Why beliefs?
Reason for exploration
Political beliefs
Think of someone who has clearly WRONG political beliefs. They don’t see the obvious symptoms where are we going as a society. They don’t understand things. Don’t see problems. See everything through the lenses of what is preached to them. They are malevolent. They are ignorant. Remember the time you were shocked by their words. Remember when they used violence against people like you. Anyone with their beliefs is a potential threat - at least (or maybe, especially), when they vote. They have their own subculture. Echo-chambers on the internet. They clearly misuse their liberties. Not all are violent, but those non-violent condone violent actions. They have their idols, books.
Ok, enough of this farce.
This is for political nihilists, relativists. If you are stuck with one particular political option, apply the above accusations to yourself. You must kill your godyourself. Here, the entry point is the angst in the modern world, disbelief in metanarratives.
Why I don’t preach to hard-shells? Reasoning with people is pointless, emotional attachment to beliefs only makes the reverse effect in most cases. Open - minded varieties welcome.
We face a problem of choosing a side in a belief war.
Which beliefs to question?
Suspending the question if ‘beliefs’ exist.
We take ‘belief’ as a thing that people list when asked about their beliefs. These include religious, scientific, political, mathematical statements. Both descriptive and normative (if we may say so!, use this distinction).
There is no need for a Descartes - deep examination of beliefs about nature of reality. For now. Let’s just think politics.
To the diagram:
And yes, denial of existence of right and wrong is also about right and wrong.
naive realism belief set is beliefs like: ‘tomatoes are edible’, ‘chairs are for sitting’.
The moment of noticing that others may think differently. Wondering about the origin of the difference, the process of belief formation. Gradual verbalization. ‘Know thyself’. Political discourse might have been one of the first opportunities for the differences to develop and be noticed. So the Socratic interlocutor finds himself against a body of his beliefs, developed in society. Novel experience. Unexplored.
What we notice is that differences between beliefs in the lower part of the graph brings out out of that very society into a straightjacket. Underdevelopment of math skills into intellectual disability group. Differences at the top are most likely to be seen as voluntary. Around them form identities. Society is not tolerant. These beliefs change most often. Socially and in persons.
The beliefs that it is socially practical to question are the most abstract ones. Some beliefs and their calls for action can get you killed or even worse, unpopular.
Going too far
So the Greeks were digging down the triangles, going so far as to question naive realism. Evolutionary apparatus evolved for social and psycho spatial reasoning, not examination of its own architecture.
What happens is sophistry. Observation that we have in any case random, unsubstantiated beliefs. What is important is that everything we say we believe we can (theoretically) trace back to some point at which we seed, hear or thought. Worldview is dependent on observation (at least to extent). There is always non-representative sample of information. Thought gravitates towards itself to singularity. A choice between random beliefs seems not only not inappropriate - but inevitable.
This is about the nihilism Nietzsche warned about.
So what do we have? Thesis: our old beliefs. Antithesis: the sceptical arguments.
We cannot walk past the antithesis. We must interact. We must incorporate both of them. Amalgamate. What do we have?
our old lower-level beliefs (about everyday life)
our old higher-level beliefs (politics, reality, religion)
sceptic arguments against all beliefs
many different belief sets that we know other people have
What does a sceptic do with that? They cannot really have ‘no beliefs’. Most often they believe in the sceptic arguments and keep lower-level beliefs to keep living. In the same way as before, just going with the momentum, old habits. They say that is more peaceful. Someone could say that you cannot live without rules, because a human needs some feeling of consequence for any meaning. That would not be entirely ‘right’, but illustrates some point.
Sceptics.
They are sometimes doubtful about doubt (Mersenne). A moderate scepticism, concerning specific topics it quite common in various philosophies, though. But according to sceptic arguments all beliefs have equal - zeroth - degree of justification. So unless we suspend judgement on everything (See section below), we can hold any set of beliefs, being equally wrong. Even the same old ones, when we add the above argument. That would be some synthesis. That would be foundationalism. Getting a few axioms at first, building more beliefs later. One could say: ‘If faith is irrational, why pick any particular in favour of what?’.
It is said that we can start the self-reflection with either ‘what’ or ‘how’ do we know. We could argue that wondering ‘how ‘ do we know requires some knowledge. Let’s stick to modern approach and say that we know things.
Let’s talk about not ‘what we believe that we can know for sure’, but rather ‘what do we believe currently’. Without thinking about validity, any truth-value for starters.
What we do know for sure about are current beliefs (gradual realization):
they successfully brought us where we are - but future might be different, (but which level beliefs?)
but at the same time maybe other belief set would bring out somewhere different (better / worse - catch here as well).
There is a possibility that are current beliefs are not optimal. (there is a catch to this, but about that later).
So there is some potential in belief exploration
Why not suspend all belief
Scepticism in its extreme variety was historically a niche philosophy. Singular people adopted it, schools of thought rarely happened. Scepticism does not scale. Transmission is obstructed. In dialogue, convincing someone, we always need the idea of ‘knowing better’ at least to keep appearances and to have a motive to debate. The same applies to relativism.
I admit that now I am attacking the ‘no belief’ position “from the outside”. Not optimal strategy generally, but you it’s hard to attack this position from within.
Someone could say: ‘Limitations are necessary - we make them ourselves, as a reference point - we can accept them or fight them, but cannot walk by’.
Political scepticism has some specific problems. Maybe the worlds ancient sceptics lived in were different. But now everything is political.If you try to achieve ataraxia, just doing your old habits, you will be accused of supporting the status quo. Other people’s ideas will not be glad with your stance. A liking for something, like oxygen. Belief police cannot be afforded right now, but you might face exclusion if you don’t conform. Which you probably do know already...
Summary
What stems from the analysis of the diagram is the impression that we can have more choice concerning the abstract beliefs. From the brief look on our current beliefs we can see some light at the end of the tunnel of scepticism. The old beliefs are no longer the same, we will see how the new ones will be found.
The way now seems to avoid scepticism, but not fall for random beliefs. We need to explore.
Explore carefully. Let’s start with better understanding where we are. How to move.
Appendix: how to make the diagram with triangles
Triangles mark expected distribution of belief points. Distance between points on Y axis is their topic, more and more abstract. X axis for difference.
Hypothesis: more abstract beliefs are more dissimilar.
Experiment design: 20, 50 or 100 participants, say philosophy students. Each asked to type down their personal beliefs. (For this variant there is no need for pattern matching software that looks for similar phrases, asks participants if merge is in order. ) Each of the participants sees a pair of beliefs on the screen, rates them on similarity and abstractness, from 0 to 10.
Expected pattern: Triangles from the above.