I don't think philosophy is good therapy, but I do think it can do some work at helping inoculate you to bad arguments. — csalisbury

I definitely think being taught critical thinking, rhetoric, and some sort of informal (not unrigorous, but informal) logic is good. But to the extent philosophy does teach this (and honestly I don't really think it does very well), it always does so as a cover for what it's really interested in, which is less benign and useful. A lot of philosophy, I think, actually positively harms your ability to think well.

And yeah, I think philosophy more than other fields is used as a means for people to work through themselves and express their deeper desires. That's partly symptomatic of why it's not very good – you can project anything onto it, say whatever you want to. I would advocate looking at it a bit more dispassionately – people trying confusedly to express themselves is fine, but we also want things that are actually real, work, and so on.

Yeah, that's right. But I think his mono-causal model is a bit oversimple. It's more just that we lack certain metacognitive abilities having to do with how language and inquiry work, and by dint of having extremely specific intellectual concerns and a certain personality and cognitive disposition, you can sort of start to notice this by accident. Trying to express your fantasies and desires, and maintain the omnipotence of the intelligence, can be part of that, but sometimes it's something more banal – simple confusion, and so on.

Do you agree with (at least some interpretations of) Wittgenstein that the role of philosophy then becomes a form of therapy for resolving conceptual confusion? — Luke

No, because I don't think philosophy has a good track record as therapy either. My position, and I've expressed it here before, is that philosophy ought to be exited, and viewed from the outside anthropologically. We should look at philosophy as a practice that we are no longer 'natives' of, and that we do not engage in, but that we do seek to try to understand, much like an anthropologist might for a foreign culture.

Philosophy, in other words, is something certain human beings in certain cultural situations do – and it isn't what it claims to be, and doesn't work, and so there isn't that much good reason to actually practice it, not even for therapeutic reasons. But looking at it and understanding why people do it, and what cognitive factors drive it, is interesting in understanding how human inquiry works.

I don't think there's any one reason people make these sorts of claims – emotional issues is probably a big one, but not the only one. Other people probably really think they're 'discovering' things while doing it. The point is just that philosophy takes place in a confused register where the conversation goes back and forth, but as far as inquiry goes, nothing is really happening. It's like watching a cat try to catch a laser light, or something.

So it's not just that people are too emotionally invested, and don't want to admit they're just trying to use words in nonstandard ways. It's more that language is the medium in which philosophy takes place, and there's some lack of meta-cognitive awareness of what goes on when we use it, in general. But sadly, I think philosophy itself is also not a great medium for giving people these meta-cognitive skills. Any understanding of the destructive portion of OLP has to start with the recognition that philosophy, objectively, doesn't work. That is, it is not what it claims to be – a form of effective inquiry.

Indeed. Later OLP understood that it wasn't doing linguistics or sociology. The commentary on ordinary language was from 'within' native knowledge of that language, and so it was neither descriptive nor normative in its claims, but rather acted as a kind of participation, that of a native heir to a tradition, as to what that tradition was, and so was partially criterial for it, but also served as the unearthing of ordinary linguistic knowledge as a kind of 'remembering,' with analogies to Platonic anamnesis. We neither stipulate, nor discover empirically, what we would say; we 'remember' it. There is an affinity here to Chomsky's notion of a native speaker judgment as to the grammaticality of a sentence. It's like telling someone 'these are the steps to the dance.'

That's what separates 'ordinary' language philosophy from the study of language as an empirical science. The ordinary language is ordinary in that the inquiry is conducted by someone who can only inquire because they are, in some sense, already masters of the domain.

Not sure how to respond to that since I don’t know what olp means to you. I’m on more familiar ground with Wittgenstein , and I’d say that a fair amount has been written recently connecting him to phenomenology. — Joshs

I don't have any thoughts on what it means 'to me,' but 'OLP' typically refers to a few strands of thought in analytic philosophy, mostly spurred by exegesis of Moore and Wittgenstein, as well as the work of Austin, that had a boom in popularity in England, especially in Oxford following the second world war. To see what it is, it's best just to read it – some of its major works can be found in the 'Linguistic Turn' collection, ed. Rorty, the 'Ordinary Language' collection, ed. Chapelle, and 'Philosophy and Ordinary Language,' ed. Caton.

