Do people hold the beliefs that they profess to hold? I've wondered about this for a long time as a sort of meta-epistemological thing. It is somewhat tricky to formulate this question. It is hard to give specific examples because then people would debate the merits of those positions rather than the "meta" question.
For example, religious people don't believe that atheists don't believe. They just think of that as a denial of what the atheist knows deep down. Or I have a problem believing that religious people believe. I think of it as more of a kind of pseudo-belief, or a belief of a different kind of order, like a justification for a behavior.
2 comments:
I wonder to what extent it is also not knowing/recognizing what they believe.
I believe in astrology and other systems of divination. But what people insist that means I believe is very different from what I actually believe. Not that they want to hear it, of course -- they want to tell me.
I have *no* idea what it would feel like to be in Christian culture as in, to have been raised Christian, to have that psychology.
Also - I think I was raised to be left-liberal and then became Marxian-socialistic. But those political compass tests always say I'm an anarcho-syndicalist. I do not know what I believe.
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