↪neomac
It is deductively valid. It'd be stupid not to notice. — Bartricks

Seriously?! Pls, formalise your argument as it is so we can laugh harder at your stupid claim.

As that argument is deductively valid it will, if sound, refute all other views about the matter. — Bartricks

It's the most stupid claim I've read so far in this thread to consider this argument (as it is) deductively valid.

If you are debating with a theist, I would say for them belief implies truth. — javi2541997

I disagree with that (but maybe you are simply confusing the truth claim intrinsic to any belief with the logic implication between belief and the truth of what is believed): "S believes that God exists" does not logically imply "God exists" (even for the religious believer... if s/he conforms to logic of course).
Besides here one of the assumptions of the formal debate between Banno and CreativeSoul that inspired this thread, is that we are talking about ordinary belief not about religious belief (or faith):

The sort of belief I intend to discuss is not the sort found in church, and that might better be called faith. The beliefs to be examined are the common everyday stuff, that the cup is on the shelf or that the sun is rising. Nothing too transcendent here. But if we start with the everyday, we might work towards such profundity.

(source: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/482145)

1. if the universe was temporally infinite, then there would be no 1st moment
2. if there was no 1st moment, then there was no 2nd moment
3. if there was no 2nd moment, then there was no 3rd moment
4. ... and so on and so forth ...
5. ... then there would be no now
6. since now exists, we started out wrong, i.e. the universe is not temporally infinite — jorndoe

"now" doesn't identify a moment relative to a temporal series. Indeed you do not need to know the timestamp of the current moment, to know that is now. This is to say that no counting from a "first moment" will ever reach a "now" even if the past temporal series was finite, unless one already knows what now is. On the other side one can count a series of temporal events starting from the moment identified as now. So the logic of "now" doesn't provide any evidence that the past/future temporal series are finite, on the contrary it admits that possibility (since one can count from now to the past or to the future indefinitely).

> Belief does not imply truth
One obvious consequence of a belief being a relation between an individual and a proposition is that the truth of the proposition is unrelated to the truth of the belief.

This consequence is not obvious at all. And this is related to the reasons clarified here. Indeed also knowledge can be put into a relational form K(S,p) between an individual and a proposition, yet the truth of K(S,p) is not independent from the truth of p. So it is not the relation between individual and proposition itself that guarantees that the truth of the proposition is unrelated to the truth of the belief ascription.

> Is it possible for broken clocks to work?

No. And you know why? It’s because “broken” and “to work” are contradictory properties.
On the other side it is possible for clocks to be working or to be broken.

> I've objected to the idea of attributing a belief that could be true to a person who has false belief, which amounts to an accounting malpractice. False belief cannot be true. I'm also noting that not a single iteration I've offered is a belief that could have been true. You seem to think that that is a problem.

The problem is that:

• False beliefs are not to be equated to contradictory beliefs
• Mere false beliefs can be occasionally false (like "that clock is working"), but they could have been true (counterfactual), while a contradictory belief is always false (as you yourself claimed “a broken clock is working - is always false”).

Here are my questions to you: which one of these 2 claims of mine are you denying? For me any attempt to deny any of these 2 claims is catastrophic.
If you admit both then you are not justified in claiming that "Jack believes that broken clock is working" is not attributing to Jack a belief content that is not contradictory, because the belief content "that broken clock is working" is contradictory,
To attribute a false belief to someone, it's enough to say "S mistakenly believes that p", there is absolutely no need to touch the belief content to convey the idea that S's belief is false. Also because rendering the belief content in such a way that it expresses a false belief (by making it misleadingly look contradictory), it presupposes the identification of such belief content prior to this revisionist rendering, so independently from this manipulation. If you can't identify what someone is aware of believing while believing it, you can not even exactly identify what you claim they are unaware of believing (truth/knowledge assessments about beliefs presuppose belief ascriptions, not the other way around!).




> False dilemma. There are more ways to understand Jack's belief than what you've offered here as the only two...

Then show me exactly what the third option is and how it derives from your own definition of belief as “meaningful correlations drawn between directly and/or indirectly perceptible things” to also prove that it effectively has explanatory power as you claim.

> Evidently you do not see the difference between believing "a broken clock is working" and believing a broken clock is working. The former is belief about language use, and the latter is belief about broken clocks. The former has propositional content. The latter has broken clocks as content.

I did see the difference. But I find your answer not only unsatisfactory but also fishy. Assuming your convention, you distinguish between quoted (“S believes that ‘p’”) and unquoted belief content (“S believes that p”). The first one is a propositional attitude and the second one is not. Here is the convention applied to the example of Jack: “Jack believes ‘that broken clock is working’” and “Jack believes that broken clock is working”, in both cases the belief content includes 3 items: “clock”, “broken”, “is working”. So it’s true but suspiciously incomplete to claim that the latter rendering of Jack’s belief has broken clocks as content. The non-propositional content of Jack’s belief has 3 items in it, not just broken clock, but broken clock is working.
Besides what kind of entities are these items? Are they linguistic terms? Are they meanings? Are they referents in the real world? What are they? And isn’t there a meaningful correlation drawn between these 3 items since they are the content of Jack’s belief? What is this meaningful correlation? Isn't this correlation supposed to show an impossible situation b/c broken clocks do not work? And how come that it's impossible that broken clocks do not work if not for the fact that the same clock is attributed or appears to instantiate contradictory properties ("broken" and "is working")?
Looking forward to hearing your answers.

> What would it have taken in order for Jack's belief that that particular clock was working to have been true at time t1?

If that particular clock at time t1 had been working, Jack’s belief would have been true.



> I've no inclination to cut through all the misattribution of meaning that you've been imparting upon select quotes, saying I've said things that I haven't, claiming what I've said leads somewhere that it does not, etc., while doing your best to discredit any parts of my contributions here that pose serious problems for yours, or better yet ignoring them altogether.

Oh boy, it was a good laugh. Thank you!

> Everyone I have asked in the last two weeks had no issue with understanding that we can and sometimes do.

Seriously?! Besides the fact that I have no idea why we should trust your survey, whose results you do not seem to be able to replicate with your interlocutors here. I’m just repeating the same points made thousands times:

• A deviation from common practices of belief ascriptions are tolerated and perceived unproblematic for pragmatic reasons (shared assumptions in the given context), not for accuracy concerns.
• My claim, since the beginning, is that “At t1, Jack believes that broken clock is working” is not a more accurate belief ascription than “At t1, Jack believes that clock is working”, assumed that Jack was simply ignorant about the condition of the clock.

In conclusion, the “unproblematic understanding” argument is not decisive since it can be explained within our common practices, and the issue I have with your views started only and exclusively selectively precisely narrowly specifically with your belief ascription accuracy claims (e.g. that "At time t1, Jack believes that broken clock is working" is a belief ascription more accurate than "At time t1, Jack believes that clock is working" when Jack simply ignores that clock was broken or not-working at t1), especially given the catastrophic line of reasoning you provided so far to support it!



> I've not talked about referents of a belief.

That is why I used the conditional (“even if…”). In any case my objection was justifiably based on the answers you already provided. If a belief is a “meaningful correlations drawn between directly and/or indirectly perceptible things” in “Jack believes that/a broken clock is working” the belief “that/a broken clock is working” either is connecting words, then it’s a contradiction in terminis, or is taken to connect its referents witch include a clock instantiating contradictory properties (broken as in “not working” and “working”). Either way (at the level of the meaning or at the level of the referents) is a contradictory situation, which doesn’t correspond to the belief of Jack (in a simple case of ignorance). BTW you yourself claimed (have you ever read what you write?) that is always false [1] as any contradiction, but since we are not aware of it, then it’s not [2].

> Here is yet another imaginary opponent you've made up for yourself.

Looking forward to hearing more about my imaginary opponents. Oh and btw what is Jack telling you about them? He must be really really upset about them, isn't he?

> You can always just ask me questions.

Well that doesn't seem to be a good strategy either, given the backlog of unanswered questions I addressed to you [3]. Besides nobody is preventing you from trying to explain better what you failed to explain so far, especially if you keep claiming that others misunderstand your own quotations, b/c maybe the problem is not really that others are strawmanning you or being dishonest, but that - given the amount of posts you made - it is very hard for you to clarify your views. Did you think about that? It seems you did [4]. After all, if you are challenging the "conventional view", you should expect that your proposal is perceived as non-obvious.
BTW, since you expressly asked for more questions, here you go: if one believing that broken clock is working at t1, is not aware of believing it at t1 out of ignorance, what is s/he exactly aware of believing while believing that broken clock is working at time t1?



[1]

The proposition, assertion, claim, sentence, statement, thought, belief, and/or utterance - a broken clock is working - is always false. Broken clocks do not work. — creativesoul

[2]

it is not contradictory at all, not in least little bit, to believe that broken clocks are working while doing so. The reason why is simple:when believing such things we do not knowingly do so! We are unaware of the fact that we believe what a broken clock says when we do. We cannot knowingly do so. — creativesoul

[3]
Without going too far back:

if “Jack’s believes that a clock is working” is true, does this imply that “a clock is working” is true? — neomac

Seriously?! I don't get the structure of this explanation at all, if it has one. For sure it is not a deduction. BTW what happened to the “meaningful correlations drawn between directly and/or indirectly perceptible things” in the case of “Jack does not believe ‘a broken clock is working’” and why are we talking “Jack does not believe ‘a broken clock is working’” instead of “Jack believes that a clock is working”?! — neomac

[4]

However, we seem to be having difficulty focusing upon what I think is of importance. That's on me. — creativesoul

> A belief is a propositional attitude.That is, it can be placed in a general form as a relation between someone and a proposition.

> Any belief, including that of creatures that cannot speak, can be placed in the form of a propositional attitude by those who can speak. A cat, for example, can believe that its bowl is empty, but cannot put that belief in the form B(a,p).

This definition of propositional attitude is far from being compelling as it is. Indeed a propositional attitude can be rendered as a relation between someone and a proposition, but not all relations between individuals and propositions express a belief as a propositional attitude, why? Because a propositional attitude is, by common definition, an individual's attitude toward a proposition, not whatever relation one can draw between an individual and a proposition! If some guy G waves his hand at me, and I mistakenly believe that that guy is greeting me instead of someone else next to me, then G is in relation to the propositional content of my belief, yet this is not G's belief.
Besides if and in so far beliefs are propositional attitudes, they are a very specific kind of attitudes toward propositions. Therefore we can question the idea that cats have propositional attitudes even if they can be put in relation to propositions. Indeed they do not seem to be able of holding beliefs as specific attitudes toward specific propositions (with their linguistic nature and alethic status) in the appropriate sense b/c they do not understand propositions (not being linguistic creatures), even if they could be put in relation to a proposition by those who can speak and understand propositions.

