What is belief? No, really?

Are beliefs really just the realm of subjectivity?

I don’t think that this is the nature of belief. In order to understand what Dr. AC Grayling was really saying in his essay Facts and Fairy Dust, I wanted to take his implicit logical framework to its extreme. I felt this was necessary because Dr. Grayling seems to identify strongly with scientism; that is to say that he disputes the existence of fairies because evidence for their existence does not meet the requirements of a narrow definition of science. As he says;

“every belief or hypothesis depends for its respectability on how it was arrived at, how open it is to test, and how it consists with what is powerfully established and repeatedly (a billion times repeatedly) confirmed in our common sense and scientific views of the world.”

The scope of respectability is defined by the boundaries of scientific empiricism; the realm of possibilities is limited in the same manner. In short, only that which fits within the scope of scientific method is respectable (real). However, I do not think that this is a reasonable requirement because it fails one of its own requirements; it is not open to testing and requires a series of additional un-testable beliefs to support it. But, I’m not quite ready to get into this quite yet, so I’ll get back to the topic at hand; what is belief?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, belief is the acceptance of something as being true. Correlational to this definition is that beliefs are not known to be true; if they were they would no longer be beliefs, but knowledge. (There is a relationship between beliefs, knowledge, scientific method which the cleverer of you may already have perceived. However, I am not ready to address this relationship, yet.) All beliefs require an hypothesis, either explicitly or implicitly, but an hypothesis does not directly require a belief; however, in practice, virtually all do.

As previously stated, beliefs have a subjective component, but are not themselves subjective. Also, beliefs are not (as I have used them previously) divorced from reality. Beliefs can be identical to an hypothesis, with the difference being that hypotheses are not (ideally) believed to be true. Description vs. unproven truth is the game at hand. Be careful, this is a game filled with subtleties and whose elements are often difficult to ascertain. Luckily, Truth is bullet-proof and we are going to fire a lot of rounds into it and see how well our view of reality holds up.