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

That is false on it's face.
We learned to use the word "belief" in the context of specific linguistic practices, but those practices were not about belief ascriptions. — creativesoul

I lost you again. It doesn’t really matter how you phrase it based on your questionable philosophical assumptions. All I meant was simply that you as anybody else learned the word “belief” when other speaking people around you were saying things such: I/you/he/she/we/they believe or not believe this or that etc. This is a linguistic fact. There is no possible contention on this. And that, only that, is the point I care making.
So if you are happier to write “We learned to use the word "belief" in the context of specific linguistic practices”, just go for it. The point I made still holds.

We've been using the term belief for thousands of years. We've been attributing beliefs to ourselves and others for at least that long. Some attribute beliefs to the simplest 'minded' of animals, such as slugs.

According to what you've said here, we ought make our theory of belief fit such usage. — creativesoul

Sure, why not? But our practices admit figurative and literal usages, normal and fringe cases, shared and non-shared background beliefs, successful and unsuccessful belief attributions, etc. When you were a kid you learned the word "belief" also in playful contexts and stories about fictional characters, if you had a religious education you also learned the word “belief” as applied to invisible divine beings or disembodied souls, etc.
In any case, I must confess in all honesty that I don’t know and never even heard of any example in any culture in the entire known human history where people learned the word “belief” predominantly as applied to slugs, do you? And if you don't, then this shows not only how weak your objection is, of course, but also an interesting linguistic fact that our theory of belief should take into account!


FYI I prefer arguments to emoticons.

I could be wrong, but not completely. — creativesoul

As far as I can tell, Frege published "Sense and reference" in 1892, while Gettier published his "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" in 1963, besides 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.

What are you ascribing to another prior to having an understanding of belief? — creativesoul

I lost you. I’m talking about your theoretical understanding of the belief ascription practice wrt to the notion of “belief”. A theory of belief should fit into a theory of belief ascription not the other way around, the reason being that you as any body else learned the word “belief” and its proper usage in the context of specific linguistic practices about belief ascriptions, prior to any philosophical debate. So the nature of belief should be such that it makes such a practice possible. Such practices tell us that we can provide de re/de dicto ascriptions, that they are appropriate in some circumstances not in others, that those belief ascriptions guide our understanding and expectations about other people’s behavior, that we can attribute beliefs even to non-linguistic creatures, etc. So based on these practices what can we claim about the nature of belief? That's the philosophical task that makes sense to me.

@Harry Hindu (bear with me for the non-standard quotation style)

> Were you asking me to describe the image, or what the image is about?

I was more brainstorming about Agent Smith’s question: “Are pictures/images propositions?”
The problem is that propositions are not supposed to be ambiguous, while images are.
Sentences can be ambiguous, but (not surprisingly) there are rules to systematically disambiguate them wrt to the propositions that they are supposed to represent (at least in the case of declarative sentences), that’s not the case for images.

> So A1 is said differently than B1, but you say that they are translatable and mean the same thing.

Because B1 not only matches with what A1 says (about Alice’s love for Jim) but also with how it is said by A1 (passive form)

> So, it all depends on what the goal of the mind is at any moment (intent).

That is the point I’m making as well: what enables us to single out semantic relations between signs and referents out of a causal chain of events is “a mind” with intentionality. If we talked only in terms of causality and effects, we would end up having a situation where, in a causal chain, any subsequent effect be "a sign of” any preceding cause.

> Imaginary concepts have causal power.

That is a very problematic statement to me: we should clarify the notions of “concept” and “causality” before investigating their relationship. But it’s a heavy task on its own, so I will not engage it in this thread.

> Why remember something that isn't useful? The act of memorizing an experience is the act of believing it so that you may recall it later (use the belief).

Not sure about that: e.g. we may remember things without believing in them (e.g. dreams). To my understanding, belief can interact with experience and memory in many ways, yet the latter cognitive skills come ontogenetically and phylogenetically prior to any doxastic attitude.

