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The conclusion outlines key points in the book. On a Kantian-Kierkegaardian account, thought experiments lead to presentations that justify calling a thought experiment an experience, though not an empirical or sensory one. Without a sensible object, we can nevertheless have givenness, or presence, but not existence. Cognition, for that reason, is not necessarily truthful: although object-directed, cognition on its own does not justify belief in any particular object’s existence. My conclusion that thought experiments provide cognition rather than knowledge echoes Michael Stuart’s claim that thought experiments increase understanding. Cognition is a common basis for knowledge in Kant, but it is not the same thing as knowledge. The conclusion also draws implications for how we understand faith (religious belief) in Kierkegaard and how thought experiments make sense of the complexity of reality.
Manufacturing Dissent reveals how the early twentieth century's 'lost generation' of writers, artists, and intellectuals combatted disinformation and 'fake news.' Cultural historians, literary scholars, and those interested in the power of literature to encourage critical thought and promote democracy will find this book of particular value. The book is interdisciplinary, focusing on the rich literary and artistic period of American modernism as a new site for examining the psychology of public opinion and the role of cognition in the formation of beliefs. The emerging twentieth-century neuroscience of 'plasticity,' habit, and attention that Harvard psychologist William James helped pioneer becomes fertile ground for an experimental variety of literature that Stephanie L. Hawkins argues is 'mind science' in its own right. Writers as diverse as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein sought a public-spirited critique of propaganda and disinformation that expresses their civic engagement in promoting democratic dissent.
The best strategy for getting away with lying is to lie small by only deviating from the truth as much as is necessary to achieve the intended deception. Why then do some demagogues lie big? One set of views has it that the only difference between small and big lies concerns the size of their contents. They claim that the purpose of big lies is the formation of false beliefs in their literal contents via counterfactual reasoning, conspiracy theories, or the illusory truth effect. The negative part of this paper questions these accounts. The positive part proposes a different explanation for why demagogues use big lies and argues that big lies may serve three distinct purposes for demagogues: they reinforce their supporters’ deeply held beliefs, test the loyalty of their close followers, or publicly demonstrate the demagogue’s power. For a big lie to serve these purposes, genuine belief in the lie is not required – in fact, few are likely to believe it. What matters is that the demagogue’s supporters publicly endorse the lie. We contend that they do so, either because they interpret them as motivational statements or use them to express or justify their shared emotions or convictions.
Paranormal explanations of NDEs generally refer to the dualistic view of the world. These explanations are built upon the belief or derived from the credo that NDEs can be explained through paranormal concepts.
Ezra Pound launches the book as a dramatic “case study” illustrating William James’s theory of “conversion” as a cognitive process by which individuals become converts to a cause, be it artistic, religious, or political. Even as recent scholars have revitalized our understanding of James’s politics and his philosophical engagements with the social, they nonetheless underscore a conspicuous gap: none have investigated how James’s understanding of the social realm is indebted to his pioneering work as a psychologist and, more specifically, to his theorization of conversion as a cognitive phenomenon that impacts not just individuals but larger groups. At one extreme, conversion can yield blind commitment to doctrine, or, more productively, can fracture such monolithic narratives to achieve productive disagreement with, or “dissent” from, repressive or demagogic systems. Literary modernists after James can be understood as mind scientists because they deploy the psychodynamics of conversion both formally and thematically. By making the psychodynamics of conversion visible, their writings encourage readerly dissent from rigid points of view and authoritarian ideological frameworks.
Chapter 2 explores the developmental psychology of metaphor and its significance for illness experience. While semiotics of medicine implies a simple link between physiological processes and symptom reports, illness experience is articulated through metaphors that are grounded in bodily experience, social interaction, discourse, and cultural practices. Bodily grounding of metaphor is based on sensorimotor equivalences, as seen early in development in synesthesia and cross-modal analogies. Social grounding resides in the pragmatics of language in which context and goals depend on social roles, norms, and cultural meaning. Despite this, metaphors allow for creative play by requiring only piecemeal correspondences to the world through ostension. The meaning of metaphors is then found not in representation but in presentation. Clinical examples illustrate a patient on dialysis refusing a blood transfusion and a woman with medically unexplained floating sensations, showing how a semantics of metaphor can clarify the tensions between the essential irrationality of illness experience and the biomedical presumption of rationality in normative accounts of illness cognition and behavior.
