The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines a "belief" as "the attitude we have, roughly, whenever we take something to be the case or regard it as true. ... Most contemporary philosophers characterize belief as a 'propositional attitude,' [where] propositions are generally taken to be whatever it is that sentences express. For example ... 'snow is white.'"
Beliefs, then, (a) are expressed in language, (b) refer to some specific contents such as "snow," and (c) express some truth about those contents. The truth need not be an empirical statement about the world -- propositions such as "x is the square root of x-squared" are also beliefs under this definition even when there is no empirical referent for "x." Beliefs can be about a single thing, or about the relationships between things, in which case they might or might not be expressed as formal rules: e.g., "every bird has wings." Language, representations, rules, and the potential for abstraction all suggest that beliefs are very much connected to the Narrative Mind, and indeed, parts of the cortex in the temporal lobe (such as Wernicke's area which handles language representation) are essential for formulating and evaluating propositional statements.
If a belief is a propositional attitude, it should then be possible to modify such an attitude through the careful application of logic and evidence. The Narrative Mind does respond well to logical arguments, and can think abstractly about many things. This is the basis for cognitive therapy and other strategies that attempt to modify people's behavior by changing the things they believe. If you accept the view that the Narrative Mind does not directly control behavior -- which is foundational to Two Minds Theory -- it shouldn't be too surprising that such efforts often fail to change behavior.
But what's remarkable is that they often don't even change beliefs. People are resistant to modifying their "propositional attitudes" on many topics, even when confronted with strong evidence or arguments to the contrary -- a significant weakness of cognitive therapy unless it is also married to behaviorist techniques. Part of this is due to "motivated reasoning," the Narrative Mind's tendency to use cognitive biases that reinforce existing beliefs and avoid challenging new information. People's beliefs also tend to align with their underlying principles or values, which suggests that beliefs are not purely evaluations of probability or factual accuracy. This is because our Narrative Minds have the primary mission of keeping us in good relationships with other people -- they are optimized for survival in small groups, not for discovering propositional truths. Just like a large-language model, the Narrative Mind creates abstractions for the purpose of communicating with others, not based on factual accuracy. But also like a large-language model, it has a strong tendency to tell you what you want to hear.
Why is the supposedly logical Narrative Mind like this? It seems that even Narrative thinking has an important Intuitive component. Interestingly, the very term belief acknowledges this fact. It comes from the proto-German ga-leubh, meaning care, desire, or love. The same root word is behind the German liebe, and the English love. In this view, then, a belief is not a propositional truth statement about reality, but instead "an idea that you love." The emotional mechanics of the Intuitive Mind are involved in the conversion of a logic statement into a true belief, an idea that someone is likely to hang onto even in the face of challenges. Facts and figures therefore are not useful in changing beliefs, unless that emotional response from the Intuitive Mind is also engaged, and to some extent re-written. This is why I wrote in my blog post on cognitive restructuring that an idea can be very powerful in shaping future behavior, but only if you truly believe in that idea. As long as you feel at some deep level that you are lying to yourself, the new idea will have no power in your life; it will stay at the abstract level of the Narrative Mind, which doesn't control behavior.
I'd like to end on a note about why scientists and philosophers seem sometimes able to overcome this basic limitation of the Narrative Mind. That's not to say that they aren't also frequently convinced by false ideas that have become entrenched as commonly-accepted paradigm views. The secret is that some people have become more in love with the idea of discovering truth through specific methods -- those of science or those of propositional logic and reasoning. That allows them to overcome the limitations of the Narrative Mind, because the idea that they are in love with is the idea that they can be proven wrong as long as the proof is grounded in certain accepted methodologies. At its best, the legal system is another approach that can overcome Narrative-Mind limitations, through a commitment to the idea of justice rather than retribution. Contrary to philosophers like Donald Hoffman who argue that we cannot ever know objective reality, I believe that people can overcome our inherent cognitive limitations. But we do it through beliefs that are still at some level irrational.
It's interesting that the philosophers provided the logic-based definition of "belief" with which I opened this blog post. One might think that philosophy would be the discipline most open to a psychological understanding of beliefs as "ideas that you love." The name of that discipline, after all, comes from the Greek filios and sophia, love of wisdom. When we "learn to love the questions themselves" (as advised by Rainer Maria Rilke), that is when we can come closest to seeing the world as it is.
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