Think of our beliefs as being spread throughout an interconnected web.
- some in the center
- some on the edges
- some scattered in between.
Beliefs on the Edges - are those we are most willing to give up in the face of unexpected observations.
Beliefs in the Center - are those we are least willing to give up, most likely to hold, come what may.
For most of us, the belief that tables do not move themselves is much closer to the center than the belief that we have not misjudged the distance to the table. A great number of unexpected observations would have to occur before we would begin to believe that tables move themselves.
As we get closer and closer to the center, our beliefs seem to be
totally protected from unexpected observations, so protected
that we
cannot imagine changing them. - the belief that
twice two is four, for example,
seems entirely
immune from revision.
All of our beliefs justify and are justified by all of our other
beliefs.
They are all connected by an explanatory network, and
changes
in one place can require changes elsewhere.
Thus, all of our beliefs
are connected to our
observations of the world.
What we observe can lead us to change any of our beliefs, no matter how certain we may have been that they were true. We try to change as few beliefs as possible, but we cannot rule out the possibility that some observations and new beliefs will require sweeping changes to the existing beliefs which already have places in the web.
Such sweeping changes do not occur often. When they do occur, they are usually heralded as scientific revolutions, such as when Albert Einstein (1879-1955) replaced Isaac Newton's (1642-1727) world view with his special and general theories of relativity, and when Charles Darwin (1809-1882) presented his theory of evolution, and when Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) revealed the powers of unconscious motivation. Similar sweeping changes may also occur in our personal lives, as when we embrace a new religion with great fervor or decide that atheism is the correct attitude and reject all religion.
Some beliefs do not depend on observation for their justification - no observations whatever could show them to be wrong. Beliefs of this type are "a priori" knowledge; their justification is - independent of experience. This "a priori" knowledge is contrasted with empirical knowledge, which does depend on observation for its justification.
We give certain beliefs a privileged place in the web. They are protected by something like a one-way glass. The beliefs behind the glass, our "a priori" knowledge, provide justification for the beliefs in front of it, our empirical beliefs, but nothing that happens in front of the glass can change what goes on behind it.
The web of belief is set up in such a way that it is always possible to hold any belief, come what may. Although most of us put the same beliefs in the center, it is possible to put anything there.
Persons And Their World: An Introduction to Philosophy - Jeffrey Olen
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0075543117/
All Knowledge Is Constructed - Knowledge Is A Conceptual - Web Of Beliefs
Learning Challenges: The ‘Web of Belief’
The philosopher W.V.O. Quine came up with the theory of the “web of belief.” According to this
theory, our beliefs are a kind of web, in which each individual statement
depends on other statements. As we learn new things, we change those statements that are no longer
tenable and adjust other statements that depend on them. Those beliefs
nearer the “core” of the web are more “fundamental” than those nearer the
periphery in the sense that it would take more powerful evidence or logic
to change them.
Beliefs at the core of my web would include statements such as the following:
- My senses and judgment are generally reliable guides to the world of experience.
- The constant conjunction of two events implies that the event happening first causes the other.
- There are such things as moral “right” and “wrong,” and you can’t escape a moral obligation merely by disclaiming or disbelieving in it.
- I and other human beings exist.
It is difficult to imagine what logic or evidence could shake any of these beliefs. Beliefs near the periphery of my web would include statements such as the following:
- There are multiple universes.
- Increasing the minimum wage a couple of dollars an hour would cause only small job losses.
- A faster-growing economy helps incumbent office-holders win re-election, but more so in unicameral, majoritarian, parliamentary systems than bicameral, proportional, and presidential ones.
- Eating less meat is morally desirable.
These beliefs are near the periphery of my web because it is easy to imagine evidence or arguments that could overturn them. On the other hand, I could also envision becoming aware of evidence or arguments showing that any one of these statements should be nearer the core of my web, because other core beliefs depend on them in a critical way.
The point of the “web of belief” metaphor is to show that we can hold just about anything to be true, so long as we are willing to accept the consequences for other beliefs. I could try to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but I would also have to reject large portions of modern science and tools of philosophy like Occam’s Razor in order to do so.
Reading evidence and arguments helps us to revise our webs of belief. Whenever we learn something that we didn’t know before, we incorporate the new learning into our web and discard any more weakly supported statements that contradict it. Science, including social science, and philosophy, including moral theories, work in different ways.