A sentence is semantically de re just in case it permits substitution of co-designating terms salva veritate. Otherwise, it is semantically de dicto. — creativesoul

All right, but pragmatic considerations should be taken into account to get the full picture of our communicative practices concerning de re/de dicto belief ascriptions (what terms are taken to co-refere, when substitution is allowed, etc.).
Besides also co-reference is matter of belief!

The point of this exercise, on my end anyway, is to show how the consequences of conventional accounting practices are absurd — creativesoul

Well, you are trying to make your belief ascription analysis fit your understanding of belief. For me, it should be the other way around.

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? — creativesoul

Simply because belief ascriptions are not based on such a math out-of-context, but on their explanatory power wrt to believers’ behavior in a given context.

BTW, once more, you didn’t clarify why JTB is the basis for belief as propositional attitude.

It has everything to do with it, for it is the basis of belief as propositional attitude. — creativesoul

Why? What are the reasons? Where are the arguments to support your claim that JTB is the basis for belief as propositional attitude? I mean, ought we not all do our own work?

Are you of the position that Jack cannot believe that a broken clock is working when he looks at it to find out what time it is? — creativesoul

Yep that would be my presupposition (and not only mine apparently) wrt your hypothetical case. The point is that I’m capable of de dicto/de re rendering/understanding of belief ascriptions as any other competent speaker in the right circumstances and prior to any philosophical debate. Your revisionist approach about this distinction based on your philosophical assumptions still looks unjustified for 2 reasons: 1. de dicto rendering is usually more accurate than de re rendering when we want to explain behavior 2. The success of de re ascriptions is not based on correctness but on shared assumptions between the one who makes the belief ascription and her audience on the situation at hand. If I don’t know enough Jack, I might find appropriate to make a de re ascription like this: Jack believes of that broken clock that is working.
Indeed de re belief ascriptions would still be effective if the shared assumptions were completely wrong: e.g. flat Earth believers could claim of me “he believes that our flat Earth is round” or, better, “he believes of our flat Earth that is round”.

Is that supposed to be clearer and more accurate somehow than just admitting that we can mistakenly believe that a broken clock is working? — creativesoul

Here my answer:
1. My claim is that “Jack believes that the broken clock is working” can be read in 2 ways, de dicto or de re. And de dicto ascription would be preferred over a de re ascription, when possible and based on shared understanding, because it’s more informative, more explanatory of believers’ behavior. But possibility and shareability assessments depend on the contextual assumptions of the involved parties: the one who states the belief ascription and her audience wrt the believer in the situation at hand.
2. The claim that “Jack mistakenly believes that the broken clock is working” out-of-context is more ambiguous about a de re and de dicto reading: with a de dicto reading Jack would simply be irrational (since it’s a contradictory belief), with a de re reading Jack could be either irrational or ignorant about the fact that the clock is not working. In other words, the de dicto belief ascription is more specific than de re belief ascription, therefore - if accurate - more explanatory or useful in guiding our expectations about Jack.

What would be a de dicto rendering of that toddler's belief? I mean, ought we not all do our own work? — creativesoul

Mine was indeed a rhetoric question! The example of the toddler was meant to show a common case where a de re belief ascription makes sense, since we may have at best an approximate idea of what a toddler’s understanding of the situation is (i.e. we would be much less confident in any de dicto belief ascription in this specific case). The same goes for belief ascriptions to animals. The better we understand the believer’s view of the situation, the more we would rely on her understanding of the situation to explain her behavior (or assess her rationality), and share it with others with de dicto belief ascriptions in the appropriate circumstances.

There's a difference between a statement and an utterance — Banno

How is this relevant? Instead, give me an example of a proposition, sentence, statement (or whatever else you don't care to distinguish from propositions) that can not be parsed into sequences of electric impulses of different voltage!

Those who are working on these problems accept that beliefs can be parsed as attitudes towards statements, sentences or propositions. — Banno

Sure and propositions statements sentences (and whatever else you have in your menu) can be parsed in sequences of electric impulses with different electric voltages, therefore - by transitivity - beliefs are attitudes toward sequences of impulses with different electric voltage.

"This is a picture of a duck or a rabbit, depending on how you look at it." The picture would be an example of "ambiguity". — Harry Hindu

That is the problem of putting visual content into propositional form. Images can be ambiguous in a way that is not captured by any related descriptions.
Besides one and the same image can correspond to many possible descriptions, whose number is arguably higher than any limited mind can conceive of.

