Epistemology Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.Anti-spam check. Do not fill this in! ===Belief=== {{Main|Belief}} One of the core concepts in epistemology is ''belief''. A belief is an attitude that a person holds regarding anything that they take to be true.<ref name="SEP Belief"/> For instance, to believe that snow is white is comparable to accepting the truth of the [[proposition]] "snow is white". Beliefs can be ''occurrent'' (e.g., a person actively thinking "snow is white"), or they can be ''dispositional'' (e.g., a person who if asked about the color of snow would assert "snow is white"). While there is not universal agreement about the nature of belief, most contemporary philosophers hold the view that a disposition to express belief ''B'' qualifies as holding the belief ''B''.<ref name="SEP Belief"/> There are various different ways that contemporary philosophers have 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 making sense of someone's actions ([[Daniel Dennett]] and [[Donald Davidson (philosopher)|Donald Davidson]]), or as mental states that fill a particular function ([[Hilary Putnam]]).<ref name="SEP Belief"/> Some have also attempted to offer significant revisions to the notion of belief, including [[Eliminativism|eliminativists]] about belief who argue that there is no phenomenon in the natural world which corresponds to our [[folk psychology|folk psychological]] concept of belief ([[Paul Churchland]]) and [[Formal epistemology|formal epistemologists]], who aim to replace our bivalent notion of belief ("either I have a belief or I 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").<ref name="SEP Belief"/><ref name="SEP Formal Belief"/> While belief plays a significant role in epistemological debates surrounding knowledge and justification, it has also generated many other philosophical debates in its own right. Notable debates include: "What is the rational way to revise one's beliefs when presented 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 H<sub>2</sub>O part 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?"<ref name="SEP Belief"/> Summary: Please note that all contributions to Christianpedia may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Christianpedia:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission! Cancel Editing help (opens in new window) Discuss this page