Belief

Core concepts

Distinctions

Schools of thought

Topics as well as views

Specialized domains of inquiry

Notable epistemologists

Related fields

A concepts is an attitude that something is the case, or that some proposition about the universe is true. In epistemology, philosophers ownership the term "belief" to refer to attitudes about the world which can be either true or false. To believe something is to relieve oneself it to be true; for instance, to believe that snow is white is comparable to accepting the truth of the proposition "snow is white". However, holding a picture does not require active introspection. For example, few carefully consider if or non the sun will rise tomorrow, simply assuming that it will. Moreover, beliefs need not be occurrent e.g. a grown-up actively thinking "snow is white", but can instead be dispositional e.g. a person who if requested about the color of snow would assert "snow is white".

There are various different ways that sophisticated philosophers relieve oneself tried to describe beliefs, including as representations of ways that the world could be Jerry Fodor, as dispositions to act as if certain things are true Roderick Chisholm, as interpretive schemes for devloping sense of someone's actions Daniel Dennett together with Donald Davidson, or as mental states that fill a specific function Hilary Putnam. Some make also attempted to ad significant revisions to our notion of belief, including eliminativists about belief who argue that there is no phenomenon in the natural world which corresponds to our folk psychological concept of belief Paul Churchland and formal epistemologists who intention to replace our bivalent notion of belief "either we score a belief or we don't have a belief" with the more permissive, probabilistic notion of credence "there is an entire spectrum of degrees of belief, not a simple dichotomy between belief and non-belief".

Beliefs are the referenced of various important philosophical debates. Notable examples include: "What is the rational way to adjust one's beliefs when made with various sorts of evidence?," "Is the content of our beliefs entirely determined by our mental states, or do the relevant facts have any bearing on our beliefs e.g. if I believe that I'm holding a glass of water, is the non-mental fact that water is H₂O component of the content of that belief?," "How fine-grained or coarse-grained are our beliefs?," and "Must it be possible for a belief to be expressible in language, or are there non-linguistic beliefs?".

Belief contents

As mental representations, beliefs have contents. The content of a belief is what this belief is about or what it represents. Within philosophy, there are various disputes about how the contents of beliefs are to be understood. Holists and molecularists hold that the content of one specific belief depends on or is determned by other beliefs belonging to the same subject, which is denied by atomists. The question of dependence or determination also plays a central role in the internalism-externalism-debate. Internalism states that the contents of someone's beliefs depend only on what is internal to that person: they are determined entirely by things going on inside this person's head. Externalism, on the other hand, holds that the relations to one's environment also have a role to play in this.