Les ambiguïtés de la croyance

Abstract

Drawing upon the observation—already made by others—of a loss of interest in the concept of belief in several fields of the social sciences, this contribution intends to show where the ambiguities of this concept come from, based on a critical discussion of the arguments of Bruno Latour. From there, the issue at stake is to reconstruct a concept of belief that satisfies its necessary contextualization and may be used in a differentiated way depending on the objects with which we are confronted. To this end, the article offers an outline of a typology of beliefs, whose relevance is assessed through three brief case studies.

Keywords

• belief
• assent
• religion
• implicit faith
• secularization
• psychological function