Quantum superposition has already been logically described without contradiction using Tensor Products in Categorical Quantum Mechanics, a form of Linear Logic . Linear logic is para-consistent, so doesn't permit the derivation of anything from A and not A, otherwise known as ex contradictione quodlibet.

I'm tempted to say that Symmetry isn't true by correspondence, rather symmetry means "truth by correspondence".

This is by considering symmetry to be the same thing as an isomorphism, i.e an invertible mapping, where an invertible map is a property of a description or acts of description.

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To sum up, Gettier Problems demonstrate that justified true beliefs can be fallible, leading to scepticism about the existence of knowledge.

But I argue that there are equally valid reasons to deny that beliefs can refer to anything but the truth, leading to scepticism about the existence of false beliefs, and hence the utility of the concept.

In my opinion, having scepticism of the second sort doesn't nullify the epistemic scepticism provoked by Gettier problems, or vice versa. After all, denying the existence of false beliefs cannot deny the reality of one's mistakes.

Arguments of the second sort are really an instance of meta-epistemological scepticism, which is to doubt the meaningfulness of epistemology as an enterprise and the idea of inter-subjective theories of truth, belief and knowledge.

In an attempt to crystallise the differences of opinion in this thread, what is everyone's view regarding the relevance of the Private Language Argument (if any) to the "The hard problem"?

In your opinion, does Wittgenstein's strategy of semantic reduction (as you understand it) successfully solve or dissolve the hard-problem? (to recall his earlier logical behaviourism)

I don't see how. You seem to be saying that I can't have a belief about the result of a coin flip because it hasn't happened yet but I'm not seeing why. — Isaac

You can have a belief in the manner you describe that refers to your psychological concept of "future". But from a physical and causal perspective, your beliefs cannot refer to the physical future and can only refer to your physical history, making your beliefs a conceptually redundant way of talking about the causes of your perceptions, from a physical perspective.

Haven't you ever had an experience where you have thought "this wasn't what I was expecting!".

What makes you think this isn't literally the case?

I don't see why not. There are psychological states regarding 'the actual lottery' as much as there are regarding 'my dream I had last night'. I can quite coherently now distinguish between my concept of what's actually in my cupboard and what I believe is in my cupboard, that's how I'm aware of the fact that I might be wrong, by holding those two concepts to be different. If someone says to me "what might be in that cupboard?" I could give them several answers, none of which correspond to what I believe is in that cupboard. I could even imagine myself opening the cupboard and being surprised by the contents. — Isaac

Right, but what has your present psychological state of uncertainty, including your memories, imagination and thought experiments, got to do with a future interaction with your cupboard?

Doesn't your self-professed ability to distinguish your beliefs from actuality preclude you from interpreting the objects of your beliefs as being in the future?

OK, so perhaps you should have said "fundamental to my definition of the actual moon" rather than "fundamental to the very definition of the actual moon"? — Janus

Yes, I'm of the view that the object of a predicate loses intelligibility if the subject responsible for the predication is dropped or replaced with the mythical subject "we".

Still not following I'm afraid. 'Truth' is a predictive function, it says that if I act as if A I will get the response expected if A were the case. I don't see how a notion of mind-state causality affect this. We can model all the prior causes of the the belief that X and still find that acting as if X doesn't yield the results we'd expect if X were the case. — Isaac

We predicate truth about people's behaviour, e.g. "John's opinion was discovered to be true", but this shouldn't be taken to imply that truth is a property of their thoughts and actions.

Suppose a person says "I expect that if I buy a ticket I will win the lottery tomorrow, because I had a vivid dream of winning it last night".

On a causal account of belief states, the psychological state of expectation cannot be interpreted as being future directed. The object of this person's expectation isn't the future lottery, but merely the dream that they had.

So in "the cat believes the food is under the box" 'believes' should be replaced with what? Or do our epistemic conventions apply to cats? — Isaac

We interpret the cat in the manner that suits our purposes, i.e. using the same approach as we do a human being. In both cases, we aren't predicating a property about the agent concerned.

