The Quicksands of Belief ― The Need for Skepticism

Humans are gullible. We do not question enough, and, of course, plenty has been written about the adverse effect that today's Western culture has on our already weak skeptical facility. This cross-disciplinary study tackles the problem from the anthropological, historical, philosophical, sociological, and neurobiological angles--from the evolution of the sense of self and the importance ascribed by it to the general idea of belief, to the cultural feedback mechanisms encouraging beliefs of all sorts--including blind ones. The author describes belief systems that encompass religion and politics and attempts to analyze how blatantly false pseudo-scientific beliefs and representations of reality enter those systems. Several social science approaches that have attempted to explain human behavior in terms of these normative systems are described and critiqued. The author implicates absolutist thinking as the root of these problems (elsewhere evident in an essentialist approach to sciences, in particular, biology, that is at the root of phenomena such as rejection of evolutionary theory) and cautions against following the easy path provided by such a mentality, a danger to human survival. Annotation c2014 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Janet B. Winn has a B.A. from Vassar College, where she was Phi Beta Kappa and was awarded a fellowship for graduate work. She earned an M.A. in philosophy from Stanford University, advanced credits in sociology at the State University of New York at New Paltz, and a Ph.D. in philosophy of social science from the State University of New York in Albany. She has taught both philosophy and sociology in the New York State university system. She is the author of The Open Mind and Sociology (Lang, 1988).