Search

This volume argues that theistic philosophy should be seen not as an “armchair” enterprise but rather as a critical endeavor to bring philosophy of religion into close contact with emerging sciences of religion. This text engages with the rationality of religious belief by investigating central problems and arguments in philosophy of religion from the perspective of new naturalistic research. A central question the book analyzes is whether findings in cognitive science of religion (CSR) falsify or undermine religious ideas and beliefs. With regard to CSR, this volume offers a sustained and critical investigation of the neutrality and positive-relevance view, before offering a re-appraisal of the conflict view. The text argues that when scrutinizing these views, much more attention must be paid to specific normative premises that allow empirical findings to have epistemic relevance. A novel feature is the theoretical application of analytical epistemology in virtue-epistemology to the central question of whether CSR undermines, supports, or is neutral with respect to religious belief. This book appeals to upper-level students and researchers in the field.

This book contributes to the developing dialogue between cognitive science and social sciences. It focuses on a central issue in both fields, i.e. the nature and the limitations of the rationality of beliefs and action. The development of cognitive science is one of the most important and fascinating intellectual advances of recent decades, and social scientists are paying increasing attention to the findings of this new branch of science that forces us to consider many classical issues related to epistemology and philosophy of action in a new light. Analysis of the concept of rationality is a leitmotiv in the history of the social sciences and has involved endless disputes. Since it is difficult to give a precise definition of this concept, and there is a lack of agreement about its meaning, it is possible to say that there is a ‘mystery of rationality'. What is it to be rational? Is rationality merely instrumental or does it also involve the endorsement of values, i.e. the choice of goals? Should we consider rationality to be a normative principle or a descriptive one? Can rationality be only Cartesian or can it also be argumentative? Is rationality a conscious skill or a partly tacit one? This book, which has been written by an outstanding collection of authors, including both philosophers and social scientists, tries to make a useful contribution to the debates on these problems and shed some light on the mystery of rationality. The target audience primarily comprises researchers and experts in the field.

Dieses Buch untersucht gängige Sprichwörter des Volksmunds aus psychologisch-wissenschaftlicher Perspektive: Stimmen die alten Sprichwörter mit den Erkenntnissen der modernen Wissenschaft überein? Weiß die Wissenschaft mehr oder gar weniger als Oma, die sich viele Zusammenhänge des alltäglichen Lebens durch'Lebensweisheiten'erklärte? 33 kompakte Kapitel beleuchten 33 bekannte Sprichwörter und erklären, was die Wissenschaft dazu weiß, unter welchen Bedingungen ein Sprichwort gilt und wo ggf. die Grenzen seiner Gültigkeit liegen. Ein Buch für Studierende und Dozierende der Psychologie, denn es bietet durch die Breite der Themen eine Übersicht über viele Phänomene und Theorien der Psychologie - gleichzeitig aber auch für interessierte Laien, die für Alltagsphänomene psychologische Erklärungen suchen.

This book proposes an applied epistemological framework for investigating science, social cognition and religious thinking based on inferential patterns that recur in the different domains. It presents human rationality as a tool that allows us to make sense of our (physical or social) surroundings. It shows that the resulting cognitive activity produces a broad spectrum of outputs, such as scientific models and experimentation, gossip and social networks, but also ancient and contemporary deities. The book consists of three parts, the first of which addresses scientific modeling and experimentation, and their application to the analysis of scientific rationality. Thus, this part continues the tradition of eco-cognitive epistemology and abduction studies. The second part deals with the relationship between social cognition and cognitive niche construction, i.e. the evolutionarily relevant externalization of knowledge onto the environment, while the third part focuses on what is commonly defined as “irrational”, thus being in a way dialectically opposed to the first part. Here, the author demonstrates that the “irrational” can be analyzed by applying the same epistemological approach used to study scientific rationality and social cognition; also in this case, we see the emergence of patterns of rationality that regulate the relationships between agents and their environment. All in all, the book offers a coherent and unitary account of human rationality, providing a basis for new conceptual connections and theoretical speculations.