Medieval? How so? Many of today’s philosophies have Kantian and Platonic influences so you may have to be a bit more specific( perhaps in a new thread). Husserl, the founder of modern phenomenology , had many influences, including DesCartes, Kant , Hume
and Brentano, but his notion of the cogito and the subject-object relation transcended these. Merleau-Ponty showed the influence of Hegel, but again his work transcended Hegel. And then there’s the phenomenological work of Eugene Gendlin, who was a friend of mine. He credited Dilthey, Wittgenstein, Dewey, Merleau-Ponty , Marx and Heidegger. — Joshs

This wouldn't be the thread for it, but phenomenology was effectively begun by Brentano, and the notion of intentionality he used and that Husserl took up is a medieval one that involves thought directed at an in-existent object.

The writers you're referring to are part of when phenomenology was just assimilated into the general soup of continental philosophy, and so lost most of its unique identity and methodological concerns (much in the way that OLP was subsumed into the soup of analytic philosophy more generally, and so lost its specific identity). The authors your bud mentions here are just general big names that all continentals read, and besides Merleau-Ponty, aren't even especially related to phenomenology (though like with much in philosophical movements, people sometimes retroactively declare every author to be everything).

If you want to make a thread about phenomenology, fine. I would even talk about it there. I don't think your description of it is right – phenomenology at its heart was a neo-medieval enterprise with Kantian and Platonist influences – but regardless, none of this has to do with OLP. Phenomenology in general has nothing to do with OLP – their milieus were too different, and their practitioners didn't overlap, so they shared few if any concerns or methodologies.

Not really – it's more that as a strand of philosophy it's been subsumed into the larger analytic ethos. There are a few defenders of the approach left, like Oswald Hanfling and Avner Baz, and you could say that Charles Travis and so on are doing something similar. But it's more used as an accusation than anything (to be an 'ordinary language philosopher' is like being a 'behaviorist' or a 'positivist,' etc. – it means you're wrong).

Recently Nat Hansen made the case that certain strands of experimental philosophy were in effect doing a contemporary ordinary language philosophy, but I don't really buy it.

This records the fact that traditional philosophy strips away our ordinary criteria and any context in the attempt to generalize for universality and ensure certainty by fixing the picture of language, even with identity for particulars (Austin works very hard picking out Goldfinches). The step we really run into trouble with is the need for justification that it is a "real" fox. — Antony Nickles

Yes, I think for the most part philosophy is bad inquiry, and bad inquiry is often mistaken for deep inquiry. Realizing this often causes philosophers to panic and ask after the conditions of good inquiry. What makes OLP interesting is the realization that these conditions are tied to conventions of language use in a certain way, since philosophy is primarily a conversational enterprise.

I think we just don't know very much about how to think well, or how our languages work. A major part of that is out not understanding the way that the conditions under which we ask questions affects their intelligibility and the truth of their potential answers. In this respect, it's the radical pragmatists like Travis that carry on the OLP legacy, if anyone. Philosophy itself as a first-order discipline is fairly tedious to me at this point, because once you see through its small bag of tricks you recognize them everywhere, and you can't be duped anymore The OLP philosophers are in large part responsible for that kind of realization (though the positivists and some others helped, and I imagine, though I have not personally witnessed, that you could traverse the same path by Kantian means) – it only has any interest, for me, as something to be studied anthropologically, as a clue as to human cognition and its weird quirks and defects.

but the phenomenological and deconstructive perspectives thought more radically about the basis of language than olp did. — Joshs

Again, I don't care that you prefer some philosophers over others, or thought they were super deep or whatever. It's just not relevant to the thread. Nor is the fact that at some points in history, some continental philosophers have engaged with or cited some analytic philosophers.

If you want to start talking about why you think these connections are appropriate, citing the works and how they interact, in a way that demonstrates you know what you're talking about, I'd be game. As of now, you're again, as Banno mentioned earlier in the thread, just making this about a random handful of philosophers who happen to be your favorites. But no one cares who happen to be your favorites.

Well, I just did read it. It's about the Royaumont Meeting of 1958, the division between analytic and continental philosophy, and the extent to which analytics may have been, or could be construed as, sympathetic to phenomenology or engaging in it.

This article is not about OLP.

