Question To what extent does belief preclude speculative thought? If to believe is to accept a proposition as being true (as my dictionary claims), do we undermine our belief by testing the proposition? To what extent does testing a proposition imply doubt. I attend a private Christian university, so I find this question extremely important. I have given up using the word "believe" completely because it seems to undermine my need to question things. When people ask if I believe in God, Jesus-as-Christ, the Trinity, I feel I have to say, "no." Would proclaiming belief in those things while questioning their validity undermine what we mean by "belief"? Did this question even make sense?

Accepted:
October 8, 2005

Comments

Belief does not imply dead certainty. Indeed many philosophers would say that no belief should reach that level, and some philosophers think that beliefs come in degrees, like probabilities. Doubt also seems to come in different levels, and allowing for the possibility of error may correspond to a low level of doubt that is compatible with belief. Of course if the doubt at issue amounts to actually believing that the proposition is false, then that is incompatible with believing it to be true. (Or if beliefs correspond to probabilities, giving the truth of the proposition a probability less than .5 is incompatible with giving a probability greater than .5 .)

Since belief is compatible with allowing for the possibility of error, belief is also compatible with an interest in testing. That process might undermine the belief; it also might strengthen it.

In religious contexts, however, the term 'belief' may sometimes be used to mean something like 'unshakable faith', in which case there may well be an incompatibility between belief and doubt, and at least a serious cognitive tension between proclaiming belief and going in for serious testing.

Traditional discussions of this question suggest that thereare two ways of understanding the relation between belief and knowledge. On theone hand, there is a tradition (tracable to Plato) which says that havingbelief about something precludes having knowledge about that thing. (Plato usestwo different words for these notions: belief is “doxa;” knowledge is “episteme.”He suggests that the things we can know belong to a special class of abstractentities called “Forms;” with respect to everything else, all we have isbelief.) At the same time, there is a tradition (which can also be traced toPlato) according to which knowledge is a special kind of belief: roughly,belief that is both true and justified. So there are two traditional answers toyour question: the first says that if you know something then you don’t (just)believe it; the second says that if you know something, then you must alsobelieve it.