According to a causal understanding of mind, each and every psychological state refers only to the situation that caused it, implying that "belief states" are necessarily infallible or that the notion of truth is superfluous. Therefore, since beliefs aren't generally considered to be infallible, they cannot be reducible to psychological states.

Rather, beliefs exist in relation to social-conventions for classifying thoughts and behaviour. To say "John's beliefs were shown to be false" is to say "Relative to our epistemic-conventions, the belief-behaviour exhibited by John was classified as "false" - which isn't to say anything about John per-se.

Why would your perception of the moon be any more "fundamental to the very definition of "the actual moon"" than mine though? While it seems true that the properties of the moon are perceived properties; I don't think it follows that the moon must be dependent for its existence on being perceived. The way it appears depends on being perceived, but that is not the same as the ways in which it could be perceived. — Janus

Because my concept of "the actual moon" is necessarily in relation to my experiences that constitute my frame of reference, and any powers of empathy i might have for pretending to understand the moon from your perspective cannot change this semantic fact.

Beliefs cannot be real properties of brains, because the notion of epistemic-error is under-determined with respect to the neurological and physical facts of perception and action.

If I think John exists and I make a statement about John, then it is intended to be about an actual John. So I know what my statements are intended to be about. But I am not infallible. — Janus

That depends on perspective. E.g, from my perspective, your perception of the moon and "the actual moon" are mostly unrelated concepts, even though I am forced to consider my perception of the moon as being in some sense fundamental to the very definition of "the actual moon".

Anyone claiming that science can solve or dissolve the hard-problem, is not only wrong, but demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of the nature and purpose of science.

The ontological naturalism of science refers to the fact that the ontology of science is deliberately left undefined in terms of the perceptual judgements of any particular individual, in order so that scientific concepts can be universally shared and applied by scientists worldwide in a free and bespoke fashion, without laboratories having to submit their interpretations of their findings to the authoritative perceptual judgements of a particular individual. The price of this freedom and universality is experiential under-determination of scientific language, whereby no particular individual can claim to have direct and objective scientific knowledge.

To understand the existence of the hard-problem is to recall the history of the metre. Recall the platinum bar locked in the vault of Paris during the 19th century that was used to define "one metre" . If that platinum bar was replaced with a person whose judgements constituted the definition of "one metre", for that particular person the "hard-problem" of "sensing" one metre wouldn't exist, because by definition whatever the person perceived to be "one metre" would by definition be "one metre".

Eventually, the definition of "metre" was dematerialised for global convenience, and redefined theoretically in terms of the speed of light, changing the meaning of " one metre" from being a fundamentally empirical proposition referring to a particular bar in paris, to being a theoretical term with ambiguous empirical content, a term that was itself defined in terms of other theoretical terms in other units of measurements. In the process of dematerialisation across all units of measurement, scientific empiricism lost the distinction between theoretical and observational terms to became thoroughly aperspectival and theoretically circular.

The dematerialisation of scientific language therefore constitutes buying universality, semantic simplicity and practical freedom, at the cost of creating the hard-problem of subjectivity.

No, I commit to all of reality, I won't cherry-pick. What I don't commit to is the fantasy of direct knowledge of objects. — Kenosha Kid

Then why not commit to direct perceptual access of vague objects?

You can't avoid the implied subjective idealism, but naturalised science can at least accommodate the paradox via the adoption of an irrealist stance; If one wants to solve the hard-problem, deflate one's notion of experience to the objects experienced. On the other hand, if one wants to solve the perceptual problem of how one perceive's optical red, study neuroscience.

The questions are qualitatively different, and so are the answers that are expected. So it shouldn't matter that incommensurable theories are used for the different types of question, except for the epistemological foundationalists who are on a hiding to nothing.