Science works on the basis of evidence coming from experience. New observations about the world can lead us to reject views about how the world works that are less well supported by observations. Someone could do a study of the minimum wage showing that job losses are larger than previous studies have shown, and if the study gives a plausible reason why previous studies were flawed, I would have a good reason to revise my view about the effects of the minimum wage.
Philosophy sorts out our concepts using logic and intuition. Suppose that I believe the government has the right to enforce drug laws, but I also believe that it would be wrong for me to go around kidnapping and imprisoning people for making, having, or selling drugs. Michael Huemer shows that it is difficult, maybe impossible, to believe both of those things. That’s not the same as proving one of those views wrong: it just means that I cannot believe both things at once; I’ll have to accept the more “core” belief and shed the more “peripheral” one.
The most valuable information is that which can challenge our more fundamental beliefs. While the “hard core” of my web of belief is virtually untouchable, there have been times that beliefs I thought were fairly fundamental have been overturned. Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson changed my views about international trade when I was a teenager, for instance. David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom also changed my mind on the consequences of competitive governance — and then later readings like Charles Tilly’s books and articles changed my mind about the stability of competitive governance.
When has something you read changed your view about something fundamental?
http://www.e3ne.org/learning-challenges-beliefs/
For more than fifty years, philosophers have argued that each of us has what Willard Van Orman Quine called a “web of belief,” and that we accept or reject a belief on the basis of how well it fits into this web. Beliefs at the center are entrenched, because changing them would require rebuilding large parts of the web, while those on the periphery can be easily altered or ignored. We do not hold beliefs one at a time; rather, we assess them in a group, because they are logically connected. If we let one go, we have to let others go as well.
The Mail | The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/13/letters-from-the-march-13-2017-issue
Confirmation Holism
Confirmation holism, also called epistemological holism, is the view that no individual statement can be confirmed or disconfirmed by an empirical test, but rather that only a set of statements (a whole theory) can be so. It is attributed to Willard Van Orman Quine who motivated his holism through extending Pierre Duhem's problem of underdetermination in physical theory to all knowledge claims.
Duhem's idea was, roughly, that no theory of any type can be tested in isolation but only when embedded in a background of other hypotheses, e.g. hypotheses about initial conditions. Quine thought that this background involved not only such hypotheses but also our whole web of belief, which, among other things, includes our mathematical and logical theories and our scientific theories. This last claim is sometimes known as the Duhem–Quine thesis.
A related claim made by Quine, though contested by some (see Adolf Grünbaum 1962), is that one can always protect one's theory against refutation by attributing failure to some other part of our web of belief. In his own words, "Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system."...
Total vs. Partial Holism
Some scholars, like Quine, argue that if a prediction that a theory makes comes out true, then the corresponding piece of evidence confirms the whole theory and even the whole framework within which that theory is embedded. Some have questioned this radical or total form of confirmational holism. If total holism were true, they argue, that would lead to absurd consequences like the confirmation of arbitrary conjunctions. For example, if the general theory of relativity is confirmed by the perihelion of Mercury then, according to total holism, the conjunction of the general theory of relativity with the claim that the moon is made of cheese also gets confirmed. More controversially, the two conjuncts are meant to be confirmed in equal measure.
The critics of total holism do not deny that evidence may spread its support far and wide. Rather, they deny that it always spreads its support to the whole of any theory or theoretical framework that entails or probabilistically predicts the evidence. This view is known as partial holism...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_holism
Semantic Holism
Semantic holism is a theory in the philosophy of language to the effect that a certain part of language, be it a term or a complete sentence, can only be understood through its relations to a (previously understood) larger segment of language...
Holism of Mental Content
These sorts of counterintuitive consequences of semantic holism also affect another form of holism, often identified with but, in fact, distinct from semantic holism: the holism of mental content. This is the thesis that the meaning of a particular propositional attitude (thought, desire, belief) acquires its content by virtue of the role that it plays within the web that connects it to all the other propositional attitudes of an individual...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_holism
Hold, Come What May
Hold come what may is a phrase popularized by logician Willard Van Orman Quine. Beliefs that are "held come what may" are beliefs one is unwilling to give up, regardless of any evidence with which one might be presented.
