Thomas Kun

Belief is important because it is a starting point for what we later think is correct about the world at large. We usually take belief to be something like "an attitude that something is the case and is true". So, by general observations and introspections of the way things seem to be, we infer that so-and-so is the case. So, belief is based on a kind of common-sense notion of how the world actually is (in some way). In natural science, we have firm notions of how we establish that matters are correct. But in the social sciences and humanities, we do not have such firmly established procedures and so we have to rely on our beliefs more than in the hard sciences. The foundations of social knowledge are based on such beliefs about how matters are, vis-à-vis the assumptions about what a human being is, within a model of civilized social reality in the world.