In this chapter, we focus on specific new Western religious movements, frequently referred to as cults, but that also might be termed “destructive” religious movements. "Destructive" elements include deceptive recruiting techniques, attempts to exert significant control over the minds and behavior of followers, abuse of followers, criminal activity, and violence or harm (including suicide) toward followers or others. A case vignette is presented, illustrating how the Branch Davidians under the leadership of Vernon Howell (AKA David Koresh) typified many of the characteristics of a Western religious cult. Common characteristics of leaders of Western religious cults are discussed, along with tactics commonly utilized by leaders to gain followers and to maintain control over followers. Common characteristics of followers are also discussed, and some prevalent myths about followers are dispelled. Psychological principles are discussed to the extent that they may shed light on the group and individual dynamics in play that may have contributed to some of the highly destructive outcomes that have occurred in some of these movements.
This chapter investigates one-person decision problems under uncertainty. The main building block is that of a conditional preference relation: a mapping that assigns to every belief about the states a preference relation over the decision maker’s choices. Under certain conditions, such a conditional preference relation admits an expected utility representation, which allows us to summarize the conditional preference relation by a finite utility matrix. Throughout the book it is assumed that the conditional preference relation indeed has an expected utility representation.
Understand how children direct their own learning and learn from others; describe the importance of imitation, play, and instruction; explain how children transfer what they know across different contexts.
This chapter argues that beliefs are causally effective representational states. They admit of two main kinds: episodic and semantic forms of memory. These are argued to be distinct, although they have overlapping origins. The chapter also discusses the states often described as beliefs that result from one making up one’s mind (forming a judgment), but many of which are really commitments (a type of intention). The relations between episodic memory and imagination are also discussed. The chapter then examines the idea that moral judgments can be directly motivating, showing that it contains an element of truth. Finally, the chapter critiques a claim that has become popular among armchair-philosophers, that knowledge is a basic kind of intrinsically factive mental state.
We often explain our actions and those of others using a commonsense framework of perceptions, beliefs, desires, emotions, decisions, and intentions. In his thoughtful new book, Peter Carruthers scrutinizes this everyday explanation for our actions, while also examining the explanatory framework through the lens of cutting-edge cognitive science. He shows that the 'standard model' of belief–desire psychology (developed, in fact, with scant regard for science) is only partly valid; that there are more types of action and action-explanation than the model allows; and that both ordinary folk and armchair philosophers are importantly mistaken about the types of mental state that the human mind contains. His book will be of great value to all those who rely in their work on assumptions drawn from commonsense psychology, whether in philosophy of mind, epistemology, moral psychology, ethics, or psychology itself. It will also be attractive to anyone with an interest in human motivation.
The placebo effect is a genuine psychobiological phenomenon in which the expectation of improvement can lead to actual changes, including alterations in perception, behaviour and physiological responses. This article explores this phenomenon by dispelling common misconceptions and highlighting its significance for critical thinking.
Taking its start from an argument of H. S. Versnel, that Greek expressions of disbelief in the existence of the gods are evidence of the possibility of belief, this article reviews the evidence of such expressions, and of ascriptions of atheism in Greek sources, and suggests that there was a difference of type, not only of degree, between Greek ‘atheism’ and our understanding of the term today. Atheist discourse in Greek sources is characterized by frequent slippages: for example, between the charge of ‘existential atheism’ and the failure to give the gods due acknowledgement; between introducing new gods and disrespecting the old. Ascriptions of atheism to third parties are commonly based on inferences from an individual's actions, lifestyle or presumed disposition – which in turn are rooted in a network of theological assumptions. The phenomenon of ‘Greek atheism’ is, fundamentally, a scholarly mirage.