The point is what you are saying, not how you are saying it. — Harry Hindu

When we translate, we take into account precisely how things are said, otherwise it wouldn’t be a translation.
So you can not use an active form in your native language to translate a foreign sentence in passive form, if you want to translate literally the foreign sentence of course.
That is why, in the examples I listed, B2 is a correct translation of A2, and not of A1, despite the fact that all 3 statements are about the same state of affaires.

I didn't say means are caused. — Harry Hindu

D'oh! I misread your statement. Apologies.

I said meaning is the relationship between cause and effect. (...) What they mean is the relationship between the scribbles existing and what caused them. — Harry Hindu

Still I disagree on this. My conviction is that linguistic meaning presupposes intentionality and intentionality can not be understood in causal terms for several reasons.
Here I limit myself to 3 and will leave it at that:
1. Causes and effects form an indefinitely long sequence of events, so in this chain of events start and end of a meaningful correlation (say between a sign and its referent) are identifiable only by presupposing the constitutive correlates of intentional states: namely subject (who would produce linguistic signs ) and object (which would be the referent of the linguistic sign).
2. “reference” between signs and referents is grounded on rule-based behavior that presupposes intentionality with its direction of fit, while causality has no direction of fit at all.
3. a sign can refer to things that do not exist, and things that do not exist can not cause anything

So beliefs would be an idea that something is true based on one observation, while knowledge would be something is true based on multiple observations that are integrated with logic. — Harry Hindu

Belief can be based on one or multiple observations, agreed. But this seems to contradict instead of supporting the idea that belief can be taken “in the form of their visual experiences”. Perceptual beliefs exceed the related visual experience: they are attitudes, but visual experiences are not attitudes. This should be true for both men and animals, to my understanding.

Russell, Gettier, and Moore all took JTB to task. — creativesoul

I don’t see what JTB about knowledge has to do with our understanding of belief ascriptions.

It's just that not all belief are equivalent to propositional attitudes, and thus those exceptions cannot be sensibly rendered in those terms. That's what my broken clock example shows us, and quite clearly it seems to me. — creativesoul

Your understanding of belief ascriptions is biased by your philosophical understanding of propositional attitudes. While de dicto/de re belief ascriptions have an appropriate usage and make sanse to competent speakers independently from your ideas about propositional attitudes.
And there is a strong reason to prefer de dicto belief ascriptions over de re ascriptions b/c the former ones generally explain better believers’ intentional behavior, than the latter (assumed they are both correct).

Jack - mistakenly - believed that a broken clock was dependable; read true; was running; was trustworthy; was where he ought look to find out what time it was; etc. Hid did not know that it was broken, but he most certainly believed it! — creativesoul

Your claim is misleading for 2 reasons: 1. De re belief ascriptions make absolutely sense in some cases (e.g. when we try to solve belief ascriptions ambiguities wrt other subjects’ contextual and shared background understanding of the situation [1]), yet it’s not correctness the ground for de-re belief ascriptions! 2. Your de re belief ascription about Jack is based on a de-contextualised assumption that the description “that brocken clock” is correct by hypothesis (an assumption that nobody would take for granted in controversial real cases b/c even your belief ascriptions are beliefs after all!).


[1]
A toddler runs toward a woman walking with her partner in a park, the toddler’s father runs after him, and, knowing that couple from the neighbourhood, explains to the surprised partner: “my son believes that your wife is his mum”. Of course the toddler knows nothing about the marital relationship between the partner and the woman, he doesn’t even have the concept of “marriage”, nor “motherhood” for that matter, as shared by adults, therefore the father’s belief ascription is not de dicto (what would be a de dicto rendering of that toddler’s belief?), yet this de re belief ascription is epistemologically plausible to the father and the couple based on their background and shared understanding of the situation.

