Belief Revision and Information Order Effects
In a broad psychological sense, belief can be described as “the mental state or function of cognizing reality.” Belief has been acknowledged as a crucial and omnipresent component of human (intellectual) life. According to Russell (1921), believing is “th
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Belief Revision and Information Order Effects General Remarks
In a broad psychological sense, belief can be described as “the mental state or function of cognizing reality.”305 Belief has been acknowledged as a crucial and omnipresent component of human (intellectual) life. According to Russell (1921), believing is “the most ‘mental’ thing” people do and the exploration of the nature of belief is the focal point in the analysis of the human mind.306 In a similar vein, Hume (1748) posits that a life without beliefs is impossible and that holding and updating beliefs is an inevitable part of human nature.307 As with all central notions and terms in the social sciences, there exists no universally accepted definition of the term “belief”. Indeed, the word “belief” has been used in a quite heterogeneous, differently nuanced manner in both ordinary usage and the existing literature.308 The multifacetedness and variety of meanings and nuances attached to the term “belief” is depicted in Figure 3 below.309
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James (1890): 198. See Russell (1921): 231. See Hume (1748), quoted in Lammenranta (2008): 29. The fundamentality of belief is further reflected in the fact that belief (or lack thereof) has been a central category and a subject of philosophical inquiry and reflection ever since the antiquity. See Carnota/Rodrigues (2010): 1. See Parret (1983): 1. Note that there exist two major scientific views on belief: the epistemological (philosophical) and the psychological view. The former uses the term “belief” in a more restrictive manner in the context of the impossibility of knowing and being certain about the reality of facts or the external world. The psychological view is wider in scope and does not consider belief and knowledge or certainty as mutually exclusive categories. Rather, beliefs represent the personal degree of conviction regarding a particular issue, with certainty representing the upper limit of an individual’s belief. See Ward (1933): 347. For a discussion of the basic philosophical conceptions of belief, see Villoro (1998): 19-40. Note that this figure is philosophically founded, and it is not meant to be exhaustive. Its inclusion merely aims to demonstrate the variety and complexity of the concept of belief.
50 K. Yankova, The Influence of Information Order Effects and Trait Professional Skepticism on Auditors’ Belief Revisions, Auditing and Accounting Studies, DOI 10.1007/978-3-658-08871-2_3, © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2015
Belief is
nothing
something
an explanatory fiction
a matter of social conditioning and linguistic practice
a way of speaking
content
a strategy of systematizing and rationalizing the data
attitude
in the mind
outside the mind representational format
actual, physical referent
de dicto
ideal, abstract referent
de se
natural kinds
implicit de re
conscious experience unconscious state
biological needs and functions social practices
mental representation
explicit
feeling, sentiment
disposition linguistics conventions
occurrent state
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