The Doubt Game And Believing Game Summary

In the excerpt from Don’t Believe Everything You Think The 6 Basic Mistakes in Thinking we are introduced to 6 things that cause us to believe everything we think. The first one is how “we prefer stories to statistics”. Humans like to base decisions or opinions based on stories they may hear from friends or family. The second example is how “we seek to confirm”, we side with information that goes along with our beliefs and ideas that we already had in place. The third example is how “we rarely appreciate the role of chance and coincidence”, which in short means we tend to ignore that things

In this lifetime, we will make decisions that affect our careers, our families, and countless other important ingredients in our everyday lives. In making these decisions, there should be some measure of doubt, to keep reality in check. But certainty leads to confidence, and the overall ability to make decisions and form opinions. This is why one should be certain, but use doubt to rationalize decisions and opinions.

Brian Davies further argued that the verificationism principle itself is unverifiable; one cannot verify whether it is true or false and therefore by its own criteria, it is meaningless. Both Ward and Davies’s arguments significantly weaken verificationism. Hick argued that statements are eschatologically verifiable, so that after someone dies, they can verify all the statements they made when they were alive, however this is a weak argument against verificationism, and it does not weaken the verification principle as much as Hick and Davies.

In Peter Elbow’s essay “The Doubting Game and Believing Game” he discusses the two types of games that an individual can use to look for the truth in a situation. The Doubting game, is when an individual believes everything is false, and prove each assertion wrong, and the Believing game, is the process where an individual believes that all assertions are correct, and go over each one separately. With both games, there are certain rules that must be followed.

In “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds”, written by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker staff writer explains significance of the well-known psychological phenomenon: confirmation bias. As its name implies, confirmation bias is “the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them” (Kolbert 4). The first section of the article is served as a simple introduction to the article with studies proving “facts don’t change our minds.” In both studies, contestants were tricked into believing deceptive information.

However, Elbow proposes that we should use the believing game more often, because it is not used enough and the doubting game is becoming a monopoly. The believing game is a practice that is the complete opposite of the doubting game. It is a practice of trying to be as welcoming and accepting as possible to every concept you encounter.

In Philosophy, certain words convey specific meanings. Here, I will define these terms.The word skepticism, relates to the idea as we do not have the knowledge to be certain of anything, our beliefs become unjustifiable. A skeptical scenario has to be consistent with evidence, and if it is true then these beliefs would be unjustified. Rene Descartes “Meditations on First Philosophy” is a philsophical treatise, which is a formal written discourse on Descartes skeptical scenario. G.E. Moore’s ‘Proof of an External World’ is an essay Moore wrote. The

Merchants of Doubt is a documentary movie that describes misinformation and confusion spread to many American citizens. The movie focuses on some of the most popular controversies and the public relation tactics used in conjunction. The documentary points out people who portray themselves as scientific authorities in media, but cause complete confusion about serious issues such as toxic chemicals, pharmaceutical and global warming. The film begins by talking about the tobacco industry’s tactic of getting rid of the government regulations put in place. In the film, they show this industry used various public relation strategies to make the public doubt that cigarettes caused cancer. This strategy basically was the center template by many other industries in various materials and foods. When scientist

The problem with reliabilism is that due to the adherence condition, true beliefs can be said to lack

Most intellectuals or academics obsessed with one way of approaching new ideas and texts, the doubting game, at the other's expense. It is important to consider other related concepts such as the believing game to consider issues ad situations in a more analytical manner. These two mechanisms enable one to criticize or accept facts based on various condition, situations, and events.

Similarly, in the novel 1984, “In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. ” We have learned in our entire life that two and two equal four, which the mathematics inside that we claimed are suspected to be true and patterned. By now, it does not matter if the mathematics are true, the numbers are right or the statistics are real; people just need to acknowledge that what the Party

The classical version in skepticism is called Pyrrhonism. It was named after an early advocate known as Pyrrho (365 BCE – 270 BCE) became so frustrated between two arguments, not being able to choose which to follow due to reasonable views on both side, and decided to make a decision to drop his concerns with the subject. With this, he figured that the frustration that came with picking sides and choosing what to believe was not worth it and believed that you cannot be certain about the truth. Once admitting this to himself, he achieved the inner peace he was looking for that was later called ataraxia.

The Epistemic closure principle explains that knowledge can be gained by the logically implied inferences between a predicate, based on past experience, and a conclusion. By definition epistemic closure purports that we are justified in believing that our logical inferences are true. Therefore, we can conclude that our past experience (predicate) is a reason to believe a proposition. This principle has been used as the basis of various forms of skeptical arguments against the traditional analysis and inductive/deductive reasoning. Such an example was presented by Edmund Gettier, whose arguments question if we are justified in believing our beliefs as knowledge. Also, Hume questioned if we can really trust inductive/deductive reasoning. In the following I will argue that even though, Gettier’s arguments hold some truth, we are still caused to conclude that the epistemic closure is a logical necessity and true.

Consider this: a random doctor comes up to you, professing to have a cure for any and all kinds of viruses. He presents a syringe of the “antidote”, he has not provided background nor the results of his experimentation. Would you take the antidote? Within a person's life time, there will be various moments of skepticism. Skepticism can be both beneficial and detrimental, it can also lead to the arising of various knowledge claims. One of the ways by, which a person can gain knowledge is through their level of skepticism. Some knowledge claims that can arise as a result of too much or too little skepticism include; does this approach allow for knowledge to be gained with some degree of certainty? Is this approach to gaining knowledge

Doubt and confidence can contradict each other. Doubt can be seen as fear of the unknown. Confidence is having faith in your own knowledge or having a feeling of certainty. Confidence comes first when we are certain in the credibility of the knowledge obtained, however, confidence is provoked by doubt when we become biased with the knowledge we already know. Both doubt and confidence are vital to the production of knowledge. Doubt is perceived to be negative because it can be viewed as a sign of questioning your own ability to understand concepts. knowledge are the skills and information we obtain from our experience with the world. The prescribed title chosen is, “We know with confidence only when we know little; with knowledge doubt increases.”