One of philosophy's greatest mysteries, even more mysterious than the hard problem, is the mystery of how Daniel Dennett ascended to prominence in anglo-american philosophy.

I suspect "I believe X" causes grammatical disagreements and confusion due to the fact that it can be used to mean ​"X is more likely true than false" and higher-order propositions, such as " the sentence "X" is true", not to mention it's use case in relativizing knowledge in relation to perspective ("I know X to be true, so let's agree to disagree").

As demonstrated in these use cases, first order and higher-order belief predicates must be eliminated via slightly different strategies in order to arrive at the equivalence of "I believe X" and "X is true", and in cases of doubt "X has intermediate truth value".

Ultimately, what Gettier overlooks is the perspectival nature of belief and knowledge, namely the fact that the intentional object of a judgement cannot transcend the information available to the judgement. So it makes no sense for an external evaluator to interpret a person's belief as referring to what only the external evaluator knows. And if the person himself evaluates his past beliefs as being false on light of new information, isn't this case the same as the previous fallacy with the person's future self playing the role of the external evaluator?

Moreover, if beliefs are interpreted as having immanently accessible referents as opposed to transcendentally unavailable referents, we end up with an opposite problem; how is it possible to have false beliefs?

In my opinion, the conclusion to the above is that beliefs cannot be properties of a mind.

It’s wrong because it is a fact that it isn’t raining. Our perspectives are irrelevant. — Michael

That's where we disagree then. If someone other than myself claims to 'know' something, I can't interpret their use of the word as making transcendental claims that from my perspective is beyond their cognitive closure.

Therefore if i was observing a brain in a vat, i would understand the brain's claims to knowledge to be correct from it's perspective, in spite of the fact that from my perspective it's claims are false. And if during the course of it's life it spontaneously started to believe that it was in a vat without being informed via miraculous intervention from my world, I would understand it's belief to be delusional.

Yes, your belief is wrong because it isn’t raining. — Michael

But is my belief wrong from my perspective given that my use of "to know" hasn't changed, or only wrong from the mods perspective?

When I'm out in the rain getting wet, I certainly have an understanding of what reality is like outside my belief that it is raining; I have the actual, physical experience of the rain making me wet. The fact that it's raining coupled with the physical experience of the rain making me wet grants me the epistemic warrant to know that it's raining. — Michael

Suppose i assert "I know that it's raining because I am experiencing rain and that this fact coheres with everything else that i know". But suppose that unknown to me, the mods of this forum had drugged me into experiencing an hallucination, in such a fashion that I would never become aware of this fact at a later date.

In this situation, should a moderator judge my belief to be wrong, given that i am employing the word "know" in the same sense in which i always employ it?

Known because denoted or denoted because known? If the latter, an example, please? — tim wood

A good introduction is Judea Pearl's "Introduction to Causal Inference". The lesson is that causal implications cannot be derived from a statistical model without some initial causal assumptions.
Garbage causal assumptions in, garbage causal inferences out.

It appears that "cause" in your references is a term of art. What exactly does it mean? And what do you say caused the dynamite to explode? Or might you say that depends entirely on the who and why of the asking. And if this, then it must seem that there is no cause by itself - or even a clear understanding of the event itself!

My argument here, such as it is, simply that in informal use most folks usually know what is meant by the word "cause" in context. But I think any claim that the word itself denotes any particular anything or has any central univocal meaning is untenable. — tim wood

Sure, and to make matters worse, intuition is often wrong with respect to logical and statistical inference. Hence the reason why formal definitions and theorem provers are useful whereby informal causal intuition is reduced to axiomatic systems, even though philosophical dilemmas remain e.g with regard to counterfactual reasoning.

As a speech act asserting that one knows X may be equivalent to asserting that one believes X, but as propositions "I believe X" is not equivalent to "I know X". This is similar to the mistake that sime made above regarding "it is raining" and "I believe that it is raining" – even if asserting the former implies an assertion of the latter, as propositions they mean different things.