Quine held that any belief can be held come what may, so long as one makes suitable adjustments to other beliefs. In other words, all beliefs are rationally revisable ("no statement is immune to revision"). He used this to reject the distinction between analytic truths (which are true come what may) and synthetic truths (which are true at least in part because of the state of the world).
Many philosophers argue to the contrary, believing that, for example, the laws of thought cannot be revised and may be "held come what may". Quine believed that all beliefs are linked by a web of beliefs, in which a belief is linked to another belief by supporting relations, but if one belief is found untrue, there is ground to find the linked beliefs also untrue. The latter statement is usually referred to as either confirmation holism or Duhem–Quine thesis.
A closely related concept is hold more stubbornly at least, also popularized by Quine. Some beliefs may be more useful than others, or may be implied by a large number of beliefs. Examples might be laws of logic, or the belief in an external world of physical objects. Altering such central portions of the web of beliefs would have immense, ramifying consequences, and affect many other beliefs. It is better to alter auxiliary beliefs around the edges of the web of beliefs (considered to be sense beliefs, rather than main beliefs) in the face of new evidence unfriendly to one's central principles. Thus, while one might agree that there is no belief one can hold come what may, there are some for which there is ample practical ground to "hold more stubbornly at least".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold_come_what_may
The Coherentist Theory of Justification
The coherentist theory of justification, which may be interpreted as relating to either theory of coherent truth, characterizes epistemic justification as a property of a belief only if that belief is a member of a coherent set. What distinguishes coherentism from other theories of justification is that the set is the primary bearer of justification...
Definition
As a theory of truth, coherentism restricts true sentences to those that cohere with some specified set of sentences. Someone's belief is true if and only if it is coherent with all or most of his or her other (true) beliefs. The terminology of coherence is then said to correlate with truth via some concept of what qualifies all truth, such as absoluteness or universalism. These further terms become the qualifiers of what is meant by a truth statement, and the truth-statements then decide what is meant by a true belief. Usually, coherence is taken to imply something stronger than mere consistency. Statements that are comprehensive and meet the requirements of Occam's razor are usually to be preferred...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherentism
Truth / Coherence
Coherence theory of truth For coherence theories in general, truth requires a proper fit of elements within a whole system. Very often, though, coherence is taken to imply something more than simple logical consistency; often there is a demand that the propositions in a coherent system lend mutual inferential support to each other. So, for example, the completeness and comprehensiveness of the underlying set of concepts is a critical factor in judging the validity and usefulness of a coherent system. A pervasive tenet of coherence theories is the idea that truth is primarily a property of whole systems of propositions, and can be ascribed to individual propositions only according to their coherence with the whole. Among the assortment of perspectives commonly regarded as coherence theory, theorists differ on the question of whether coherence entails many possible true systems of thought or only a single absolute system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth#Coherence
Coherence Theory of Truth
Coherence theories of truth characterize truth as a property of whole systems of propositions that can be ascribed to individual propositions only derivatively according to their coherence with the whole. While modern coherence theorists hold that there are many possible systems to which the determination of truth may be based upon coherence, others, particularly those with strong religious beliefs, hold that the truth only applies to a single absolute system. In general, truth requires a proper fit of elements within the whole system. Very often, though, coherence is taken to imply something more than simple formal coherence. For example, the coherence of the underlying set of concepts is considered to be a critical factor in judging validity for the whole system. In other words, the set of base concepts in a universe of discourse must first be seen to form an intelligible paradigm before many theorists will consider that the coherence theory of truth is applicable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherence_theory_of_truth
Cognitions & Beliefs that Contradict Each Other Cause Negative Arousal
Cognitive Dissonance - Discomfort a person feels when their behavior does not align with their values or beliefs.
Cognitive dissonance occurs when a person holds two related
but contradictory cognitions or thoughts at the same time.
Two ideas can be consonant or dissonant. Consonant ideas logically agree with or compliment one another. Dissonant ideas oppose or contradict one another.
All people are motivated to avoid or resolve cognitive dissonance due to the discomfort it causes. These defense mechanisms fall into three categories:
https://immortalista.blogspot.com/2022/08/cognitive-dissonance-consonance.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_favoritism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity
No comments:
Post a Comment