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Author: Tim Crane Publisher: ISBN: 9780674982727 Category : BODY, MIND & SPIRIT Languages : en Pages : 207
Book Description
Contemporary debate about religion seems to be going nowhere. Atheists persist with their arguments, many plausible and some unanswerable, but these make no impact on religious believers. Defenders of religion find atheists equally unwilling to cede ground. The Meaning of Belief offers a way out of this stalemate. An atheist himself, Tim Crane writes that there is a fundamental flaw with most atheists' basic approach: religion is not what they think it is. Atheists tend to treat religion as a kind of primitive cosmology, as the sort of explanation of the universe that science offers. They conclude that religious believers are irrational, superstitious, and bigoted. But this view of religion is almost entirely inaccurate. Crane offers an alternative account based on two ideas. The first is the idea of a religious impulse: the sense people have of something transcending the world of ordinary experience, even if it cannot be explicitly articulated. The second is the idea of identification: the fact that religion involves belonging to a specific social group and participating in practices that reinforce the bonds of belonging. Once these ideas are properly understood, the inadequacy of atheists' conventional conception of religion emerges. The Meaning of Belief does not assess the truth or falsehood of religion. Rather, it looks at the meaning of religious belief and offers a way of understanding it that both makes sense of current debate and also suggests what more intellectually responsible and practically effective attitudes atheists might take to the phenomenon of religion.--
Author: Tim Crane Publisher: ISBN: 9780674982727 Category : BODY, MIND & SPIRIT Languages : en Pages : 207
Book Description
Contemporary debate about religion seems to be going nowhere. Atheists persist with their arguments, many plausible and some unanswerable, but these make no impact on religious believers. Defenders of religion find atheists equally unwilling to cede ground. The Meaning of Belief offers a way out of this stalemate. An atheist himself, Tim Crane writes that there is a fundamental flaw with most atheists' basic approach: religion is not what they think it is. Atheists tend to treat religion as a kind of primitive cosmology, as the sort of explanation of the universe that science offers. They conclude that religious believers are irrational, superstitious, and bigoted. But this view of religion is almost entirely inaccurate. Crane offers an alternative account based on two ideas. The first is the idea of a religious impulse: the sense people have of something transcending the world of ordinary experience, even if it cannot be explicitly articulated. The second is the idea of identification: the fact that religion involves belonging to a specific social group and participating in practices that reinforce the bonds of belonging. Once these ideas are properly understood, the inadequacy of atheists' conventional conception of religion emerges. The Meaning of Belief does not assess the truth or falsehood of religion. Rather, it looks at the meaning of religious belief and offers a way of understanding it that both makes sense of current debate and also suggests what more intellectually responsible and practically effective attitudes atheists might take to the phenomenon of religion.--
Author: Akeel Bilgrami Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell ISBN: 9780631196778 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 312
Book Description
Belief and Meaning is a philosophical treatment of intentionality. It offers an original, logical and convincing account of intentional content which is local and contextual and which takes issues with standard theories of meaning.
Author: Jordan B. Peterson Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135961751 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 564
Book Description
Why have people from different cultures and eras formulated myths and stories with similar structures? What does this similarity tell us about the mind, morality, and structure of the world itself? From the author of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos comes a provocative hypothesis that explores the connection between what modern neuropsychology tells us about the brain and what rituals, myths, and religious stories have long narrated. A cutting-edge work that brings together neuropsychology, cognitive science, and Freudian and Jungian approaches to mythology and narrative, Maps of Meaning presents a rich theory that makes the wisdom and meaning of myth accessible to the critical modern mind.
Author: James E. Alcock Publisher: Prometheus Books ISBN: 1633884031 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 640
Book Description
An expert on the psychology of belief examines how our thoughts and feelings, actions and reactions, respond not to the world as it actually is but to the world as we believeit to be. This book explores the psychology of belief - how beliefs are formed, how they are influenced both by internal factors, such as perception, memory, reason, emotion, and prior beliefs, as well as external factors, such as experience, identification with a group, social pressure, and manipulation. It also reveals how vulnerable beliefs are to error, and how they can be held with great confidence even when factually false. The author, a social psychologist who specializes in the psychology of belief, elucidates how the brain and nervous system function to create the perceptions, memories, and emotions that shape belief. He explains how and why distorted perceptions, false memories, and inappropriate emotional reactions that sometimes lead us to embrace false beliefs are natural products of mental functioning. He also shows why it is so difficult to change our beliefs when they collide with contradictions. Covering a wide range -- from self-perception and the perceived validity of everyday experience to paranormal, religious, and even fatal beliefs--the book demonstrates how crucial beliefs are to molding our experience and why they have such a powerful hold on our behavior.
