Aug 17, · Use our tips and strategies for Common Application essay option two on learning from a challenge, setback, or failure. Common Application Essay Option 3 Tips: Challenging a Belief. Writing Prompts for 7th Grade. The Length Requirements for the Common Application Essay in Aug 31, · The employee is now as belief-driven in selecting and staying with a company as a consumer is in buying and sticking with a brand. The Employee Value Proposition (EVP) now looks like a tripod, balanced on the traditional enticements of pay and career advancement, a newer focus on employee well-being, with flexible hours and remote work, and now Oct 11, · Before Dr. Anthony Fauci was tasked with overseeing the country’s response to COVID, he was the nation’s point-person for HIV-AIDS. His work as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is fueled by his belief in personal responsibility to
This I Believe | A public dialogue about belief — one essay at a time
The central question in the debate is whether there are norms of some sort governing our habits of belief-formation, belief-maintenance, and belief-relinquishment. Is it ever or always morally wrong or epistemically irrationalor practically imprudent to hold a belief on insufficient evidence?
Is it ever or always morally right or epistemically rationalessay on belief, essay on belief practically prudent to believe on the basis of sufficient evidence, or to withhold belief in the perceived absence of it?
Is it ever or always obligatory to seek out all available epistemic evidence for a belief? Are there some ways of obtaining evidence that are themselves immoral, essay on belief, irrational, imprudent? Related questions have to do with the nature and structure of the norms involved, if any, as well essay on belief the source of their authority.
Are they instrumental norms grounded in contingent ends that we set for ourselves? Are they categorical norms grounded in ends set for us by the very nature of our intellectual or moral capacities? Are there other options? And what are the objects of evaluation in this context—believers, essay on belief, beliefs, or both? Finally, assuming that there are norms of some sort governing belief-formation, what does that imply about the nature of belief?
Does it imply that belief-formation is voluntary or under our control? If so, what sort of control is this? If not, then is talk of an ethics of belief even coherent? The locus classicus of the ethics of belief debate is, unsurprisingly, the essay that christened it. At the outset of the essay, essay on belief, Clifford defends the stringent principle that we are all always obliged to have sufficient evidence for every one of our beliefs. Clifford's essay is chiefly remembered for two things: a story and a principle.
The story is that of a shipowner who, once upon a time, essay on belief, was inclined to sell tickets for a transatlantic voyage. It struck him that his ship was rickety, and that its soundness might be in question.
After making this diagnosis, Clifford changes the end of the story: the ship doesn't meet a liquid demise, but rather arrives safe and sound into New York harbor. Does the new outcome relieve the shipowner of blame for his belief? Clifford goes on to cite our intuitive indictments of the shipowner—in both versions of the story—as grounds for essay on belief famous principle:.
Despite the synchronic character of his famous Principle, Clifford's view is not merely that we must be in a certain state at the essay on belief time at which we form a belief. Rather, the obligation always and only to believe essay on belief sufficient evidence governs our activities across time as well. With respect to most if not all of the propositions we consider as candidates for belief, says Clifford, we are obliged to go out and gather evidence, essay on belief, remain open to new evidence, and consider the evidence offered by others.
The diachronic obligation here can be captured as follows:. There might be at least two kinds of diachronic obligation here: one governing how we form and hold beliefs over time, and the other governing how we relinquish or revise beliefs over time.
Despite the robustious pathos, it is not clear in the end that Clifford's considered position is as extreme as these two principles make it sound.
James's Non-Evidentialist alternative to Clifford is far more permissive: it says that there are some contexts in which it is fine to form a belief even though we don't have sufficient evidence for it, and even though we know that we don't.
As permissive essay on belief this sounds, however, James is by no means writing a blank doxastic check. In the absence of those conditions, James reverts happily to a broadly Evidentialist picture see Gale, Kasser and Shahand Aikin For more on the varieties of Non-Evidentialism, see §6 below. The phrase may be of 19 th -century coinage, but there were obviously essay on belief of belief well before Clifford and James.
In the context of a search for certain knowledge scientiaDescartes maintains, we have the obligation to withhold assent from all propositions whose truth we do not clearly and distinctly perceive clear and distinct perceptions themselves, by contrast, will produce belief ineluctably.
Even then, however, essay on belief, we are obliged to have some sort of evidence before giving our assent. To form a belief about important matters without possessing sufficient evidence—or to believe anything with a degree of firmness that is not proportioned to the strength of our evidence—is to misuse our faculties and court all manner of error. By contrast, Blaise Pascal and Immanuel Kant anticipated James by emphasizing that there are some very important issues regarding which we do not and cannot have sufficient evidence one way or the other, but which deserve our firm assent on practical grounds nonetheless.