They didn’t have to read it to have absorbed the essence of its advances. Do you think that olp’s ideas are proprietary, that they don’t belong to larger movements in philosophy that includes hermeneutics , phenomenology, pragmatism, constructivism, social constructionism, philosophy of science? — Joshs

I think that, in a thread about OLP, coming in and listing a bunch of random philosophers who never engaged with it and have nothing in particular to do with it is not helpful – to claim that they somehow assimilated all of its points without being aware of it is then absurd. Philosophical movements are contingent historical things, and you can't magically grasp them without engaging with them. And no, what goes under the moniker of 'OLP' is not just Wittgenstein, which your post heavily implies.

This is totally off-topic and has nothing to do with the thread. No one asked you for a list of philosophers you happen to like, which is all this amounts to. If you have something to contribute on the topic, then I'll respond, but this is just not it.

I have 'expanded my horizons' – I'm talking about OLP in this thread because that is what the thread is about, not because, somehow, that's the only thing I ever managed to read.

here’smy list of philosophers who absorbed the lessons of olp ( whether they read it or not) and moved on from it: — Joshs

This list doesn't make any sense, since it includes philosophers who wrote their major works prior to or during the time OLP was being worked out. Rorty is the only one here that really makes sense as having 'learned from' OLP – many of these guys probably hadn't even read it or weren't aware of it.

And yeah, if I'm meant to be impressed by Heidegger and Gadamer and so on as examples of 'good' philosophy...well, our notions of what is good are probably too different for any interesting discussion to happen here. I have no interest in 'team continental' versus 'team analytic' nonsense, which this post smacks of.

I don't think philosophy died – it just went on doing pretty much what it did before when people got bored of one way of doing it and moved on. It's a matter of historical contingency and fashion. It's not any better now than it was then, though.

Well, you are officially in charge of this thread. I'm finding "explaining" it is either beyond me or does little to shift people's framework to consider it, and I'm afraid I don't seem to have the skills to provide compelling examples and don't even do a good job of stealing Austin's or Cavell's. I have posted a few other oblique attempts, and I will, of course, carry this on. — Antony Nickles

I don't think there's much point in trying to convince people. While OLP is good, it relies on a certain psychological leap that it never figured out how to instill in other people. Lazerowitz said it was a matter of 'clicking,' or like seeing through a magic-eye painting. Much of OLP was, and I think should still be seen, as destructive to philosophy, and is a matter of 'seeing through' it. People who are invested in philosophy as part of their identity have a predisposition not to listen, and even someone who wants to listen has no guarantee it will 'click.' That's the major shortcoming of the method – no one figured out how to make someone see that initial insight. Philosophy is, in some sense, stupid or defective, but we're cognitively disposed to fall into its traps.

The thing that did it for me was Malcolm's 'Moore and Ordinary Language,' which contains something like the OLP 'master argument' in the allegory of the animal, and the argument over whether it's a fox or a wolf.

Suppose we're going through the forest and we hear rustling, so we go to investigate. We look beyond and in a clearing there's an animal. We are close enough to see it perfectly clearly. You say it's a wolf, and I say it's a fox. When you protest, I ask, how can that possibly be a wolf? It looks and acts like a fox – it has all the features typically associated with a fox. But you protest, and say 'I grant you that – it has all the characteristics of what we would normally call a fox. Nevertheless, it is a wolf.'

The idea is that here you're doing philosophy, in insisting that a fox is a wolf. The point is to consider – what sense is there in saying that a creature that has all the characteristics of what is normally called a fox, not a fox? Yet this is precisely what the philosopher spends the great majority of his time doing.

I've spent a lot of time reading the 'canonical' OLP philosophers, and I tend to think that to the extent OLP exists, it's just an expression of a more Moorean as opposed to Russellian tendency in the larger scheme of analytic philosophy. In fact the core inaugural document of 'OLP' as an explicit kind of 'doctrine' is Norman Malcom's exegesis of Moore, which Moore repudiated, but which is an interesting reading of what his tendencies would have to amount to.

It's a good approach, one that I think can be deeply assimilated to make your life and everyone else's better while conducting any inquiry that requires talking. The idea that it 'died' is false; its insights were simply assimilated into the wider contemporary mass of analytic philosophy. I don't really think that's a kind fate, since analytic philosophy as it stands now is sort of bad. The tendency to think of it, along with logical positivism, as a philosophy somehow 'outdated' or 'refuted' is laughable – it's something I think everyone should have to contend with.