When translating languages, that is what is translated - the state-of-affairs the scribbles refer to. — Harry Hindu

Not sure about that. Take a couple of English sentences with their relative translations in French:
A1) Alice loves Jim
A2) Jim is loved by Alice
B1) Alice aime Jim
B2) Jim est aimé par Alice
I would take all 4 statements to be about the same state-of-affairs (and you?). Yet B1 is a correct translation of A1 only, and B2 of A2 only. If it was true that the translation is based on reference to the same state-of-affairs then both B1 and B2 would be equally good translations of A1 or A2 indifferently.

Meaning, however, is not arbitrary. It is the relationship between cause and effect. What some scribble means is what caused it to exist on the paper or on the screen. It is caused by a mind — Harry Hindu

The idea that “a mind” is causing “scribble means” doesn’t sound right to me.
“Scribbles” may be the kind of entities that can be caused, but “means” are not caused, nor can be rendered in causal terms.

So non-language creatures have beliefs in that they learn by making observations and what they learn is what they believe to be the case in other similar states-of-affairs. Their beliefs are not in the form of propositions, but the visual experiences they had. The same goes for scribble-using humans, and is how they learned a language in the first place by believing that scribbles can be used to refer to what is the case or not. You have to believe that before you can begin using scribbles. — Harry Hindu

I’m inclined to agree with you in general, but the devil is in the details. So, I agree that animal cognitive skills and consequent behavior are much more constrained by their experience than human cognitive skills are. Yet it doesn’t sound right to me to claim that animals’ beliefs are “in the form of their visual experiences”. The problem is that experience (visual or other) doesn’t seem to be enough to grant belief (see the case of optical illusions like the Müller-Lyer illusion [1]: the 2 arrows keep looking different in length even if one correctly believes that they have the same size), therefore animals’ beliefs too are not necessarily nor tightly coupled with their experiences.
Besides the claim that human’s beliefs are “in the form of propositions” does sound right, at least in part. However I would complement it by saying that a belief in propositional form is just a belief that is expressed through a declarative sentence, i.e. through a specific linguistic behavior, that doesn’t imply that humans are equipped only of propositional beliefs.


[1]

1. Are pictures/images propositions? — Agent Smith

Good question. Here is another one: if all propositions can be rendered in linguistic form, then what proposition would correspond to the following image?

Mind independent abstract entities seems to be a contradiction. Abstractions are defined as existing as an idea and not as physical or concrete. So how can something that is abstract be mind independent? — Harry Hindu

Many philosophers take the technical notion “abstract entity” to mean something that is not the result of some mental operation (“abstraction”). According to them “abstract entities” are to be contrasted to “concrete entities”: indeed both of them are real (i.e. mind-independent) entities , the difference (at least according to many) is that abstract entities are not located in space and time, and they are causally inert, while concrete entities are located in space and time (or at least, in time) and are not causally inert. Propositions, numbers, sets are often taken to be some common cases of abstract entities by those who believe in their existence. So for example, while a sentence is a concrete entity, the proposition that the sentence is meant to represent would be an abstract entity of the sort I’ve just described. Frege seems to have proposed this view.

This sounds like what I was hinting at here:

What form does a language you don't know take? How does that change when you learn the language? Do the scribbles and sounds cease to be scribbles and sounds, or is it that you now know the rules to use those scribbles and sounds? — Harry Hindu — Harry Hindu

Yes it does.

creativesoul's reminder of "rigid designators" is misleading. Kripke's theory of rigid designators was supposed to address the logic distinction between proper names and decriptions, and to argue against the Russellian's analysis of proper names in terms of descriptions: now, "broken clock" is a description not a proper name.
Besides we shouldn't take Kripke's theory for granted. And indeed I don't.

de re belief ascriptions can be less ambiguously rendered in the following form:
S believes of X that p
E.g. Jack believes of that broken clock that is working
The reason being that in this form, the reference to X is put within the semantic scope of the one who is making the belief ascription instead of the scope of Jack's beliefs themselves.

Other examples to consider:
a1) Jack believes that Alice loves Jim
a2) Jack believes that Jim is loved by Alice
b1) Jack believes that Alice is the sister of Jim
b2) Jack believes that Jim is the brother of Alice

Do a1 and a2 express the same belief?
Do b1 and b2 express the same belief?

