I will certainly attest to have had many lucid dreams, but yet, I am unable to describe what makes my previous lucid dreams different from my memories of non-lucid dreams.

Certainly there is a present difference between being lucid versus non-lucid. For example, I can in this present moment either lose myself in a book, or I can scrutinise my environment and check as to whether my experiences cohere with my memories and understanding.

But does it make sense to assert that one can remember being lucid?

Many Christians fall into the mistake of associating meaning with private sensation or private experiences. For example, many will often associate some inner experience with that of the Holy Spirit, or the idea of the soul as something private to each of us. Each of these examples are very similar to the beetle-in-the-box. — Sam26

Supposing a Christian, Bob, associates some ineffable inner experience with the Holy Spirit, is perfectly happy, and never complains of experiencing confusion. Why would Wittgenstein, the philosophical therapist who hated substantial philosophical theses, think Bob is nevertheless making a mistake? what should be the criterion of correctness here? the opinions of the priesthood? or Bob's happiness?

Supposing Bob compares his religious experiences with fellow Christian Alice, who also says that she identifies the Holy Spirit with her ineffable private sensations.

Given that Neither Bob nor Alice can point to anything public playing the role of the "holy spirit", can Bob and Alice be said to be in agreement here about their ineffable experiences? or is there at most merely a delusion of agreement?

Well from each of their perspectives, experiential agreement might mean "The other appears to perform similar rituals to me and expresses similar sentiments as I do, and that is my criteria for them having the same ineffable experiences of the Holy-Spirit as I do".

In which case Bob and Alice's agreement isn't an illusion relative to their chosen criteria.

The Beetle-in-the Box analogy therefore isn't applicable.

Even I feel I understand what Bob is saying, and I'm an atheist who never practices religion. So am I under a delusion of understanding Bob? According to Alice's opinion and her criteria, the answer is probably yes. Relative to my own criteria? no.

Wittgenstein's private language metaphors seem to provoke their own misunderstanding, namely that to understand a language is to have absolute criteria of correctness.

Assertions must only be judged relative to independent criteria if they are to be interpreted as conveying truth-by-correspondence. That is all. And in my opinion, this is all Wittgenstein was pointing out.

I understand Wittgenstein's "Beetle in the Box" discussion as referring to the same aesthetic quality of depth to our language. In that discussion he considers the logical consequences of equating the meaning of a name with a particular sensation.

"if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation' the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant." L.W

This nominalistic equivocation of names with particular experiences produces an aesthetic of superficiality similar to your picture of the garden-path leading nowhere and is in contrast with our actual use of names, in which names are representative of roles played by particulars within a language game.

As you hinted, the aesthetic depth of a name corresponds to an appreciation of the role referred to by the name , i.e. to the name's potential use.

I think the underlying problem is that our concept of 'other minds' straddles the subjective-objective distinction and cannot be categorised as either. As a result it seems inappropriate to speak of ethical principles as being either subjective or objective.

To my mind the subjective-objective distinction is only applicable to practical situations in which there is a verifiable criterion of truth that is independent of one's feelings about the matter. For example, when betting on the outcome of a football match.

Ethical judgements do not fall into this category, since one's feelings are the ultimate arbiter of truth here.

A realist who interprets the concept of Necessity as being a mind-independent principle of nature that is charted by causality, will have to either deny humans of will, or reduce the human will to causality rending the notion of free-will as meaningless.

An anti-realist who identifies the concept of necessity not as a description of nature "in itself" but with what we think ought to happen or what we intend will happen, will generally be a "free will compatiblist" with respect to causality, since he will view causality as purely a language for describing past orderings of events.

It should be clear that for both the realist and the anti-realist, knowing more physical facts cannot force either to change their position.

To my mind, the concept of self-control is partially distinct from the concept of motivation.

Motivation is a relationship of attraction between a person's biological drives such as sex, hunger, companionship e.t.c, and the person's environment that triggers or suppresses the person's drives and that as a consequence compels or inhibits the person's behaviour in pursuit of satisfaction.