That belief and knowledge are different is obvious when we consider it in the third-person: "John believes that Donald Trump won the 2020 election" is not equivalent to "John knows that Donald Trump won the 2020 election." John can believe that Donald Trump won even if he didn't, but he can't know that Donald Trump won if he didn't. — Michael

As we are both not john, we can both agree that John's beliefs doesn't equal the truth, but that doesn't give John the epistemic warrant to know that fact, because it lies outside of John's cognitive closure.

At most, John can parrot the sentence without any understanding of what reality is like outside of John's beliefs.

I'm concerned with the meaning of the proposition "you're wrong", not how to interpret it as a speech act in a specific situation like we've done above. — Michael

If you understand my point of view, then we might be talking apples and oranges with you playing the game of arguing within accepted philosophical convention and me under-mining it, but assuming we disagree i'll continue.

What I am questioning is the very existence of inter-subjective semantics for propositions, which in turn leads to questioning the distinction between ethical misconduct and epistemic errors. The notion of inter-subjective meaning is dubious at best, and rigor is improved by conditionalizing every utterance, including so-called propositions, with respect to the causes of the speaker's utterances including causes that are external to the speaker's mind or brain.

For instance, consider the published results of a scientific experiment. If the details of the experiment aren't reported, then the results cannot be interpreted and are gibberish. Why should utterances divorced from their speakers be treated differently? How can we arrive at the idea of an inter-subjectively meaningful and speaker-independent proposition? And if we can't, then why should we attribute epistemic errors to anyone, even in the case of ourselves?

Language is a social convention for coordinating human activity, and achieves this by correcting people who fail to speak in a socially accepted fashion. But how do we leap from the observation that a speaker has spoken the unethical utterance "The Earth is Flat", to the conclusion that the speaker has made an epistemic error? This isn't justified on any causal analysis of psycho-linguistics, unless "epistemic errors" are trivially defined by convention to refer to the unethical utterances concerned.

Just because my assertion "it is raining" implies that I believe that it is raining, it doesn't then follow that "it is raining" means "I believe that it is raining." — Michael

If you say "It is raining", i cannot interpret you as saying anything other than " Michael believes it is raining".

And if i notice that it isn't raining, then it begs the question as to how a false state of affairs could cause your belief. The notion that the cause of a belief can be detached from the intentional object of the belief is a fallacy, well, at least according to me.

No, not according to us. It's not according to anyone. It's about what actually is the case. I don't understand what's difficult about this. — Michael

Every assertion has a cause. In your view, is it possible to grasp the meaning of an assertion without understanding the cause of the assertion?

It's not according to anyone. It's about what really is the case, irrespective of what anyone believes. — Michael

So according to us? See my last example.

It doesn't. It refers to the independent fact that it is raining. — Michael

An independent fact according to whom?

John knows that it is raining if:

1) John believes that it is raining,
2) John is justified in believing that it is raining, and
3) it is raining

It would be a mistake to interpret this as saying that John knows that it is raining if:

1) John believes that it is raining,
2) John is justified in believing that it is raining, and
3) I believe that it is raining

This latter argument is obviously fallacious. — Michael

If 3) refers to your belief that it is raining, then I would say, by appealing to the meaningless of Moore's Sentence, that :

John doesn't know that it is raining from my perspective,
John knows that it is raining from your perspective.

If this looks uncomfortable, recall as Wittgenstein did, that we often say "I thought I knew, but i am proven wrong". From the perspective of ordinary language philosophy, the use of the verb "to know" doesn't imply infallibility of belief.

Consider also:-

1) John is blind, never leaves the house, and believes that it is raining,
2) John is justified in believing that it is raining, and
3) you and I directly observe that it isn't raining.

In which case John's belief that it is raining is false-according-to-us. But if we are privy to "insider information" about the weather that John does not and cannot possess, then is it logically coherent for us to interpret John's concept of the weather as being the same as ours?