@creativesoul

> Do you agree that it is impossible to knowingly believe a falsehood? Where do you stand on that?

I take to be impossible that a rational individual believes something to be the case while knowing it is not, under the condition that both belief/knowledge ascriptions should be taken according to our common practices of belief/knowledge reports.

> If that was according to my claim, I would have said that. I did not say that.

Well I quoted you, so let’s the gods decide. BTW I also added 2 more objections for their holy judgment.

> Seems we get five or six or eight strikes in your game of baseball.

Absolutely no clue about what game you are watching, but sure buddy, do you want some pop-corn?

> Gettier did the same thing to Smith's belief... both of them.

Not interested in talking about whatever you think you have understood about Gettier's ideas.

> True belief cannot be false. If your logic says otherwise, it is mistaken.

But it could have been false (counterfactual), if it’s not an analytic truth. This is what my logic keeps saying. And if your logic says otherwise (as it is seems [1] and I was suspecting all along), it is so badly mistaken (one of the many own goals made by you).
You repeat, I repeat. Oh boy, isn’t that fun? (And I'm the one strawmanning you?! seriously?!)

Only the first remark (one out of five) seems to be worth exploring (or so I wish). That’s not an ideal ratio for interesting debates. So unless you are tired of our exchange, pls, don't waste posts just to tease me out of bitterness or make more apparent that you are being in denial, because there is no philosophical challenge in there. I'm here to play philosophy not facebook, dude.

[1]

False belief cannot be true.

But it could have been true — neomac


Well, here is one place that our respective positions diverge. — creativesoul

> Do you agree that it is humanly impossible to knowingly believe a falsehood?

It’s logically impossible if knowledge presupposes true belief.



> It was an explanation of Jack's belief in the terms I defined "belief" in earlier.

Seriously?! I don't get the structure of this explanation at all, if it has one. For sure it is not a deduction. BTW what happened to the “meaningful correlations drawn between directly and/or indirectly perceptible things” in the case of “Jack does not believe ‘a broken clock is working’” and why are we talking “Jack does not believe ‘a broken clock is working’” instead of “Jack believes that a clock is working”?!

> I'm beginning to seriously question your honesty here given the sheer amount of strawmen, red herrings, and other such non sequiturs that you've provided with your interpretations of my claims.

There there... whatever makes you feel better, my friend.

> There's a bit of irony in that too

Oh not really, this is a likely outcome if you confuse belief ascription with knowledge ascription as you do.



> You presented "a broken clock is working" as a contradiction. Going on to then say that I am attributing a contradictory belief to Jack by saying Jack believes that a broken clock is working at time t1. I did not say that Jack believed "a broken clock is working”. Evidently you do not see the difference between believing "a broken clock is working" and believing a broken clock is working. The former is belief about language use, and the latter is belief about broken clocks. The former has propositional content. The latter has broken clocks as content.

I see the quotation marks which is your preposterous made-up convention, but it doesn’t help you for 3 reasons:

• You wrote: “It is not contradictory at all, not in least little bit, to believe that broken clocks are working while doing so. so. The reason why is simple:when believing such things we do not knowingly do so! We are unaware of the fact that we believe what a broken clock says when we do. We cannot knowingly do so.” So the problem was - according to your claim - that we are not aware of the contradiction, so it is not a contradiction.
• Even if you want to talk about the referents of a belief (according to your questionable understanding of propositional attitudes), then Jack believes that a broken clock is working, is linking together “clock”,”broken”,”working” within the same content of Jack’s belief, which is an impossible state of affairs as much as a squarish circle, b/c the working broken clock has contradictory properties while the state of affairs believed by Jack was epistemically possible and didn’t have contradictory properties.
• Not to mention the fact that your made-up convention based on the quotation marks is still de-facto a linguistic representation, only with a contradictory function b/c it plays the vicarious role of the state of affairs but in this case it can not be true/false in any sense since state of affairs are not the kind of things that can be true or false, but at the same time it must be true or false, otherwise you could not claim that is more accurate than my belief ascription.

> It's false at the time. False belief cannot be true.

But it could have been true. And it’s this counterfactual what grounds the claim that a false belief can not be equated to a contradictory belief. So… again focus, especially if you want to talk about logic, dude.

> You've admittedly attributed a belief to Jack that is true […] What’s stopping you from realizing that you've misattributed belief to Jack as a result of employing the standard practices?

Well, because I didn’t. Quoting myself: I don’t take “Jack believes that a clock is working” as an accurate belief ascription of Jack’s belief in your example. What I would take to be an accurate belief ascription in your example is more something like “Jack believes that clock is working” since belief ascriptions need to be taken in the context.
You are confusing my reasoning about the contrast between “Jack believes a clock is working” vs “Jack believes a broken clock is working” (to point out that attributing a false belief should not be equated to attributing a contradictory belief) with what I claim to be a more appropriate belief ascription in your thought experiment.

> Jack's belief cannot be true for it is false.

It’s false ex-hypothesi but it could have been true. So it can not be rendered with a contradiction b/c a contradiction could not have been true at all. This is the logic difference between a merely false belief and a contradictory belief. That's logic, dude.


> It is not contradictory at all, not in least little bit, to believe that broken clocks are working while doing so. so. The reason why is simple:when believing such things we do not knowingly do so! We are unaware of the fact that we believe what a broken clock says when we do. We cannot knowingly do so.

What did you just write?! That’s the craziest thing I’ve heard so far! Contradiction has to do with logic not with your awareness. The fact that one does not realize to have a contradictory belief doesn’t make it, not in least little bit, less contradictory. And the problem is not that we are not aware of a contradictory belief, the problem is that a false belief is not a contradictory belief! (Not to mention, again, the unaccounted knowledge ascriptions…)



> Jack draws correlations between a broken clock and the time of day while believing a broken clock is working. Jack does not believe "a broken clock is working". Jack believes a broken clock is working.

Seriously?! I don't get the structure of this argument at all, if it has one. For sure it is not a deduction. BTW what happened to the “meaningful correlations drawn between directly and/or indirectly perceptible things” in the case of “Jack does not believe ‘a broken clock is working’” and why are we talking “Jack does not believe ‘a broken clock is working’” instead of “Jack believes that a clock is working”?!



> Is that what counts as a valid objection on your view?

Worse, this is what counts as own goals made by you. But apparently you are not over yet.

> You've ascribed a belief to Jack that is true. I have not. Jack's belief is false.

Correct but I don’t get what is supposed to prove, since it’s not troubling at all for our common understanding of belief ascriptions nor my claims. Here is why:

• By our common understanding of belief ascriptions, “Jack believes that a clock is working” may be true or false, but “Jack believes that a broken clock is working” is attributing to Jack a false belief b/c it is attributing to him a contradictory belief (“a broken clock is working” is a contradiction!), which also implies that this belief would be always false in any context (while merely false beliefs are not always false in any context). The point is that we do not take “Jack believes that a broken clock is working” to be an accurate description of Jack’s merely false belief b/c a false belief should not be equated to a contradictory belief. While you, on the other side, seemed to claim that “Jack believes that a broken clock is working” is not attributing to Jack a contradictory belief, but then I don’t know what else would make apparent that Jack’s belief “a broken clock is working” is false, as you claim.
• To repeat the point I already made, I don’t take “Jack believes that a clock is working” as an accurate belief ascription of Jack’s belief in your example. What I would take to be an accurate belief ascription in your example is more something like “Jack believes that clock is working” since belief ascriptions need to be taken in the context. It’s true that “that clock is working” implies “a clock is working”, but what explains Jack’s behavior in the given context is not the belief that a clock is working instead it’s the belief that that clock is working. If I used the example “Jack believes that a clock is working” is just to contrast it with “Jack believes that a broken clock is working”, remark that while the former may report Jack’s merely false belief the latter would report a contradictory belief, and therefore conclude that the latter is inaccurate b/c false beliefs are not to be equated to contradictory beliefs.
• By our common understanding, belief ascriptions are not required to deal with beliefs’ truth-value or knowledge assessments. On the contrary, truth-value/knowledge assessments presuppose belief ascriptions, and our reports are designed to express this accordingly, with statements like “Jack believes mistakenly that clock is working” or “Jack believes that a clock that ex hypothesi CreativeSoul believes broken, is working”. Truth/knowledge assessments of a given belief are a distinct task wrt to belief ascription, and a task that presupposes belief ascription.

> Despite your objections, it is. Your rejection of the very idea that we can and often do believe that broken clocks are working is directly linked to what you conceive of being a belief.

Plainly wrong. Let me clarify once more my take. The idea that “Jack believes that a broken clock is working” is not an accurate belief ascription is a linguistic fact, part of our common practices as competent speakers, and this linguistic intuition or pre-philosophical understanding of belief ascriptions is acknowledged by all of us (you included, unless you are crazy!). The philosophical task is providing a theoretical analysis/explanation either to support our common practices (as I would do) or to question it (as you would do). So the reluctance to accept your peculiar revisionist approach is not directly linked to any theoretical claim nor to my specific theory of belief (since other theories, which I do not share, could still be supporting the common understanding of belief ascriptions).

> If you do not have a general understanding of what sorts of things beliefs are, then there could be no possible way for you to know what sorts of ascriptions are accurate, if being so requires being true.

If by “general understanding” you mean a philosophical understanding, then this plainly false, since we learn and practice belief ascriptions before any philosophical scrutiny of our practices. If by “general understanding” you mean the cognitive abilities involved in acquiring and applying successfully belief ascriptions, then this ability is shown by our practices themselves, they are linguistic facts. And, absolutely yes, we can know how to properly use the word “belief” in belief ascriptions without being capable of theorising about it, as much as we can speak a native language without being able to theorising about its linguistic rules.



> It is humanly impossible to knowingly believe a falsehood. When Jack is in the process of believing that a broken clock is working he is totally unaware of it. The proposition, assertion, claim, sentence, statement, thought, belief, and/or utterance - a broken clock is working - is always false. Broken clocks do not work. This is all just a matter of how we use the words everyday. We cannot knowingly believe that broken clocks are working, but we can and do believe that they are nonetheless.
Not one iteration I've offered here, despite the overall quantity of slightly different offerings, is ever even capable of being true. They all pass Leibniz's muster. They can all be interchanged and attributed to Jack without any unacceptable change in meaning. Jack's belief is false. As such, it is his belief that determines the truth value of any and all ascriptions thereof. Therefore, any and all ascriptions to Jack must be of false belief. That is to say, that any and all true attribution of belief to Jack at time t1 will be of some belief that it is humanly impossible to knowingly believe.

