- Sixth, a belief is a unit of indeterminate size that may be contracted or extended to a certain degree in accordance with the requirements of a situation and of an individual. In this respect a belief resembles such cognitive units as "chunks" in learning, sentence in linguistics, and proposition in logic, but differs from other units, mainly attitudes. The extensions occur in the form of elaborations append to a certain nucleus that functions as the core of the belief. These elaborations often assume the role of specifications imposed on the more general meaning of the nucleus. For example, the nuclear unit may be "Belief is a cognitive unit," whereas potential appendable specifications could be "of indeterminate size," "with an important function for molar behavior," "consisting of concepts," "accepted by some investigators," etc. The number of these appended elaborations is potentially infinite but is practically limited through the requirements of the context.
So if someone has a belief, say 'I should be nice because other people are nice', then this belief may be modified in many different ways that could have an impact during an interaction. For instance someone could modify that a little by adding a 'maybe' before it. The core of the belief would always be that quoted statement, however it could be modified and changed in many different ways depending on the situation. It may even be changed in ways that aren't possible to verbally describe, but its nature would still be different.
- Seventh, as a unit of meaning each belief is embedded in networks of beliefs and other units on the same level as beliefs, as well as on other higher and lower levels of comprehensiveness. In this respect belief resembles all other major types of cognitive units, although the nature and extent of the auxiliary networks differ. Contextual embeddedness not only implies relations with the preceding and succeeding beliefs that form a kind of immediate environment for the focal belief; it also includes relations with beliefs that may not actually occur in a particular situation but are closely allied to the focal belief. For example, there may be beliefs that support the focal belief; exemplify it, for instance by personal memories; are derived from it, perhaps by a method similar to "evaluative assertion analysis"; or form presuppositions necessary for its understanding. Frequently beliefs are embedded in a hierarchy as, for instance, a hierarchy ordered in accordance with preference, generality, credibility, or utility with regard to a particular purpose, and so on. Finally, each belief is also embedded in more comprehensive structures. Those include, for example, constellations of the beliefs centered on some criterial referent as the "belief system", the group of attitudes, or the "semantic field" as conceived in linguistics. A similar group of beliefs, which we call belief cluster, is of important in our context. WE define it as a constellation of beliefs focused on a certain theme, which is represented by means of at least one specific meaning value shared by all the beliefs included in the belief cluster. ON a higher level, the grouping of beliefs may become more inclusive and take the form of a doctrine, ideology, or faith, or even of the totality of all the individual's knowledge. WE do not share the common assumption that more inclusive groupings of beliefs are necessarily subject to the striving for consonance and balance.
- The wider and narrower contexts in which a belief is embedded constitute a kind of tacit knowledge that turns each belief into the vertex of pyramid, a point beyond which increasingly large domains of knowledge unfold the closer we approach it. This implies that each belief is a sample from a much larger constellation of beliefs on various levels. Practically it means not only that the strength or utility of a belief for the individual as well as for a researcher depend on this submerged population of beliefs but also that certain margins of error are allowed the researcher in sampling beliefs from the invisible, actual, and potential ocean of beliefs.
Beliefs help to answer the question, "what does this mean", or "What does this mean to me and for me?", or "what am I to do?". When bringing up a response, not just one belief might be the answer - each belief is related to many other different beliefs that might also have an impact on you. There may be a hierarchy of beliefs that relate to the purpose you brought up one of the beliefs for. It may not be possible to tell which beliefs are related to the purpose at hand, many different things could have an impact on our thoughts and our emotions that we aren't aware of - beliefs, attitudes, other thoughts, etc.
