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Wednesday, November 7, 2018
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This post is a collection of quotes about beliefs. There are 12 quotes divided into 5 sections.
A. Something accepted as true is a belief (3)
B. Every belief is a representation of reality (1)
C. In life, an individual forms a web of beliefs (2)
D. Ideally, every belief should be in congruence with all other beliefs (4)
E. People agree on most aspects of reality (2)
David Hume (1711-1776, philosopher):
1. "In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore proportions his beliefs to the evidence." (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748)
Rene Descartes (1596-1650, philosopher):
2. "The aim of our studies must be the direction of our mind so that it may form solid and true judgments on whatever matters arise." (Rules for the Direction of the Mind, 1628)
Gottlob Frege (1848-1925, philosopher):
3. "A judgement for me is not the mere grasping of a thought, but the admission of its truth." (On Sense and Reference, 1892)
Plato (427 BC- , philosopher):
4. "All that is said by us can only be imitation and representation." (Critas)
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951, philosopher):
5. "What I hold fast to is not one proposition but a nest of propositions." (On Certainty, 1969 posthumous)
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951, philosopher):
6. "The child learns to believe a host of things, i.e. it learns to act according to those beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system, some things stand unshakably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it." (On Certainty, 1969 posthumous)
Otto Neurath (1882-1945, philosopher):
7. “Every new statement is to be confronted with existing ones, already brought to a state of harmony between themselves. A statement will be considered correct if it can be joined to them." (Soziologie im Physikalismus, 1931)
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970, philosopher)
8. “Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one." (Our Knowledge of the External World, 1914)
Willard van Orman Quine (1908-2000, philosopher):
9. "Implication is thus the very texture of our web of belief, and logic is the theory that traces it." (The Web of Belief, 1970)
Richard von Mises (1883-1953, mathematician):
10. “No contradiction exists, if the events are correctly interpreted." (Probability, Statistics and Truth, 1957)
William James (1842-1910, philosopher):
11. "The most violent revolutions in an individual's belief leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one's own biography remain untouched." (What Pragmatism Means. Lectures at the Lowell Institute and Columbia University, 1931)
G. E. Moore (1873-1958, philosopher):
12. “I can prove now, for instance that two human hands exist. How? By holding up my two hands and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, 'here is one hand' and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, 'and here is the another'." (Proof of an External World, 1939)
