Google

Friday, November 16, 2007

Objects of belief or; A belief isn't the thing believed

In my last post, I claimed that belief is the acceptance of the truth of something. To believe is to accept something as being true (which is not known to be true); confidence in or conviction of the truth of something. This belief requires an object of belief and differs substantially from belief in Truth (that objective truth exists, in general). I will refer to the object of belief to as an hypothesis, although it can be any sort of claim from completely fanciful to scientific theory and of any degree of complexity, logical soundness, or verification. Beliefs, like premises, can be implicit and explicit, recognized and unrecognized by the believer. Lastly, a belief is not the same are the object of belief; while this may seem self-evidently true, I’ve found that most people do not, in practice, recognize this subtlety. “The sun will rise tomorrow morning”, is not a belief even if someone believes it; it is the object of belief – belief is the accept-as-true part. “The sun will rise tomorrow morning”, in my vernacular, is an hypothesis.