I was thinking about the relativity of our perspectives.
What I mean is I have often been called a misogynist for my views on women. Now does this mean I am actually misogynistic or does it mean the rest don’t see the truth? It’s like if I generalized and said most black people are criminals does that make me racist even if it were a statistical fact that it were so (I am not saying it is so, just an example). I mean, with the case of women, to me the evidence seems clear…but for others they would think I am deluded and have ‘deep seated mental issues with women’.
I often think it’s just because most people have now been socially conditioned to pander to women so they really don’t see what is what, but then again maybe I am just talking from my narrow and jaded worldview…how do you make the distinction between factual data and skewed perceptions/opinions?- I think most beliefs are tinted with one’s own experiences but I think they can be more or less so, it’s been a sticky one for me to grasp.
Likewise, for instance, I am sure that Nazis had plenty of their own ‘rational’ arguments for why Jews were evil and demons etc. It’s like you can make a rational argument for anything pretty much but what makes it more valid than another person’s view? See I have solid conviction about my views of women being uncreative and whatever else but I am sure that Anita who replied to my thread is just as adamant in her position…is anyone really right? or are we just fighting over illusory ideas? I mean my beliefs are still relevant to me but my main query is are they any ‘more real’ than anyone elses? It seems we are all just fighting for the ideological upperhand and it’s just an intellectual survival of the fittest.
In that sense though I think that may hold it’s application to the relation to the world at large in that the worse the person’s belief systems are is the quicker they will get weeded out or the less they will thrive. Like if their beliefs are truly deluded for instance believing that ‘aliens are going to come and take me away next tuesday at 10pm (without any supporting evidence)’ then it is less likely to be fulfilled- the person may very well believe this but that doesn’t mean that it is so. Conversely good beliefs will correlate with the outside world.
Beliefs must have SOME relation to the outside world to be effective. I am guessing the more rooted they are in experience is the more accurate they are. But then again people will have experiences and just solidify their current beliefs making them stronger and stronger never really changing so what is going on here? I mainly see beliefs as a way to get what you want. I have an internal desire, I have a belief and through that belief I achieve my objective. So like a vehicle for action which links my internal desire with the external world. If the belief is deluded then I would not get my outcome fulfilled. I could either lie to myself and have the same thing happen again next time or continuously change the belief until it achieved the outcome I want. But if the belief currently suits my outcome then why change it? Now I write this I see it need have no correlation to an objective truth so long as it fulfills its purpose.
I dunno I’m still quite confused by this. It’s gonna take some more untangling, so let me hear your take on it.
You can observe that this confusion stems from your partial acceptance of some dogmatic stereotypes which you consider appropriate for you to have as a civilized person, but the problem is that you can’t quite accept all of them yet - because, not being a fool, you intuit that they are at bottom only fastidious, crowd-pleasing lies.
Thus my advice to you is to accept all the appropriate stereotypes and become a perfectly civilized person, or reject all the appropriate stereotypes and become a wild man of intuition. Confusion will resolve, and you will now be in your proper place.
Beliefs and reality have a simple relation: they are antithetical. Because in your usage a belief signifies a mental acceptance of something as true as a matter of social or religious doctrine, reality need not play a part at all in such belief. If on the other hand you are interpeting reality as it is, then you are by definition not allowing belief to play its part!
Well, I think the only way to figure these things out personally is through rigorous methodical reasoning. You will find most people off base with reality because of social conditioning, but you will also find the same problem in yourself.
Hagbard I’d agree on that. From my own rigorous methodical reasoning I have time and again trounced the stupid and most times arbitrary beliefs of social conditioning to replace them with more sturdy beliefs of my own (what I would think are better based in reality/experience).
Thing is though these answers still haven’t really touched on the relation between beliefs and reality.
I read a quick passage of the critique of pure reason last night as I saw it on my bookshelf. It reminded me that this is Kant’s MAIN inquiry in that- how we can never know the thing in itself. I have (quite gladly) forgotten most of his extremely obscure terminology but even so I know that the CPR was what gave me some deep insights in to this relation between the senses and the ‘outer realm’, I have just forgotten what was said exactly but still get the ‘gist’.
Anyhow my query is- It is apparent that a belief doesn’t have to be true to still be useful for the individual, but at the same time it can be more accurate if based on experience rather than a total manufacturing form the mind alone. If it is grounded in experience I think that it is more likely to adhere to some sort of general acceptance if it can be proved by others then they can’t as easily reject it- this is what the scientific method is all about after all is it not? For instance once it can be proven that the earth is round rather than flat others, however reluctant, must crumble their old faulty beliefs under this new accepted knowledge. With a delusional belief this is not going to fly as easily. I could fully believe that aliens are coming for me but until I can prove it to others with reasonable arguments or proof then it won’t be accepted and I will come under fire when I discuss such topics with others. As such I realize that this is as much about being able to prove it to myself as to others. For a belief to be sound to myself and not be some stupid concoction which could lead to my demise if followed through (i.e I believe I can walk in front of moving buses) it must be tested or at least, in the case of the bus which would likely cause my death, similar lower circumstances tested to see whether it is correct or incorrect.
