Belief Formation-Initial thoughts
June 9, 2011I recently found myself stuck on the idea of belief formation, and while i’ll spare you the details of how that conundrum came up, I will just express my initial thoughts about the issue.
In order to delve further into this issue, I will have to accomplish the monumental task of defining belief:
A belief, as far as I am using it here, is simply something we take to be true.
A belief I have would be “the sky is blue”, or “Coffee is an amazing elixir of life”, or even “cats are the most non-chalant creatures on this planet”. I believe all those sentences are true, and therefore are beliefs that I have. Hopefully that is satisfactory.
The problem i am trying to grapple with at this point is whether or not beliefs can be formed through some sort of authentic inspiration, or whether beliefs are only formulated through some sort of complex relation of already present beliefs coming together and formulating a new belief via some process.
Basically, the simple thing I am asking is whether or not this can exist:
(inspiration hits)-> new belief
or if the only way we can obtain a new belief is through a method similar to this:
(set of present beliefs)+some process-> new belief
The main roadblock in answering this question involves the fact that we aren’t exactly aware of our belief formation process. Every now and then we might get a belief through some sort of logical proof, but for the most part we just sort of formulate beliefs without being aware of how they came to be (which is where the idea of inspiration formulating belief comes from).
However, if most of our beliefs came from inspiration, then technically there should be occasions and times when we get beliefs that are completely unrelated to beliefs that we already hold, and that can contradict them greatly. I don’t know about the rest of you, but that hardly ever happens for me, which pushes me towards the idea that much of our belief formation comes through a complex process where our present beliefs come into play in the creation of a new belief.
Anyways, those are my initial thoughts about belief formation, I’m actually about to go read some theories on it, and hopefully gain some insight on it. CLEARLY i’m pretty ignorant on the whole field, so corrections and comments would be very helpful.
Edit:
I realized that this analysis is probably unhelpful in so far as describing what i’m talking about. So i’ll try to create an example: Say a person enters a house, he sees shoes (a belief that there are shoes there) and believes that someone took their shoes off and entered the house, therefore formulating a belief that there is someone else in the house.
Is this logical process the only method in which someone formulates a belief? Or are there cases in which there is no interaction of beliefs with the formulation of the new belief? (aka the inspired belief)
Edit 2:
A few things:
1. I take the point of this post to be bringing out a notion of “genuine inspiration” in the formulation of belief, and considering whether or not it is plausible. Otherwise, we only have a system of creating beliefs that builds off old beliefs. Which leads us to the next point…
2.The “genuine inspiration” idea is something like a miraculous belief formulating in your mind without any kind of apparent cognitive process involving beliefs bringing it about. For instance, perhaps something fantastically crazy happens with your brain and causes your brain to just generate a belief. Such a belief is formulated without the need to appeal to other kinds of beliefs.
Shouldn’t an account for the formation of beliefs address the differences in individuals criteria for believing something to be true?
Not all inspiration or sensory input leads to belief (not quite sure what you mean by “inspiration,” but I assume is something other than “that which leads to a belief” for the sake of avoiding circularity). However, it hardly seems controversial for me to claim that certain inspiration leads some to form belief and not others. For instance, if one hears a creepy bump in the night, some might believe this is a result of ghosts, and others might consider it nothing but background noise and form no particular belief about the event.
Additionally, a set of present beliefs seems to at least influence the formation of beliefs, if not dictate this formation; if I believe that supernatural events are nonsensical and impossible, that will prevent me from forming a belief in a supernatural event, even if the same “inspiration” leads someone to believe something else.
I am not saying that you are guilty of this, but from this blog post, it seems you might be in danger of presenting a false dichotomy–it is possible that the formation of “beliefs” (or “something we take to be true”) has nothing do with simple inspiration or a process in combination with our current beliefs. It is possible that “beliefs” a name for the process by which our brain accesses the likelihood of various scenarios. Seeing the shoes on the ground could be a sensory input that triggers our brain to formulate a scenario with makes sense of this datum. This conception would challenge the notion that we take things to be true absolutely (even if we are convinced of something on a conscious level), and instead posits the brain as a biological machine that calculates the probability of events. Of course, the calculation of these probabilities would depend on our brains understanding of previous sensory input and logical truths (which would have undergone the “probability calculator” before).
@Aaron
I probably wasn’t too clear, but I guess I was trying to ask the question of whether there is anything such as “genuine inspiration”, or basically the formulation of a belief (aka a thought you take to be true) without appealing or resorting to other beliefs you have.
As far as hearing a sound and forming a belief of supernatural events, I would categorize that under “non-inspired beliefs” because beliefs play a role in the creation of the supernatural belief. I.e. you have a belief that you heard a sound, you have a belief that if monsters exist, they make sounds like that, and then through some means you come to form your belief in supernatural events.
The “genuine inspiration” idea is something like a miraculous belief formulating in your mind without any kind of apparent cognitive process involving beliefs bringing it about. For instance, perhaps something fantastically crazy happens with your brain and causes your brain to just generate a belief. Such a belief is formulated without the need to appeal to other kinds of beliefs.
But the question is whether or not such a thing ever occurs or is possible. If this “genuine inspiration” is impossible, then all our beliefs should be formulated through a process that plays off beliefs (usebelief(x) v ~usebelief(x))