Besides all the usual crap everyone knows about – you know, Strawson on presupposition, Grice on implicature, speech act theory – OLP spawned some of the most exquisite methodological discussions about how inquiry itself works that I've ever read. To read Ryle on what constitutes 'ordinary' language, what it is for words to have a 'use,' and so on, is truly a pleasure, and the back-and-forth between Ayer and Austin, and Mates and Cavell, are wonderful. I don't think analytic philosophy ever reached such self-awareness and methodological heights again. It was a rare burst of sophistication. The less-celebrated OLPers, such as Malcolm, Wisdom, Urmson, Ambrose, and Lazerowitz, are all worth reading in their own right.

John didn't say that he thinks it's raining. What he said was that it is raining, but he thinks it isn't. And that is true when it's raining but he thinks it isn't.

The point is that the sentence is still odd because he commits to believing that it's raining in virtue of asserting that's it's raining. But that isn't part of what he said.

So if John said, for whatever weird reason, 'It's raining but I don't think it is,' then if it really is raining and he really doesn't think it is, then I'll say, yeah, he's right, despite the fact that what he said was really bizarre. To say that what he said was true is the same thing as to say that 'It's raining but John thinks it isn't' is true, because that was what he said.

Yes, it would be bizarre for him to say that. That is the point. But what he said was just that it's raining but he doesn't think it is. I can say that just fine, and it can be true, no problem. Yet when he says the same thing, even in the same circumstances, it's bizarre. That is the point.

This doesn't make any sense. You can't just say that something is true or not without knowing what's being said and what the non-linguistic situation is like, and you haven't given an example of something you can say, since you've only said "X," and there is no explained situation, either.

If I say "It's raining, but John thinks it's not," I can't just say that's true or not – it depends on whether it's raining, and whether John thinks it's not. Surely you agree that can be true, in such a situation, right? Now suppose we're in such a situation: it really is raining, and John really thinks it's not.

Now suppose John hears me say this and says, 'that's right!' He is agreeing with what I just said, no? And so affirming that it was true? But it's weird for him to do that, even though it wasn't weird for me to say it.

Note that this example illustrates the same point without John himself having to make any such statement of the form you cite.

We're not describing an action or event as true (which I don't think makes much sense), but what someone said. Whether or not 'it would happen' isn't the relevant point. The point is that if it did happen, he would have said something true.

We know this because he said the same thing that I did, namely that it's raining, but John thinks it's not.

You can also show this another way. If I say, 'It's raining, but John thinks it's not,' and John says, 'agreed,' or 'that's right,' he has equally said something very bizarre. Yet he has done so just by agreeing with exactly what I already said. Yet I said something obviously true – so what's strange is not what I said, but that fact that John is the one saying it or agreeing to it.

Didn't I say the same thing as him, though? And isn't what I said true?

Such a profound insight. And all that was needed to arrive at it was to pretend that a statement which would not be made was made, and was "true." — Ciceronianus the White

Well, it would be true. Think of it this way. If I say 'John thinks it's raining, but it's not,' there's really no issue. And suppose I'm right: it isn't raining, but John thinks it is. Then I've said something straightforwardly true. But if John were to report this same thing, how would he say it? Well, he'd say 'I think it's raining, but it's not.' He said the same thing as I did, but there is something wrong with the way he said that thing. The reason is that if he says it, he must commit to his own belief in what he denies believing. There's no such restriction on me if I say it.

And so, it's not just about what we say and whether it's true – there are additionally norms governing who says that very same thing, and in what circumstances. In this case it's because we typically commit to believing what we assert, though we don't say that we believe it in making this commitment.

Oh no. I've made an assertion I don't believe without saying I don't believe it. That's absurd, isn't it? Why is that? — Ciceronianus the White

I'm not really understanding what this has to do with the scenario. You may not be following.

around here 'believe' is usually shoptalk that's just neutral on the confidence with which you believe. — Srap Tasmaner

The problem is we're talking, presumably, about normal English, not the specialty language of philosophers. I wouldn't really trust the specialty language, either – we can't just destroy the use of a verb by professional fiat, and we're always in danger of returning with our insights to use the word normally again, therefore drawing inferences we were never licensed to.

Another difference – 'I believe it's raining' typically implies that the speaker does not see that it is raining. 'It's raining' implies no such thing – we might see it, we might not. These nuances are crucial in evaluating these things. We can't just throw these words around.