The preparation of this volume began with a conference held at Trier University, approximately thirty years after the publication of the first Belief in a Just World (BJW) manuscript. The location of the conference was especially appropriate given the continued interest that the Trier faculty and students had for BJW research and theory. As several chapters in this volume document, their research together with the other contributors to this volume have added to the current sophistication and status of the BJW construct. In the 1960s and 1970s Melvin Lerner, together with his students and colleagues, developed his justice motive theory. The theory of Belief in a Just World (BJW) was part of that effort. BJW theory, meanwhile in its thirties, has become very influential in social and behavioral sciences. As with every widely applied concept and theory there is a natural develop­ mental history that involves transformations, differentiation of facets, and efforts to identify further theoretical relationships. And, of course, that growth process will not end unless the theory ceases to develop. In this volume this growth is reconstructed along Furnham's stage model for the development of scientific concepts. The main part of the book is devoted to current trends in theory and research.

Philosophy of Probability provides a comprehensive introduction to theoretical issues that occupy a central position in disciplines ranging from philosophy of mind and epistemology to cognitive science, decision theory and artificial intelligence. Some contributions shed new light on the standard conceptions of probability (Bayesianism, logical and computational theories); others offer detailed analyses of two important topics in the field of cognitive science: the meaning and the representation of (partial) belief, and the management of uncertainty. The authors of this well-balanced account are philosophers as well as computer scientists (among them, L.J. Cohen, D. Miller, P. Gärdenfors, J. Vickers, D. Dubois and H. Prade). This multidisciplinary approach to probability is designed to illuminate the intricacies of the problems in the domain of cognitive inquiry. No one interested in epistemology or aritificial intelligence will want to miss it.

In the pages that follow, an attempt is made to examine those sections of the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion which deal with the Argument from Design - the argument which purports to prove that certain observed similarities between the design of the world and machines of human contrivance countenance reasoning by analogy to the conclusion that the cause of the design of the world resembles human intelligence. The sections which deal with the Argument from Design, and with which I am therefore concerned, are Parts I through VIII and Part XII. I argue that a clue to Hume's discussion of the Argument from Design is to be found in Section XII of the first Enquiry, in which Hume presents his most thorough analysis of philosophic dogmatism and scepticism. The Dialogues, as will be shown, follows precisely Hume's recommendations in this Section for bringing the dogmatist to the position which Hume himself endorses -'mitigated scepticism.'It is, then, the position of the mitigated sceptic which is elaborated in Part XII of the Dialogues. The belief in an intelligent designer of the world is shown to be akin to certain other beliefs discussed by Hume - causality, physical objects, a continuing self - which are usually referred to in the literature as'natural beliefs.'The mitigated sceptic's defense of the unknowability of the divine nature is seen to be in accordance with Hume's view that whatever is believed naturally cannot be known or understood.

(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.

The relationship between thought, language, and the world is an intimate one. When we have an idea or thought about the world and we wish to express that idea or thought to others we utter a sentence or make a statement. If the statement correctly describes the world then it is true. Moreover, it seems as though our ability to have more complex or sophisticated thoughts about the world increases as the complexity of our language or our ability to use the language increases. Understanding the complex relationship between language, thought, and the world is one of the central aims of philosophy. This book is an attempt to increase our understanding of this complex relationship by focusing on certain philosophical issues that arise from our ability to refer to objects in the world though the use of language. In particular, it is an attempt to solve the puzzles of reference and belief that Frege and Russell presented within the context of a theory of direct reference for proper names.

1. A WORD ABOUT PRESUPPOSITIONS This book is addressed to philosophers, and not necessarily to those philosophers whose interests and competence are largely mathematical or logical in the formal sense. It deals for the most part with problems in the theory of partial judgment. These problems are naturally formulated in numerical and logical terms, and it is often not easy to formulate them precisely otherwise. Indeed, the involvement of arithmetical and logical concepts seems essential to the philosophies of mind and action at just the point where they become concerned with partial judgment and'belief. I have tried throughout to use no mathematics that is not quite elementary, for the most part no more than ordinary arithmetic and algebra. There is some rudimentary and philosophically important employment of limits, but no use is made of integrals or differentials. Mathematical induction is rarely and inessentially employed in the text, but is more frequent and important in the apP'endix on set theory and Boolean algebra. • As far as logic is concerned, the book assumes a fair acquaintance with predicate logic and its techniques. The concepts of compactness and maximal consistency turn out to have important employment, which I have tried to keep self-contained, so that extensive knowledge of meta­ logical topics is not assumed. In a word, the book presupposes no more logical facility than is customary among working philosophers and graduate students, though it may call for unaccustomed vigor in its application.