To my mind there is no such thing as "self-motivation". What we call self-motivation is more accurately described as being in a state of psychological momentum towards a goal-state when one's drives are already awoken. The likelihood and extent to which an individual achieves his goal-state is a function of "self-control", which refers to the extent to which the individual can ignore competing reward signals that threaten to divert his actions towards less rewarding behaviour.

To my mind "self-control" should really be called "partial-self control", since it not only consists of an individual's partially learned neurological abilities and habits, but also the degree of social support the individual receives as well as the quality of environmental feedback he receives. Together they keep the individual's productive behaviour on track, by determining the extent to which the individual continues to anticipate future rewards as a consequence of his actions, and the extent to which the individual finds working towards the goal satisfying in and of itself, before the goal state is reached.

In many cases the skeptic fails to understand how to use the word doubt, and it is also true that the non-skeptic fails to understand why this is the case. Therefore, the non-skeptic will argue against the skeptic making the same mistakes in their use of the word know. Both Moore and the skeptics have fallen into the trap of not understanding the rules of the game. The rules are not spelled out, they are implicit, one must come to understand the rules by thinking about the many uses of words like know and doubt. — Sam26

I don't believe Wittgenstein would have supported this, as that appears to imply that skeptical doubts are largely symptomatic of bad English. I believe that Wittgenstein took the skeptic's malady much more seriously as a deeper psychological and epistemological problem, and disagreed with Moore precisely for this reason.

In fact, I believe Wittgenstein would have taken more issue against the non-skeptic for misinterpreting what the skeptic is attempting to express, especially if the non-skeptic insisted that individual expression should be understood relative to, or worse, subordinate to essentialist ideas concerning language use in the form implicit community conventions. For this is platonism about rules in another disguise.

Going back to your pornography example, not only doesn't the individual have a clear concept of what pornography is or is not, but neither is there any implicit essential idea of the concept in the general community. Every individual who joins a community proactively contributes via his actions and verbal behaviour to the community's ever-evolving meaning of its language. Like Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, individuals are the evolutionary engines of community conventions, and shouldn't held to it for sake of philosophy. Why wouldn't Wittgenstein have held this more common-sensical view?

Recall Wittgenstein's sympathy with what Heidegger was attempting to express in Being and Time. Rather than chastise Heidegger for failing to conform to our ordinary usage of the word "being", Wittgenstein said he understood what Heidegger was attempting to say even as Heidegger bumped his head against the limits of language.

I believe that Wittgenstein strongly rejected logical-positivism on the basis that a community shouldn't get to decide the value of individual expression on the basis of linguistic conformity . For that leads to scientism, authoritarianism and the suppression of aesthetic expression.

The universe is constitute of many parts. There is however one process which describes the evolution of whole since all parts are interacting with each other. This means that there should be a single consciousness if we relate consciousness to motion of parts. Instead we observe that consciousness is personal and local. How do you resolve this problem? — bahman

By rejecting the fictitiously imagined "birds-eye" perspective of reality, where one pretends to oneself that one is transcendentally observing reality detached from one's first-person perspective.

Once the meaning of all concepts including the concepts of "matter" and "other minds", are understood as pertaining to empirical criteria of verification in the first-person, the transcendental fiction of seeing the universe in the third-person can be rejected as nonsensical.

This is why I separated philosophical and scientific inquiry. Even in cases like normative ethics, which seem to me to be statements based on the way people think the world should be, there is no way to really ground any of the arguments in reality. — MonfortS26

Even assertions of metaphysics and ethics must be reducible to empirical propositions about how the world really is. For to assume otherwise is to assume that verbal behaviour has non-physical causes.

When a religious person earnestly asserts that "God Exists", to doubt the factual accuracy of what he is saying is in some sense to misunderstand what he is saying. For the only meaningful scientific problem is to ascertain the environmental stimuli that upon interacting with the person's brain provokes his assertion. Thereupon identification of the environmental stimuli, we can interpret the religious person's assertion "God Exists" as his empirical measurement of said environmental stimuli.

Yep, none of our concepts are linguistically representable, because our intended use of rules cannot be finitely represented in terms of rules and signs. We can at most express what we mean and intend, but we cannot reduce meaning and intention to rules and signs.