Despite your previous muddling claims [1] (to be patched with some additional but pointless terminological/formatting style acrobatics) and in addition to your failure to show how this argument rigorously follows from your definition of belief as “meaningful correlations drawn between directly and/or indirectly perceptible things” (as I did with my definition), it looks now evident that you are definitely embracing the catastrophic line of reasoning that I already spotted a while ago: equating false beliefs with contradictory beliefs (or if you prefer, equating occasionally false beliefs with always false beliefs), and confusing belief ascriptions with knowledge ascriptions. I was right all along. So here I rest my case.



> No. I did not say all that either.

You wrote: “No. Believing is not equivalent to belief. The former is an activity. Activities are not the sort of things that have truth conditions. Activities are not capable of being true or false. Whereas at the core, the latter are compositions of meaningful correlations manifesting in varying complexities drawn between directly and/or indirectly perceptible things by a creature capable of doing so.” And you also wrote: “You've ascribed a belief to Jack that is true. I have not. Jack's belief is false.”
So you said that believing is an activity and it doesn’t have truth conditions. Beliefs are somehow related to believing and are the sort of things that can be true or false. So what else is exactly bothering you? The expression “belief is the representational result of the activity ‘believing’”? Why? Is it because you do not take belief to be representational? Beliefs must be representational in the sense I’ve immediately clarified (‘representational b/c it can be true or false’) b/c belief are the sort of things that can be true or false according to what you wrote. Or is the problem the fact that you do not take belief to be the result of the believing activity? Then what else is the relation between belief and believing?


[1]

You also seem to want to say that I am somehow attributing a self-contradictory belief to Jack, but I've yet to see you explain how I have done so. Thus far it's been gratuitously asserted along with other charges as well. That said, granted, going by the standards you're working from and one absolute presupposition they rest upon, it would be contradictory to say that anyone believed that broken clock was working. However, if we acknowledge the fact that we can and do hold belief that we are unaware of holding at the time of holding it, it is not at all contradictory to believe that a broken clock is working. — creativesoul

Pls focus: “a broken clock is working” is a contradiction (!!!). — neomac

While believing that a broken clock is working is not.
It's the difference between understanding that believing a broken clock is working is not the same as believing "a broken clock is working".
The latter is how those who hold all belief as propositional attitude would render Jack's belief that a broken clock is working. Not all belief can be successfully rendered as such. — creativesoul

> No. Believing is not equivalent to belief.
The former is an activity. Whereas at the core, the latter are compositions of correlations in varying complexities drawn between directly and/or indirectly perceptible things by a creature capable of doing so. Believing is an activity, and as such it is something that happens and/or takes place over an extended period of time.
Some belief can be and/or become true(in the case of predictions), and some cannot(false and/or otherwise mistaken belief). Believing cannot. It's an activity. Activities are not the sort of things that have truth conditions. Activities are not capable of being true or false.

All right, so for you “believing” is an activity with no truth-value while belief is the representational result of the activity “believing”, representational b/c it can be true or false. Is that it?
What is the difference between a proposition and a belief as a “meaningful correlations drawn between directly and/or indirectly perceptible things”?


> An interesting response to offer in lieu of a yes or no answer to a simple question.

If I simply said no, one could be misled into thinking that it is b/c I can’t (which is possible, I don’t have answers for all kinds of challenging philosophical questions) instead of because I don’t want. And I also wanted to profit from your question to point out at a methodological constraint, that it helps not disperse intellectual energies. So far I insisted on two methodological constraints: focused objections, and avoid framing other people's claims. Here is one more: do not open too many fronts of contention at the same time.


> A baffling one when held in light of the subsequent extensive efforts to convince me to adopt your accounting practices. […] When we say things like let's "keep it that way", we're presupposing that things have been that way.

You are missing the larger picture here:

• I’m here in the first place to discuss about your debate with Banno as the main post title is suggesting.
• My main motivation is simply and only my own fun as long as the “philosophical game” we are playing here is challenging to me (based on lots of factors: analysis sharpness, definitional/argumentative clarity, internal theoretical coherence, logic rigor, argumentative originality, honest effort in avoiding sophistry, etc.).
• You are my direct interlocutor in this exchange right but whatever answer I’m giving to you is aiming at a more general audience (whoever is following or might follow our exchange, and find my arguments at least, as interesting as yours, if nor more)
• “My accounting practices” are the common ones, you are the one who wants to reform them. So I’m not personally invested in this exchange as much as you should be.
• I gave up on the idea of convincing people of their own philosophical mistakes ages ago, b/c most of philosophical debates I engaged in or witnessed almost never ended up in a change of philosophical convictions, but at best in an open ended reciprocal challenge. So I take the objective of convincing you as improbable from the start, but also of little interest.
• Concerning my effort of unpacking my ideas, you shouldn’t complain too much, given that you drafted at best only the necessary conditions of the notion "belief", while I drafted necessary and sufficient conditions.

In conclusion, the efforts I’m putting here are justifiably focused around your position on the subject, and motivated by ultimate reasons that have nothing to do with convincing you.


> When we say things like let's "keep it that way", we're presupposing that things have been that way.

This is what the title of the main post is suggesting, and I’m fine with that.


> Your position has been the ground of your objections throughout!

Of course, my position is the ground of my objections. You are absolutely right. What I’m denying is simply that my objections have anything to do with my specific understanding of what belief (or believing) is, that is why there is no need to specify them. Let me summarize some of my arguments for clarity:

• The claim that “Jack believes that a broken clock is working” is not accurate, is not directly linked to my specific understanding of belief.
• The claim that your argument “Can Jack look at a broken clock? Surely. Can Jack believe what the clock says? Surely. Why then, can he not believe that a broken clock is working?” Is a preposterous example of propositional calculus, is not directly linked to my specific understanding of belief.
• The claim that Jack believes that a broken clock is working is attributing to Jack a contradictory belief, is not directly linked to my specific understanding of belief.
• The claim that belief ascription I can not be based on unaccounted knowledge claims, b/c knowledge ascriptions are based on belief ascriptions, is not directly linked to my specific understanding of belief.
• The claim that belief can not be reduced to “drawing meaningful correlations”, is not directly linked to my specific understanding of belief.

Besides my first objection is also similar to the ones other people made (which again proves
that it is not directly link to my specific understanding of belief), and since I didn't elaborate further my specific understanding of belief, you do not even have evidences to support the claim that my objections are based on my specific understanding of belief.

Again: focus.

> All belief consists of correlations, nonetheless. There's still a bit of honing to go on this basic level, for sure. For now though, it's proving to have immense explanatory power.

Really? Then show me how this definition is supposed to support your claim that “Jack believes that a broken clock is working” is more accurate than “Jack believes that a clock is working”.

> Your report ascribes a belief to Jack that would be true when any clock is working at time t1. Jack's belief cannot be true!

That is correct but it’s a weak objection b/c we can ascribe to Jack more specific beliefs regarding the clock while always maintaining our common practices. Indeed our ordinary belief ascriptions (linguistic fact) can not be taken out of context (as I claimed since the beginning). That is why I started with examples like “Jack believes that clock is working”. However, as you scroll our past exchanges, you would notice that I’m trying to stick to your examples and claims. So when you started using belief ascription as “Jack believes that a clock is working”, I did the same. But I didn’t make to you the objection you are now making to me, because the focus of my objection was on the contrast between “Jack believes a broken clock is working” and “Jack believes a clock is working”.
Said that, here’s the glaring problem with your objection: the same objection you are making to me can be retorted to you. "Jack believes that a broken clock is working" would be true for any broken clock at time t1. Of course, you could sill claim that “a broken clock” is a more accurate description than “a clock”, but then “Jack believes a broken clock is working” would still be less accurate than “Jack believes that a clock that ex hypothesi CreativeSoul believes broken, is working” b/c if “a broken clock” is a more accurate description than “a clock”, “a clock that CreativeSoul believes broken” is not only a more accurate description than “a broken clock” but it also matches our ordinary belief ascription practices. Now what's your defense?

Again the focus of my contention is that the accuracy conditions in our common practices of belief ascriptions are not based on whatever level of descriptive accuracy you can come up with but only on those ones that match as best as possible the believer’s p.o.v. in the given circumstances (and if we infringe that rule, this is for pragmatic reasons not for accuracy concerns).

> No thanks, but I'll stick to my own position on such matters…

Pls stick to it in the most challenging way possible (at least, to me).

> That's a very odd phrasing at the end. There were others earlier, but they all seem inconsequential. I think you meant to write "Until I do..." rather than "Until I don't...". Clarify please if my interpretation is incorrect. If it's correct, no need to spend time verifying.

My bad, I meant until I do. I re-edited my text.

> That's a fair and relevant question given the discussion. The near equation of statements and propositions amounts to combinatory vestiges from earlier discussions, including but not limited to the belief that approach which I've always taken to be about belief statements and the presupposition of truth inherently embedded within them such that suffixing them with "is true" amounts to redundancy.
It's good to know that that's not what you're doing with those words. Duly noted! Seeing that I've no issue with using them however you wish here, I'll follow your lead. I'm not at all married to the idea of propositions or attitudes towards them such that one takes them to be true(in the sense of propositions as statements) or such that one takes them to be the case(in the sense of propositions as states of affairs/events). To your point, I would concur that I certainly cannot offer a valid objection, should I have an issue, regarding the practice of rendering belief as propositional attitudes if I've not understood what is meant by your use of the term propositional attitude; or better yet, if I've not rightly understood the practice. I now understand, perhaps moreso than at the time, why you opened with the questionaire that you did. So, this serves as a reminder to me that there's often very good reasons why some want to begin by defining one's key terms.

I find this answer unclear. And the situation could get much messier if there are different assumptions on the literature we are familiar with. Since I find your understanding of propositional attitudes peculiar wrt what I read so far on the subject, I was wondering where you got it from.

Let me clarify this a bit more. It seems you distinguish between these 2 types of statements:
S believes that p
S believes that ‘p’

However based on the literature I’m more familiar with (e.g. Frege and Russell), belief as a propositional attitude is always rendered as “S believes that p” (without quotation marks around p). Yet I’m fairly confident that “S believes that ‘p’” could be taken as a metalinguistic belief, namely as a propositional attitude about a sentence, which would allow claims as “S believes that ‘p’ is true” or “S believes that ‘p’ is not a correctly formed proposition” (if metalinguistic belief ascriptions can be reduced to non-metalinguistic beliefs is another issue). In any case, both renderings express propositional attitudes.

