Nineteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Every individual’s understanding of the world is influenced by their system of beliefs. As a result, the decisions made by every individual are determined by their system of beliefs as well. This belief system is composed of true and false beliefs. An individual’s false beliefs are the result of untested beliefs which have been taken for granted. If an individual attempts to evaluate their beliefs without any criteria to identify false beliefs, they may ignore a part of their belief system to which some kind of sanctity has been attributed by them, or they may replace one false belief with another. Therefore, in order to criticize one’s system of beliefs, having criteria to identify false beliefs appears to be necessary. This paper seeks to propose criteria to identify false beliefs to make critical thinking and revision of belief systems possible. Since cognitive biases are the obstacles on the way of rational thinking and are therefore the main cause to create false beliefs, the method used in this paper to identify false beliefs is studying the nature of cognitive biases and the way they work, in order to identify cognitive biases and hence false beliefs.