Monotheism implies a God who is active in creation. An author writing a novel provides a better analogy for God's creative activity than an artificer constructing a mechanism. A miracle is then not an interruption of the ordinary course of nature so much as a divine decision to do something out of the ordinary, and miracle is primarily a narrative category. We perceive as miracles events that are extraordinary while also fitting our understanding of divine purpose. Many miracle accounts may remain problematic, however, since recognizing that a given story purports to narrate a miracle does not determine whether the miracle occurred. This Elementweighs competing narratives. In doing so the understanding of the normal workings of nature will carry considerable weight. Nevertheless, there can be instances where believers may, from their own faith perspective, be justified in concluding that a miracle has occurred.
Our doxastic states are our belief-like states, and these include outright doxastic states and degreed doxastic states. The former include believing that p, having the opinion that p, thinking that p, being sure that p, being certain that p, and doubting that p. The latter include degrees of confidence, credences, and perhaps some phenomenal states. But we also have conviction (being convinced simpliciter that p) and degrees of conviction (being more or less convinced that p). This Element shows: how and why all of the outright doxastic states mentioned above can be reduced to conviction thresholds; what degrees of conviction fundamentally are (degreed reliance-dispositions); why degrees of conviction are not credences; when suspending a belief is compatible with continuing to believe; and the surprising extent to which Kant endorsed the theory of conviction that emerges in this Element.
Chapter 4, ‘The Efficacy of Empirical Vision’, argues that physical sight can and should lead to belief in John. Scholars often cite John 2:23; 4:48; and 20:29 as evidence for John’s own critique of physical seeing as a means of coming to belief. The chapter argues that close reading of John 2:23 and 4:48 reveals human hearts to be the true cause of unbelief and shows that physical sight is the catalyst for all unbelief and all belief. Neither does John 20:29 condemn sight as a means of acquiring belief. Rather, it suggests that mediated seeing – via the text of the Gospel – can be as efficacious for belief as an actual encounter with Jesus. The chapter concludes that sight is complex, but that no critique of the positive relationship between sight and belief exists in John.
Chapter 1, ‘My Lord and My God’ in John 20:30–31’, asserts that the cause, content, and consequences of belief all suggest that Jesus is God. In John 20:27–29, Thomas sees Jesus and calls him ‘my Lord and my God’. After Jesus blesses those who believe without seeing him, John claims that he has written down signs in this book so that his readers can come to believe that ‘Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God’ and ‘receive life in his name’ (John 20:30–31). The proximity of both statements is not coincidental but reveals that 20:30–31 describes the same fullness of belief as Thomas’s exclamation. What emerges is that John’s portrayals of the ‘signs’, the titles ‘Christ’ and ‘Son of God’, and the resulting ‘life in his name’ are fundamentally theological. True belief will always make Thomas’s declaration.
The introduction raises the question of how one ought to understand the challenge of God’s invisibility/visibility in the Fourth Gospel with regard to its stated purpose: ‘These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.’ Scholars and theologians have often taken God’s invisibility to be ‘absolute’, in the sense that it describes an immaterial, eternal God whose deity is invisible by nature. While John claims that no one has ever seen God, it also describes God as incarnate in Jesus Christ, the one in whom the Father may be seen. The introduction shows that scholars have not yet satisfactorily defined the nature of divine invisibility in John nor reckoned with the import of this important theme for John’s purpose. It proposes that, according to John, God must become physically visible in Jesus in order for belief to obtain.
A brief conclusion summarizes the argument as a whole, asserts that God is physically visible in Jesus’s body, considers the impact of this conclusion on Johannine scholarship, and suggests further areas of research.
Although scholars have debated the link between empirical senses and belief in the Gospel of John, few have queried their own presuppositions about the invisibility of God. In this study, Luke Irwin establishes the value of God's physical incarnation for belief, arguing that the theological nature of belief derives from a God who makes himself physically visible in the world. Irwin builds on recent work on divine embodiment in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament and illuminates the Jewish context for John's Gospel. He also explains John's understanding of 'seeing' as a positive component of belief-formation and resolves the Johannine relationship between 'seeing' and 'believing'. Showing how God is the ultimate target of belief, Irwin argues that unless God becomes physically visible in Jesus, belief cannot be attained.