ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the question raised in the previous chapter about the community experience characteristic of Western societies and how nationalism is an instance of this dialectic. It claims that the fundamental experience of community in Western societies is doxastic in nature; that is, membership is structured through shared narratives, their resultant belief states, and thus entails the sustenance of doxastic communities. It delineates some important logical and sociological conditions necessary for the sustenance of those communities. Finally, it shows how this hypothesis can better explain the phenomenon of nationalism in the context of Western societies and is better suited to understand the impact of a doxastic community experience (in the form of nationalism) when attempting to understand a culture where community membership is not structured in the same way.
