After reading the Fixation of Belief, several thoughts ran through my mind.
First, one argument that is made is that if someone beleives something, and someone else does not, who gets to say who is right and who is wrong. Now this seems like an easy answer, just look at both point of views and see which one has facts backing it up. This is where the problem comes in. Now who is to say, that the facts supporting one's argument are correct, because the other person might not believe in those facts but believe in ideas which he believes to be facts that support his argument.
Second, if one person believes that he is always rights, should he not think that any other person could be always right based on their beliefs. I think point trying to be made is that there is no such thing as fact, there is always a variable that could change an outcome. Facts are what the individual believe them to be, but there are also facts which are believed by the majority which makes others assume they are true.
This leads to the next point, so if every person had their own beliefs, people would probably be in a constant state of war with each other to decide who ultimately has the right befiefs, but this war can never be won. So even though there are multiple people that believe in the same logic of ideas(even millions of people) there are still those who will oppose those ideas with their own.
These ideas seem to make everything way more complicated than they need to be but if people did not challenge these ideas then we would never learn anything new, or different approaches to different problems or situations.
Steven Lippman
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I liked how our Prof. brought up how he believes that in today's world, most people are more interested in finding supporting views for our own opinion, and staunchly defending what we believe, instead of actually seeking out the reasons why other people believe other things.
ReplyDeleteI really do wish that people could take a more inclusive view of facts, and instead of just trying to make themselves look better and right, just try to educate themselves. I think that that part, part of human nature, is the major issue.
I like how you talked about challenging each others point of view. One may think this is correct while others don't. We have to challenge these ideas to better ourselves and make constant improvements. If everyone agrees with what everyone else says, then our society may be very homogeneous which is not good. We need challenges and competition to get a good world view.
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