What I understood so far from your claims is that, for you, “S believes that p” (without quotation marks around p) does not express a propositional attitude, while “S believes that ‘p’” (with quotations mark around p) expresses a propositional attitude. Is that right? If so then, your understanding of propositional attitudes is different from the literature I’m familiar with, and I would like to understand from whom you got your idea that “S believes that p” (without quotation marks around p) is not a propositional attitude while “S believes that ‘p’” expresses a propositional attitude?

The only author whom your understanding of propositional attitudes seems to be referring to is Carnap: according to Carnap, “Jack believes the clock is on the table” should be analysed as “Jack believes-true ‘the clock is on the table’” (indeed Carnap’s position is called sententialism, i.e. beliefs are understood as attitudes towards sentences). However you do not seem to take “S believes that ‘p’” (with quotation marks around p) as an analysis of “S believes that p” (without quotation marks around p). On the contrary, it seems you take “S believes that ‘p’” (with quotation marks around p) as a wrong analysis for “S believes that p” (without quotation marks around p). Am I right? If I’m right, the following holds:

• Sententialism is but one way of understanding belief as propositional attitude. So at best you questioned one specific way of understanding belief as a propositional attitude.
• For Russell and Frege, “S believes that p” (without quotation marks around p) is a propositional attitude. And “S believes that ‘p’” (with quotation marks around p) is not an analysis of “S believes that p” (without quotation marks around p). But probably there are implications between the two statements. For that reason, your idea that “S believes that p” (without quotation marks around p) does not render a propositional attitude while “S believes that ‘p’” (with quotation marks around p) renders a propositional attitude, is quite incomprehensible wrt to authors I’m more familiar with.

> You're drawing a distinction between one's point of view and one's belief. Could you unpack them both individually please, so as to be able to compare and contrast the two?

It is impossible to unpack these two notions individually, since for me they are essentially linked together. A belief is, by (my) definition, an intentional state/event with intrinsic cognitive fitness conditions. By (my) definition, the intrinsic cognitive fitness conditions constitutive of a belief is the point of view (p.o.v.) of a believer.
I could say more about how I understand the intrinsic cognitive fitness conditions constitutive of belief b/c the definitions I just provided are not that controversial in the literature about intentionality (despite possible non-substantial differences in phrasing), while my substantial understanding of belief intrinsic cognitive fitness conditions could sound more controversial (even within the literature about intentionality). But I will not do it for two reasons:
- I’m reluctant to open too many fronts of contentions at the same time, especially if I do not see enough convergence in background knowledge, terminology and methodology. As it seems to be the case with you. So since the thread focus is on your & Banno’s positions, not mine, I prefer to keep it that way.
- A good deal of objections I made to your position are not directly linked to my specific understanding of belief, but more on the way we intuitively use belief ascriptions (so on linguistic facts), on what I take to be common knowledge about the debate on belief as propositional attitudes, or propositional calculus, or the internal logic of your claims as far as I understood/misunderstood them.


> The double use of the term "cognitive" is throwing me.
My bad, I removed “(cognitive)” from my text.






> Believing a clock is working is something that happens as a result of knowing how to read a clock and looking towards one as a means to know what time it is. Things such as these are not the sort of things that we say have truth conditions. Rather, they are the truth conditions of statements about what's happened, and/or is happening. […] The truth conditions of the statement are another matter altogether…

OK, so you are contrasting statements and things happening outside statements, and claim that truth values can be attributed only to statements and not to things that happen. Since beliefs are something that happens in the world, they do not have truth values. Is that it? If so, the least I can say is that I find it highly counter-intuitive for 2 reasons:
- Statements are taken to be true or false b/c they describe something happening, yet the sequence of verbal/written signs that constitute a sentence do not seem capable to describe anything by themselves. They do only if someone is expressing her belief about how things are through verbal/written signs and related linguistic rules. So truth-values are attributed derivatively to statements because they are originally attributed to beliefs.
- We attribute beliefs also to non-human animals and infants incapable of producing or understanding verbal/written statements. Yet we do not take their beliefs to be beyond any cognitive accuracy assessments, just because they happen to have them. Actually we would take as a sign of intelligent behavior from animals and kids, one were beliefs could be revised over time based on past cognitive failures.

> It makes no sense to me to talk about the truth conditions of (believing "a clock is working"). That does not at all seem to be a truth apt set of meaningful marks contained within the parentheses.

Profiting from you own suggestion, I would encourage you to change your phrasing style from:
S believes that p (where p is not a statement but the referent of the statement ‘p’ in the real world)
S believes that ‘p’ (where ‘p’ is a statement)
To:
(S believes that p) (where all the items within parentheses - or other types of brackets - are taken to be the referents in the real world of the belief ascription “S believes that p”, as such the expression within parentheses is neither true nor false)
S believes that p (as a statement, more precisely a belief ascription, that can be true or false)

The second rendering would not conflict with more common ways of reporting beliefs as propositional attitudes. In other words, it will spare others to adopt your non-conventional phrasing style, or to be always misrendered/misunderstood wrt to your view. Unless there are substantial reasons to not do it, and I would like to hear which ones.


> The statement about the clock is true when and only when a clock is working. The statement about Jack's belief is true when and only when it corresponds to Jack's belief.

All right, and if “Jack’s believes that a clock is working” is true, does this imply that “a clock is working” is true?



> Belief consists entirely of meaningful correlations drawn between directly and/or indirectly perceptible things by a creature with the biological machinery capable of doing so.

I’m not sure to understand what “drawing meaningful correlations” is supposed to mean. But I find this definition counter-intuitive, b/c one can draw meaningful correlations without believing anything: fantasizing or contemplating a painting are ways where we draw meaningful correlations but that doesn’t mean we believe any of that; even the simple understanding of a statements whose truth-value we acknowledge is unknown to us, requires “meaningful correlations” to be drawn yet understanding a statement is not believing what the statement says.

Show me again, because thus far you've changed Jack's belief in your translation. — creativesoul

Quoting myself:
OK let me help you with your case. Indeed, I think there might be a way out for you but only if you reject this line of reasoning: “Can Jack look at a broken clock? Surely. Can Jack believe what the clock says? Surely. Why then, can he not believe that a broken clock is working?” (along with the idea that de re belief ascriptions are appropriate independently from pragmatic and contextual considerations, or a better rendering than de dicto belief ascriptions). Indeed if you rejected that line of reasoning, then you could explain the situation in your thought experiment based on pragmatic considerations and shared assumptions, much better. How? Here you go: since at moment t2, you and Jack share the same assumptions about the reliability of that clock, the belief of Jack about that clock at t1, and the rationality of you and Jack, then between you two it would be easier to disambiguate the claim “Jack believed that broken clock was working”, and this is why you two would not find it so problematic to use that belief ascription (BTW that is also why we can't exclude a non-literal or ironic reading of this belief ascription either). However, as soon as we add to the story another interlocutor who doesn’t share all the same assumptions relevant to disambiguate “Jack believed that broken clock was working” then this rendering would be again inappropriate or less appropriate than de dicto rendering “Jack believed that clock was working”.

You're the one who has issue with the fact that we do sometimes believe that broken clocks are working. — creativesoul

Closer but still wrong, since I question such a fact as well as framing my view based on this putative fact. So, more accurately, I (as many others here) have issue with your claim that we do sometimes believe that broken clocks are working.

While believing that a broken clock is working is not.
It's the difference between understanding that believing a broken clock is working is not the same as believing "a broken clock is working".
The latter is how those who hold all belief as propositional attitude would render Jack's belief that a broken clock is working. Not all belief can be successfully rendered as such. — creativesoul

OK, let’s delve into this other claims of yours.
But first, let me notice that I don’t know whom you are talking about here (“those who hold all belief as propositional attitude”), since in the literature propositional attitudes are not normally rendered as attitudes toward quoted sentences, making them look as metalinguistic beliefs or beliefs about sentences! This notation is more likely your way to mark a difference between propositions and contents of belief. But if you take propositional attitudes as metalinguistic attitudes then your understanding of propositional attitudes certainly doesn’t match the common understanding of propositional attitudes and indeed this is confusing wrt to the related debate: e.g. for Frege, propositions are thoughts (senses), while for Russell they are complexes of objects and properties as extensional referents of words (probably state of affairs), while neither renders belief as belief that ‘p’ (with quotation marks). So from whom did you get the idea that beliefs as propositional attitudes are by definition attitudes toward sentences to be reported in quotation marks (as in “S believes that ‘p’” instead of “S believes that p”)? Until I do have a convincing answer to that, your claim is another unacceptable example of framing the issue in a way that presupposes your understanding as correct.

Said that, here my 3 questions:

• Does believing a clock is working (without quotation marks) have the same truth conditions of believing “a clock is working” (with quotation marks)? If they differ, what is the difference?
• If “a clock is working” is true, does this imply that “Jack’s believes that a clock is working” is true? If not, why not?
• Take the statement “Jack believes that a broken clock is working” and the statement “a broken clock is working”, do they share the same content? If they differ, what is the difference?

What exactly are you attributing/ascribing to another when you say that they believe something? — creativesoul

I'm attributing a belief: beliefs are intentional cognitive states/events with intrinsic mind-to-world fitness conditions expressed through behavioral attitudes in a given context. These intrinsic fitness conditions constitute - broadly speaking - the p.o.v of the believer. So I take the task of identifying the intrinsic fitness conditions of a given belief in a given context as equivalent to providing an explanation of P’s behavior in a given context based on her cognitive intentionality. Since what better explains the cognitively-guided behavior of P at time t1 based on cognitive intentionality (i.e. P's belief at t1), to me, is the p.o.v. of P at t1 than any other alternative (like the p.o.v. of Q at t1, or the the p.o.v. of P at t2), then belief ascriptions about P at time t1 are accurate in so far as they match the p.o.v. of P at time t1.

We can set all the other stuff aside for now and focus upon what counts as belief. — creativesoul

OK let’s try. Now it’s your turn to clarify what belief is. However, I would still like to hear at least your answers to my 3 questions b/c it helps clarify your ideas about belief.

> Well, if you do not wish to continue, there's not much more I can do. I am very short on time for doing this stuff, for having this discussion, but I am making time just to be able to do so. You've levied a fair amount of serious charges here, and evidently you do not feel the obligation to allow the accused to provide a defense.

