Limiting Beliefs and Epistemology / Formal Logic

[melontonin]

Hi, hope everyone's doing well. 

Does anyone have advice about improving your epistemology to start unrooting limiting beliefs? I feel like my ability to distinguish truth from falsehood is very weak because I'll get these absurd thought patterns that, although superficially I can see are ridiculous, I can't feel are ridiculous - I still feel them as though they're true. I've been reading books on critical thinking and epistemology which has helped to some extent but I haven't been doing it for too long so I don't think I've seen the full benefits of it yet.  Also, would learning formal logic be valuable for specifically evaluating the inferences the arguments are based on or do you think that'd just be getting sidetracked?

One thing that works for some of them is just to apply empiricism but then for others, it feels like it's not within that domain so it feels like to just deny it on the basis of empiricism would be the same kind of reductionism/bypassing of modernist science. For example, one thing that empiricism could be used for is "everyone will laugh at you if you share your art" because I can just literally perform the experiment to see whether that's true. But for example, I get thought patterns like "you've got no skills which means you're worthless and deserve to die because you have no utility to society." That doesn't feel like it pertains to empiricism, it feels like more of an ethical question so for me to just deny it on the basis that it doesn't correspond to anything empirically observable feels like bypassing. It almost feels equivalent to saying that "meaning" or "value" don't exist because they're not empirically observable phenomena. I have similar confusion around socially constructed concepts and what degree of reality they have - whether I can just completely negate the existence of thought patterns about "status" simply because it's not a sensory empirical object, for example.

Anyway, they're just specific examples. The broader question I'm asking is just whether anyone has any advice for unrooting beliefs. 

Thanks in advance for any responses.

Peace and love.