Believed Belief: Science/Religion versus Sukuma Magic

Hysteria, belief, and magic.

(a) A courageous OP refers a boy aged eight who has †̃¿ gone off his legs' that morning. The OP says he knows it is hysterical but that he cannot stop it. The boy is brought by car. A kind psychiatrist negotiates through the window the need for the boy to mount the steps to come and talk. The boy comes. He talks about how his estranged father had promised first a trip to the cup final and then...

Belief versus Acceptance

Belief seems to be connected to truth and to the acceptance of the content of belief as true. If a person accepts as true that the cat is on the mat, then it might seem that he must also believe that the cat is on the mat, and conversely. However, the connections here should be investigated in terms that are more precise and should be properly argued for. This is my main aim in this paper. I wi...

The Belief in Magic in the Age of Science

Three movements in understanding: magic, belief and generative causation

Among those endeavouring to improve the human condition, there is a general acceptance that policy making and implementation should be informed by some form of evidence. However, the debate around what works can degenerate very rapidly into a less constructive argument around what counts as evidence, which ignores the contexts in which evidence may be generated and used. One response to this un...

Belief Merging versus Judgment Aggregation

The problem of aggregating pieces of propositional information coming from several agents has given rise to an intense research activity. Two distinct theories have emerged. On the one hand, belief merging has been considered in AI as an extension of belief revision. On the other hand, judgment aggregation has been developed in political philosophy and social choice theory. Judgment aggregation...