The problem is not that you do not have time, but how you use it to respond to my “serious charges”. Even this time, you wrote a lot, but no value added. Just more of the same. And if you keep repeating the same "begging-the-question" claims and framing examples based on your questionable assumptions, I will just repeat my objections (unless you are unlucky, b/c I will add more objections on top of the ones I already made).

> I raised the valid objection that, at time t2, the believer's own report of their belief at time t1 does not meet the standard you've set. [...]
That's absurd. Special pleading at best.

It’s absurd how much trust you put in this argument.
First of all we are talking about a fictional character you invented to support your claims, while real people like us are questioning the intuitive strength of your claim. So no, my denial is not absurd at all, especially if compared to your claim.
Secondly to the perceived plausibility of “Jack believed that a broken clock was working” can be explained also by our common understanding of belief ascriptions, without supporting your idea that your belief ascription style is accurate or even more accurate than “Jack believed that a broken clock was working”. So no special pleading.
In conclusion. your objection relies on the fact that the believer's own report (in your fictitious example) is accurate and this suffices to destabilize a common understanding of belief ascriptions. I question both, and justifiably so.


> You also seem to want to say that I am somehow attributing a self-contradictory belief to Jack, but I've yet to see you explain how I have done so. […] it is not at all contradictory to believe that a broken clock is working.

Pls focus: “a broken clock is working” is a contradiction (!!!). You are attributing to Jack, in your example ("Jack believed a broken clock was working"), a contradictory belief. The consequence is that, by your standard, any false belief is equated to a contradictory belief. This shows a confusion between false belief and contradictory belief, therefore your belief ascription is inaccurate and ambiguous.
If it wasn't already enough, here you go with two other preposterous consequences of your view:
1. if a belief ascription about P at time t1 is based on P's p.o.v at time t1m, we shouldn't change the belief ascription every time P changes her mind about the relevant facts (which she can do in an unlimited number of time). While with your standard we should revise our belief ascriptions at every revision of P's beliefs about the relevant facts.
2. We (collectively) do not always know or can determine the truth-value of our beliefs (are there aliens in the universe? can we prove this mathematical conjecture?), yet that doesn't prevent us from believing and being attributed beliefs, independently from of our capacity to determine what the relevant facts are. This is perfectly compatible with a belief ascription that aims at reporting the p.o.v of the believer independently from the truth about the relevant facts and knowledge claims, while with your standard the real content of a belief would be indeterminate until we can't determine what the relevant facts are.

> Thus far it's been gratuitously asserted along with other charges as well.

Marginal observation: how you can talk about “the depth and breadth” of my “serious charges” (which I seriously doubt you grasped) and yet claim that they are gratuitous (wrt your intuitions, I guess), is a mystery to me, but at this point I can't find it surprising anymore.

> The standard you've presented presupposes that a believer is always aware of their own belief at the time it is influencing their behaviour. That is a false presupposition.

Not only I do not presuppose this but I also declared that the false belief of P is explainable in terms of her ignorance (so lack of awareness about the relevant facts). However I also clearly stated that knowledge ascription should not be presupposed by belief ascription: i.e. Jack, in your example, ignored at t1 that his belief was false or he was not aware at t1 of his mistaken belief until t2. And an accurate way to express this is "at t1, Jack mistakenly believed that a clock was working", so there is no need to mention at all the "broken clock" within the scope of Jack's belief, even after he becomes aware that his belief was false. Replacing "clock" with "broken clock" would mess up the belief report, not make it more accurate.

> What are you attributing(ascribing) to another prior to having a standard for what exactly counts as belief?

I don't get the sense of this question. I exposed my understanding of belief ascriptions when I talked about intrinsic/extrinsic fitness conditions of beliefs, did you read and understand the point I made there? If you do not agree, what would be the reasons?

Have you never believed a clock that was not telling the right time? — creativesoul

Pls, focus: "to believe a clock that is not working" is as fine as "to believe a broken clock that is working", these are a kind of de re ascriptions that can be legitimately, accurately and unambiguously used in certain contexts, and that possibility is grounded on the fact that "the (broken) clock" is within the cognitive scope of the one who makes the belief ascription, not within the scope of the believer . And I already discussed about this kind of belief reports before you did, so don't look for disagreements where there are none.
My problem is only with the claim that this belief report “P (mistakenly) believed that a broken clock was working” is not only accurate, but even more accurate than “P (mistakenly) believed that a clock was working”. So I’m challenging you to explain why, and in particular, accurate with respect to what. Your belief attribution report is not accurate wrt to the relevant facts ("a broken clock is working" is not a fact), nor it is an accurate report of P's p.o.v at time t1 (since at time t1, P doesn't know his belief is wrong and would express this by saying "I do not believe that a broken clock is working" or "I do believe that 'a broken clock is working' is false"), so what else? Even if you claimed that it matches P's p.o.v at time t2, there is big problem: why should we take P's p.o.v at time t2 as an accuracy condition for belief ascriptions about P at t1, instead of P's p.o.v at time t1? Here is where you need to feel in your defensive arguments without "begging the question".

It still seems to me we have a different understanding of what a philosophical debate is, and until you do not prove to me you are playing the same game, your case is not intellectually challenging to me.

> I am talking about a belief that they are unaware of having at time t1. Thus, my proposal ought not match their point of view at time t1.

First of all, the expression “unaware of” is ambiguous here: “unaware” can mean that the belief is there just implicitly/dispositionally there; or it can mean we are “unaware” of the actual truth value of a belief (b/c we will discover it later or never) or if it expresses knowledge or not.
Secondly what your proposal ought to do, depends on the accuracy condition for belief ascriptions: as I said they should be intrinsic to belief and not extrinsic to it (as knowledge is) and when we are reporting beliefs at time t1 they should ideally track the p.o.v. of the belief holder at time t1 (it doesn’t matter if the belief is implicit or explicit) which can not be contradictory just because later it is proven to be false (so if a false belief is presented as contradictory, it will be ambiguous wrt to the believer’s p.o.v. at time t1 as it is confusing logic and epistemology).
Therefore the appeal to beliefs we are unaware of, doesn’t hint at anything decisive unless you are specifically referring to the actual truth-value or knowledge-status of the belief. But in this case, there is the problem of the unwarranted knowledge claims, on top of the irrecoverable ambiguity of your belief ascriptions.

> According to the standard you've put forth for what counts as an acceptable report of Jack's belief at time t1, Jack's own reporting at time t2 would not meet that standard.

Right, this is coherent with my view and indeed this is what I explicitly claimed in my previous comment ("P at t2 is not offering any accurate report of P at t1 if she used your belief ascription report"). Yet I also pointed out to a specific situation where a belief ascription like yours (“Jack believed that a broken clock was working”) even though doesn’t meet the standard I acknowledge, it could be tolerated b/c easy to disambiguate (which also means that your “Jack” example does not necessarily support your view more than the conventional understanding of belief ascriptions!).

> Ah shit! That's true! At time t1, I did believe that that particular broken clock was working!

The philosophical task, as I understand it, consists precisely in looking for what justifies one’s intuitive assumptions and not giving them for granted, all the more if they are not shared (like in your case). This amounts to trying to strengthen one’s position or weaken alternative positions, by means of sharper analysis of our assumptions, assessments of the explanatory power of available&shared evidences, assessments of our theory internal coherence or theoretical benefits.
In other words, if you think you can advance our philosophical dispute by dramatizing an example you invented and appealing to its intuitive force, then I’m afraid we do not have the same understanding of the philosophical task and your proposal is no longer intellectually challenging to me.

> In your rendering of my contentions here, you've placed far too much importance on the notions of intentional, intensional, and extensional..

Indeed I reported that premise (there was a typo: I wrote “intenTional” instead of “intenSional”), b/c if you want to make a philosophical proposal that is appealing to me, or those holding the conventional view of belief ascription, you should feel intellectually compelled to show understanding toward what we are concerned about (de dicto report are necessary for rendering believers' p.o.v.), and prove by that that we are not talking past each other. The burden is on you, b/c it’s you who wants to challenge the conventional view, not the other way around.
Otherwise our exchange will just end up in butting heads against the wall of our diverging intuition pumps. It’s pointless. So we can work out our different views better if we start from common grounds or at least reciprocal concessions (depending on the burden of proof).

> I mean, it looks like a very intelligent viewpoint is being described.

So, do you find my formulation good enough despite of “you've placed far too much importance etc.”, or not good enough because of “you've placed far too much importance etc.”?




> The above is not half bad. That's supposed to be a compliment.

So, is the part you quoted acceptable enough or not? And if not, for what reason?




> One great reason to deny the need for a match between our report and the person's own perspective and/or point of view at that time is when they believe that a man in a sheep suit is a sheep, but they've no idea. […]
One great reason to pick the same person at another time is when we find ourselves discussing another's belief that they themselves do not know that they have. We can ask them later after they become aware of the relevant facts. It seems to me thatthat part of what I'm saying here honors and satisfies your standard of matching the individual's perspective concerning what exactly they believed at time t1. Moreso even than the alternative.

