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this business of belief gets tricky if you keep the levels you're talking about straight---for example in the haze that the op, the question posed is mostly about ideological frames, which folk use to selected, weight and sequence information---what prompts someone to select one as over against another. and ideological frame can operate as rules do in a proof, and so the same power and problems--a result (a political position) can *be* logical in that it doesn't violate the rules no matter what the frame is. there's nothing about logic that necessarily leads you to put the frame itself into question, any more than there's any particular impetus in formal logic to put the rules of formal logic itself into question (sometimes i wonder if inertia in this respect explains why something like godel's theorem was not always understood as being the case, but that's another matter)---and, following godel--formal logic presupposes an invested participant, just like any other game does. so logic in itself does not enable you to avoid political judgments. invoking logic as a weapon inside a political debate doesn't guarantee anything about your position as over against that of another, either.
generally, political debate seems about who gets to control the premises, who gets to define information into or out of the point of departure for thinking about the social world. so my inner marxist tends to prompt me to argue against the vailidity of a separation between, say, economic activity and other forms of social life. a neo-liberal sort would not accept this, and my thinking has generally been that if you can get a neoliberal type to accept that you cannot make the separation between the economy and everything else, that neoliberalism itself comes undone, in the sense that it stops making sense.
but this doesn't explain anything about why one would come to buy into one frame or another.
to get there, you'd have to be careful about levels of argument, because without that semantic questions become pissy. witness the discussion between filtherton and knife missle above. the statement "i believe jerry falwell to be an influential man" involves a different order of relation to information than does "i believe markets to be rational" or "i believe that secret messages are transmitted to me across the box scores for baseball games". the "i believe" is the same, and maybe it's a peculiarity of english that statements regarding factual arrangements (jerry falwell was an influential man" and statements regarding committments to arbitrary or metaphysical states of affairs (markets are rational, secret messages are contained in box scores) are amenable to being grouped as the same kind of arrangement. maybe this is a real problem and a committee should be notified to make a change. or we should start a change. anyway, in the first case, appeal doesn't mean the same thing as it might in the other two--one appeals to the facts of the matter in the first case, which are not objectionable insofar as they describe a state of affairs, quite apart from what you think of it. one wonders about the appeal of these metaphysical committments in the other cases.
the mode of reference is different, the meanings shift.
there's stuff about appeal/how attractors work at the level of "real-time" processing of information about the world that is interesting to think about, and doing that makes ideological committments scary business, and that seems to me a way of getting to whatever it is that the op is on about, but to do that, like is said, you have to keep levels straight and types of statements separated.
but i gotta go.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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