'Individuals who live in groups hold common beliefs which define their reality, not only as persons, but also as group members. This reality becomes especially important when group members become aware that they share beliefs and are convinced that these beliefs characterize them as a group. In this case common beliefs become group beliefs.'With this statement, Dr. Bar-Tal begins his far-reaching analysis of beliefs as a group phenomenon. Group beliefs are shown to have important behavioral, cognitive, and affective implications for group members and the group as a whole. They may contribute to the behavioral direction a group takes, coordinate group activities, determine the intensity and involvement of group members, and influence the way group members affect the leaders. This book introduces and articulates the implications of a new concept of group beliefs, shedding new light on the structure and processes of groups, focusing on such phenomena as group formation, subgrouping, splits, mergence and group disintegration. By taking an interdisciplinary approach, this integrative conception opens new avenues to the study and understanding of group behavior.

Underdetermination. An Essay on Evidence and the Limits of Natural Knowledge is a wide-ranging study of the thesis that scientific theories are systematically'underdetermined'by the data they account for. This much-debated thesis is a thorn in the side of scientific realists and methodologists of science alike and of late has been vigorously attacked. After analyzing the epistemological and ontological ascpects of the controversy in detail, and reviewing pertinent logical facts and selected scientific cases, Bonk carefully examines the merits of arguments for and against the thesis. Along the way, he investigates methodological proposals and recent theories of confirmation, which promise to discriminate among observationally equivalent theories on evidential grounds. He explores sympathetically but critically W.V.Quine and H.Putnam's arguments for the thesis, the relationship between indeterminacy and underdetermination, and possibilities for a conventionalist solution. This book is of interest to anyone working in philosophy of science, and to those interested in the philosophy of Quine.

According to our commonsense view of the matter, beliefs, desires, intentions and the like are special kinds of internal states the possession of which by a given cr- ture potentially explains its behavior and otherwise renders the creature intelligible to us. So-called folk psychology provides us with a rough-and-ready network of counterfactuals delimiting the role supposedly played by these internal states v- à-vis perceptual input, inference, and behavioral output in a normal member of our species. The exact empirical details of this network do not matter here, for we are not undertaking further re nement or systematization of the relevant counterfac- als. Instead, our topic is the ontological analysis of the internal states that occupy the nodes of this complex network and the bearing of that analysis on the truth conditions of the sentences we use to ascribe beliefs and related states. The relevant counterfactuals canonically describe particular belief-, desire-, and intention-states as states of believing, desiring, and intending that such-a- such. The use of in nitival clauses to describe desires and intentions is not really an exception, for desiring or intending to do A (or to be F) is just having a self-regarding desire or intention that oneself does A (or that oneself is F). By the lights of our commonsense psychology, then, to be in a particular belief-, desire-, or intention-state is to bear the corresponding attitudinal relation— believing, desiring, or intending—to a certain content.

The twenty chapters in this book all focus on aspects of mathematical beliefs, from a variety of different perspectives. Current knowledge of the field is synthesized and existing boundaries are extended. The book is divided into three, partly overlapping, sections. The first concentrates on conceptualizations and measurement of beliefs, the second on research about teachers'beliefs, and the third on facets of students'beliefs about mathematics. A diversity of instruments is used for data collection, including surveys, interviews, observations, and essay writing, as well as more innovative approaches. The volume is intended for researchers in the fleld, as well as for mathematics educators teaching the next generation of students. The book is also useful for those working in other subject disciplines, since many of the themes explored have relevance well beyond mathematics education.

The'belief in a just world'is an attempt to capmre in a phrase one of the ways, if not the way, that people come to terms with-make sense out of-find meaning in, their experiences. We do not believe that things just happen in our world; there is a pattern to events which conveys not only a sense of orderli­ ness or predictability, but also the compelling experience of appropriateness ex­ pressed in the typically implicit judgment,'Yes, that is the way it should be.'There are probably many reasons why people discover or develop a view of their environment in which events occur for good, understandable reasons. One explanation is simply that this view of reality is a direct reflection of the way both the human mind and the environment are constructed. Constancies, patterns which actually do exist in the environment-out there-are perceived, represented symbolically, and retained in the mind. This approach cenainly has some validity, and would probably suffice, if it were not for thatsense of'appropriateness,'the pervasive affective com­ ponent in human experience. People have emotions and feelings, and these are especially apparent in their expectations about their world: their hopes, fears, disappointments, disillusionment, surprise, confidence, trust, despondency, anticipation-and certainly their sense of right, wrong, good, bad, ought, en­ titled, fair, deserving, just.