This critical anti-realist insight renders rules and laws as having trivial epistemological significance, since the meaning of rules and signs is ultimately grounded, explained and justified in terms of our behavioural dispositions, as opposed to our behavioural dispositions being grounded or justified in terms of mind-independent rules and laws. This in turn ought to lead to a rejection of the free-will-determinism dichotomy.

The point that Wittgenstein seems to be making is that doubting the existence of one's hands, or doubting the existence of the external world, fall outside the language-game of use for these particular words. — Sam26

Presumably Wittgenstein would not want to imply that every or even any skeptic's epistemological malady is curable by merely insisting to them that their use of the word "hands" should conform to ordinary usage - especially considering, as you have mentioned, that Wittgenstein was against the reduction of word usage to precise definitions, whether they be formally stated rules or socially demonstrated rules of conformity.


The Skeptic who doubts the existence of his own hands is generally the Humean skeptic who doubts the predictability of his hand's future behaviour. These doubts further bring into question the predictability of language games, the reliability of the linguistic definitions they serve to ground and the conceptual networks we derive from them.

Like in your pornography example, I cannot give to myself a precise, explicit and all-encompassing definition of what I mean by "my hands". And it is imaginable that my hands will pass through this solid wall in front of me, and that in this event we might - or even might not - collectively abstain from referring to them as "my hands" .

Of course a non-skeptic might remark that this event is in-ordinary and unlikely in the eyes of the community. But their remark which a skeptic will likely consciously accept, cannot be made into an argument of refutation against the skeptic's position, for the skeptic is consciously insisting on what is in-ordinary.

The philosopher can only empathise with the skeptic who asserts the in-ordinary and try to publicly unravel the mystery that is the skeptic's private-language game of in-ordinary doubt. In other words the philosopher must try to understand the skeptic's doubting-behaviour as behavioural expression of a different sort.

I passed out once for ten minutes. When I came round, I had no idea how long I'd been out. Another time I passed out for twenty minutes, same result. The last time it could be like that, only no coming round. Of course I won't be round to tell the tale. But that doesn't mean it's a tale that can't be predicted, whether truly or falsely. It doesn't sound meaningless - it's an explanation of 'infinitely long and unconscious'. — Cuthbert

A third party can certainly make sense of your death and say that you are "permanently no longer around to tell the tale", since your corpse can be empirically verified as being deceased according to biological definition. So your death has empirically meaningful behavioural consequences for everyone except for yourself. But that doesn't mean that you can meaningfully refer to your own expiry and say things like "i will be asleep forever", and that is nonsense even from a third-person's perspective.

It is naturally tempting to imagine oneself from a third-person perspective and pretend to witness one's own death, and to mistake this imagined thought experiment for self-knowledge. But this attempt at deriving first-person knowledge by making a transcendental analogy with the third-person creates many philosophical problems by running over the bounds of sense without any regard for principles of cognitive closure and empirical meaning.

There is an incommensurable semantic barrier that separates our behavioural understanding of other minds from our mentalistic understanding of our own experiences.

Your survivors will experience the time after your complete shutdown. You won;t.

What will you experience then? Going to sleep. Basically like every other time you went to sleep. — Michael Ossipoff

But here lurks a problem, for our notion of sleep is empirical, even for so called "maximally unconscious sleep."

For example, the meaning of a "fully unconscious sleep" from a first-person perspective is the experience of being presently awake but without having memories of being asleep. This is the first-person empirical definition of "fully unconscious sleep".

Without the experience of being awake yet having no previous memories of being asleep, one cannot assert the existence of fully unconscious sleep. Hence the notion of an infinitely long and unconscious sleep is a meaningless sequence of words that contributes nothing to any discussion.

Either there's no afterlife or there is. — TheMadFool

But this both assumes that life is a singular concept and that ' afterlife' is a meaningful concept such that it can asserted or negated to mutual exclusion of the other possibility. If it concluded that life isn't a singular concept or that the afterlife isn't a meaningful concept, then the logical laws of the excluded middle and of non-contradiction does not apply.

I can meaningfully assert the end of someone's life other than my own in the deflationary sense of Moore, by saying "here is a dead person" while pointing to a particular corpse.
For if my definition of "living person" is this particular corpse when it was biologically active, then by definition it is now dead. I would therefore contradict myself to now assert continuing life on the corpse's behalf.