If John's justification for his beliefs is logically valid and logically sound with respect to information he possesses, and if he is never confronted with a situation in which he declares his previous beliefs to be wrong, then where is John's mistake?

The same way most people do. The world isn't just what I believe it to be. Sometimes the things I believe turn out to be wrong. — Michael

It is obviously that case that you aren't necessarily willing to presently assert your previous beliefs, or to presently assert my present beliefs.

This is why i precisely asked

"So what are you willing to assert about the present that you don't presently believe? "

Which is the case precisely raised by Moore's paradox.

Nothing. What relevance is that? — Michael

I'm trying to understand how you distinguish your concept of your beliefs from your concept of reality.

So what are you willing to assert about the present, that you don't presently believe?

Do you have a clear idea of what the purpose of the labor over "cause" is? It seems that cause itself is a word that seems to have a meaning, but that disappears when looked at closely, making it a word for informal use, or one to be defined as a term of art by its several users - a lawyer's delight. That is, it's not a one but a many, and most of those incompatible. So I'm baffled why anyone bothers with it - and I read that scientists use it only informally if at all; that is, not a concept in science. — tim wood

That's understandable, due to historical disagreements and confusion in science as to how to formulate the notion, but things have rapidly changed in recent years as causal semantics has been steadily formalized, most notably in the structural equation modelling approach of Judea Pearl; the structure of a multi-variate probability distribution is factored into a set of conditional probability distributions, a subset of which are interpreted axiomatically as denoting known causal relations. With respect to these causal assumptions, the remaining correlations of the model can then be tested for the property of "cause and effect" through analytic methods and through additional interventional studies in cases where additional real-world data is required. However, the statistical quality of these non-deterministic models obscures the underlying logic of causality they employ, which is explicated more succinctly in Linear Logic, process algebras, and related semantics such as Petri Nets, monoidal categories and string diagrams

And it may be altogether in the eye of the beholder. An example from a book: a car rolls in a turn; what caused it? Driving too fast, according to the police. Bad suspension, per the automotive engineer. Off-camber road, according to the road builder. And here we get contributory causes, which is to say that no cause is a cause! — tim wood

And yet their perspectives are compatible, no? Each actor is expressing the existence of a different marginal distribution conditioned upon their favourite independent variable, which are hopefully mutually consistent and can be added together into a combined model.

I dislike the word "hard", for it seems to encourage an inaccurate association of pain and struggle with respect to the "hard" objective concerned, leading to procrastination.

I think the concept of difficulty should be eliminated for the concept of expense, which is more objective and might be perceived as being a less painful concept.

My arm moves when I will it. Is that magick? — Michael

I hazard a guess that magick is another word for affirmations.

Oppeheimer would be the distal cause of the explosion, as described by transitivity. And the role of U-235 might also be relegated to that of a distal cause in a sufficiently fine-grained model of the explosion.

But not all descriptions of a process obey transitivity, in which case such descriptions aren't causal descriptions. For example, take the SEP's example in the metaphysics of causality article that purportedly refutes causal transitivity :

A large boulder roles down hill (A) causing a hiker to jump out of the way (B). The hiker's jump (B) "causes" him to survive (C). Therefore by transitivity the boulder rolling (A) causes the hiker's survival (C), which is a false conclusion.

But this isn't a valid argument, because although A --> B can be considered a true implication in the example, survival isn't definable in terms of acts of jumping alone, and so we don't have the implication B --> C, therefore we cannot use transitivity to derive A --> C.

What this example actually demonstrates is the situation (A and B) --> C.

The study of transitive relations is otherwise known as Order Theory. A model of Causation without transitivity would essentially amount to a set of unorderable events without a notion of implication.

Something’s truth does not require that anyone can know or prove that it is true. Not all truths are established truths. If you flip a coin and never check how it landed, it may be true that it landed heads, even if nobody has any way to tell.

