“Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is” (Johan W. von Goethe). “The word ‘belief’ is a difficult thing for me. I don’t believe. I must have reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it –I don’t need to believe it” (Carl Jung). “The most interesting and valuable things about a man are his ideals and over-beliefs” (William James). “A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but satisfying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance” (Antoine de Saint-Exupery).
Abstract
The most common definition of belief is taken from analytical philosophy, which understands it as a proposition that is considered as true. Such a broad definition is ambiguous for some fields of empirical research, like psychology, which deals with the mental state of the believer when holding the belief. This article aims to reach an operationalization of beliefs to pinpoint their distinctive features with respect to similar concepts (knowledge, opinion, preference, perception or prediction, for instance). We summarize the most influential interpretations of belief in psychology and psychiatry, which are mainly based on Immanuel Kant and analytical philosophy. We also expose the problem that arises from putting the mental states of beliefs, knowledge, opinions and preferences in the same bag. Our proposal is that a belief is: (1) a proposition that is taken to be true; and (2) which the subject is willing to hold even if irrefutable evidence were hypothetically argued against it. We introduce a narrower interpretation to reliably discriminate the mental state of believing, which is intended to be applied to empirical psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, sociology and related sciences.
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Data availability statement
In the final section of this manuscript, we report some results of a pilot empirical study. Data are available upon reasonable request to the corresponding author (jbernacer@unav.es).
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Camina, E., Bernacer, J. & Guell, F. Belief operationalization for empirical research in psychological sciences. Found Sci 26, 325–340 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-020-09722-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-020-09722-9