On the other hand, if by "this person" i meant the behavioural and functional roles I associated with this corpse, then these roles are still existent, for I can still meaningfully imagine these roles and phenomena after the body has expired. In this more abstract sense of "living person" it would be meaningful to speak of continuation rather than "after-life" , for the simple reason that the death of an abstract entity is unimaginable.

I can also apply the same concepts to an imaginary fictitious person, namely to my ego as witnessed in my imagination. But this is where the application of my concepts must end, for i have now exhausted my empirical criteria for the application of these concepts.

May I remind you of the definition of metaphysics? “abstract theory with no basis in reality.”

With regards to your statement “under the pseudo-scientific assumption”, they’re not assumptions, they’re facts based on physics, anatomy and physiology. — CuddlyHedgehog

if the meaning of the word "metaphysics" really is "an abstraction with no basis in reality", then how is it possible that you uttered this sentence?

I think you misunderstand me. For the behaviourist, any verbal utterance of a so-called "metaphysical principle" is reducible to stimulus-response usage. To think anything else is to assume the falsity of behaviourism, and hence to assume the falsity of physics, anatomy and physiology.

It is certainly pseudo-scientific to assume that either a believer in the after-life, or non-believer in the after-life, can literally reference their self non-existence.

Imagine two people Bob and Alice discussing life after death; Bob has a definite understanding of what it means to say that the world continues to exist after the destruction of Alice. And likewise, Alice has a definite understanding of what it means to say that the world continues to exist after the destruction of Bob. Yet this doesn't imply that Bob can meaningfully say of himself that the world continues to exist after the destruction of Bob, or that Alice can meaningfully assert of herself that the world continues to exist after the destruction of Alice.

the human brain can only function because of the neuron activity inside its circuits. Consciousness is the result of such activity. When we die the brain disintegrates back to its building elements, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon etc that get recycled and reused by nature. The “spirit” cannot exist without matter. This theory makes sense to me and is easily explainable by simple physics and medical science. Everything else is speculative and unfounded wishful thinking, in my opinion. — CuddlyHedgehog

Yes. I am merely following that logic even further. If the thoughts of a person are reducible to their memories and their current environmental stimulus, then this must also be the case for a person's thoughts concerning an "after-life". Hence what is being referred to by talk of "an after-life" cannot be of anything transcendent of memory and the immediate environment.

For a behaviourist, the only meaningful reaction to a person asking "is there an after-life" is to understand the physical circumstances that provoked their question. For example, perhaps on further investigation it is determined that the questioner is recalling a scene from a movie they have seen and are wondering if they might find themselves in a similar scene in the future after having witnessed a funeral held in their name. In which case the answer might be " it is potentially possible that you witness a reconstruction of this movie scene in the future having witnessed a funeral held in your name".

What the behaviourist cannot say is "no, there isn't an after-life" under the pseudo-scientific assumption that the person is literally referring to a transcendental idea that isn't reducible to their current state of mind and physical circumstances.

If we understand all metaphysical ideas as being reducible to our current state of mind and interactions with the world, then questions about an after-life should dissolve, rather than being answered in the affirmative or the negative.

The concrete vs abstract distinction in language is questionable, given that the names of particulars play a functional role.

Denying the possibility of an after-life is as equally nonsensical as affirming it.

Think about what could possibly be meant by an "after-life". Aren't we merely imagining another potential within-life experience?

If the human brain is only capable of imagining within-life experiences, then it is impossible for a human brain to deny the existence of an after-life.

And no, the "denial of an after-life" doesn't win by default of the premise being meaningless.

The solipsist thinks they are eternal and there experience will never end? How is that not completely unfounded? — Marchesk

Would such verificationism also commit one to not being able to speak of past experiences except as memories now. — Marchesk

Verificationism and presentism go hand in hand. For according to the verificationist, to speak of the past or the future is to refer to their criteria of verification, a verification that consists of temporal signification within the present.

But even if you reject verificationism, say because you are metaphysical realist concerning the past, suppose that a living brain which from your perspective is most definitely mortal, says of itself "I am mortal". What is the brain asserting of itself here? Does it make sense to think that a brain can represent to itself the criteria of its own existence?

