' creation of this text is complex and not altogether consistent. first step seems to be an outright rejection of the church, and this is most obvious in the conftontations between several rebellious characters and church leaders. In The Sky Is Gray, a young man in the dentist's office directly challenges a preacher regarding the existence of God: 'You believe in God because a man told you to believe in God,' the boy says. 'A white man told you to believe in God. And why? To keep you ignorant so can keep his feet on your neck' (96). preacher slaps the young man for his beliefs, recalling to a lesser degree the actions of European Christian missionaries attempting to bring their religion to non-European races, and in so doing reveals himself to be a maintenance man for an oppressive system. Some critics may dismiss this episode because the young man becomes one of Gaines's most radical characters, tending his questioning of beliefs to the words has been taught by white society, but Gaines does not pass judgment on the young man. In fact, others around such as the woman who laughs at him for saying 'The wind is pink' (100), are made to seem iridiculous against his solemnity. Jameson in A Gathering of Old Men is another religious figure who crumbles in the face of adversarial conditions. When the old men arrive to make their stand in support of Mathu and against Fix, Jameson implores them to give up: 'That's what y' all come here for?' asked. 'To die? Y'all think that'll make up for all the hurt? That's what y'all think?' (55). is first ignored, but eventually confronted: Reverend Jameson, just shut up, Beulah said. Just shut up. Nobody listening to you; so just shut up. Go on back home .... Nobody listening to you today. Maybe I ought to shoot him, Rooster said. You think I ought to shoot Dirty Red? No, let him slide, Dirty Red said. He might change 'fore the shooting start. …

Belief Perseverance, Biased Assimilation, and Covariation Detection: The Effects of Hypothetical Social Theories and New Data

Initial beliefs about the relation between a person's risk preference and ability as a firefighter were manipulated using a hypothetical explanation task. Subjects then evaluated new data that displayed either a clearly positive or a clearly negative relation between the variables, presented in scatterplots. Final beliefs were assessed in several ways. The main findings were that general beliefs were influenced by new data but not by explanation, that specific predictions about a group of 7isk-preferring and a group of conservative firefighters were influenced by explanation but not by new data, that specific predictions about 1 00firefighter trainees were influenced by new data and by explanation, and that new data were evaluated in an unbiased fashion. Discussion focuses on the power of hypothetical explanation to produce belief perseverance, boundary conditions of biased assimilation, and the different judgment processes people use to generate answers to different types of belief questions.

Christianity and Individualism: (Re-)Creation and Reality in Frederick Douglass's Representation of Self

question of religious belief prompted by Douglass's impassioned utterance regarding the relation between the existence of God and his own status as a slave was not raised by him alone. Reverend Charles Colcock Jones, a white, Southern slave missionary, wrote in 1842, who carries the Gospel to them ...discovers deism, skepticism, universalism ... such strong opinions about the truth of God, objections which he may perhaps have considered peculiar to the cultivated minds of critics and philosophers (qtd. in Raboteau 176). Raboteau also reports the response of a recently freed black woman who was questioned about her religious belief. has been a terrible mystery to know why the good Lord should so long afflict my people and keep them in bondage to be abused and trampled down any rights of their own, with no ray of light in the future. Though she had sustained her own faith, others had not. Some of my folks said there wasn't any God, for if there was he wouldn't white folks do as they have done for so many (314). most interesting aspect of this response, and of Douglass's questioning of God's existence, is the ambiguity occasioned by the context. Each expresses belief, yet raises the issue of disbelief in the face of felt knowledge and experience. Douglass's response to the question raised by theodicy, the recognition of the problem raised by the co-existence of a just God and evil, had a profound effect on Douglass's thinking, for the question was basic to his sense of self and thus to the extraordinary sense of individualism that he clearly possessed. That Douglass should, in the epigraph above, in the same breath implore God to him and then question his very existence points to an implicit line of reasoning: If there were a God, then I would not be a slave, since I am a slave, the possibility exists (hence the question, not a positive assertion) that there is no God. Also implicit in his reasoning is the assumption that, if there were a God, he would save me, deliver me, let me be free. It is of significance that this expression of ambivalence occurs in the Narrative prior to Douglass's fight with Covey, the nigger breaker, for it is my contention that such ambivalence was resolved with the outcome of that confrontation, a moment that also witnessed the birth, in the consciousness of the former (as he sees himself at the time) slave, of an extraordinarily intense and ardent individualism. Douglass's sense of individualism is inextricably bound to his psychological sense of self. When sent to Covey's farm, Douglass was sixteen years old and verging on adulthood. He had experienced life as a slave in Baltimore, and as we know, city slave life was on the whole comparatively less restrictive.(1) His recalcitrance and his wilfulness were attributed by his then present owner, Thomas Auld, to his sojourn in the city.(2) His defiance and intractability were immediately occasioned by the necessity to fulfill his needs (he allows Auld's horse to run away to Auld's father-in-law's because the underfed Douglass knows he will get food there), but he as well challenges patriarchal authority. severe whippings he receives as a result of his fractious behavior are all to no purpose. Douglass, out of psychological necessity, perhaps, or out of instinct, struck at the very core of slavery when he challenged the authority of white males, especially when he rendered Auld's punishment futile by refusing to modify his behavior. Kenneth Stampp says about punishment that, without the power to punish, which the state through the black codes conferred upon the master, bondage could not have existed. By comparison, other techniques of control were of secondary importance (171). Eugene Genovese puts the issue in another way in quoting the opinion (State v. Mann, 1829) of North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Thomas Ruffin: The end of slavery |is the profit of the master; the task of the slave is to toil that another may reap the fruits. …

