ABSTRACT
Humans cannot operate without some level of belief in their experience; nor can they mature, progress or adapt successfully to a complex or changing social and ‘physical’ environment without critical reflection on what they believe to be the case. Operationally, these two factors are not separable: they are multidimensional and intertwined, fed by batteries of sense-receptors acute to some stimuli, blind to others; then ‘organised’ and distributed by the hyper-connected networks of the human brain. It is also characteristic of human society, or at least of European thought, that the two factors become, to some extent, separated, indeed specialised, and this has unintended, undesirable outcomes. The traditional separation has taken two forms: first, the ‘disciplines’ associated with belief which include religion, custom, culture, common sense; and second, those associated with the criticism of belief, which are philosophy and science (with its conceptual divisions) and mathematics.
