Concept
Doubt
Overview
Doubt is a mental state in which the mind remains suspended between two or more contradictory propositions, and is uncertain about them. Doubt on an emotional level is indecision between belief and disbelief. It may involve uncertainty, distrust or lack of conviction on certain facts, actions, motives, or decisions. Doubt can result in delaying or rejecting relevant action out of concern for mistakes or missed opportunities.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Thus, both doubt and belief have positive effects upon us, though very different ones. Belief does not make us act at once, but puts us into such a condition that we shall behave in a certain way, when the occasion arises.
Charles S. Peirce, Chance, Love, and Logic
States what Doubt is; names Doubt twice.
That we ought not meanwhile to make use of doubt in the conduct of life. In the meantime, it is to be observed that we are to avail ourselves of this general doubt only while engaged in the contemplation of truth. For, as far as concerns the conduct of life, we are very frequently obliged to follow opinions merely probable, or even sometimes, though of two courses of action we may not perceive more probability in…
René Descartes, Selections from the Principles of Philosophy
Names Doubt several times; the author is tied to Doubt in the knowledge graph.
The natural tendency of man is not to press home a doubt, but to cut inquiry as short as possible. The practical man's impatience with theory has become a proverb; it expresses just the feeling that, since the thinking process is of use only in substituting certainty for doubt, any apparent prolongation of it is useless speculation, wasting time and diverting the mind from important issues. To follow the line of…
John Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic
Names Doubt several times; states what Doubt is.
Philosophers who discussed Doubt
Related ideas
- Belief
- Emotion
- Christian existentialism
- Falsifiability
- Pyrrhonism
- Cartesian doubt
- Jurisprudence
- Karl Popper
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Mind
- Heresy
- Mental state
- Pascal's wager
- Probability
- Rhetoric
- René Descartes
- Skepticism
- Scientific method
- Sect
- Søren Kierkegaard
- Logic
- Henri Poincaré
- On Certainty
- Fact
Place in the tradition
Part of Agnosticism.