Here my objections:

• In my comment, I contrasted P’s belief prospective at t1 with both Q’s belief prospective at t1 and P’s belief prospective at t2 (when she understood her belief at t1 to be wrong). And I said our report is accurate when it matches P’s belief prospective at time t1. In your comment, you start denying the need for that match in case of Q’s belief ascription, and then conclude with claiming that my standard is satisfied in the case of P’s belief prospective at t2. These claims are, at least, twice contradictory: first, it seems you are distinguishing 2 cases (belief ascription by Q at t1, and belief ascription by P at t2) even though there is no such difference with respect to what is ascribed to P at time t1 in both 2 cases, according to your belief ascription report (at t1, P believes that a broken clock is working, for both Q at t1 and P at t2). Secondly, since for me there is no difference in belief ascription failure between Q at t1 and P at t2, then you are not satisfying my standard, b/c at least in case of Q at t1 - you claim - there is no need for matching. Not to mention the fact that even the belief ascription by P at t2 is not satisfying my standard either, as I intend it: P at t2 is not offering any accurate report of P at t1 if she used your belief ascription report.
• My reformulation was aiming at rescuing your proposal also from the line of reasoning you just drafted, which I find simply catastrophic, even if we forget the aforementioned objections. Why? Because “accuracy” as an intrinsic fitness-condition of beliefs is what grounds our expectations about our honest reports, like the expectation that a factual report about facts at time t1 should match them, and the expectation that a belief ascription to P at time t1 should match the belief prospective of P at time t1 (i.e. the way P would express her belief at time t1). While what you are trying to do is to blend the 2 distinct expectations in a belief ascription that matches neither the prospective of the believer nor the relevant facts: a broken clock is working is neither a fact nor the perspective of P at time t1, just a blend of what you take to be a correct description of the relevant facts ("the broken clock") with P’s perspective (“is working”). The utmost preposterous consequence of your approach is that all false beliefs are equated to contradictory beliefs (since, the belief ascription subordinate clause "a broken clock is working" is a contradiction). This amounts to a categorical confusion between epistemology and logic: a false belief is not a contradictory belief (!!!), since a contradictory belief is always false, while a false belief could have been true, and this depends on the relevant facts not on its internal logic. Indeed this would also make the believers look always irrational, when they could have been simply ignorant about the relevant facts.
• Why would you do such a catastrophic move? My impression is that you are misled, by your unaccounted knowledge claims (“we find ourselves discussing another's belief that they themselves do not know that they have”), into thinking that belief report accuracy is based on knowledge (track knowledge or lack thereof). This is wrong for 2 reasons: 1. belief ascriptions by S are themselves beliefs and do not warrant S’s knowledge of the relevant facts, nor need for such a warrant 2. knowledge ascriptions about P presuppose belief ascriptions about P (and not the other way around). In other words, a theory of belief ascription can not settle issues about belief and belief ascription by presupposing knowledge, b/c knowledge presupposes belief, therefore accurate belief reports should be understood in terms of intrinsic fitness-condition of belief, not in terms of extrinsic fitness-condition of belief (as knowledge is).

My reformulation of your proposal looks better because it is not based on anything I found highly controversial in your claims (wild propositional calculi, confusion between false and contradictory beliefs, confusion between knowledge and belief ascriptions) and it doesn’t evidently betray any intrinsic accuracy condition for belief ascriptions (since the believer's perspective is still preserved through metalinguistic belief ascriptions) which is at the core of conventional understanding of belief ascriptions.

@creativesoul

Let me reformulate your proposal without mentioning all wrong hints I think you provided (and still provide) and in terms that I find less equivocal, in order to make it look better (at least, to me).
----------------------------------------------------------------
We commonly take a believer’s perspective on a given situation as a fundamental accuracy condition for belief ascriptions about him, and intensional belief ascriptions are designed for expressing this understanding. This is why we reject extensional belief ascriptions, at least, when intensional belief ascriptions are available.
Yet one can wonder if all intensional belief ascriptions can be in principle replaced by extensional belief ascriptions without omitting the believer’s perspective. How? By rendering the believer’s perspective in terms of metalinguistic belief ascriptions (belief about the truth-value of some propositions).
This is why one can claim as valid both <Jack believes a broken clock is working> (extensional belief ascription) and <Jack believes the proposition “a broken clock is working” false> (extensional belief ascription rendering the believer’s perspective in metalinguistic terms).
Where is the benefit? At least, in preserving truth-value through substitution of co-referent terms, even for belief ascriptions, and without giving up on the believer’s perspective. [I’ll let you integrate with other benefits]
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Before commenting further, would you find this re-formulation enough acceptable? And if not, why not?

It seems that I am the only one around here who finds the bottom set to be more accurate and/or acceptable than the first. — creativesoul

Accuracy with respect to what? All I can say is that the most accurate report of someone’s belief at time t1 is the one that best matches the point of view of the believer at time t1. Why would I pick the point of view of some person P at time t2 (or some other person Q at time t1) as a criterium of accuracy for reporting P's belief at time t1?

> "Something" that is shared by different sentences is too vague. […] If not, then how can we say that different sentences share things?

Right. But I left it vague on purpose b/c otherwise I should have taken position wrt what propositions are, which is not my intention. Yet a major intuition pump that is inspiring the philosophical theory of propositions lies in that kind of examples I provided.

> So it isn't likely that someone just created a 7 of diamonds card without also creating the rest of the deck, hence the 7 of diamonds is only meaningful with the rest of the deck. With that I can agree, but it still is possible for someone to find a card with the number 7 and 7 diamonds on it that has never seen playing cards.

Your last point is going back to where we started: images (taken as a representational kind of things) can match different descriptions that do not share the same proposition. Then, if you remember, you asked me “what rules would we need to remove the ambiguity of images that are not scribbles?”. So, I proposed you to consider the codification systems that we have to interpret images (traffic signs, deck of cards, national flags, emoticons, brand logos, etc.). These codification rules are certainly helping us identify and understand images, but the issue at hand is more specific: can they help us determine the right propositional content of an image? I’m inclined to think that the correct answer is no. Unless, say, images are trivially coupled with sentences by stipulation (but what if the problem is deeper than this?).

> How would they go about determining the meaning of the card?

Good question, but your question should be more demanding than this, and look for a meaning that has an intrinsic propositional form (that sentences can share etc.). So the question should be: how would they go about determining the meaning propositional content of the card?

> What do you mean by "propositional content"? What are you pointing at when you use the string of scribbles, "propositional content”?

I take it to mean, something that at least can be shared by different sentences (e.g. “Jim loves Alice” and “that guy called Jim loves Alice” ), by different propositional attitudes (e.g. I believe that Jim loves Alice, I hope that Jim loves Alice), by different languages (e.g. “Jim loves Alice” and “Jim aime Alice”) and determines their usage/fitness conditions. Those who theorize about propositions have richer answers than this of course (e.g. Frege’s propositions, Russell’s propositions, unstructured propositions, etc.). But I’m not a fan of these theories, so I’ll let others do the job.
Anyways, I hear people wondering about images as propositions or as having propositional content, without elaborating or clarifying, so this was my piece of brainstorming about this subject.


> You seem to be confusing the card with the deck. I don't need to know it's relationship with other things to know that it is a sheet of paper with red ink in shape of diamonds and a “7".

To know that I’m confusing the propositional content of that image, presupposes that you know what the propositional content of that image is. But I’m not convinced it’s that simple, see what you just wrote about that image: <it is a sheet of paper with red ink in shape of diamonds and a “7”> while you previously wrote something like: <it’s a seven of diamonds >. Is it essential for the propositional content of that image the mention of ink or paper? A seven of diamonds tattooed on the the body doesn’t share the same propositional content of the image on paper? How about the arrangement of the diamonds on the surface of the card? How about the shade of red? How about the change of light condition under which the image is seen? If I warped that image with an image editor to make it hardly recognisable but still recognisable after some time as a 7 of diamonds, shouldn’t we include in the propositional content of that image all the features that allowed me to recognise it as a 7 of diamonds, despite the warping? And so on…
Again, I’m just brainstorming, so no strong opinion on any of that. Indeed I was hoping to get some feedback from those who talk about propositional content of images, or images as propositions.

Fine with me, I don’t want to waste your time and energies. And you already have many other interlocutors. In any case, I'm more playful than you might think. Just I can play it tougher depending on other peoples' replies.

but only after you learned that is what the scribbles are labeled as. I've been using the term scribble, not word, because they are scribbles without rules and words when rules are applied to scribbles. — Harry Hindu

Agreed, indeed I was backing up the part where you wrote “meaning that words (as an image of strings of scribbles)”

Isn't it a seven of diamonds regardless of what card game that we are playing? We don't even need a game to define the image as a seven of diamonds, because we have rules about what scribble refers to which shapes (diamonds, spades, hearts, or clubs). — Harry Hindu

Maybe regardless of any specific card game, but the challenge here is to express the propositional content of that image (something that an image can share with sentences, different propositional attitudes, different languages): so is the propositional content of that image rendered by “this is a seven of diamonds” or “this is a seven of diamonds in standard 52-card deck” or “this is a card of diamonds different from a 1 to 6 or 8 to 13 of diamonds” or “this is a seven of a suit different from clubs, hearts, spades” or “this is a card with seven red diamond-shaped figures and red shaped number seven arranged so and so” or any combination of these propositions? All of them are different propositions which one is the right one? BTW “this” is an indexical, and shouldn’t be part of the content of an unambiguous proposition: so maybe the propositional content is “something is a seven of diamonds” or “some image is a seven of diamonds”? And so on.
At least this is how I understand the philosophical task of proving that images have propositional content, but I'm neither sure that others understand this philosophical task in the same way I just drafted, nor that this task can be accomplished successfully.

By definition, a broken clock doesn't work, so your proposition makes no sense. — Olivier5

Of course, but if you follow my exchange with Creative Soul with due attention, you should understand why I made it up. That crazy sentence is the result of some unjustified propositional calculus that I applied to the belief ascription rendering "Jack believes that broken clock is working" (proposed by CreativeSoul). Why did I do that? To show CreativeSoul that my unjustified propositional calculus is very much the same type of propositional calculus CreativeSoul used to justify his belief ascription rendering (e.g. "Jack believes that broken clock is working")

> Rather than propose something I've not,

Oh really? This is what you wrote: “Can Jack look at a broken clock? Surely. Can Jack believe what the clock says? Surely. Why then, can he not believe that a broken clock is working?”.
To obtain “Jack believes that broken clock was working” you simply replaced the term “broken clock” from “Jack looks at a broken clock” with the term “the clock” from “Jack believe what the clock says”. This is a substitution operation applied to two propositions (one reporting a belief ascription), to obtain a third proposition (reporting a belief ascription) based on the sheer co-reference of some terms involved. That is why I call it propositional calculus. Indeed a propositional calculus that is supposed to work independently from any other pragmatic and contextual considerations. Hence: you proposed something by applying some propositional calculus that I find quite preposterous.
Since you didn’t perceive how preposterous your argumentative approach is, then I gave you another case where your type of reasoning (i.e. propositional calculus applied to belief ascriptions, based on sheer co-reference, and indifferent to any pragmatic/contextual considerations) looks more evidently preposterous: if one can render “S did/did not believed that p” as “p and S did/did not believe it” and vice versa, and one can take p="that broken clock was working”, why can’t I justifiably render “Jack did believe that broken clock was working” as “that broken clock was working and Jack did believe it”?

> would it not just be easier to answer the question following from the simple understanding set out with common language use?