As OLP birthed or transformed into pragmatics, it became clear that reading those cases as questions of 'what makes sense' is not so simple: what makes sense is sometimes what fits the pragmatics rather than what is truth-apt or something. — Srap Tasmaner

I think that in this case, the semantics is indeed different, which is why the pragmatics is different. It's true that at this time people weren't so good at distinguishing different levels of implication, but the discovery of Moore's Paradox was part of the process of sorting that out a little better. You can see Wittgenstein here as making the mistake you outline – he saw that 'I believe it's raining' and 'it's raining' are often used for similar illocutionary purposes (true) and therefore concluded that in some sense they must 'mean the same' or 'be used the same way' (false, once we look more carefully, and at a wider array of examples).

Note a methodological weakness in the Wittgensteinian claim is that we're unable to explain why 'I believe it's raining' has a similar effect sometimes to 'it's raining,' but we can't explain why this tendency goes away when the tense or person shift. Wittgenstein notes this, but so far as his comments go, it's a complete accident that these functions differ in such systematic ways. But it's not an accident – there is a reason why the first person present tense for these verbs is what triggers the oddity, precisely because 'believe' means the same in all these contexts, but only when one commits to not believing what one is saying at that time does it become odd, due to the constraints on normal assertion.

There's no circumstance, however, where we would say "It's raining but I don't believe it is" unless there was something seriously wrong with us, or unless we're playing games. There is no truth to the statement. It sounds absurd because it would never be said by a normal person in a normal situation, but nor would it ever be thought true. It might be thought to be a statement made by someone seriously ill, but that obviously isn't what Moore intends. I think there is no paradox because there is nothing "true" about Moore's contrivance. — Ciceronianus the White

I don't think you're getting the point of the example. Everyone, including Moore, agrees it's absurd, that one wouldn't normally say it, etc. That's the whole point – the fact that it's absurd shows something interesting about the relation of belief to assertion, viz. that we commit to believing what we assert, without outright saying that we believe it.

It is not 'my' approach, but what Moore already suggested...and I haven't ever seen a better explanation than the one he gave. It fits into a more general pattern of speech acts – sincerity (even knowledge, perhaps) is a general condition on most assertion, but that sincerity isn't what one asserts. Moore's Paradox isn't interesting because the problem itself remains 'unresolved,' but because it tipped analytic philosophers off to the fact that we imply multiple things in multiple ways when we speak, often over and above the narrow content of what's asserted. As Banno suggests, this was important because, along with the discovery of presupposition and implicature, it helped pave the way for a better semantics embedded within a logic of speech acts.

Wittgenstein's stab at it can't possibly be right, since 'I believe it's raining' and 'It's raining' don't mean the same. Of course, one can utter the first to convey the second, and this might even be the point of saying it. But to deny the first, we say 'no you don't,' and to deny the second, we say 'no it's not.' And in doing so, we deny very different things. Likewise, the report of what's said is different: 'John said he thinks it's raining' versus 'John said it's raining.' Even in isolation the utterances have quite different pragmatics – 'I believe it's raining' is weaker, in that it implies a hedge, and puts less pressure on the audience on the uptake. Cf. 'I believe it's raining, but I'm not sure if it is,' versus 'It's raining, but I'm not sure if it is.'

Much of Lazerwitz' paper is about the non-reality of universals, so I presume he would have to hold to something very like mathematical fictionalism on the same grounds. — Wayfarer

That is not what the Lazerowitz paper (whichever one you're referring to) is about, nor is it what's outlined in this thread. And that is not the position he would hold, as you would know if you read the OP carefully, rather than 'presuming.'

The point is not a denial of realism about universals or whatever. The point is that any hypothesis as to their reality, pro or con, is equally metaphysical in the relevant sense, and is a matter of proposing to use words in a certain way. That goes for denying that they are real as well as affirming.

You're missing the point on a basic level. Were this the case, there would be no need for arguments such as 'mathematical fictionalism'. The whole rationale for that argument, which is the subject of many learned papers, is the fact that numbers appear to be real, which undermines materialist views of what exists. — Wayfarer

What are you talking about? I don't think you're following the discussion.

You're missing the point on a very basic level, so I'll repeat.

The point is not skepticism towards whether any purported metaphysical objects exist, are fictional, etc. The point is that theses the the effect that they don't exist, or are fictional, etc. have the same status as the theses that they do.

We don't understand it, so a commitment to your current scientific practices being efficacious mans that it can't exist (or else there's something that exists but that your current scientific practices can't understand).

That's my guess – it's an anxiety about the current feebleness of human inquiry or the social institutions it gets routed through.