That gives me a nice place to start. I'll have a look at Sense and Reference. — ZzzoneiroCosm

creativesoul's ideas about belief ascriptions sound not only preposterous (and justifiably so for me), but also very dangerous: e.g. imagine some christian reported the belief of a high muslim mufti as “he believes that Allah is Jesus” because christians take Jesus to truly co-refere to god. And it doesn't matter if christians' religious beliefs are truly true, because as long they believe they are, they are allowed to make belief ascriptions the way creativesoul is suggesting. Indeed belief ascriptions are second order beliefs, and also description/name coreference is matter of belief, that is why we can't simply overlook de dicto belief ascriptions. De re belief ascriptions, are only apparently so, and when we use them appropriately this becomes more evident.

I'm spending some time trying to understand what a proposition — ZzzoneiroCosm

The philosophical debate about propositions starts (or should start) from some strong intuitions that should be readily acknowledged by all competent speakers. That doesn’t mean that they are rationally justified, it simply means that philosophical accounts are supposed to neither deny nor underestimate the strength of these intuitions, but to take them as a starting point for their analysis and explanations. Here are at least some strong intuitions:
1. All the following statements say “the same” in different languages:
That apple is on the table (in English)
La pomme est sur la table (in French)
Der Apfel ist auf dem Tisch (in German)
2. All the following statements are about “the same” based on name/description coreference (I.e. “that red apple” and “that Fuji apple” co-refere to the same apple):
That red apple is on the table
That Fuji apple is on the table
3. All the following statements report different types of attitude from different subjects toward “the same”:
Jim sees that apple is on the table
Sally states that apple is on the table
Jack believes that apple is on the table
Cindy does not believe that apple is on the table
Billy hopes that apple is on the table

Alice orders that apple should be on the table
4. In any belief ascription (e.g. “Jack believes that apple is on the table”), what the belief is about is “the same” as what the statement (related to the belief ascription’s subordinate clause) is about (e.g. “that apple is on the table”)

What is “the same” in all 4 strong intuitions? “Propositions” some/many/most philosophers say, but this is a theory-laden notion and it depends on the theory of proposition one supports (I would suggest you to read Frege’s “Sense and reference” to have a better grasp on the issue).

I'm spending some time trying to understand what a proposition — ZzzoneiroCosm

Well, I’m not very familiar with his views (which he also revised over time) so I’m not sure how to answer. As far as I’ve understood, Moore initially takes propositions to be mind-independent abstract entities (a view that was probably inspired by Frege’s views) that constitute the objects of our thoughts and the meanings of our statements. My understanding of meaning (in semantics) is highly influenced by Wittgenstein’s views (as reported in his “Philosophical Investigations”), so for me meanings are not mind-independent abstract entities, but rules that present themselves in the course of actual and contextual linguistic practices: this implies that meanings are neither mind-independent, nor practice independent, besides they are not “objects” of thought since they regulate how we think about “objects”, they kind of operate in our thinking when we think more than being things that we consult in order to think.
So “proposition” for me is just a notion that we use for an a-posteriori semantic/logic formalisation of our language, in the same way we use the notion of “name” and “verb” for an a-posteriori grammar formalisation of our language.

Jack believed that the clock was working and believed that "the clock is working" is true. Your insertion of the adjective 'stopped' muddies the waters: it adds a perspective: it adds the perspective of some X that knows the clock is stopped.


(Again, I won't be hurt if you don't want to engage. If I can't play with others I'm content to play with myself :sweat: ) — ZzzoneiroCosm

↪ZzzoneiroCosm
You beat me to it! Of course Jack didn't know the clock was stopped. So he didn't believe a stopped clock was working, he believed a clock was workin — Janus

I made the same observation a while ago.

Be well. — creativesoul

You too along with your mentor

I'm afraid I cannot help you there. I'm working on an understanding of belief that is amenable to evolutionary progression based upon the tenets of methodological naturalism. — creativesoul

I didn't ask for help, I asked you how you understand the relation between the notion of "belief" and the one of "concept". You retorted the question to me and I drafted an answer. Now should be your turn in answering the question I asked, right? If you are not interested to continue the exchange, just tell me. It's simpler, more honest and more respectful of each others' time.

