Paradigms and Beliefs

paradigm - a pattern, example, or model -Webster New World
dictionary

The world we live in is an incredibly complex place. Man has developed to the point that he is striving, with some success, to understand the world around him. He has learned to harness many of the forces of nature. He has learned to shape many elements of his environment. In so doing he has built an understanding of how the world works; physical processes have been studied and documented to the point where man is dangerous to himself and all of the other creatures of the earth. Nonetheless, his understanding of the physical world is complete enough that he can shape his environment, and he has developed a practical knowledge sufficient to predict the immediate effects of his actions. The study of physical processes has led him to develop models, or paradigms, that are useful in this prediction.

The primary model underlying this understanding is his model of causality. If I do A, B follows. Man has had such success using this model in the exploration of the physical world that it has become an assumption that underlies nearly all of his undertakings. This assumption is at the heart of the "scientific method", whish is a model unto itself of how man expands his understanding of the universe.

As man's body of knowledge has developed, the exploration of causes has been pushed further and further from it's original basis - causality in the physical world that is clearly explained by physics and chemistry. The same methods are being applied to the elucidation of questions that border on religion: philosophy, cosmology, ethics, and human behavior in general. The lack of agreement that is found among the proposed answers to these root questions implies that this approach fails badly when applied to these areas of inquiry. The fact that "objective" approaches to demonstrating causality fail in contexts other than the physical world means that there can be, and is, a much wider diversity of opinion (and belief) about the answers to these more abstract questions.

Some in the academic world have carried the causality paradigm to its logical extreme. They have given birth to such theories as behaviorism that would have us believe that man is much like the machines that we understand so well from physical science, only so much more complex that the actual forces and influences that "cause" his behavior cannot be singled out.

If one has given the matter any thought, one has probably developed some kind of belief concerning the validity of behaviorism. Such beliefs are based on ... Just what are they based on? Beliefs about the physical world are based, in the simplest cases, on our perceptions of the world around us and how it reacts to our influence. In cases that are outside of our everyday experience, we rely on the "experts" (beginning with mom and dad) who have models of why things work the way they do - in general, these models are accepted by us because they seem to explain the world of our everyday experience fairly reliably. When we reach the realm of psychology or other less tangible pursuits, we rely on such things as "knowledge", "reason", or "the experts" - Ah, the experts. At this point, we must take a leap of faith, directly into the arms of those who have made it their business to apply their "knowledge" and "reason" to the area of interest at the moment. Where did their knowledge come from? In most cases, most of it came from the "experts" that preceded them.

So, can one show us that the explanations that they would have us take as beliefs are any more than a house of cards? Should one of the basic tenets, or foundation amends of their models turn out to be false, will it collapse on itself leaving us with nothing more than chaos?

Well, I digress a bit here, but only to make the point that beliefs are not always founded on extremely solid ground, but instead are notions that we pick up during life that we internalize and make our own. The fact that they are not necessarily True is not evident to us because "we take these truths to be self-evident", as the wise men who framed the U Declaration of Independence put it.

The fact that there is such diversity among humans with respect to which truths that they take to be self-evident must lead one to question the validity of all beliefs!

This essay explores some of the literature on beliefs, belief systems, their adaptability, their development, and the human characteristics that cause us to either accept existing belief systems or to forge our own.

Belief Systems

First, a definition is in order. One definition proposed in the literature seems reasonable:

The belief system is conceived to represent all the beliefs, sets, expectancies, or hypotheses, conscious or unconscious, that a person at a given time accepts as true of the world in which he lives.

This belief system need not be "systematic" in that all of the parts fit neatly together. Some or many beliefs may be logically related or consistent, but there may be apparent contradictions or ambiguities between individual beliefs. Nonetheless, it functions as a system in that concepts are evaluated with respect to the entire group of beliefs. It may be useful to think of the system as consisting of a group of sub-systems, each of which does display a high degree of integrity within that sub-system. The degree to which such sub-systems vary or appear contradictory may be viewed as a measure of the willingness of the individual to tolerate ambiguity, or as an acknowledgement that the world is indeed complex, and apparent contradictions are just that - apparent contradictions. The fact that the disparate beliefs can coexist may mean that the individual is willing to accept that a resolution is possible, but not achievable yet, due to a lack of knowledge or understanding. In the extreme case, the individual may be so openminded as to have a high degree of inconsistency between sub-systems. Each sub-system may itself be quite narrow in scope, and there may be a much larger number of sub-systems than in most other individuals. Such an individual would probably exhibit a confused state when faced with a decision, or might be judged to be quite irrational by most observers. He would probably be seen by society as mentally disturbed.

This raises the issue of the functionality of belief systems. The barrage of sensory input presented to man needs to be filtered, weighed for importance, interpreted for its meaning, and evaluated with respect to its relevance to the individual's survival (see Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception). If this process were wholly conscious, the individual would be totally absorbed in the process. We develop early in life a set of expectations about the world we live in that allows us to classify perceptions at an unconscious level so that our conscious mind need only deal with those that "important" or "relevant". These expectations form a very basic part of our belief systems. In this way, belief systems allow the individual to move beyond dealing with the barrage of perceptions, and free up his mental resources to deal in a more in-depth way with those perceptions that are deemed important.

Social psychologist Milton Rokeach (who penned the definition above) developed a model of belief systems and how they are organized. He proposes that they can be viewed as consisting of three layers: central. Intermediate, and peripheral. What Rokeach calls the central region contains our most basic beliefs concerning:

* the nature of physical reality and the physical properties of the world we live in;
* the social world he lives in;
* the self.

The beliefs in this region he terms primitive beliefs. One characteristic that he proposes to identify a belief as primitive is that "virtually everyone is believed to have it also".
The intermediate region consists of a very special kind of beliefs: those associated with "the nature of the positive and negative authority to be depended upon to fill out" our knowledge of the world (i.e. which experts to believe). Each individual can only hope to gain first-hand knowledge of a small part of the world, and must rely on others who he deems trustworthy and knowledgeable to provide him with credible beliefs about the rest.

This intermediate region is not concerned with what types of authorities (they may be religious, governmental, political, academic, popular, journalistic, etc.) an individual accepts, but their attitudes towards these authorities' pronouncements. Is there blind faith in the pronouncements even though they may contradict the individual's experience? Are the authorities' statements weighed as to their rationality? The answers to these questions and many related ones places the individual somewhere on a scale of dogmatism. Psychologists have studied this field quite a bit and have developed tests to measure how dogmatic individuals are.

[ More on dogmatism to come.]