Intellectual Vs Unintellectual Analysis

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The question of relationship between belief and evidence is important to the development of society today.The concern is what exactly we are to believe when there is no evidence available William James was a leading American psychologist and philosopher in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. James maintains that pure reason is never the final determinant of what we believe(Warren). Does our will to have beliefs come from families , Society , our enviorment or because we have no other choice but to believe in something.We cannot always postpone belief until we have received sufficient evidence of what is in front of us. The question we now must ask is , The Will to believe : Is the will to believe intellectual or unintellectual?

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I have to disagree with the thoughts that uninterllectual thinking is a source of selfishness towards others. In My opinion I think we may adopt beliefs for unintellectual reasons, like simplicity or the desire for the existence of the divine. Simplicity is just as intellectual a reason for believing something as is empirical evidence. When a choice is made it should only affect the person who is making the decision not all those around that person or involved in the subject.Each individual has a mindset of their own and yes it can be said that others shape the midset of those around them .The second belief I also agree with that a belief adopted for unintellectual reasons could create intellectual reasons for maintaining that belief. This argument differs from the first argument in two ways. First, the evidence is entirely determinate, second, it does not attempt to give a definition of what someone should accept as an intellectual reason. It only points out that we can influence a particular class of reasons— those furnished by empirical evidence, which both James and Clifford accepted.It seems that all reasons are unintellectual in the sense that we accept any reason as valid simply because we do there is no grand epistemological criterion by which to distinguish intellectual reasons from unintellectual

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