It seems quite easy to understand like that but what about where the line is blurred?- where we both have the same source of data but draw different interpretations both with equally compelling evidence (at least as compelling to each individual). They both have the same data yet draw different interpretations of the data, what is happening here? Why is there no standardized beliefs et al especially in the sphere of social situations. Like I may have a belief women are bitches based on my interpretations of how they have treated me in the past. They too may have the interpretation that I am a bastard cos the way I treat them with this belief that I believe they are all bitches; the belief becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. So how do you determine in this case the ‘more true’ case. Both are just a PRODUCT of a certain belief so what are the differences here than to my above example of non animate objects?
Perhaps the first problem you might consider is reaching “all” conclusions. Experience in social settings is too limited to ever say “all” about any group. Individuals within a group will exhibit beliefs and behaviors that fall along a continuum. The larger the group, the less likelyhood of making an accurate “all” statement. I can always say “some” and back that statement experientially. In the case of saying “all” women are bitches, have you met all women? Obviously not, and so the “all” statement falls flat on it’s ass. But “some” women are bitches? Absolutely. Most men and women have experienced a social situation where that is true. Are all men retarded assholes? Hmmmm, maybe not a good example. That one could be true. But finding supporting evidence might be difficult.
The second problem is a little more subtle. I firmly believe that experientially, we always have the right answers. But it isn’t our answers that is the issue. What has to be considered is, have we asked the right questions? You’ve hit on that quandry obliquely. What if the reaction of a woman being a bitch is the result of my being an asshole assuming she will act like a bitch? There are two quick reality checks to find an answer. First, what were my intentions? If my only intentions are to get her panties off, and she becomes a resentful bitch, who created the situation? Second, what were my expectations? The fact that she rejected my advances makes her a bitch?
If you can honestly say you had good intentions and really low expectations and she acts badly toward you, then you can say you have just had an experience with a bitch. SOME women are bitches.
This is where I get confused. I accept what you say about the self fulfilling prophecy thing but why do men get slated as dirty fucking bastards for expressing a natural urge? This I don’t get, it doesn’t seem fair. I admit it’s inappropriate to make advances when the other person doesn’t feel the same. I have had this happen to me myself and it makes me most uncomfortable and I also act like a bastard/aloof to them to make them go away. So I understand the experience when the shoe has been on the other foot.
As such I am not blaming them for acting that way.
I suppose this is to do with the management of people’s varying desires and wants within a society.
For instance someone who is poor will believe that they must steal to get what they want. The person who is stolen form will think the stealer a ‘dirty thief’ and thus deem them ‘bad’. So are they really bad or just victims of circumstance?
I guess with are getting into politics and morality now…(which I am not saying we shouldn’t, bring it on , just commentating)
We all have needs and wants. That is a given. It is how, when, and where we act out those needs and wants that is at issue and creates the misunderstandings and problems.
If you don’t mind, could we ask that this thread be moved to Sociology? There may be philosophical issues involved, but the discussion might fit better in Soc.
Agape, I agree with you, what we believe is often guided by class interests and political interests, not to mention social and religious influences. I don’t think it’s possible to get away from that. And if I can borrow from Kuhn, it seems to me that men and women routinely hold incommensurable viewpoints when it comes to judging the behaviors of the opposite sex. We can be using the same terminology, but mean very different things. Your idea of an inappropriate advance could diverge from what I’d consider an inappropriate advance (Not saying it is, just using that as an example).
I think it’s important for us to acknowledge the difference between “belief” and “knowledge,” and to try to remain open to the possibility that our beliefs could be unfairly biased. And that’s not easy for anyone to admit.
You mentioned using the scientific method, but keep in mind that even what we’d consider reliable scientific “knowledge” is updated constantly - sometimes radically[size=85] (which is what brought Kuhn to mind)[/size] - as new information becomes available. We are best served if we could be willing to do the same with our own personal convictions.
Agreed, and we need to remember that there’s a difference between affect-based beliefs and knowledge-based beliefs. Deliberately adjusting our beliefs with new knowledge is very much influenced by our motivation; if we are affectively motivated to form beliefs, those beliefs will be much more resistant to change.
