belief

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1. The mental act, condition, or habit of placing trust or confidence in another: My belief in you is as strong as ever.
2. Mental acceptance of and conviction in the truth, actuality, or validity of something: His explanation of what happened defies belief.
3. Something believed or accepted as true, especially a particular tenet or a body of tenets accepted by a group of persons.

[Middle English bileve, alteration (influenced by bileven, to believe), of Old English gelēafa.]

SYNONYMS   belief, credence, credit, faith. These nouns denote mental acceptance of the truth, actuality, or validity of something: a statement unworthy of belief; an idea steadily gaining credence; testimony meriting credit; has no faith in a liar's assertions. See also synonyms at opinion.
ANTONYM  disbelief

noun

1. Absolute certainty in the trustworthiness of another: confidence, dependence, faith, reliance, trust. See belief/unbelief.
2. Mental acceptance of the truth or actuality of something: credence, credit, faith. See opinion.
3. Something believed or accepted as true by a person: conviction, feeling, idea, mind, notion, opinion, persuasion, position, sentiment, view. See opinion.

Definition: doctrine
Antonyms: denial, disavowal

n

Definition: something regarded as true, trustworthy
Antonyms: disbelief, nonbelief

To believe a proposition is to hold it to be true. The philosophical problem is to understand what kind of state of a person constitutes belief. Is it, for example, a simple disposition to behaviour? Or a more complex state that resists identification with any such disposition? Is verbal skill or verbal behaviour essential to belief, in which case what is to be said about prelinguistic infants, or nonlinguistic animals? An evolutionary approach asks how the cognitive success of possessing the capacity to believe things relates to success in practice. Further topics include discovering whether belief differs from other varieties of assent, such as acceptance, discovering whether belief is an all-or-nothing matter, or to what extent degrees of belief are possible, understanding the ways in which belief is controlled by rational and irrational factors, and discovering its links with other properties, such as the possession of conceptual or linguistic skills.

1. An attitude based subjectively on emotions, rather than on objective evidence. There are many beliefs in sport, particularly concerning diet, ergogenic aids, training, and injury. Some of these beliefs are based on empirical evidence, others are based on superstition or misunderstood theory. An important task of the sports scientist is to examine these beliefs; to support those that are beneficial and have scientific validity, and to give rational explanations that lead to the abandonment of those that are harmful or useless.

2. A socially constructed and shared view about what should or should not be, or what is, was, or will be. Beliefs have been classified as either descriptive or normative. A descriptive belief is concerned with what is, or was, or will be; a normative belief is concerned with what should be or ought to be.

Belief is the condition of holding a thing to be true or probable, giving credit to a person or an idea, giving credence to or having faith in a story. In this last sense belief is related to theology and economy. The believer is situated in a religious system in which he adopts a certain number of convictions, accepts a series of dogmas and makes this credo a guideline for living. Belief may have to do with clinging to a truth or belonging to a church or a party. The believer is also indebted to the person or persons, parents or teachers or others, who provide the material for belief, and possess a capital of confidence and a stock of responses, encouraging or obliging the believer to borrow from them models of reasoning and types of solutions.

The theme of belief is directly addressed by Sigmund Freud in a note accompanying a letter to Wilhelm Fliess dated May 31, 1897. There, belief is described as a phenomenon belonging entirely to the ego system (consciousness), without any unconscious equivalent. The topic had already been addressed indirectly in chapter 12 of the Studies on Hysteria (1895d), belief there being associated with superstition (p. 250).

It may seem paradoxical to speak of belief in the context of psychoanalysis. Freud described himself as nonbeliever and made no secret of his atheism. But precisely this external position with respect to unproven truth made him see belief as an anomaly that needed to be explained. Influenced by the positivism and scientism of his time, he considered belief to be a relic of childhood. He thus placed himself within the tradition of Auguste Comte, who believed that the individual and humanity as a whole both went through a childish stage with theological and military characteristics. He considered that the church and the army were the two social institutions responsible for perpetuating this stage. The reference to childhood here is bound up with the role of the father: God is the father of believers, who are all brothers; likewise the commander-in-chief is the father of soldiers, who are all comrades. The belief in salvation or victory is thus vital for maintaining the sense of family.

For Freud the concept of belief is inseparable from childhood theories of sexuality that continue to be held by the individual or by society. The little boy believes that women (and therefore his mother) have a penis. Society believes that the child has no sexuality. Belief is always associated with a disavowal of reality. The renunciation of belief is then an educational task and a psychological struggle, both liable to encounter much resistance. Psychoanalytic treatment cannot itself dispense with belief, for the transference, which reactivates infantile processes, demands that the patient lend credence to the analyst's words even though these do not belong to the realm of demonstrable truth. The better to remove the need for belief, therefore, psychoanalysis is obliged temporarily to replace one belief by another.