Why is it necessary to believe that a flipped coin assumes a definite state of affairs before checking? This assumption only appears to be necessary relative to the commonly accepted assumption that causality is asymmetrical in which causes must precede effects. But this assumption isn't empirically testable.

Instead, if causation is treated symmetrically, in the sense of allowing both forward and backward causation, then the act of checking the outcome of a flipped coin can be freely interpreted as forcing the past state of the coin to assume a definite state of affairs.

Consider for instance a video game that dynamically generates a dungeon around a player in response to the player's movement. This demonstrates that backward causation is a valid empirical notion, even if the game's underlying implementation involves only forward causation.

I like the brash and provocative title. As to your underlying views, they sound faintly reminiscent of Leo Strauss. What is your understanding of the modernism/post-modernism distinction?

I'm inclined to reject the idea that truth is a predicate for similar reasons as to why Frege, Hume and Kant rejected the idea of existence as a predicate.

Suppose that a belief is a truth-apt mental state. If the truth of beliefs is identified with either their mental content or their material causes, then all beliefs must be necessarily and vacuously true. For example, i believe i am tying at a desk which i see before me. If "desk" is considered to refer to my experience directly, or to it's perceptual causes, then the truth of my belief is vacuously true in expressing nothing over and above the fact i am seeing something i call "desk" as a result of whatever caused me to say such a thing.

On the other hand, if the truth criteria of beliefs is considered to be independent of their mental content, as is normally considered where the truth of beliefs is regarded as being future-contigent, then the truth of beliefs is divorced from their mental content and material causes. In which case truth is no longer attributable to beliefs in themselves, but refers to an external convention for classifying belief-behaviour.

"The visual data is believed to be consistent with the existence of a cow, relative to the present state of the observer that summarises the reliability of unstated contextual assumptions".

Shouldn't sentence A be considered an acceptable expression of justified true belief?

I think so, even if the impossibility of error is implied.

The issue is the intent behind the creation of the thing. So the trail with a fork is not analogous, because each fork may have been created and intended to lead you somewhere different. Instead, we could talk about a sign which is intended to lead you in two distinct and incompatible directions. Such a sign is really not intended to lead you anywhere. However, this does not mean that it is not intended to do something, i.e. it does not mean that the sign is meaningless. — Metaphysician Undercover

I roughly concur; although by "trail" i wasn't necessarily implying a man-made trail. Tea leaf patterns at the bottom of a cup would suffice as an example, as would mental imagery that spontaneously arises inside the mind of a water-diviner. A sign's public information (e.g grammar, syntax, history of ostensive definition etc) under-determines any supposed external referent of the sign. The referent of anything interpreted as being a "sign" is subjective and relative to the intentions of a particular user who interprets the "sign" in a manner that is dependent on the user's personal history including his past observations of similar appearances of said sign, among other things.

In my understanding, semantic realists tend to think of signs as teleological entities that express future-contingent propositions. They reason on the basis of past experience that a trail must lead somewhere, and consequently interpret the trail as signifying one or more unexplored possibilities, even if nobody ever follows it. They do this by imagining a fictional use of the trail that accords with their past experiences and they then conflate this fictitious extrapolation of memory with an actual use of the trail, which they then ironically attribute to a space of possible futures, in spite of the future playing no actual role in their experiences or use of words.

My understanding of Wittgenstein's point, which is presumably related to your point, is that there is nothing a priori about a sign that can be called it's 'future-contingent' referent in any literal sense of the word "future". A forteriori, there is nothing a priori about a sign that can be called it's external bearer or referent.

A person makes predictions with signs, but their predictions are merely reports of their observations in relation to their present mental state. Therefore if a contradiction arises between a previous prediction and presently observed circumstances, it isn't that the previous prediction is really wrong, rather the contradiction refers to the fact that the previous prediction is now labelled "wrong" as part of a post-hoc revision of linguistic convention.