This is technically true, in the sense that belief won’t hurt me in and of itself. But beliefs inform our actions, and once the two are connected, beliefs acquire causal power to hurt me.
I think the folk epistemology implied in the distinction between words like “suspect,” “think,” “feel,” “believe,” and “know” is, on the whole, fairly useful. You can flatten them all into the word “believe” but you lose something. The dogma here is also to assign probabilities to your beliefs—the zoo of belief-verbs is just a cognitively cheap way of doing so.
This is technically true, in the sense that belief won’t hurt me in and of itself. But beliefs inform our actions, and once the two are connected, beliefs acquire causal power to hurt me.
Also, we have a bias against overturning beliefs.
I think the folk epistemology implied in the distinction between words like “suspect,” “think,” “feel,” “believe,” and “know” is, on the whole, fairly useful. You can flatten them all into the word “believe” but you lose something. The dogma here is also to assign probabilities to your beliefs—the zoo of belief-verbs is just a cognitively cheap way of doing so.