Psychologically, then, the everyday concept of belief and the philosophical one differ from each other in the most salient way imaginable: in how we experience them. Functionally, however, they are virtually indistinguishable. Whether we are aware of our beliefs or not, they are all, like Greenspan’s free-market philosophy, models of the world. In the literal sense, a model of the world is a map, and that’s basically what beliefs are, too: mental representations of our physical, social, emotional, spiritual, and political landscapes. My explicit belief that my father-in-law dislikes me is
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