I would suggest that there is no affective without cognition, nor is there cognitive without affective. Beliefs contain the germ of both. Beliefs only cause us trouble when one dominates the other. A pure emotional response or the abstracted cognitive belief are the least likely to match up with any useful reality. It is the balance of heart and mind that allows strong conviction and the flexibility to re-visit and alter our beliefs.
Being a bit of a romantic and skeptic simultaneously, I had hellacious problems with beliefs until I decided to listen to heart informed by mind, and when I sensed a balance neither too emotional or too intellectual, beliefs and reality (mine) matched up. I admit that strong skepticism and old age cynicism makes me a little less than a cuddly teddy bear, but my beliefs and my realities match up reasonably well. For me, the beliefs and our chosen realities are seated on a three legged stool. What we think, what we say, and how we act. Pretty simple stuff, really.
I think it does make it easier to view emotions as inner and whatever else as outer (bit of an oversimplification perhaps but instructive nonetheless) then finding the balance between the two being the ideal. Emotions after all are just the evolutionary products of the individual organism and at their most basal, to put it in psychological terms, the yearnings of the id which wants instant gratification. Mind then is the ego which mediates between inner and outer and to say that beliefs are a mixture of both inner and outer sums it up well. The ideal being that balance between the two, not too impulsive so as to trammel others and cause yourself bad karma, and also not too rational so as to allow the superego to stifle your natural desires which would cause neurosis as the kettle overboiled down the line.
Along these lines, then, it makes sense that ‘beliefs’ will differ from person to person, taking into account that they are always going to be tinted by the individual’s perspective to some degree.
Anita could you clarify what you meant by affect (what does affect mean again I always get confused between effect and affect) based beliefs and knowledge based beliefs? Perhaps with an example of each to elucidate.
I hashed that together quite quickly so if someone could do an ecology check (not sure if that is the correct term for the context but I will take a chance) on it I’d be grateful.
Hey Agape,
I don’t know the text book definitions but as I understand it, affect-based knowledge is largely instinctual or intuitive; the believer’s emotions are the primary motivating force and it is often linked to social interaction. Whereas cognitive/knowledge-based beliefs are more abstract, and derived using reasoning and critical thinking. It would be a belief in which the believer had no emotional investment.
So for example, one’s conviction that pure water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen would be considered a cognitive or knowledge-based belief – it is based on verifiable scientific data. On the other hand, one’s conviction that men are unfairly slammed for expressing natural urges would generally be construed as affect-based knowledge, due to the emotional and social elements. Those are the types of convictions that will vary based on political, economic, and religious [etc] leanings, and they’re often the most difficult to revise, even in the face of new information.
opinions are the same as these affect based beliefs?
And how do you know that you still don’t have a bit of affect based belief even if you can prove something veridically? Like how do you know it’s not a mix of both? Nietzsche claimed all knowledge was from some perspective and so subject to affects.
I was thinking how the driving force of beliefs are emotions (and when we look at the etymology of emotion it means to move), so without these emotions we would not seek out veridical knowledge in the first place…But can we use the emotions to motivate u to action yet suspend them sufficiently while conducting our experiments?
And Nietzsche lived in era where the sciences where not nearly as far. Considering the times, his view was probably reasonably accurate. Things have change a bit, but for the regular non-scientist Joe, not so much. Science can provide increasingly accuate descriptions in specific domain, but is’t hard, clumsy and time-consuming. For most of us time is an issue, so relying on experience is still the way to go. But I’d also stay away from to much general conclusions as tentative said. If a women has proven to be a bitch in your experience, than she’s a bitch, it doesn’t really matter what women in general are.
Regarding emotions, and accurate experiments/science. Things can be accurately measured, but what is measured, the kind of hypothesis we choose to test (we can’t test them all), is not all that objective. The conclusion drawn from the measurements are also not warranted a lot of the time. I recommend you to start investigating one issue in depth, to see how difficult it actually is and how different interests play their part in what is being researched. It’s still a matter of justification a lot of the time, especially if politics are involved.
On example that struck me was the scientificly inspired arguments being used to ban smoking in pubs here in Europe. The argument was that scientific studies have shown that passive smoking is harmful, ergo smoking should be banned in public pubs. This was generally accepted as if it were divine truth. On closer examination it turns out that the harm caused by passive smoking was exagerated, and it was actually unclear how much harm passive smoking caused. Most studies also only researched the wifes of smokers (who are exposed to smoke day in day out), not the occasional visit to the pub. And then there’s the issue of selective research to find the damage caused by passive smoking especially, and not the harm caused by countless of other things… if one wants to base policies on science, it seems only fair that similar issues are held to the same standard.