Differing attitudes regarding belief broadly coincide with the major splits in psychoanalysis and the schisms that have marked its history. In the early days, there was a "left" psychoanalysis, centered around Alfred Adler and the Social Democrats, which believed in popular revolution and the possibility, within a new political system, of eliminating alienation in both the social and the psychiatric senses of the word. A "right" tendency, meanwhile, epitomized by Carl Gustav Jung, believed in a metamorphosis of the soul and an internal unification of man that could heal all dislocations of being and all fissures in the ego. Freud was suspicious of all such beliefs, and his clinical experience tended to make him pessimistic about the possibility of separating belief from illusion. He saw the need to believe as a powerful means of mobilizing the instincts and manipulating the unconscious: so loath were man and society to consent to what Max Weber called the disenchantment of the world that they continually felt the need to believe in the unbelievable, to hope against all hope in some distant paradise or in glorious tomorrows.

Skepticism did not in Freud's view mean a refusal of values. Values were indeed necessary for the progress of culture and its corollary, the renunciation of the immediate satisfaction of instinctual impulses. The values of civilization called nonetheless for a truly critical scrutiny that held fast to one most important principle: to fear no truth no matter how painful it might be.

Bibliography

Dolto, Françoise. (1996). Les évangiles et la foi au risque de la psychanalyse. Paris: Gallimard.

Freud, Sigmund. (1927c). The future of an illusion. SE, 21: 5-56.

—— (1930a [1929]). Civilization and its discontents. SE, 21: 64-145.

Freud, Sigmund, and Breuer, Josef. (1895d). Studies on hysteria. SE,2.

—ODON VALLET

Mental reliance on or acceptance of a particular concept, which is arrived at by weighing external evidence, facts, and personal observation and experience.

Belief is essentially a subjective feeling about the validity of an idea or set of facts. It is more than a mere suspicion and less than concrete knowledge. Unlike suspicion, which is based primarily on inner personal conviction, belief is founded upon assurance gained by empirical evidence and from other people. Positive knowledge, as contrasted with belief, is the clear perception of existing facts.

Belief has been defined as having faith in an idea or formulating a conclusion as the result of considering information. Information and belief is a legal term that is used to describe an allegation based upon good faith rather than firsthand knowledge.

Quotes:

"The will to do springs from the knowledge that we can do." - James Allen

"Our systems, perhaps, are nothing more than an unconscious apology for our faults --a gigantic scaffolding whose object is to hide from us our favorite sin." - Henri Frederic Amiel

"It doesn't matter how many say it cannot be done or how many people have tried it before; it's important to realize that whatever you're doing, it's your first attempt at it." - Wally Amos

"If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?" - Dr. Robert Anthony

"If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don't like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself." - St. Augustine

"Sooner or later, those who win are those who think they can." - Richard Bach

See more famous quotes about Belief

This article is about the general concept. For the religious sense, see Religious belief. For other uses, see Belief (disambiguation).

Certainty series

Agnosticism Belief Certainty Determinism Doubt Epistemology Justification Estimation Fallibilism Fatalism Nihilism Probability Solipsism Uncertainty

v • d • e

Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true.^[1]

Contents 1 Belief, knowledge and epistemology 2 Belief as a psychological theory 3 How beliefs are formed 4 Delusional beliefs 5 Notes 6 See also 7 External links

Belief, knowledge and epistemology

The terms belief and knowledge are used differently in philosophy.

Epistemology is the philosophical study of knowledge and belief. The primary problem in epistemology is to understand exactly what is needed in order for us to have knowledge. In a notion derived from Plato's dialogue Theaetetus, philosophy has traditionally defined knowledge as justified true belief. The relationship between belief and knowledge is that a belief is knowledge if the belief is true, and if the believer has a justification (reasonable and necessarily plausible assertions/evidence/guidance) for believing it is true.

A false belief is not considered to be knowledge, even if it is sincere. A sincere believer in the flat earth theory does not know that the Earth is flat. Similarly, a truth that nobody believes is not knowledge, because in order to be knowledge, there must be some person who knows it.

Later epistemologists^[who?] have questioned the "justified true belief" definition, and some philosophers^[who?] have questioned whether "belief" is a useful notion at all.

Belief as a psychological theory

Mainstream psychology and related disciplines have traditionally treated belief as if it were the simplest form of mental representation and therefore one of the building blocks of conscious thought. Philosophers have tended to be more abstract in their analysis and much of the work examining the viability of the belief concept stems from philosophical analysis.

