Belief and Subjective Knowledge - Essay Example

In distinguishing between belief and knowledge, it is important that one have an idea of what each is. To the common man, the definition of belief as"something held or thought by a person to be true" would likely be sufficient. However, the nature of belief has been examined by many a philosopher. One such, Bertrand Russell, points out that tradition has led man to think of belief as a "state of mind". He concedes that behaviouralists, who do not believe in states of mind, would offer the alternate definition of belief as "a characteristic of bodily behaviour" 1. In other words, ones actions usually give a good indication of what one believes to be true. According to a Socratic principle, any belief must be justified in order to be counted as knowledge2. It therefore appears that belief can be considered a step toward knowledge. Knowledge has been divided into six areas (ranging here from the most objective to the most subjective forms): mathematics, natural sciences, social sciences, ethics, history, and the arts. There are also four agreed-upon ways of arriving at knowledge on any of these levels: through perception, emotion, reason, and language. Two of these, emotion and reason have, however, been considered by many to be in opposition. They both contribute to belief, though the degree to which each contributes is usually dependent on the person in question. World views often contribute to the common understanding of belief-that of what is considered to be true by an individual, and worldviews are often derived from certain social or organizational affiliation such as family, community, religion, and political partisanship. Beliefs that derive from these are generally heavily anchored in emotion, and where reason opposes this there is often conflict and resistance. It can therefore be argued that reason identifies knowledge and emotion identifies belief. Mathematics begins with axioms from which all other principles must derive. It is a purely deductive discipline that admits reason to the exclusion of emotion. It might be argued that this area of knowledge has nothing upon which emotion might hinge (barring, perhaps, love or hatred of the subject or a particular aspect of it). This dependence upon reason has placed Mathematics in the realm of the exact. Whatever is deduced using the laws of mathematics is shown to be testable by time and intellect, so that no matter who performs a problem, when it is performed or the method used to perform it, the answer derived will be the same provided the logic is maintained. This answer can be considered objective knowledge. This type of knowledge is not threatened by any amount of emotion with which a mathematician attacks a problem. Laughing or crying, as long as his/her faculties are not clouded, the answer remains objective. Very little knowledge, in this case, hinges on belief. Although more removed from the abstract, the natural sciences are also dependent on reason. The scientific method includes induction in the construction of knowledge, weaving it in with the mathematical deduction. It also is very exclusive of emotion, basing all that is admitted to knowledge on its steps: observation, questioning, hypothesis, testing, and explanation. This may very well produce things that are contradictory to belief. In fact, in the time of Copernicus, there were many who believed that the sun engaged in all the motion necessary for its "rising" and "setting." However, when Copernicus proposed a heliocentric universe, it was because what he had observed did not agree with belief3. Later, when Galileo too had problems with the church because his observations again went against belief, it was clear that this belief was fuelled by the emotions of those who brought him before the Inquisition and forced him to withdraw his scientific claims4. When we get to the social and behavioural sciences, we find that emotions come into play a lot more. This is because these sciences study people, and emotions as well as reason are a part of the way in which people come to know things. Goldman writes, "Since specialists themselves often disagree in interpreting scientific results, laypersons must choose among them. They must decide what to believe without personally applying scientific methods."5 Teachers who apply educational theories to their students know that they must modify the application based on the behaviour of the student. Here knowledge gained by expert researchers must be tempered by the belief of the teacher that a student learns in a particular way. Here, this belief constitutes a deeper knowledge than that obtained by reason alone. What teachers use to gain this deeper knowledge is not reason, per se. Often emotions do play a part. One example could be sympathy for the difficulty the student might be having with a concept. Consider also the situation in which scientists disagree. In these cases, the matter over which they disagree is not fully settled and they are allowed to choose sides. Each scientist will offer very rational explanations for why he or she believes a certain way. However, there will usually be some underlying theme or belief to which each one subscribes that urges him in the direction of one of the alternatives. The fierceness with which Einstein believed in his principle of simplicity6 and the string theorists to their idea of symmetry7 demonstrates a high level of emotion. Here a scientist expresses emotion in conjunction with his work: "The elegance of rich, complex, and diverse phenomena emerging from a simple set of universal laws is at least part of what physicists mean when they invoke the term 'beautiful'"8. When scientists (as people) are found using emotion and belief to inform their practice, they become data for the social and behavioural sciences, and in these disciplines knowledge is derived not just through reason but through beliefs. When it comes to history, people are apt to believe what they are told, and the version of the truth with which one comes in contact often has to do with whom one listens to. People take sides, too, in ongoing conflicts depending on the affiliations of the social groups to which they belong. It is often the case that "truth" and "knowledge" are not absolute, but are apt to change. It is also often true that emotions that stem from attachments to belief systems inform what is thought of as truth. A Muslim, for example, who considers the historical dispute between the Israeli and the Arabs over Palestine is more likely to believe that the Israeli are attempting to steal the land from the Arabs. It is quite possible that in such a case, reason would be useless to convince that Muslim that he and his race should relinquish the territory to the Israeli. And on the other side, the Jews version of history would probably amount to the Arabs' being squatters on land that rightfully belongs to the Israeli people. Emotion is a very important part of most religions. It has a lot to do with the way people feel toward the creeds of the religion to which they adhere. People who believe very strongly in their religion- for example, a Muslim or Hindu, might very well consider their beliefs to be knowledge. The truth is, regardless of what is actually contained in the Qur'an or the Vedas, emotion binds many of these people to the creeds of their religion. It dictates their beliefs, often regardless of evidence to the contrary. The question of abortion or euthanasia might be argued very rationally and the conclusion drawn that it is both humane and correct to participate in these actions, but the emotions involved in the issue for many persons would cause them to reject the reasonable arguments in favour of beliefs published in their holy books and already held to be true. If the theory of evolution could be proved beyond the shadow of a doubt, many Christians would still condemn it as falsehood. Any new knowledge issuing from reason to which they have just been exposed would have been barred from their beliefs and therefore from their concept of knowledge. Reason, according to their view, would have produced something that is contrary to truth and therefore could not be correctly termed knowledge. In light of what has gone before, it is possible to see that emotion is usually very attached to belief and subjective knowledge while reason is often attached to objective knowledge. The difficulty in defining knowledge lies in the fact that it can be accessed using methods that produce varying results depending on the person and the beliefs that he or she carries. Since knowledge ranges from objective to subjective, there are things that can be known fully and purely mentally, whereas there are other things that can be known only partially and/or through experience. It can be said, however, that emotions are usually a part of that knowledge that comes with or ends in "mere" belief while reason goes with those facts that end in pure, unbiased knowledge. Works Cited "Epistemology" Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology Filkin, David. Stephen Hawking's Universe. New York: Basic, 1997. Goldman, Alvin. "Social Epistemology." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. U. of Stanford. 2001. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-social/ Greene, Brian. The Elegant Universe. New York: Vintage, 2003. Holton, Gerald. The Scientific Imagination. Harvard: Cambridge, 1998. Russell, Bertrand. "The Theory of Knowledge." The Encyclopaedia Britannica. 1926. http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/russell1.htm Read More