Anyway, what i want to say is, most of the beliefs of the large majority are just opinions, affect-based beliefs. In line with WL, those serve another purpose that their relation to reality. As a rule of thumb, i only trust testimonies of direct experience. I’ll trust a carpenter’s views on my wooden door, though he’s probably exploiting my lack of knowledge, not his views on women.
Somehow, this is drifting toward seeing belief as a fixed “thing”, and we should remember that our state of being and all within that is process. Beliefs can be seen as an event within the larger realities of our lives.
It is absolutely true that there can be nothing but from a perspectival point. Try to find an example without one. Sentience can be a double-edged sword. We move beyond instinctual behaviors (affective) and now include what is mind. (I’ll let you define that) And so heart/mind are in constant negotiation. We are feeling thinking animals and no, a normal person cannot divorce one from the other. But that is less important than being aware of how easily it is for one to dominate the other and skew both our precepts and percepts.
There is a term that appears in Taoist philosophy called unprincipled knowing that reflects a state of being acutely aware of our pre-conceived notions and not allowing either the affective or cognitive to color our experience. Obviously, it is impossible to completely escape either one, but it is the “balance” of the two that allows us to “see directly” as far as possible.
What motivates us to seek out knowledge? Curiosity, which I would suggest is both the affective and cognitive capacities we have plus one more item supplied by mind: imagination. Motivation can be quite simple. Encountering a predator, we use both emotion(run like hell!) and cognition (can I use this spear to kill him?). But motivation can be far more complex. Science depends on this complexity. (What happens when… I wonder if…)
But how does this connect us to a functional reality? The scientific method says that our experiments must be repeatable and the conclusions from those experiments must be consistent. The greater the veracity, the greater the opportunity to call those conclusions “facts”. This is one form of knowledge, and if we could stop with facts, wouldn’t it be lovely. But we don’t. We want to know what those facts “mean”, and back into the soup we go. What something means depends on our perspective, our pre-conceived ideas, and the flow of our experience.
Hmm still more interesting points, this issue has quite a bit more steam left in it I think.
I was thinking about how even knowledge based beliefs become obsolete too due to the constant change of the world. For example I was thinking how old people would have been knowledgeable in their time but can become hardheaded and dogmatic when they are faced with new knowledge and refuse to believe it, preferring to curl back into their antiquated beliefs. So I guess it is safe to say that nearly all/all? beliefs are cursory; some more, some less accurate. Either way they are more or less accurate rules of thumb. The less accurate being from emotions alone, the more accurate being from knowledge gathered from the latest scientific methods. Another example being the case of the world being debunked as flat with the new shiny realization that it is round. It still makes sense to keep a belief if it is getting your desired outcome but also be open to revision and refinement if new data becomes available. In this sense I would say beliefs are like any improving technology. Even though one car may not be the BEST it is still more effective than nothing (hmm now in the case of having no beliefs this would open up a whole new can of worms we I aren’t touch right now, if someone has the sagacity and patience to do so then be my guest).
I think a quote form one of my favourite philosophers proves instructive here- sumbunall. Some girls are bitchy but not all. And also the idea of ‘maybe logic’ being- whatever ‘conclusion’ we make is our best guess at the time. So in the sense that science can predict probabilities it is still very instructive, we just must remember that they are still only cursory.
Hmm so how does this relate to my OP? As you said diekon, most scientific evidence is ‘selective research’ within the sphere of politics. I think when someone is presenting a case to us then we should bear this in mind and not draw conclusions too quickly. Even though the research was selective and may indeed be overexaggerated with regard to how bad smoking is for your health I for one was extremely grateful to it. I despise smoking and it made me very ill whenever I went to a public gathering as it riled up my already chronic allergies. So it may not have been true but it helped sway public opinion because it had the stamp of authority. Now this was for a good cause but of course not everyone will agree and also much advertising uses the same and more manipulative tactics for a bad/more questionable cause. This I think would fall under the art of oratory. Aristotle and Schopenhauer have written on the difference between discourse and reason (that is not exactly what they called each one but still the same contents which they were discussing; check Schopenhauer’s Art of Controversy).
I suppose this leads on to the question of whether politics are always going to be linked with this kind of affect based argumentation. I know that currently it is the most effective as even if one party gave the most reasonable arguments then they wouldn’t necessarily be the most persuasive simply because most of the population are not reasonable creatures and are thus driven and respond to affect based stimuli. Edward Bernese was very familiar with this and as such played on people’s susceptibility to affect based advertising to make him and his clients so successful. The opposition need only do some kind of ‘smear campaign’ to trump those nice reasonable arguments.
That one could be true. 
But finding supporting evidence might be difficult.
, just commentating)
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