The Hidden Processes of Belief

On the 30th I am going to a game at Roosevelt High School. This location that has historical significance to me. I performed in an assembly when I was a sophomore. The goal of these kind of assemblies was to tell the student congregation about the Gospel without actually telling them that is what they were talking about. In other words lead them into what the church’s beliefs are without actually saying you are leading them to the church's beliefs as you can't outright do that in a public school.

All someone can do in this situation is keep the message vague enough and see if they can connect all the dots on their own. Proselytizing would still be done by public high schools but not directly on campus. Groups of preachers would rather right outside of the school boundaries to push beliefs as school got out.

There are some who accuse street epistemology practitioners of having a hidden agenda too.

This is due to the fact that that in SE you do not disclose your positions at the start. Over the years many in SE are opening up to being a bit more open on positions especially if the person being interviewed asks them. There is still a discussion on whether to focus on the interviewers conclusions when the steps to their reasoning are the primary goal of this exercise. The end result should not get in the way of how the IL got to where they are.

The production I was a part of didn't do that. There wasn't a deep investigation into how our belief structure came about in contrast to other belief systems. When a frequent visitor to our youth group wrote an article in the public high school's paper about the importance of supporting religious pluralism we were told the belief was wrong. We were not told how it was wrong. In the same way the end result of what we were, essentially preaching, was semi-hidden and unknown. How can someone build even the most basic of foundations without a deep look into how we arrived at the conclusion over competing explanations? This gives you a faulty foundation for belief.

An emerging way of doing street epistemology is to examine hidden claims.

When the one conducting the interview doesn't know what the interlocker is arguing for it allows for their bias to get out of the way and allows for SE to get past its initial short-comings. It is to the credit of the public education system that the conclusion of what we were talking about shouldn't be rushed into. It is perhaps detrimental that we consider anything without a clear pathway provided from the first step to the arrival point. Why even vaguely kick around ideas without having a clearer context to where they came from?

Here are some examples of hidden SE. Lately this technique is being picked up in more SE channels and in spectrum SE. In spectrum SE you stand on a position ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree and are free to move along gradations of belief as the discussion progresses.