For more on Pascal and Kant on Non-Evidentialism, see §6. This last point makes it clear that there may be different types of norms governing practices of belief-formation, essay on belief, and that these will correspond to different types of value.
The ethicist of belief will thus need to specify the type of value she is invoking, why and how she thinks it can ground doxastic norms, whether it is the only kind of value that does that, essay on belief, and if not what the priority relations are between norms based in different essay on belief of value. Clifford and Locke, as we have seen, claim that the issue of whether we have done our doxastic best is an epistemic one and also given a few further premises a moral one.
The general idea is that if something is beneficial, and believing that p will help us achieve, acquire, or actualize that thing, then it is prima facie prudent for us to believe that p. This will be true even essay on belief we lack sufficient evidence for the belief that pand even if we are aware of that lack.
Consider for example someone who reads in the psychological literature that people are much more likely to survive a cancer diagnosis if they firmly believe that they will survive it. Upon being diagnosed with the disease himself, and in light of the fact that his goal is to survive, it will be prudent for this person to believe that he will survive, even if he knows that he and his doctors lack sufficient evidence for that belief.
If this is right, then the case would not be in tension with Clifford's Principle after all. You also have some moderate but not compelling olfactory evidence that he is using drugs in the house when you are away in response to your queries, he claims that he has recently taken up transcendental meditation, and that the funny smell when you come home is just incense.
Suppose too that you know yourself well enough to know that your relationship with your son will be seriously damaged if you come to view him as a habitual drug-user. This suggests that you would violate a prudential norm if you go ahead and believe that he is. In other words, it is prudent, given your ends, to withhold belief about the source of the aroma altogether, or even to believe, if possible, essay on belief, that he is not smoking pot but rather burning incense in your absence.
On the other hand, if you regard the occasional use of recreational drugs as harmless fun that expresses a healthy contempt for overweening state authority in some states, at leastthen it might be prudent for you—confronted with the telltale odor—to form the belief that your son has indeed taken up the habit in question.
Either way, the recommendation here aims at a kind of prudential or pragmatic value, and not at the truth per se. For some recent arguments in favor of prudential evidence for belief, see Reisner and ; for arguments against, see Adler and Shah In addition to being sorted according to the type of value involved, essay on belief, doxastic obligations can be sorted according to their structure.
The main distinction here is between hypothetical and categorical structure. Prudential norms usually have a hypothetical structure: if you have prudential reason to survive the disease, and if believing that you are going to do so will help you achieve this end, then you have a prima facie obligation to believe that you are going to essay on belief. Likewise, essay on belief, if you want to protect your relationship with your son, and if believing that he is deceiving you and taking drugs will damage your ability to trust him, then you are prima facie obliged to withhold that essay on belief. Put more generally: if you have a prudential end Eessay on belief, and belief that p is likely to essay on belief E obtain, then you have a prima facie obligation to believe that p.
The obligation will be particularly powerful though still prima facie if E cannot be achieved other than through belief that pand if you are or should be aware of that fact. For more on hypothetical norms generally, see Broome essay on belief Schroeder The structure of moral and epistemic norms can also essay on belief construed hypothetically in this way. The ends in question will presumably be doing the morally right thing or promoting the moral goodon the one hand, and acquiring significant knowledge or minimizing significant false beliefon the other see Foley Achieving these ends clearly does involve an increase in well-being on most conceptions of the latter.
However, because these ends are putatively set for us not by a contingent act of will but rather by our nature as morally engaged, knowledge-seeking beings, some philosophers regard them as categorical rather than instrumental imperatives. In other words, they take these norms to say not merely that if we want to achieve various hypothetical ends, then we have the prima facie obligation to believe in such-and-such ways.
Rather, the norms say that we do have these ends as a matter of natural or moral necessity, and thus that we prima facie ought to believe in such-and-such ways. And so by the same logic it might be taken to underwrite a categorical—albeit still prudential—norm of belief, especially in life-or-death cases such as that of the cancer diagnosis above.
So far the norms involved in the ethics of belief have been characterized without attention to reflective access requirements, essay on belief. In order to see how such requirements can play a role, essay on belief, consider the following prudential doxastic norm:. If A were the right way to articulate obligations in the ethics of belief, then we would have far more prima facie doxastic obligations than we realize, essay on belief. B is towards the top of the scale in terms of reflective access requirements: S has to know that he has E and that believing that p is likely to make E obtain.
