"Recent studies in belief actually restore its relationships to a doing. Doubtless in a ling, especially Mediteranean tradition, the believed object has been isolated from the collective and individual steps that it brought together in contracts. Cut of from the act that posited it, regarded as a "mental occurance", belief received the comprehensively negative definition corresponding to what one does not know or see, in other words, of being the other of knowledge or sight. It whas labelled with such an identity by an epistemology that judged knowledge according to the truth value with which an utterance can be affected and which distributed this truth according to its two possible sources, memory or proof. In another, especially Anglo-Saxon tradition - one linked to the philosophical rigour of an "individualism"that distinguishes the act from its object - belief appears as the positive formality of an act of uttering related to a (willing) to do of the subject and to a contract entered into between social and/or symbolic partners. It thus refers to an acting.
... one could adopt the thesis that a belief devoid [verstoken, JvB] of practical implications is not a belief. With the bluntness characteristic of the style of his later years Pierre Janet rightly said: 'Fur us, belief is nothing more than a promise of action: to believe is to act; to say that we believe in something is to say: we shall do something.'"
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