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In this incisive new monograph one of Britain's most eminent philosophers explores the often overlooked tension between voluntariness and involuntariness in human cognition. He seeks to counter the widespread tendency for analytic epistemology to be dominated by the concept of belief. Is scientific knowledge properly conceived as being embodied, at its best, in a passive feeling of belief or in an active policy of acceptance? Should a jury's verdict declare what its members involuntarily believe or what they voluntarily accept? And should statements and assertions be presumed to express what their authors believe or what they accept? Does such a distinction between belief and acceptance help to resolve the paradoxes of self-deception and akrasia? Must people be taken to believe everything entailed by what they believe, or merely to accept everything entailed by what they accept? Through a systematic examination of these problems, the author sheds new light on issues of crucial importance in contemporary epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science.
Does our available evidence show that some particular religion is correct? It seems unlikely, given the great diversity of religious - and non-religious - views of the world. But if no religious beliefs can be shown true on the evidence, can it be right to make a religious commitment? Should people make 'leaps of faith'? Or would we all be better off avoiding commitments that outrun our evidence? And, if leaps of faith can be acceptable, how do we tell the difference between goodand bad ones - between sound religion and dogmatic ideology or fundamentalist fanaticism? Believing by Faith offers answers to these questions, inspired by a famous attempt to justify faith made by William James in 1896. In doing so, it engages critically with much recent discussion in the philosophyof religion, and, especially, the epistemology of religious belief.
(1) Beliefs are involuntary, and not nonnally subject to direct voluntary control. For instance I cannot believe at will that my trousers are on fire, or that the Dalai Lama is a living God, even if you pay me a large amount of money for believing such things. (2) Beliefs are nonnally shaped by evidence for what is believed, unless they are, in some sense, irrational. In general a belief is rational if it is proportioned to the degree of evidence that one has for its truth. In this sense, one often says that "beliefs aim at truth" . This is why it is, on the face of it, irrational to believe against the evidence that one has. A subject whose beliefs are not shaped by a concern for their truth, but by what she wants to be the case, is more or less a wishful thinker or a self-deceiver. (3) Beliefs are context independent, in the sense that at one time a subject believes something or does not believe it; she does not believe it relative to one context and not relative to another. For instance if I believe that Paris is a polluted city, I cannot believe that on Monday and not on Tuesday; that would be a change of belief, or a change of mind, but not a case of believing one thing in one context and another thing in another context. If I believe something, the belief is more or 4 less pennanent across various contexts.
An account of how a rational agent should revise beliefs in the light of new evidence. Computationally implementable, it provides rigorous mathematical theory of dependency networks and investigates the complexity of algorithms for rational agents revising beliefs.
This volume brings together Nicholas Wolterstorff's essays on epistemology written between 1983 and 2008.
Excerpt from Clouds on the Horizon: An Essay on the Various Forms of Belief, Which Stand in the Way of the Acceptance of Real Christian Faith by the Educated Natives of Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania IT pains me to witness two very strong tendencies on the part of good men of the present epoch, which I cannot but with all humility pronounce to be erroneous. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.