Abstract
Argument: Beliefs develop out of the deep self. The conceptual element is emphatic in belief, the affective element (will) in desire. Knowledge is shaped by core beliefs and valuations. Action is structured by implicit beliefs, which include experiential and world knowledge. Explicit beliefs are action equivalents of knowledge when truth judgments are required. Conviction develops in the derivation of value to a feeling of reality that accompanies the actualization of objects as facts.
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Notes
R. Bogdan, “The Manufacture of Belief,” in Belief, ed. R. Bogdan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 149.
Consistent with the principle that feelings are less readily “retrieved” than ideas, Brown, Self and Process, 155.
N. Nelkin, “Propositional Attitudes and Consciousness,” Journal of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 49(1989): 413–430.
See F. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1914).
M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
G. Santayana, Skepticism and Animal Faith (New York: Scribner, 1923).
G. Moore, “Proof of an External World,” Proceedings of the British Academy 25(1939).
L. Wittgenstein, On Certainty (London: Basil Blackwell, 1969), 42.
See N. Malcolm, Memory and Mind (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), on how we know what we remember is accurate without a standard in memory for comparison. The pathological material argues against such a standard, suggesting that the feeling of conviction (or lack of awareness of error) is generated with the content and is not an extrinsic function of correspondence in awareness.
Henri Poincaré described the “feeling of absolute certitude” preceding a proof in “Le Raisonnement mathématique,” 1908; reprinted in The Creative Process, ed. B. Ghiselin, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952).
E. Swedenborg, Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell, trans. J. C. Agen (New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1940). Originally published in Latin in 1758. Regarding philosophical delusions, Schiller has written: “Those unfortunate enough to have acquired and retained an exclusive view of truth are usually secluded in prisons or asylums, unless their truth is so harmlessly abstruse as not to lead to action, when they are sometimes allowed to be philosophers!” F. Schiller, Humanism (New York: Macmillan, 1903).
G. Strawsen, Freedom and Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
M. Leon, Philosophical Papers 21(1992): 299–314.
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© 1996 Plenum Press, New York
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(1996). Belief and Conviction. In: Time, Will, and Mental Process. Cognition and Language: A Series in Psycholinguistics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-34654-0_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-34654-0_9
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