That’s what I and others did, unless you think you are a more competent speaker than all of those who objected your rendering, you should take this as a linguistic datum and infer that your account is not that common language usage, after all. And indeed you did that already when you claimed to be questioning the “conventional” belief account.
Let me repeat once more: I don’t feel intellectually compelled to answer questions based on preposterous assumptions, like this one:“Can Jack look at a broken clock? Surely. Can Jack believe what the clock says? Surely. Why then, can he not believe that a broken clock is working?”. But I can certainly show you why I find them preposterous (which I did). BTW, as far as I read from your posts [1], this is the only argument you made to justify your belief ascription rendering (besides your thought experiment with a fictional character that — surprise surprise — agrees with you!).
Anyways, I now question this justification not simply because its conclusion is wrong (which is), but also because itself is flawed by design (even if your conclusion was correct)!


> Do you not find it odd that Jack would agree, if and when he figured out that the clock was broken?

Seriously?! By “Jack” you mean a fictional character in a story that you just invented? Oh no, that’s not odd at all, it would be indeed much more odd if you invented stories where fictional characters explicitly contradict your theories, and despite that you used those stories to prove your theory.
OK let me help you with your case. Indeed, I think there might be a way out for you but only if you reject this line of reasoning: “Can Jack look at a broken clock? Surely. Can Jack believe what the clock says? Surely. Why then, can he not believe that a broken clock is working?” (along with the idea that de re belief ascriptions are appropriate independently from pragmatic and contextual considerations, or a better rendering than de dicto belief ascriptions). Indeed if you rejected that line of reasoning, then you could explain the situation in your thought experiment based on pragmatic considerations and shared assumptions, much better. How? Here you go: since at moment t2, you and Jack share the same assumptions about the reliability of that clock, the belief of Jack about that clock at t1, and the rationality of you and Jack, then between you two it would be easier to disambiguate the claim “Jack believed that broken clock was working”, and this is why you two would not find it so problematic to use that belief ascription (BTW that is also why we can't exclude a non-literal or ironic reading of this belief ascription either). However, as soon as we add to the story another interlocutor who doesn’t share all the same assumptions relevant to disambiguate “Jack believed that broken clock was working” then this rendering would be again inappropriate or less appropriate than de dicto rendering “Jack believed that clock was working”.




> Interesting thing here to me is that on the one hand you're railing against propositional calculus(as you call it), and yet again on the other your unknowingly objecting based upon the fact that Jack would not assent to his own belief if it were put into propositional form and he was asked if he believed the statement. At least, not while he still believed it.

There are 2 problems in your comment:

• It can be misleading to claim that I’m “railing against propositional calculus”. I’m more precisely railing about the propositional calculus you applied to belief ascription rendering in order to justify the claim that “Jack believes that broken clock is working” is not only fine independently from any pragmatic and contextual considerations, but even better than the de dicto rendering “Jack believes that clock is working”.
• I didn’t make the claim you denounce here “your unknowingly objecting based upon the fact that Jack would not assent to his own belief if it were put into propositional form and he was asked if he believed the statement.” (ironically, you were the one repeatedly suggesting me to stick to what you write), nor my line of reasoning requires the claim “Jack would not assent to his own belief if it were put into propositional form and he was asked if he believed the statement. At least, not while he still believed it.” to be true, independently from pragmatic and contextual considerations (see the way out I suggested you previously).

[1] If you have others and can provide links, I’d like to read them.

Do you agree that in the Russell and Gettier cases that the belief was properly accounted for? — creativesoul

I don't see them as presupposing a specific account of belief as such, in their treatment of JTB. They are reasoning about the idea that JTB (formulated in some way) provides all necessary and sufficient conditions to have a case of knowledge.

You agreed with what I wrote — creativesoul

Agreed? In what sense? Where? Can you quote where I agree with you? I also said, let's pretend etc.

changed that, and then denounced the change — creativesoul

And this is just one part of the reasoning, where is the rest?

If you wish to see how they could be rendered similarly...


It was raining outside and I did not believe it. The clock was broken, and I did not believe it. — creativesoul

No sir. the problem I have is with "Jack believed that a broken clock was working" since your are insisting on it.
You came up with this rendering based on the propositional calculus suggested here: “Can Jack look at a broken clock? Surely. Can Jack believe what the clock says? Surely. Why then, can he not believe that a broken clock is working?”.
So I proposed you the following propositional calculus: if one can render “I did/did not believed that p” as “p and I did/did not believe it” and vice versa. And asked you: why can’t we do the same with p="a broken clock was working" [1]?
So I'm challenging you to explain why your propositional calculus is correct, and mine is wrong based on your own assumptions. This is the problem you should address, hopefully in a non ad-hoc way.


[1] I re-edited because the value of p that I had in mind was "a broken clock was working" but by copy-and-pasting I made a mistake.

@Harry Hindu

> If you are agreeing with me that strings of scribbles is an image then there could be many descriptions that could correspond to the same image of strings of scribbles, meaning that words (as an image of strings of scribbles) would be subject to the same ambiguity that you are ascribing to images that are not scribbles.

Yep, this is correct if we take strings of characters, independently from any pre-defined linguistic codification. The difference is that with words (notice that the term “word” is already framing its referent, like an image, as a linguistic entity!) we readily have different codified systems of linguistic rules that help us identify the propositional content of declarative sentences and solve ambiguities internal to that practice.

> I asked you what rules would we need to remove the ambiguity of images that are not scribbles?

You can have all kinds of sets of rules (e.g. the codification of traffic signs). Concerning the problem at hand, one thing that really matters is to understand if/what systems of visual codifications disambiguate an image always wrt a specific proposition: think about the codified images of a deck of cards. Does e.g. the following card have a propositional content that card game rules can help us identify? What would this be?

What's your view regarding Russell's clock, Gettier's cases, and Moore's paradox? — creativesoul

Not sure about it, also because knowledge is a wider issue. What I can say now is that, concerning belief ascription practices, I'm strongly against a "propositional calculus" kind of approach.

If we say that Jack believes of that broken clock that it is working, what is the content of Jack's belief, and what is Jack's belief about? — creativesoul

As I said, this is the kind of de re belief ascription that we can use when we are not sure about a de dicto belief ascription (i.e. we don’t know what someone else’s beliefs are really about, see the case of the kid in the park). In the case of Jack, I would prefer that form of rendering, if e.g. I’m not sure whether Jack is holding contradictory beliefs or he simply ignores that that clock is not working. Certainly, if I knew that Jack ignores that clock is not working, I would prefer to say “Jack believes that clock is working” or “Jack mistakenly believes that clock is working” instead of “Jack believes of that broken clock that is working”, or worse, “Jack believes that broken clock is working”.
Now imagine another case: Jack and everybody else believes that clock is working, except me who hacked the clock to show whatever time I wanted it to show. If I decided to confess this to everybody, would I still say “you all guys believe of that broken clock that is working”? Nope, because given everybody else’s default understanding of the situation (the shared assumptions), people would reply “what?! That clock?!” being unsure that I’m referring to the same clock or what exactly I’m claiming about that clock, etc. (i.e. what shared assumption they need to revise). So what I would prefer to say, is “you all guys believe that clock is working, but you are wrong”.
Now imagine another case: I and Jim hacked the clock, so we both know that is not working, but Jim doesn’t know if Jack was told about the hack, what could I say to assure him? I could say indifferently “Jack believes that broken clock is working” or “Jack believes of that broken clock that is working” sure that - given our shared assumptions about the clock and Jack’s rationality - Jim wouldn’t possibly interpret my belief ascription as de dicto. Unless, of course, Jim has a philosophical attitude and will start questioning me about it!

I write something that you agree with. You change what I write. You disagree with and denounce the change, not what I wrote. Evidently, you cannot see. — creativesoul

All right sir, let’s talk about what I did and why I did it.

First of all, I already made my objections to your theoretical assumptions wrt a more common understanding of belief ascriptions (as others did). Those objections still hold, independently from the following additional remarks.
Secondly, this time I tried something different, namely I’m questioning the internal coherence of your theoretical approach on its own (de)merit. How?

Let’s recapitulate:

• Once you wrote: “Can Jack look at a broken clock? Surely. Can Jack believe what the clock says? Surely. Why then, can he not believe that a broken clock is working?”. What this line of reasoning shows to me is that the prospect of some propositional operation based on sheer co-reference, indifferent to any contextual pragmatic considerations, is enough for you to do your propositional math accordingly and grant legitimacy to the resulting belief ascription “Jack believes that a broken clock is working”.
• In a more recent comment you wrote: “there's nothing at all stopping us from admitting that it was once raining outside and we did not believe it, or that we once believed a broken clock was working”. This shows that you take the admission “that we once believed a broken clock was working” at least as plausible as the admission that “it was once raining outside and we did not believe it”.

Now to my argument: if we pretend that both these 2 points hold, then at the prospect of some propositional operation based on sheer co-reference that I spotted, I too did my propositional math accordingly in order to show you its dumb result.
Of course, you too disapprove of such a dumb propositional math, otherwise you would try to defend it. The problem however is: can you explain why your propositional math is acceptable while mine isn’t, based on your own assumptions? Again, if I can plausibly render “we did not believe that it was once raining outside” as “it was once raining outside and we did not believe it” based on sheer co-reference, why can’t we plausibly render “we once believed a broken clock was working” as “a broken clock was working and we once believed it” ? Or to put it into more formal terms: if one can render “I did/did not believed that p” as “p and I did/did not believe it” and vice versa, why can’t we do the same with your type of belief ascriptions?
If you can not provide an explanation on that case that is coherent with your own assumptions and doesn’t look ad-hoc, then your theoretical approach appears incoherent and your propositional math as dumb as mine. In other words, we have one more reason to question your theoretical approach along with what results out of it (your rendering of belief ascriptions).

Get it now?

Great job of denouncing shit that I've not written. — creativesoul

What do you mean? I just quoted verbatim the shit you wrote. Did you change it again?

Interesting how different your account of my position is from what I've argued here. — creativesoul

mmmkey

And what does "My claim was that JTB was the basis of the rendering" is supposed to mean?

Great job denouncing shit that I've not said. — creativesoul

All right, as I wrote in the P.S. you re-edited the text, after I picked it up. I realised it too late. Apologies, sir. Let me repay you by denouncing the shit that you wrote (unless you change it again):

there's nothing at all stopping us from admitting that it was once raining outside and we did not believe it, or that we once believed a broken clock was working, — creativesoul

Now, admitting that it was once raining outside and we did not believe it, makes sense. While admitting that we once believed a broken clock was working, still looks problematic and a way to see it is by rendering it in the same form as the former statement: once a broken clock was working and I did not believe it. Does it make sense? Hell, no.

