Table of Contents
Chapter 1: How to Explain Anything
* Explanations solve mysteries
* Explanations provide understanding
* Explanations are stories with purposes
* Telling a story about belief
* How to know if a story is true
Chapter 2: What Belief Isn’t
* Two historical mistakes about belief
* Theories of belief
* Beliefs are not mental states
* Beliefs are not dispositions
* Beliefs are not brain events
Chapter 3: What Belief Is
* Beliefs do many things
* Examples of belief give us clues
* Belief isn’t what we thought
* Belief is behavior
* We hold beliefs in three basic ways
Chapter 4: Why Saadia and Maimonides Couldn’t Believe -- But Did
* How Medieval Islam challenged Judaism and Christianity
* Can you believe the unbelievable?
* Groucho Marx in Babylonia
* Saadia defends belief
* Maimonides insists on beliefs you can’t believe
Chapter 5: Why Spinoza Could Believe -- But Didn’t
* Spinoza’s religious motivation
* Spinoza’s concept of belief
* Spinoza’s concept of God
* God in idea and belief
* What Spinoza believed
Chapter 6: Why Mendelssohn Changed the Subject
* The Socrates of Berlin
* The Lavater affair
* Mendelssohn’s concept of belief
* Mendelssohn’s “search for light and right”
* Mendelssohn’s key conflict
Chapter 7: Belief and Biology
* Biblical Biology 101
* From creation to evolution
* The problem of altruism
* Emotion as calculation
* The neuroscience of practice
Chapter 8: What Beliefs Do
* Beliefs satisfy psychological needs
* Beliefs provide factual guidance
* Beliefs provide moral guidance
* Beliefs indicate membership
* Beliefs express and encourage loyalty
Chapter 9: What Justifies Belief
* Conventional wisdom about justification
* Backward and forward
* It’s complicated
* Misapplying justification
* Is factual truth intrinsically good?
Chapter 10: Belief in the Braino Machine
* Plato’s cave prisoners see shadows
* Descartes thwarts his evil demon
* Reid’s common sense strikes back
* Putnam puts brains in a vat
* Meaning and truth cast their shadows
Chapter 11: How Beliefs Have Meaning
* Meaning starts with connection
* Defining meaning
* Meaning for groups
* How "unbelievable" beliefs have meaning
* How mixed-domain beliefs are meaningful
Chapter 12: How the Ineffable Leads to Religion
* Our unavoidable leap of faith
* What makes associations true or false
* How we leap into religion
* How Judaism made the leap
* How Christianity made the leap
Chapter 13: How Description Shapes Truth
* How descriptions shape truth
* What is a foundational description?
* The main theories of truth
* How we test for truth
* What is truth?
Chapter 14: Does It Make Any Difference What We Believe?
* Postmodernism
* Knowledge approaches absolute truth
* Situations and purposes with “one truth”
* Four seductive fallacies
* When argument can work
Chapter 15: Why Be Tolerant?
* What is tolerance?
* Tolerance recognizes self-interest
* Tolerance recognizes reasons for difference
* Tolerance recognizes our limitations
* Tolerance recognizes dignity of all people
Chapter 16: Building Tolerant Societies
* Choose the achievable imperfect
* Make Tolerance Easier
* Mitigate kin selection hostilities
* Use the power of beliefs
* It all begins with you ...