It's worth noting also that the characterization of words like nouns and adjectives as denoting single universal essences that a person can recognize is largely a caricature – Austin's 'the meaning of a word' is a great commentary on this. A lot of this puzzling springs from never actually attending to what languages do.

where do we acquire the ability to recognise general forms in the first place; — Wayfarer

What does a philosopher have to contribute to that question?

I like those articles because I cannot, after a considered appraisal of the issue, take the problems he critiques seriously after reading them. I just can't: psychologically, they convince me.

The deeper point for Lazerowitz is that one can in principle construe these words how one pleases where the ordinary language itself doesn't decide, as naming something or not, depending on how one sets up the language. So (early) Quine is fundamentally mistaken in thinking there is something to worry about in the ontological commitments of language, partly because there is no one ontology we have to worry about, and partly because there is no one language we're forced to speak. So the initial analytic project was fundamentally mistaken.

This was also the view eventually taken by Carnap. There is a lot of overlap here – the error the philosopher makes is, in Carnap's turn, thinking external questions are internal ones, and so that they are questions 'about' something rather than effective insistences on speaking a certain way.

I think that Plato likely had something like initiation into a mystery religion in mind.

What about it?

What if we take as example belief in a supreme, infinite, eternal and yet personal intelligence; what does it entail to hold such a belief? I think what is involved conceptually could only be understood for the most part by more or less loose analogical negation. A supreme entity is imagined as being greater than, and fundamentally different than, every other entity. — Janus

Good question – I tend to think that folk religion is cognitive, while classical theism and so on isn't. Folk religion has God or the gods be transcendent, but capable of interacting with the world in concrete ways (leading to lots of claims about the world, especially historical, many of which are wrong). Folk religion, if you like, shades off from the concrete and obviously meaningful into more ineffable things, and points and some transcendent beyond that one can't express. Classical theism and 'philosopher's religion,' however, seems to me to have no such foothold, and so I would classify it as genuinely 'metaphysical.'

In folk religion, the supreme being is not just an analogical or negative abstraction, but has a concrete personality and has done things in history.

I'm not sure what you mean by "truth of certain bits of language" — Janus

What I mean is that we have linguistic conventions to assenting to things as true or repudiating them. To treat a bit of language as true is to respond to it with affirmation, to say you believe it, and so on. This can lead to arguing in its favor, adopting various emotional and aesthetic reactions to it, etc. But when we know something banal like what the capital of a state is, we don't just do this.

The question is, then, what makes a certain claim cognitively meaningful? By this we mean 'meaningful' in a restricted, technical sense of interest to us – it tells us, roughly, 'how things are.' Metaphysical claims do purport to do this, and not just to be meaningful in some other, poetic way (although they may be that as well).

Here is the problem, then: for a claim to be cognitively meaningful, and to meaningfully present the world in some way, is for accepting or denying that claim to have some effect on 'how we take the world to be.' But what exactly is it to take the world to be the way it is? A good first stab is, it's something like having one's own treatment of the world track the features of the world systematically, so that one's behaviors and attitudes change as the world changes, and for that reason. So to take the world to be some way rather than another, whether one is right or wrong in doing so, is something like coping with the world with behaviors and attitudes as if those behaviors and attitudes were tracking it in that way. The question becomes: do metaphysical beliefs ever do this? Could adopting, or disposing of, a metaphysical belief, change our treatments of or action towards the world in any way, other than the way we talk, and any other attitudes and behaviors derivative from this? That is, do we do anything else, in accepting a metaphysical claim, other than deciding to assent to the truth of certain bits of language, and the actions derivable from that?

It's facile (and usually their only "comeback") for such enunciators to claim that those who claim that their claims are meaningless simply "do not understand". — Janus

It's a strange comeback, since this was the claim in the first place. Of course we don't understand – that's what we're saying!

What makes people upset, I think, is the invitation to consider whether perhaps they also do not understand themselves.

It should be remembered that there is no such thing as a 'scientific worldview,' being 'pro-science,' etc., to begin with. These are just popular mythologies. 'Science' does not really have a core set of concerns and methodologies, in the way that 'metaphysics' does (the latter has remained basically unchanged since Plato, although it takes on new dresses and responds superficially to new developments around it).

So when I lie I commit to believing my lie? — Michael

Yes. In fact, otherwise lying wouldn't work! The whole point of lying is publicly committing to believing something you know to be false (well, in the most canonical case of lying).