Author: S.G. Pulman Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134995075 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 239
Book Description
First published in 1983, the aim of this book is to diagnose linguists’ failure to advance satisfactory theories of lexical meaning, then to propose the requirements that such a theory should meet and, drawing on work in philosophy and psychology, to take the first steps towards satisfying these requirements. It begins by discussing the work of Quine on the indeterminacy of translation and it is shown that attempts by linguists to answer Quine’s arguments by proposing universal ‘semantic primitives’ or their equivalents is unsatisfactory. The relation between the theory of word meaning and the theory of categorisation is explored, and an alternative to Rosch’s ‘family resemblance’ account of the ‘prototype’ effect in both nouns and verbs is provided. The author argues that identification of certain implicit categories like ‘action’ and ‘event’ can be related to principles of individuation, and builds on the work of Kripke and Putnam on proper names and natural kind terms. This book will be of interest to students of linguistics and the philosophy of language.
Author: Claude M. Bristol Publisher: Courier Dover Publications ISBN: 0486840247 Category : Self-Help Languages : en Pages : 179
Book Description
"One of the greatest inspirational and motivational books ever written." — Norman Vincent Peale In this bestselling self-help book, a successful businessman reveals the secrets behind harnessing the unlimited energies of the subconscious. Millions of readers have benefited from these visualization techniques, which show you how to turn your thoughts and dreams into actions that can lead to enhanced income, happier relationships, increased effectiveness, heightened influence, and improved peace of mind. World War I veteran Claude M. Bristol (1891–1951) wrote The Magic of Believing to help former soldiers adjust to civilian life. A pioneer of the New Thought movement and a popular motivational speaker, Bristol addressed those in all walks of life, from politicians and leaders to performers and salespeople. His timeless message of the powers of focused thinking and self-affirmation remains a vital source of inspiration and a practical path to achievement.
Author: Jacob L. Mackey Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691165084 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 496
Book Description
A groundbreaking reinterpretation that draws on cognitive theory to show that belief wasn’t absent from—but rather was at the heart of—Roman religion Belief and Cult argues that belief isn’t uniquely Christian but was central to ancient Roman religion. Drawing on cognitive theory, Jacob Mackey shows that despite having nothing to do with salvation or faith, belief underlay every aspect of Roman religious practices—emotions, individual and collective cult action, ritual norms, social reality, and social power. In doing so, he also offers a thorough argument for the importance of belief to other non-Christian religions. At the individual level, the book argues, belief played an indispensable role in the genesis of cult action and religious emotion. However, belief also had a collective dimension. The cognitive theory of Shared Intentionality shows how beliefs may be shared among individuals, accounting for the existence of written, unwritten, or even unspoken ritual norms. Shared beliefs permitted the choreography of collective cult action and gave cult acts their social meanings. The book also elucidates the role of shared belief in creating and maintaining Roman social reality. Shared belief allowed the Romans to endow agents, actions, and artifacts with socio-religious status and power. In a deep sense, no man could count as an augur and no act of animal slaughter as a successful offering to the gods, unless Romans collectively shared appropriate beliefs about these things. Closely examining augury, prayer, the religious enculturation of children, and the Romans’ own theories of cognition and cult, Belief and Cult promises to revolutionize the understanding of Roman religion by demonstrating that none of its features makes sense without Roman belief.
Author: Michael Ridge Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199682666 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 277
Book Description
Provides a taxonomy of the array of theories about the nature of so-called normative judgments, and argues for a more expressivist hybrid theory that accommodates both the context-sensitivity of normative predicates and a broadly truth-conditional approach to semantics.
Author: Michael Shermer Publisher: Macmillan ISBN: 1429972610 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 400
Book Description
The Believing Brain is bestselling author Michael Shermer's comprehensive and provocative theory on how beliefs are born, formed, reinforced, challenged, changed, and extinguished. In this work synthesizing thirty years of research, psychologist, historian of science, and the world's best-known skeptic Michael Shermer upends the traditional thinking about how humans form beliefs about the world. Simply put, beliefs come first and explanations for beliefs follow. The brain, Shermer argues, is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses, the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning. Our brains connect the dots of our world into meaningful patterns that explain why things happen, and these patterns become beliefs. Once beliefs are formed the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive-feedback loop of belief confirmation. Shermer outlines the numerous cognitive tools our brains engage to reinforce our beliefs as truths. Interlaced with his theory of belief, Shermer provides countless real-world examples of how this process operates, from politics, economics, and religion to conspiracy theories, the supernatural, and the paranormal. Ultimately, he demonstrates why science is the best tool ever devised to determine whether or not a belief matches reality.
Author: John J. McGraw Publisher: AEGIS PRESS ISBN: 0974764507 Category : Body, Mind & Spirit Languages : en Pages : 422
Book Description
From its beginnings in prehistoric religion to its central importance in Western faith traditions, the soul has been a constant source of fascination and speculation. Brain & Belief seeks to understand mankind's obsession with life, death, and the afterlife. Exploring the latest insights from neuroscience, psychopharmacology, and existential psychology, McGraw exhaustively researches the various takes on the human soul and considers the meaning of the soul in a postmodern world. The ambitious scope of the book is balanced by a deeply personal voice whose sympathy for both science and religion is resonant.
Author: Tim Crane
Author: Tim Crane
Author: Akeel Bilgrami
Author: Jordan B. Peterson
Author: James E. Alcock
Author: S.G. Pulman
Author: Claude M. Bristol
Author: Jacob L. Mackey
Author: Michael Ridge
Author: Michael Shermer
Author: John J. McGraw