belief

That falsity is a defect in belief can be captured with a prohibitive norm holding that truth is the necessary condition for permissibility of belief. Furthermore, such a formulation avoids the difficulties encountered in earlier literature that offered prescriptive norms. The normativity of belief thesis is widely discussed in the literature. I criticise bi-conditional formulation of the norm of the normativity of belief thesis which holds that truth is both the necessary and sufficient condition for the permissibility of belief formation. I argue that the part which holds that truth is the sufficient condition for the permissibility of belief formation is redundant. The argument follows from clarifying the key ideas at stake in the normativity of belief thesis, namely, that false belief is a defect and that the normativity thesis is supposed to distinguish the concept of belief from other cognitive attitudes and the slogan that belief aims at truth.

It seems obvious that the mere acknowledgment of a norm cannot explain the agent’s undertaking what the norm prescribes; Steglich-Petersen makes the point as there is <em>no</em> strong relation between normative judgments and motivation from such judgments. To explain why someone does what a norm prescribes, according to Steglich-Petersen, we need to know not only that they acknowledge the norm, but that they are motivated to follow it. I will argue that this apparent truism is false in the case of constitutive norms. In a constitutive norm, the action specified in the correctness condition is constitutive of what is governed by the norm. I will focus on the constitutive norm of belief to argue that the mere acknowledgment of the norm suffices to explain the transparency of belief. That is to say, I explain why a subject who deliberates whether to believe that p thereby, in virtue of acknowledgment of the belief norm, deliberates whether p.

According to traditional philosophical literature, Akrasia is defined as acting against one’s best judgment. Philosophers have considered Akrasia as synonymous with the weakness of will. However, Holton considers these two phenomena to be distinct and argues that weakness of will is better understood as over-readily giving up on one's resolutions. This study seeks to show that these two phenomena – unlike Holton's claim – are not distinct, but the accounts of Akrasia and weakness of will take two approaches to explain the reasons behind quitting actions: (1) in terms of its relationship to the agent; and (2) in terms of its relationship to the action. The researcher attempts to show that Holton's interpretation of the weakness of will refers to the second perspective whereas Aristotle approaches it from two perspectives. However, on duly analyzing the elements put forward by Holton, we can see them to be consistent with those of Aristotle.

Early Muslim philosophers, theologians, logicians and experts in jurisprudence understand knowledge as “firm true belief supported by evidence”. They consider conjectures as a kind of ignorance, the domain of certain knowledge confined in necessary truths; and the domain of uncertain knowledge limited to contingent facts. From their definitions and postulates, we can conclude that they took “having appropriate source” as the criterion of knowledge. For this reason, they included the qualifications “firm” and “immutable” in their definition of knowledge in lieu of distinction between the definition and the criterion of knowledge and separation of cognitive characteristic features of beliefs from the non- cognitive ones. Their approach in epistemology is externalistic but it accommodates foundationalism and fallibilism while evading epistemological relativism. In this approach, knowledge is defined as true belief with proper source. Having proper source is a criterion for knowledge which is not explicitly stated but is implied by different qualifications introduced by them. A source of belief is proper iff it bears a causal relation of some sort to the state of affairs the belief depicts.

Most studies on Written Corrective Feedback (WCF) have focused either on ESL or EFL teachers’ beliefs and practices. However, it is still not known how teachers who teach second or foreign languages other than English will provide information on the learners’ written language production. To bridge the gap in the literature, this current study reports on an interview study investigating nine university lecturers’ beliefs and their actual practices about WCF on an assignment done by the third-year exchange student of Thai as a foreign language (TFL). Quantitative and qualitative data were collected through feedback tasks and semi-structured interviews. The findings indicated that there was alignment between teachers’ beliefs of their WCF practice and their actual practice in terms of types of WCF and feedback techniques. However, the amount of feedback provided and the teachers’ time constraint, not the level of students’ ability as they thought, appeared to be the reasons for these misalignments of TFL teachers’ beliefs and practices

For many religious people there is a problem of doubting various creedal statements contained in their religions. Often propositional beliefs are looked upon as a necessary, though not sufficient, condition, for salvation. This causes great anxiety in doubters and raises the question of the importance of belief in religion and in life in general. It is a question that has been neglected in philosophy of religion and Christian theology. In this paper I shall explore the question of the importance of belief as a religious attitude and suggest that there is at least one other attitude which may be adequate for religious faith even in the absence of belief, that attitude being hope. I shall develop a concept of faith as hope as an alternative to the usual notion that makes propositional belief that God exists a necessary condition for faith, as Plantinga implies in the quotation above. For simplicity’s sake I shall concentrate on the most important proposition in Western religious creeds, that which states that God exists (defined broadly as a benevolent, supreme Being, who is responsible for the creation of the universe), but the analysis could be applied mutatis mutandis to many other important propositions in religion (e.g., the Incarnation and the doctrine of the Trinity). I am not sure how these ideas fit into Islamic thought, but I offer up my paper to stimulate discussion between Christian and Islamic philosophy on the subjects of faith and doubt.