The Question of Belief

The Question of Belief

Cognitive linguistic correlates of ‘theory of mind’ ability in autistic children

A specific deficit in theory of mind has been proposed to explain the distinct pattern of social/cognitive deficits in autistic individuals (Frith, 1989). However, it is clear that a number of children are able to demonstrate knowledge of mental states in others (Prior, Dahlstrom & Squires, 1990), hence an important question is what particularly characterizes those autistic children who do show theory of mind. Baron‐Cohen (1988) has argued that pragmatic language skills and theory of mind ability ought to be intimately related since they draw on similar representational abilities. We examined the cognitive linguistic correlates of this ability in 29 high functioning autistic children. The 11 children who could reliably show this ability were compared with those who could not, on CA, verbal MA, pragmatic language skills, WISC Vocabulary, Comprehension and Similarities, and were superior on all measures except Vocab and CA. A stepwise discriminant function analysis showed an 86 per cent correct classification of the two groups with pragmatic skills and abstract thinking as the best discriminators.Procedural and instructional variables were also assessed in this study, as was reliability of theory of mind ability from one year to the next. Most children were stable in their demonstrated knowledge. The addition of the word ‘first’ to the false belief question (Where will Sally first look for the marble?) allowed 50 per cent of the originally failing group to answer the question correctly, suggesting the need for extreme care in the details of replication experiments of this kind. Our results support the likelihood of a developmental delay in theory of mind in autism rather than endorsing the notion that this is a specific deficit with pervasive explanatory power. However, the findings might also support the ‘continuum’ conceptualization of autism with more mildly autistic children able to demonstrate knowledge of mental states and to develop adequate pragmatic language competence.

When 3‐year‐olds understand ignorance, false belief and representational change

This study examined conditions under which 3‐year‐olds can conceptualize ignorance, false belief, and representational change, and assessed the order of emergence of these three abilities. One hundred and twenty children between 2:11 and 4:1 were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: standard, explanation, and trick. In the standard condition, children were administered a standard false belief task. In both experimental conditions, the discrepancy between children's false expectation and reality was highlighted. In the explanation condition, children were also given an explanation of the source of a false belief. In the trick condition, the questions were placed in the context of a deceptive game. None of the experimental manipulations affected the younger subjects (2:11‐3:7). However, for the older subjects (3:8‐4:1), performance on the ignorance question was significantly elevated by both the highlight alone and a combination of the highlight with either explanation or trick; performance on the false belief question was significantly elevated by the highlight alone; and performance on the representational change question was significantly elevated by a combination of the highlight plus explanation. Thus, only children over 3:7 can be helped to pass the standard ignorance and false belief questions. Finally, contrary to previous findings, all three kinds of understandings emerged simultaneously, suggesting that all require a similar level of representational ability.