Plato is perhaps best attributed with the original conception of JTB. Nonetheless, JTB presupposes belief as propositional attitude, as you yourself have acknowledged. My claim was that JTB was the basis of the rendering. — creativesoul

You claimed that JTB was the basis of belief as propositional attitude. I took you to mean either that the notion of belief as propositional attitude is grounded on the notion of knowledge as JTB, and this is false, because it's at best the opposite. Or that the contemporary debate on belief as propositional is originally inspired by the debate between Russell, Moore and Gettier over the notion of knowledge as JTB. But that's not true b/c the contemporary debate about belief as propositional attitude was heavily inspired by Frege "Sense and Reference" which doesn't address the notion and the problems of knowledge as JTB. That is why I asked you to give me something else to support your claim, which it seems you tried to do, but I don't understand what you mean.

@creativesoul

> However, after becoming aware of our error, there's nothing at all stopping us from admitting that it was raining outside and we did not believe it, or that we believed a broken clock was working.

Still, I don’t see anything problematic in the claim “that it was raining outside and we did not believe it”, while “that we believed a broken clock was working” still looks problematic. If you tried to put the second claim into the same form of the former, you would obtain: that broken clock was working and I didn’t believe it. Does it make sense? Hell, no.

P.S. you re-edited your post, fine. But my comment still holds

@Harry Hindu

> Here we are talking past each other again. In 1 and 2 you are talking about the some string of scribbles (descriptive sentences that do not share the same proposition). You're talking about words, not images. You're explaining how words, not images, are ambiguous.

No, I’m talking about images. Images are visual entities like strings of letters written on a paper, yet we can take images and strings to represent something (again intentionality is a presupposition here for understanding images and textual strings as representational). If we were to describe with sentences what images can represent, we would notice that there can be many descriptions that could correspond to the same image (this is particularly evident in the case of so called “ambiguous images” - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguous_image), yet they do not share the same proposition. And so on with the other remarks I made. Don’t forget that my brainstorming was about the propositional nature of images.

> Huh? How is it false?

That’s basic propositional calculus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_proof): if you claim that conditional that I reported in the previous comment, it can not be true that the consequent is false and the antecedent is true. I gave an unquestionable counter-example to prove the falsity of the consequent, so the antecedent must be false.

> I also said that you can translate different words in the same language (synonyms).

Besides the fact that synonymity is grounded on semantics, while passive and active forms are grounded on syntax, the point is that translation has to take into account all the relevant semiotic dimensions of a text for a proper translation, and the co-reference to the same state of affairs is only one semiotic dimension.

> What else would belief include if not just experience and episodic memory?

To my terminology, experience includes perception, memory, imagination. Belief can not be reduced to experience. Belief is a cognitive attitude based on experience or other beliefs.

> In the moment of your dream, you are remembering what is happening and therefore believing it is happening. What happened in the beginning of the dream is useful to remember in the middle of the dream, or else how would you know you're still in the same dream?
After you wake up you still have the memories because they were stored when you were believing, not when you aren't. Because they aren't useful memories they will eventually be forgotten.

I don’t follow you here: first it seems to me you are talking about different types of memory (working and episodic memory) and I don’t know if you are taking this in due account, secondly your statements concern empirical regularities (while I’m more interested in broadly logic analysis and reasoning), thirdly they do not seem to be always true (I doubt that while dreaming at any given time I know that I am in the same dream, also because normally I’m not aware of dreaming when I dream), forth you talk about usefulness which is a term to be clarified and then empirically proved.
In conclusion, I’m not sure how to understand your claim, if I understood it, it doesn’t seem to be right, and even if you were right, I don’t know what to do with it.


> What is logic if not the manipulation, or the processing, of symbols?

This seems again an identity claim, but I wouldn’t talk about logic as identical to manipulation or symbolic processing. However, I’m not going to open another front of contention, before converging on the many ones that we already have at hand.

@Harry Hindu

> In what way are images suppose to be ambiguous? The only images and words that are suppose to be ambiguous is art.

My point was that images are ambiguous in 2 senses: 1. they can match different descriptive sentences that do no share the same proposition. 2. Propositions - differently from sentences - are supposed to be unambiguous, however images can be not only ambiguous but also be ambiguous in ways that no descriptive sentence can render (image ambiguity does not match sentence ambiguity).
These observations are relevant b/c if we are supposed to take propositions as correlates that different sentences, different languages, different propositional attitude can share, we can wonder if propositions can be shared across different media (images vs linguistic expressions)

> When I say "how it is said", I'm referring to the scribbles used. Using different scribbles to say the same thing is saying the same thing differently.

OK let’s start again. I remember you claiming “When translating languages, that is what is translated - the state-of-affairs the scribbles refer to”. Now, I understand your comment as implying the truth of the following conditional: if translation consists in replacing statements from at least 2 different languages co-referring the same state-of-affairs, then the French translations (I provided in my example) could translate the English sentences indifferently, because they all are referring to the same state of affaires (at least to me). But the consequent of that conditional is false, so it should be false also the conditional.

> I'm not clear of where we are agreeing or disagreeing here.

My central claim is that semantic relations can not be reduced to sequences of mind-independent causal chains. You seem to do the same (due to the relevance of the notion of “mind” in your argument), but you are also developing your discourse over aspects that simply widen the scope of that central claim (e.g. with the reference to art works), which is fine but I'm more interested in arguments that support or question the claim: semantic correlations (between sign and referent) can not be reduced to causal chains. To support that central claim, one could for example argue that while art works are ambiguous in some sense, any causal chain involved in the intentional production/experience/understanding of a piece of art work can not be qualified as "ambiguous". While to question that main claim one could argue that indeed ambiguity can be reduced to some probabilistic feature of causal chains involving psychological states, etc.
In any case, I'm not interested to deal with this specific task in this thread. So I'll leave it at that.

> It's not useful to remember/believe that you dream, or to remember/believe you know the difference between dream and reality?

In your past comment, you wrote “The act of memorizing an experience is the act of believing it”. This looks as an identity claim to me, and I don’t support such identity claim. For me belief exceeds both experience and episodic memory. Maybe you wanted to say that an act of memorizing a given experience always results from believing in that experience. Even if this was true, it would be just an empirical fact, namely something that doesn’t exclude the logical possibility of believing a given experience without memorizing it and memorizing a given experience without believing in that experience. Besides there are actual counter-examples: I remember a dream but I do not believe in that dream, I do not take whatever seemed to happen in that dream to be the case. Maybe you want to claim that while dreaming I was believing whatever was experiencing, and that resulted in me memorizing it. But that we believe in our dreams while dreaming can be acknowledged for all our most common dreams, yet we do not seem to remember all of them either.
The correlation between usefulness, memory, experience and belief you are pointing at, again looks empirical to me, not logical (which is the part I’m more interested in), and even more slippery because what counts as useful is no less controversial than what counts as memory, experience, and belief.

@creativesoul

> There is a common practice of personifying animals. If we follow your advice here, anthropomorphism is acceptable.

Not necessarily. First of all, I find acceptable as a linguistic datum the cases that you may qualify as anthropomorphic along with those that you do not qualify as anthropomorphic based on your assumptions, precisely to assess your own assumptions. Secondly, belief attribution practices evolve over time, so we can’t ignore this fact either, and I don’t assume that they do it arbitrarily.


> What I'm saying is that some belief existed in it's entirety prior to our talking about it, and as such, our common practices could very well be wrong, particularly regarding language less ones as well as ones that are formed and/or held prior to thinking about them as a subject matter in their own right.

One way to revise the practice is to fix ambiguities/indeterminacies internal to the practice itself (here the need to distinguish e.g. different logical functions of “to be”). Your approach about belief ascriptions however doesn’t seem to solve ambiguities/indeterminacies of ordinary belief ascriptions, instead - depending on the pragmatic context - introduces them as I already argued.


> My aim currently is to shine a bit of much needed light upon the current failings of our accounting practices. Russell's clock, both Gettier cases, and Moore's paradox all stem from belief as propositional attitude.

Not sure how I am supposed to understand such a claim. Also because I’m not sure that Russell, Moore, Gettier, and you share the same idea of “belief as propositional attitude”, nor that their arguments rely on a specific way of understanding “belief as propositional attitude”. Anyways, how can your way of understanding belief ascriptions “shine a bit of much needed light upon” these three cases? If you explained it already elsewhere and can provide the links, I’m willing to read it of course.


> My attitude towards your position is clear befuddlement. It is about as preposterous as it can be for us to deny that it is possible to believe that a broken clock is working, or object to the reporting of that simply because your accounting practice cannot make sense of it, because not only is it possible to believe that a broken clock is working, it happens on a regular basis to someone... somewhere. It's happened to me.

Sure, you are right, if you frame the problem in the way you believe it should be handled, how on earth can I possibly question it? Unfortunately it’s just a sophism.
Besides since the question for me, it’s not if it is possible, but under what conditions it is permissible to make such claims, there is a way I could make sense of it, after all. And I also told you that in this case, to avoid ambiguities, instead of saying “Jack believes that a broken clock is working” I would say “Jack believes of that broken clock that is working”, is there any substantial reason why you wouldn’t?


> Then I suggest you peruse the last couple of weeks worth of posts by yours truly here in this thread, because you seem to have either ignored or missed the arguments that have been given.

And I suggest you to do the same, because I addressed many of them when they were available.
But in the following comment I couldn’t find any, unless you consider emoticons as arguments:

...the JTB analysis of "knowledge" challenged by Gettier presupposes (or so it seems) the notion of "belief" as propositional attitude not the other way around. So, unless you have something more convincing to support your claim ("JTB is the basis for belief as propositional attitude"), b/c that is what I asked, then it is fair to say that you are completely wrong


:meh: — creativesoul

> I too prefer arguments to rhetoric, handwaving, and gratuitous assertions. So far, you've offered the latter three [1]. Got any of the former?

I wish I could help, but unfortunately, I don’t take emoticons to be arguments. Sorry.


[1]
Maybe you have that impression b/c you are the one to be challenged now. When I was challenging Banno you used to write things like: "I'd be honored to offer my feedback to such a carefully well-crafted post". Not to mention all the moments you agreed with my points against Banno. You even re-used an argument I made against Banno without mentioning me.

Indeed this is what I already — neomac

creativesoul

If "The present King of France is bald" is not a proposition, and yet it can be believed nonetheless, then it cannot be the case that either all belief has propositional content or all belief is an attitude towards some proposition or other. — creativesoul


Indeed this is what I already remarked in my previous comment:

You mean your pointless challenge: " If there are beliefs that cannot be presented in propositional form, give us an example".
What about this example: X believes that the present King of France is bald. Did I win anything? — neomac — neomac