I'm afraid that I left the reader to draw the conclusion... — creativesoul

Therefore, he believed that a broken clock was working. — creativesoul

If you don't care to argue better than this nor to address my points, I guess I'm done here.

I mean what I write. Let's focus there. — creativesoul

Sure, but again I’m interested to understand better what kind of substantial issues your claims are supposed to address. For the same reason I asked you another question that you didn’t answer yet: how is your distinction (between what belief is about and content of belief) supposed to work when Jack, in a dream, believes that he’s talking about his dog (which he really never had) with a kid (which he never met or saw in his real life) in a place (which doesn’t resemble any places he remembers to have seen so far)?

Evidently, we've very different standards regarding what counts as a "better report" of Jack's belief — creativesoul

I don’t think so, despite your claim: indeed if we stick to your other claim - “I mean what I write” - in a previous post you reported Jack’s belief as “he believes that a broken clock was working” which is a contradictory belief, while now you report his belief as “he believed that that particular clock was working” (i.e. the same way I would do) which is not contradictory. Unless you have another reason to explain the way you reported Jack's belief, I take it to mean that the second report is better then the first one, as I too believe.
I can readily grant you that you can make a de re/de dicto distinction in Jack’s belief about the clock but it’s still the “de dicto” rendering that is supposed to better show what Jack believes based on his own understanding of the situation.

The broken clock shows that the content of belief is not equivalent to what belief is about. — creativesoul

Well so far it shows just your terminological preferences. What substantial issues they are supposed to clarify is another question.
Anyhow, I am familiar with the literature where “reference” is attributed to names (e.g. Frege “Sense and Reference”). But Frege has no problems to talk about the reference of sentences either. Now, I can stick to that terminology, yet the reason why I feel justified to export the term “reference” outside the realm of semantics, it’s because semantics is grounded in intentionality as much as belief in the realm of epistemology. And, if we can talk about the content of a sentence, or what a sentence is about, or the reference of a sentence as much as we can can talk about the content of a belief and what is the belief about, then I don’t see any strong substantial reasons to prevent us from talking about the reference of a belief.
Additionally, I don’t know how much the distinction you make between “the content of belief” and “what belief is about” is supported in the literature: can you pls provide some reference?

he believes that a broken clock was working — creativesoul

That doesn’t sound a correct report of Jack’s belief. Indeed it would make Jack’s belief contradictory. A better report would be: Jack believes that clock is working. But that belief is false.
Anyway what you mean is that the difference between “content of belief” and “what belief is about” is related to the distinction between how things are and how things appear to Jack?
If so, before commenting on this further, I would like to know how your distinction works when Jack, in a dream, believes that he’s talking about his dog (which he really never had) with a kid (which he never met or saw in his real life) in a place (which doesn’t resemble any places he remembers to have seen so far). In this case, what is the content of the belief?

Name some things that you count as a concept, and it will help this along better. — creativesoul

I take the word “concept” as referring to some cognitive abilities presupposed by belief ascription. For now all I’m inclined to add is that concepts essentially involve classificatory intentional abilities (i.e. they can not be reduced to causal explanations) of some kind. What kind? I do not have a clear and straightforward answer to that, I’m still thinking about it. However I leave it open the question if concepts require linguistic abilities (surely linguistic concepts do). Yet I’m inclined to think this is not the case: i.e. what I would take to be conceptual consists in what classificatory features linguistic and non-linguistic concepts share. Related to this, I think there can be non-propositional beliefs, while there can not be non-conceptual beliefs.
To not get lost in uninteresting terminological controversies, I would like to stress that the substantial issue is if, what and how classificatory intentional abilities “guide” behavior and make it intelligible in linguistic and non-linguistic creatures.

I do not use the notion, finding different ways of talking to be more practical. — creativesoul

What other ways did you find? Could you provide examples?

The concept of belief and belief...

Do you draw a distinction? — creativesoul

I do. Who doesn’t?

