This is http://www.essayz.com/a9110031.htm Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay Click HERE on this line to find essays via Your-Key-Words. {Most frequent wordstarts of each essay will be put here.} ========================================================== %CREDIBILITY PERSON TRUST RELIABLE PARADIGM FAITH 911003 The credibility of a person depends upon how reliable the person is, upon how faithful the person is to the dominant paradigm, and upon the person's integrity/honesty. The credibility of a person pertains to how willing other people are to believe, trust, rely upon, respect, and in general hold a person in high esteem. We do not want to rely upon a person whose behavior is erratic, unpredictable, changeable, senseless, etc. The credibility of a person thus depends upon how well we understand the person's behavior as being in keeping with our expectations that the person will behave in keeping with a paradigm which we understand and respect. A person may be a person of integrity and may be totally honest, but may be living in keeping with a paradigm other than any which we understand and respect. Such a honest person of integrity may appear to us to be totally unreliable, because the person's behavior will make no sense to us in terms of the paradigm(s) which we understand and respect. Not all honest people of integrity are regarded as being credible people. Many creative people at the cutting edge of human developments are not credible people, because they violate the patterns of thought of old paradigms. We may regard a person as not credible because it is clear to us that the person is operating in terms of a paradigm in which the rule is to get ahead in whatever way possible; and manipulations of people, relationships, facts, truths and perceptions are regarded as perfectly normal and natural. Such people are not credible because we cannot rely upon them to be open and honest with us; for they are reliably manipulative and dishonest. We can rely upon them to do violence to us in one way or another. We do not want that kind of reliability and so tend to avoid it and those people who initiate it. We and they become alienated from each other, and through such alienation the manipulative behavior is intensified. A person may be not credible to us because the person is operating in terms of some belief/trust in a different set of "facts" and/or "theories" regarding how processes/changes occur. Militarists and pacifists operate in terms of quite different sets of "facts" and "theories" about how people think, feel, and behave; and thy often do not regard each other as being credible persons. People who are primarily interested in teaching science students as persons are quite different from people who are primarily motivated to do pure objective research, and are expected to teach science courses wherein the only emphasis is upon the subject-matter- content. The latter researchers barely relate to students as persons. The former barely relate to new scientific discoveries. They do not regard each other as credible persons, and so the "crisis" in science education is a perpetual state of human affairs; because such people do not really listen to other people whom they do not regard as credible. (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================