Doxastic attitudes are

epistemic Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Episte ...

attitudes which a person can hold towards a

proposition In logic and linguistics, a proposition is the meaning of a declarative sentence. In philosophy, " meaning" is understood to be a non-linguistic entity which is shared by all sentences with the same meaning. Equivalently, a proposition is the no ...

. The most commonly discussed doxastic attitude is

belief A belief is an attitude that something is the case, or that some proposition is true. In epistemology, philosophers use the term "belief" to refer to attitudes about the world which can be either true or false. To believe something is to take i ...

(holding something to be

true True most commonly refers to truth, the state of being in congruence with fact or reality. True may also refer to: Places * True, West Virginia, an unincorporated community in the United States * True, Wisconsin, a town in the United States * Tr ...

). Other doxastic attitudes include disbelief (holding something to be false) and suspension of judgment (withholding assent to a proposition without judging it to be true or judging it to be false). The term ''doxastic'' is derived from the

ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic peri ...

word δόξα (or ''

doxa Doxa (; from verb )Henry Liddell, Liddell, Henry George, and Robert Scott (philologist), Robert Scott. 1940.δοκέω" In ''A Greek–English Lexicon, A Greek-English Lexicon'', edited by Henry Stuart Jones, H. S. Jones and R. McKenzie. Oxford. ...

''), which means "belief". Thus, doxastic attitudes include beliefs and other psychological attitudes which resemble beliefs. Doxastic attitudes in many ways resemble

propositional attitude A propositional attitude is a mental state held by an agent toward a proposition. Linguistically, propositional attitudes are denoted by a verb (e.g. "believed") governing an embedded "that" clause, for example, 'Sally believed that she had won ...

s, although the two concepts are distinct from one another. Other terms which are commonly used to refers to beliefs, such as " judgment" and "

opinion An opinion is a judgment, viewpoint, or statement that is not conclusive, rather than facts, which are true statements. Definition A given opinion may deal with subjective matters in which there is no conclusive finding, or it may deal with f ...

", can also be classified as doxastic attitudes. More broadly, the term "doxastic attitude" can also refer to states sufficiently similar to beliefs, such as psychological certainty and credence.

References

{{epistemology-stub Belief Epistemology

See also

References