The concept of belief presumes a subject (the believer) and an object of belief (the proposition). So, like other propositional attitudes, belief implies the existence of mental states and intentionality, both of which are hotly debated topics in the philosophy of mind whose foundations and relation to brain states are still controversial.

Beliefs are sometimes divided into core beliefs (those you may be actively thinking about) and dispositional beliefs (those you may ascribe to but have never previously thought about). For example, if asked 'do you believe tigers wear pink pajamas ?' a person might answer that they do not, despite the fact they may never have thought about this situation before.^[2]

That a belief is a mental state has been seen, by some, as contentious. While some philosophers have argued that beliefs are represented in the mind as sentence-like constructs others have gone as far as arguing that there is no consistent or coherent mental representation that underlies our common use of the belief concept and that it is therefore obsolete and should be rejected.

This has important implications for understanding the neuropsychology and neuroscience of belief. If the concept of belief is incoherent or ultimately indefensible then any attempt to find the underlying neural processes that support it will fail. If the concept of belief does turn out to be useful, then this goal should (in principle) be achievable.

Philosopher Lynne Rudder Baker has outlined four main contemporary approaches to belief in her controversial book Saving Belief^[3]

• Our common-sense understanding of belief is correct - Sometimes called the ‘mental sentence theory’, in this conception, beliefs exist as coherent entities and the way we talk about them in everyday life is a valid basis for scientific endeavour. Jerry Fodor is one of the principal defenders of this point of view.
• Our common-sense understanding of belief may not be entirely correct, but it is close enough to make some useful predictions - This view argues that we will eventually reject the idea of belief as we use it now, but that there may be a correlation between what we take to be a belief when someone says 'I believe that snow is white' and however a future theory of psychology will explain this behaviour. Most notably philosopher Stephen Stich has argued for this particular understanding of belief.
• Our common-sense understanding of belief is entirely wrong and will be completely superseded by a radically different theory that will have no use for the concept of belief as we know it - Known as eliminativism, this view, (most notably proposed by Paul and Patricia Churchland), argues that the concept of belief is like obsolete theories of times past such as the four humours theory of medicine, or the phlogiston theory of combustion. In these cases science hasn’t provided us with a more detailed account of these theories, but completely rejected them as valid scientific concepts to be replaced by entirely different accounts. The Churchlands argue that our common-sense concept of belief is similar, in that as we discover more about neuroscience and the brain, the inevitable conclusion will be to reject the belief hypothesis in its entirety.
• Our common-sense understanding of belief is entirely wrong, however treating people, animals and even computers as if they had beliefs, is often a successful strategy - The major proponents of this view, Daniel Dennett and Lynne Rudder Baker, are both eliminativists in that they believe that beliefs are not a scientifically valid concept, but they don’t go as far as rejecting the concept of belief as a predictive device. Dennett gives the example of playing a computer at chess. While few people would agree that the computer held beliefs, treating the computer as if it did (e.g. that the computer believes that taking the opposition’s queen will give it a considerable advantage) is likely to be a successful and predictive strategy. In this understanding of belief, named by Dennett the intentional stance, belief based explanations of mind and behaviour are at a different level of explanation and are not reducible to those based on fundamental neuroscience although both may be explanatory at their own level.

How beliefs are formed

Psychologists study belief formation and the relationship between beliefs and actions. Beliefs form in a variety of ways.

• We tend to internalize the beliefs of the people around us during childhood. Albert Einstein is often quoted as having said that "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." Political beliefs depend most strongly on the political beliefs most common in the community where we live.^[4] Most individuals believe the religion they were taught in childhood. ^[5]

• People may adopt the beliefs of a charismatic leader, even if those beliefs fly in the face of all previous beliefs, and produce actions that are clearly not in their own self-interest.^[6] Is belief voluntary? Rational individuals need to reconcile their direct reality with any said belief; therefore, if belief is not present or possible, it reflects the fact that contradictions were necessarily overcome using cognitive dissonance.

• The primary thrust of the advertising industry is that repetition forms beliefs, as do associations of beliefs with images of sex, love, and other strong positive emotions.^[7]

• Physical trauma, especially to the head, can radically alter a person's beliefs.^[8]

However, even educated people, well aware of the process by which beliefs form, still strongly cling to their beliefs, and act on those beliefs even against their own self-interest.

