A Quote by Hilary Kornblith
The worry that unreflective belief acquisition may be unreliable, after all, applies equally to reflective belief acquisition: it too may be unreliable. To my mind, the plausibility of internalist views about justification is dramatically decreased when one becomes vividly aware of what introspection and reflection actually achieve.
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I argue is that philosophers have had a tendency to present a kind of mystical view of the powers of reflection. Unreflective belief acquisition is seen in mechanistic terms, but when philosophers talk about reflection, it is as if reflective processes are not bound by the kinds of limitations which inevitably arise from being embedded within the same causal structure which governs unreflective belief acquisition.
The idea that we should check on our unreflective belief acquisition sounds great, but we need to know whether the processes of reflection which we put to work serves to improve our reliability or not.
Internalist approaches to epistemology, I believe, have a great deal of intuitive appeal. Internalists believe that the features in virtue of which a belief is justified must somehow be internal to the agent. On some views, this amounts to the claim that these features must be accessible to introspection and armchair reflection. On others, it amounts only to the claim that they must be mental features.
When we recognise that reflective processes are no more outside the causal net than unreflective processes, and that they are bound by similar constraints, we may come to understand the nature of reflection for the first time.
I think the large part of the function of the Internet is it is archival. It's unreliable to the extent that word on the street is unreliable. It's no more unreliable than that. You can find the truth on the street if you work at it. I don't think of the Internet or the virtual as being inherently inferior to the so-called real.
The unreliable narrator is an odd concept. The way I see it, we're all unreliable narrators of our lives who usually have absolute trust in our self-told stories. Any truth is, after all, just a matter of perspective.
We cannot allow our Republican party to be based on what Olympia Snowe and Ben Nelson or Blanche Lincoln may or may not do. What's smart about that? You do that, build a strong future on a foundation with unreliable keystones.
The various processes of belief acquisition which are native to a species include ones which may allow for the reliable pick-up of information, which, in turn, allows individual members of the species to successfully negotiate their environment and satisfy their various desires.
Learning is more than the acquisition of the ability to think; it is the acquisition of many specialized abilities for thinking about a variety of things.
Ethologists thus have an interest in looking at these capacities for the reliable acquisition of belief, and it is not surprising that they have a name for the true beliefs which are the typical product of these reliable capacities. They call them items of knowledge. So I argue that talk of knowledge may thereby be seen to be embedded within a successful empirical theory.
Religion becomes a matter of belief, and belief acts as a limitation on the mind; and the mind then is never free. But it is only in freedom that you can find out what is true, what is God, not through any belief; because your belief projects what you think God ought to be, what you think ought to be true. If you believe God is love, God is good, God is this or that, your very belief prevents you from understanding what is God, what is true.
If you have a belief and you come against an experience which the belief says is not possible, or, the experience is such that you have to drop the belief, what are you going to choose — the belief or the experience? The tendency of the mind is to choose the belief, to forget about the experience. That’s how you have been missing many opportunities when God has knocked at your door.
Religion becomes a matter of belief, and belief acts as a limitation on the mind; and the mind then is never free.
The mere power of saving what is already in our hands must be of easy acquisition to every mind; and as the example of Lord Bacon may show that the highest intellect cannot safely neglect it, a thousand instances every day prove that the humblest may practise it with success.
Vision, even for a dragon, is woefully unreliable. What you can see with great clarity may not be real; what you cannot see may be the ultimate reality.
In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts.
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