"One's beliefs are not fixed for all time. Why does a person revise or at least question her beliefs? What are the occasions of revision? Perhaps she was unaware that she held inconsistent beliefs but is not aware; perhaps she was aware that she held inconsistent beliefs but not finds herself in a situation in which she can no longer tolerate the inconsistency and must resolve it. Perhaps due to some new experience, whether her own or that of some trusted other on whom she relies, she has acquired a new belief inconsistent with one or more beliefs previously held; or perhaps the new belief is not inconsistent with any previously held belief but nonetheless renders her system or "web" of beliefs less balanced or integrated or coherent and more ad hoc. Perhaps she simply finds herself in a situation in which one or more of her beliefs is subjected to a challenge that, as an existential or at least practical matter, she cannot ignore. Revision of one or more of the beliefs that constitute a person's web of beliefs may require revision of one or more further beliefs, and so go, given the extent to which a person's beliefs are interdependent." [Michael J. Perry, Morality, Politics, and Law 27 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)]

"Conceptions of the good are normally fairly open to change in the light of experience, and they are normally composed, like a mosaic, of many distinct interests and commitments, usually exhibiting some general pattern, but probably not a very clear one.

* * * *

Conceptions of the good are normally the outcome of a person's experiences of satisfaction and disappointment, of the personal influences in his life, of his temperament and his talents and his imagination, and of the habits prevailing around him, rather than of original thought and abstract speculation." [Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience 103, 104 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989)]

"[Some writers and some texts] seek to change he minds of their readers; they have designs on us; they are out to do us good; and they require our participation in what is, more often than not, the painful and exhausting process of self-examination and self criticism. . . . In all of these works, an uncomfortable and unsettling experience is offered as the way to self-knowledge, in the hope that self-knowledge will be preliminary to the emergence of a better self, with a better (or at least more self-aware) mind. And by offering that experience rather than another, these works shift the focus of attention from themselves and from what is happening in their formal confines to the reader and what is happening in the confines of his mind and heart." [Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth Century Literature 349-371 (1972)]

"Moral reflection attempts, at its best, a knowledgeable revision of the world that human practice presents. . . . We cannot change our behavior unless, in some respects, our perception of the world changes. In this task, the ethicist theorizes--quite literally--and thus liberates.

Unfortunately, theorizing suggests to the practical person a remote and abstract enterprise, lacking in relevance and payoff, blindly distant from the world of practice. But classically understood, the theorist provides a fresh and liberating vision of the world. . . . The word 'theory' in its Greek root refers to vision. Appropriately, the word 'theater' is also related to theoria because theater, like good theory, presents us with a world to see and frees us from the local and given." [William F. May, The Physician's Covenant: Images of the Healer in Medical Ethics 3 (Lexington, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2nd ed, 2000)1983)]

"Furthermore, mark you, the man who wishes to persuade people will not be negligent as to the matter of character; no, on the contrary, he will apply himself above all to establish a most honorable name among his fellow-citizens; for who does not know that works carry greater conviction when spoken by men of good repute than when spoken by men who live under a cloud, and that the argument which is made by a man's life is of more weight than that which is furnished by words? Therefore, the stronger a man's desire to persuade his hearers, the more zealously will he strive to be honorable and to have the esteem of his fellow-citizens. . . ." [Socrates, Orations, quoted in Paul Nash, Models of Man 59-74, at 73 (New York: Wiley, 1968)]

"For centuries, the Greek imagination attempted to find the secrets of rhetoric and poetry that would move soul, the way of words and the way with words that would speak to soul, the magic in words that would heal soul. The person who could bring "cheering speech" was sought after and esteemed even more than the physician who practiced the art of medicines and procedures that later came to be known as the ‘silent art.' Such a silent art could heal the body, temper the mind, restore spirit to the blood and humorous. But it could not reach soul; it did not speak to psyche." [Russell A. Lockhart, Words as Eggs: Psyche in Language and Clinic 86 (Irving, Texas: Spring Publications, 1983)]

"When I was in college I became close friends with someone whose political beliefs were different from mine. We are still good friends. We disagreed about certain matters that we considered important. We talked about these issues a lot, partly because we found them interesting and partly because we could not understand why we disagreed. Most important, however, we were close friends, and we each cared a great deal about what the other thought. After four years of these discussions, I became frustrated because I could not convince my friend that he was wrong about certain things. He believed things that I considered, and still consider, morally wrong. I had assumed all along that if we talked long enough, and that if we were both people of good faith trying to reach the right answer, we would eventually agree. But we did not agree.

I found that I had to give up one of the underlying assumptions on which I had based our long conversations. I could give up the idea that my friend was intelligent. In that case our disagreement could be explained by his stupidity. Or I could give up the idea that I was intelligent and explain or disagreement by my inadequate mental capacity. Alternatively, I could give up the idea that we were both acting in good faith, that we were both trying to reach the right answers and were not just playing games with each other. But I believed that we were intelligent people of good will. I could also conclude that one or both of us were mistaken about what was right. But this did not make sense to me. We held our different positions because of values that were important to us, and I did not see how we could be mistaken about what was important to us. The only alternative was to give up the final assumption: the belief that if we talked long enough we could eventually agree. And that is what I did." [Joseph Singer, The Player and the Cards: Nihilism and Legal Theory, 94 Yale L. J. 1 (1984)]

"[N]either Plato nor any other philosopher can force the audience to think in a certain way. At best the audience can be persuaded to go along or give assent. At worst the audience will be persuaded neither to believe nor to entertain the arguments of the philosopher. Plato's writing can as easily produce hostility or indifference in an audience as it can a love of philosophy." [Jeff Mason, Philosophical Rhetoric: The Function of Indirection in Philosophical Writing xii-xiii (New York: Routledge, 1989)]

"I do not think that we can become conscious of anything which at one level we do not already know, and which we are not, in some way, prepared for and willing to recognize." [Sukie Colegrave, The Spirit of the Valley: The Masculine and Feminine in the Human Psyche 5 (Los Angeles: J. P.Tarcher, 1979)]

"Man living in society has discussions with his fellows and tries to bring them to share some of his views and to perform certain actions. Relatively rarely does he have recourse solely to coercion in order to do this. In general, he seeks to persuade or to convince; and to this end he reasons. . . ." [Chaim Perelman, The Idea of Justice and the Problem of Argument 168 (New York: Humanities Press, 1963)]

Judgment