forum for week of 12 September

I would like to apologize for not being able to contribute to this forum in time. Unfortunately, I have had some struggles getting the wiki to accept my email account. Needless to say, I would still like to share my thoughts on this week's readings.

After reading the first page of the text, I decided to look up a definition of "beliefs". I found one that I thought was in agreement with my own view of what constitutes a belief: "confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof." This lead me to believe that there must be a purpose for why many people choose to believe in explanations that perhaps don't have concrete evidence. Veronica D., you mentioned that the "placebo effect" is an example of someone having a belief that is so strong that it controls their perception and therefore what they experience. This is true of all people: what we know, what we feel and what we experience serves as our reality and therefore the basis for our knowledge. I think that is the purpose for why people choose to have beliefs, to explain something that they can't necessarily rationalize with scientific evidence. If we evaluate beliefs and modify them in order to obtain truth and create a universal epistemic ideal, are we creating conformity and agreement amongst all people? Would that disturb the unique characteristics across cultures? Morton re-iterates this on page 2 while writing about the epistemic ideal, asking us "what would be the price for satisfying this ideal: in order to have beliefs like this would we have to lose something else of value?" I think the pursuit for higher understanding is noble, but I think that trying to obtain relative objectivity is really difficult since people bring biases and stories based on their own experiences to the table. And that's what makes life so interesting, no two peoples' life narratives are akin, but does that make them untrue? -Claire Chevreau