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Monday, 25 December 2023

Why do We Believe what We Believe

Site logo image Eduardo Maresca posted: " The American Philosopher Willard Van Horman Quine, in his paper entitled "The Two Dogmas of Empiricism" made a very interesting point: he argued that "the totality of the stuff that we call knowledge, from the most casual matters to the most advanced and" ITALIAN MARRIED TO A FILIPINA

Why do We Believe what We Believe

Eduardo Maresca

Dec 25

The American Philosopher Willard Van Horman Quine, in his paper entitled "The Two Dogmas of Empiricism" made a very interesting point: he argued that "the totality of the stuff that we call knowledge, from the most casual matters to the most advanced and nuanced ones, is a man-made fabric that impinges on experience along its edges".

What this means, in a nutshell, is that our worldview is situated at the center of a network of beliefs and it is buffered and protected by this web of beliefs and concepts that justify one another.

And because humans have a psychological need to maintain homeostasis, whenever a raw fact that seem to contradict our worldview, we simply rearrange our web of beliefs to explain away that raw fact, and yet we have a raw fact.

So, in my mind, what openmindedness entails is allowing raw facts to ripple through our web of beliefs instead of rearranging the interior of the web to dismiss whatever piece of information that comes into contact with our web.

Quine says that "a conflict at the perifery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field", which simply means that, if an external piece of raw data contradicts any belief situated at the boundary of our network of beliefs, the entire web has to account for it, it has to morph, to adapt and to assimilate that raw fact in some way.

So, which would we rather do: simply explain away that raw fact by rearranging and refining the interior of the web or allow that data to pierce through our house of cards?

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