As a sufficient condition essay on belief having a doxastic obligation, it may be acceptable, but most ethicists of belief will not want to make the reflective knowledge necessary in order for there to be genuine prima facie prudential obligations. Note that an ethicist of belief who wants to include a reflective access requirement in a doxastic norm would need to do so essay on belief a way that essay on belief generate an infinite regress.
Note too that the norms we considered above govern the positive formation of belief. An account of the plausible conditions of reflective access may be somewhat different for norms of maintaining, suspending, and relinquishing belief for suspending, essay on belief, see Tang and Perin Another closely-related debate has to do with the types of value that can generate doxastic norms and obligations.
Value monists in the ethics of belief argue that only one type of value usually some kind of epistemic value can generate such norms. Other more permissive accounts go beyond the three types of value considered above—prudential, moral, essay on belief, and epistemic—to suggest that there are other types that can generate doxastic obligations as well.
Perhaps there are aesthetic norms that guide us to beliefs that have some sort of aesthetic merit, or that make us qua subjects more beautiful in virtue of believing them. There may also be social norms that govern beliefs we form in our various communal roles as lawyers, priests, psychiatrists, friends, parents, etc.
regarding the doxastic obligations of friends, see KellerStroudand Aikin and political norms that govern beliefs we form as citizens, subjects, voters, and so on here see the second half of Matheson and Vitz It's an interesting essay on belief open question whether such aesthetic, social, or political norms could be cashed out in terms of epistemic, essay on belief, moral, and prudential norms e.
perhaps being someone's lawyer or being someone's friend underwrites certain essay on belief or prudential norms of belief regarding his or her innocence, essay on belief. Norms, and types of norms, can be related in different ways.
According to the interpretation of Clifford presented above, there is a strong connection between the epistemic and the moral types: the fact that there is an epistemic essay on belief to believe always and only on sufficient evidence entails that there is an analogous moral norm.
The reasoning here seems to be as follows:. P1 We have an epistemic obligation to possess sufficient evidence for all of our beliefs;, essay on belief. C Thus, we have a moral obligation to possess sufficient evidence for all of our beliefs.
This formulation keeps the types of values distinct while still forging a link between them in the form of P2, essay on belief. But of course we would need to find a sound sub-argument in favor of P2 see Dougherty In some places, Clifford seems simply to presume that epistemic duty is a species of ethical duty. Elsewhere Clifford defends P2 by reference to our need to rely on the testimony of others in order to avoid significant harm and advance scientific progress.
No belief is without effect, he claims: at the very least, essay on belief, believing on insufficient evidence even with respect to an apparently very insignificant issue is liable to lead to the lowering of epistemic standards in other more important contexts too. And that could, in turn, have bad moral consequences. Elsewhere still Clifford seems not to recognize a distinction between epistemic and moral obligations at essay on belief see Van InwagenHaackessay on belief, Woodand Zamulinski for further discussion of Clifford on this issue.
It was noted earlier that one way to read Locke is as arguing for P2 via the independent theoretical premise that God's will for us is that we follow Evidentialist norms, essay on belief, together with a divine command theory of moral rightness see Wolterstorff But Locke can also be read as primarily interested in defending P1 rather than P2 or C see Brandt Bolton A virtue-theoretic approach, by contrast, essay on belief, might defend P2 by claiming not that a particular unjustified belief causes moral harm, but rather that regularly ignoring our epistemic obligations is a bad intellectual habit, and that having a bad intellectual habits is a way of having a bad moral character ZagzebskiRoberts and Wood In addition to using theoretical arguments like these, ethicists of belief can connect doxastic norms by appealing to empirical data.
John Searle - What is Belief?
, time: 8:05Common Application Essay Sample for Option #3
[Originally published in Contemporary Review, ; reprinted in William K. Clifford, Lectures and Essays, ed. Leslie Stephen and Frederick Pollock (London: Macmillan and Co., ). The author (–) was an English mathematician.] William K. Clifford THE ETHICS OF BELIEF SAMPLE STATEMENT OF PURPOSE - ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING EXAMPLE ESSAY. Give your Statement of Purpose an Edge at blogger.com!. My decision to pursue graduate study in the United States is underscored by my desire to be a part of the graduate program at your institution Oct 11, · Before Dr. Anthony Fauci was tasked with overseeing the country’s response to COVID, he was the nation’s point-person for HIV-AIDS. His work as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is fueled by his belief in personal responsibility to
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