Note he asked the referent of the belief, not the word "belief". Beliefs do not have referents for they are not used to pick something out to the exclusion of all else. That's what names do. — creativesoul

It wasn’t clear to me since "the cat believes the bowl is empty” could be taken as mentioning a sentence not as using it to describe whatever is supposed to be the case. However your reply is misleading as well in this respect, because I would grant that the question doesn’t make sense if the question presupposes a categorisation of belief as a word with some referent instead of an intentional state. And this would be a categorial mistake: beliefs are not words (but is there anybody here who would believe otherwise? If not, then what's the interest in asking this question wrt to the topic under discussion?). Yet as long as beliefs are taken to be representational, then for me “content of belief”, “what belief is about” and “what belief is referring to” (so the referent of a belief) are interchangeable expressions. Is it not the case for you? If it is case for you too, then your previous claim was wrong, indeed it does make sense to ask what the reference of a belief is and the plausible answer would be a description of whatever a specific belief is concretely about. On the other side if you disagree, how else do you understand the different meaning of “content of belief”, “what belief is about” and “what belief is referring to”?

Indeed, we do draw correlations when imagining, remembering, creating, envisioning, dreaming, etc. I fail to see how that presents any issue for the position I'm putting forth here. I mean, I've not claimed that all correlations are belief, nor would I. — creativesoul

Let’s focus. You wrote: “All belief consists of correlations drawn between directly and/or indirectly perceptible things”. First of all, to me beliefs do not consist of correlations drawn, but at best of drawing correlations. The second point is that I’m not satisfied with the latter formulation either, not because it's utterly wrong but because at best it provides a necessary condition, it certainly is not necessary and sufficient for belief ascription.
Another potential source of contention could come also from clarifying what kind of ability the expression “drawing correlations” is supposed to mean. But pls let’s ignore this last point for now.
I'm just fine if you agree on the first 2 points I made.

Are those meaningful marks imperceptible? When one believes that 3 + 2 = 5, they've done nothing more than accept the rules of arithmetic. It may be worth noting here that numbers are nothing more than the names of quantities. When one believes that God is omniscient, they've done nothing more than learn to use language to talk about the supernatural beliefs of the community, and believe that what they are saying is true. Believing that God is omniscient is to believe that there is a God, such that God exists, and that God knows everything. — creativesoul

It seems to me here you are confusing the perceptual nature of our representations with what they are about. The belief that God is omniscient or that 3 + 2 = 5 [1] are about something that doesn’t look to be perceptible in nature even if those beliefs can be rendered through perceptible statements. So the correlation of meaningful perceptible marks doesn’t imply that what it represents is a correlation between perceptible things. Unless you can clarify how.


[1] I'm not sure that arithmetic beliefs are best understood as beliefs about something to be the case. But for now I pretend to be they are.

What is the referent of the belief in "the cat believes the bowl is empty"? — Banno

The question makes no sense on my view. — creativesoul

I disagree. The referent of the word "belief" is a cognitive intentional state/event (depending on the dispositional or actual meaning we attribute to the word "belief").

Beliefs are complex things composed of other things. They are a result of cognitive processes. All belief consists of correlations drawn between directly and/or indirectly perceptible things. — creativesoul

My impression is that here you are confusing the content of the belief, with the belief. I think your formulation would sound better if you stated "All belief consists of drawing correlations" instead of "All belief consists of correlations drawn". Yet I wouldn't find it satisfactory: we draw correlations even when we imagine or associate ideas, but imagination is not belief. Besides what is "correlations drawn between directly and/or indirectly perceptible things" supposed to mean when one believes that 3 + 2 = 5 or God is omniscient?

Do you find the account I set out in the first three posts of the debate to be a complete one? — creativesoul

To me, they are enough to seriously challenge Banno's account as he presented it so far. But as I said, we can determine our views on beliefs better by clarifying other related notions, like proposition, concept, reference, perception, sentence, etc. That’s why I’m interested now to explore your understanding of the relation between beliefs and concepts.

On my view, all concepts are linguistic constructs, whereas not all beliefs are. All concepts are existentially dependent upon language. — creativesoul

On what grounds do you believe that all concepts are linguistic constructs? What are the features you ascribe to concepts that essentially require language?