Comments: Does Meditation Affect Philosophical Beliefs?

Some thoughts and some questions:

I think that often in accepting a set of philosophical beliefs, we erroneously presume a certain psychological manifestation for those beliefs that does not in fact follow. We'll adopt a mindset, behavior, or personality, the nature of which isn't contained in or prescribed by our ideas, simply because it seems to be a common psychology among adherents of the beliefs. But while we (hopefully) have put a lot of critical thought into our philosophical beliefs, chewing them over endlessly and continuously until we really understand them, the same is hardly so true for our psychological beliefs: we often haven't done the intellectual work necessary to validate our character (or attitude, mindset, personality, or whatever), and instead we just default to whatever is typical. Which isn't to say that what's typical is wrong, or to imply that there's a rift between philosophy and psychology -- on the contrary, it's usually difficult to say where "philosophical" ends and "psychological" begins -- only the two seem different enough that they'd require independent verification (and also, I think, different types of verification).

Problems arise when that second (psychological) verification is neglected; we end up lumping together concepts out of context or prematurely. We end up believing there to be an "Objectivist outlook" (or Buddhist, or anything else), when we've really only earned half of that phrase: i.e., we do know the beliefs of Objectivism, but we haven't put forth the effort to turn those beliefs into an outlook, into a way of interacting with the world, which I'm calling the psychological effort. Here I'm using "psychological" to mean "attitude, personality, behavior, etc." which may or may not jive with what you've written, but whatever. What I think this means is that....

[I'm quickly starting to realize that, as vague as the terminology is, I'm prone to veer farther and farther away from the topic of your post, so I'll cut this shorter than it might have been and just pose a couple important questions: ]

"Philosophical" and "psychological": what do you consider the difference between the two? Is it just "stuff in general" versus "one's own mind"? Is it "what you believe" versus "how you believe it"? I've got some ideas brewing, and I'll elaborate in good time, but it would help to know what you think about their interrelatedness and about the poorly defined "psycho-epistemology."

Along the same lines, what do you mean by psychological views and statements, and by a psychological lens? Am I on-target in mentioning "attitude, character, mindset, personality, behavior, etc." or do you intend something completely else by the word "psychological"?

Posted by Zachary Bleu at April 10, 2004 06:40 AM
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