Delusional beliefs

Delusions are defined as beliefs in psychiatric diagnostic criteria (for example in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). Psychiatrist and historian G. E. Berrios has challenged the view that delusions are genuine beliefs and instead labels them as "empty speech acts", where affected persons are motivated to express false or bizarre belief statements due to an underlying psychological disturbance. However, the majority of mental health professionals and researchers treat delusions as if they were genuine beliefs.

In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, the White Queen says, "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." This is often quoted in mockery of the common ability of people to entertain beliefs contrary to fact.

Notes

1. ^ Schwitzgebel, Eric (2006), "Belief", in Zalta, Edward, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford, CA: The Metaphysics Research Lab, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/belief/, retrieved 2008-09-19 
2. ^ Bell, V., Halligan, P.W. & Ellis, H.D. (2006) A Cognitive Neuroscience of Belief. In Peter W. Halligan & Mansel Aylward (eds.) The Power of Belief: Psychological Influence on Illness, Disability, and Medicine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198530102
3. ^ Lynne Rudder Baker, Saving Belief, Princeton University Press, 1989, ISBN 9780691020501
4. ^ Andrew Gelman, David Park, Boris Shor, Joseph Bafumi, Jeronimo Cortina, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do, Princeton University Press, 2008, ISBN 9780691139272
5. ^ Michael Argyle, The Psychology of Religious Belief, Behavior, and Experience, Routledge, 1997, ISBN 9780415123310, p.25 "Religion, in most cultures, is ascribed, not chosen."
6. ^ Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2002, ISBN 9780060505912
7. ^ Jane Kilbourne, Mary Pipher, Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel, Free Press, 2000, ISBN 978-0684866000
8. ^ Babette Rothschild, The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment, W. W. Norton & Company, 2000, ISBN 9780393703276

See also

Thinking portal

Psychology portal

Sociology portal

• Charm
• Cognitive dissonance
• Collective belief
• Conversational intolerance (Sam Harris)
• Culture-specific syndrome
• Delusion
• Doxastic logic
• Evil eye
• Expectation
• Faith
• Folk psychology
• Gettier problem
• Idea
• Life stance
• Moore's paradox
• Nocebo
• Observer-expectancy effect
• Placebo
• Propositional attitude
• Propositional knowledge
• Psychosomatic illness
• Religion
• Self-deception
• Spell (paranormal)
• Spirituality
• Subject-expectancy effect
• Sugar pill
• Suggestibility
• Suggestion
• Subjective validation
• Truth
• Thomas theorem
• Ultimate importance
• Unintended consequence
• Value (personal and cultural)
• List of sociology topics
• Sociology

External links

Look up belief in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• "Belief" article by Eric Schwitzgebel in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Beliefnet - Belief-o-matic
• Compare Different Beliefs Information on different religions/beliefs
• Beliefs and Practices Belief refers to a part of a wider Spirituality
• Belief’s Role in Your Life The Power of Belief
• Think without Beliefs Does rational thinking require the adherence to beliefs at all?
• Religious Beliefs Submit a belief and read about others' thoughts.
• Ethics of Belief Classic WK Clifford essay that belief by its nature is unethical, with counterpoint by William James

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Common misspelling(s) of belief

• beleif

Dansk (Danish)
n. - tro, overbevisning, mening

idioms:

• beyond belief    utroligt

Nederlands (Dutch)
geloof, mening, opvatting

Français (French)
n. - croyance, (Relig) foi, credo, opinion, conviction, confiance

idioms:

• beyond belief    (être) incroyable

Deutsch (German)
n. - Glaube, Vertrauen, Auffassung

idioms:

• beyond belief    unglaublich

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - πίστη, πεποίθηση, δοξασία, γνώμη

idioms:

• beyond belief    απίστευτος

Italiano (Italian)
opinione, fede

idioms:

• beyond belief    incredibilmente

Português (Portuguese)
n. - crença (f), opinião (f), fé religiosa (f)

idioms:

• beyond belief    inacreditável

Русский (Russian)
мнение, убеждение

idioms:

• beyond belief    невероятно, не вериться

Español (Spanish)
n. - creencia, convicción

idioms:

• beyond belief    increíble

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - tro, övertygelse, tilltro

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
相信, 信念, 看法, 信任, 信赖, 信仰

idioms:

• beyond belief    难以置信

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 相信, 信念, 看法, 信任, 信賴, 信仰

idioms:

• beyond belief    難以置信

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 확신, 신뢰, 신앙

idioms:

• beyond belief    믿을 수 없는

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 信念, 確信, 信じること, 信頼, 信用, 信仰

idioms:

• beyond belief    信じられない

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) عقيدة, مذهب, أيمان, راي, أعتقاد‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮דת, אמונה‬

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