This column will change your life: From alief to belief | Tamar Szabó Gendler
In a famous investigation of disgust, the psychologist Paul Rozin asked people to eat fudge that had been moulded to look like dog faeces, and drink soup from a brand new, pristine bedpan. These were educated adults, raised in a rationalist culture; they knew the fudge was fudge, the bedpan clean. Still, many recoiled (maybe you did, too, just reading that) and showed a marked preference for food that less closely resembled what all food eventually becomes. Nor is disgust the only realm in which our responses blatantly contradict what we know, as visitors to Toronto discover when they step on to the glass-bottomed viewing deck of the 553m-high CN Tower. I knew the floor was secure, but my lurching stomach didn’t agree. There’s a good restaurant at the top of the tower, but take my advice: visit it after the viewing deck. The philosopher Tamar Gendler has coined the word “alief” to describe what’s going on in our minds here. If beliefs are conscious responses to how we think things are,
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