I don't know how you've come to that conclusion. One doesn't need to believe that one's experiences are eternal to believe that one's experiences are all that exist, just as one doesn't need to believe that matter is eternal to believe that material things are all that exist. — Michael

All i mean to say is that if subjective idealists are understood to be verificationists in the strongest possible sense, then it makes no sense for them to speak of an absence of experience when it comes to their own experience.

The idealist can make this move, but there is also the possibility that experience just ceases. Other people will infer that the falling piano or oncoming car killed you. The examiner might say poor sap didn't even feel it.

So the idealist has to include the possibility that not looking will result in no longer experiencing, for no reason at all, since there is no unperceived death event. — Marchesk

The possibility of 'not experiencing' doesn't make any sense to the subjective idealist. For the subjective idealist semantically reduces the meaning of what is meant by a cause to the collection of observations that are said to verify it. Hence the idealist cannot make sense of the postulation of a cause that he cannot consciously verify.

In conclusion the subjective idealist is a solipsist who cannot make sense of the statement "I am mortal". Yet why should this be absurd by your criteria? After all, the solipsist is not only against holding views that he cannot disprove, he is even against attributing meaning to such views.

We have of course no reason to assume that our discrete representations are literally representative of a discrete reality undergoing state transitions, for we never observe precise and static states undergoing transition, rather we just see a fuzzy dynamic procession that we carve up into neat pieces for sake of approximate analysis.

So perhaps you argument should be interpreted as a modus-tollens that leads to a rejection this assumption, rather than an argument for a separate mental substance. I'm not even sure how introducing an overseer solves the problem without introducing it at another level.

Subjective idealists rightly insist that our definitions of physical objects must in some way semantically reduce to our observations and interrogative practices, such that "to be is to be perceived" is a logical truth.

Realists are right to point out that subjective idealists are naive if they think that the semantics of physical objects reduce to atomic acts of perception.

Once realists and idealists recognise the semantic holism in our translation of observations into causes and vice versa, they ought to realise they are speaking past one another and making complementary arguments.

I still have no idea what you mean by this. Warrant is what makes epistemology normative. To say that such and such belief is warranted is to say that you can and should believe such and such. What is vacuous about this? — SophistiCat

I'm saying that if there are no objective criteria, i.e. physical criteria, for ascribing to agents propositional-attitudes pertaining to prediction-making, then it makes no objective sense to discuss agents as needing epistemological warranty for induction, since applications of rules of induction is then in the eye of the beholder, for example the community the agent belongs to who selectively interprets his behaviour as prediction-making for their own concerns.

In other words, I am suggesting that to follow a rule of induction is no different to following any other rule; it is a normative principle pertaining to language-games, but not in any way that is significant to metaphysics or epistemology.

But Hume represents the nominalist turn of thought. He was not a pragmatist in the sense of arguing for the reality of the general or universal. He was an atomist in regards to empirical sense data. So his epistemology reflects a particular brand of metaphysics. — apokrisis

Whether or not Hume was an atomist is irrelevant, as Goodman's new riddle of induction illustrates.

If today one person sees an object as green, and another person sees it as grue (i.e. currently green up until some future time t, then blue afterwards), then their principles of the uniformity of nature are different.

As this illustrates, the so called 'principle' of the uniformity of nature is relative to one's ontology, and hence so is one's principle of induction. And regardless of whatever this ontology is, the infallibility of induction relative to this ontology cannot be non-circularly justified, nor empirically defended.

In my opinion a better way to understand Hume, is to say that whatever one uses as a principle of induction it is impossible to distinguish good from bad inductions without pain of circularity.

Of course warrant is normative. How can you say that it is both normative and vacuous? That seems contradictory. — SophistiCat

Sorry, i meant warrant being epistemologically vacuous.

That is a very contentious proposition, and in any case, I don't see how it bears on warrant. No one denies that we do think - and behave - inductively (except maybe Popperians). — SophistiCat

Because if induction is a vacuous notion then to insist upon warrant is to insist upon nothing. I'm with popper, but feel he didn't quite go far enough to dissolve the issue of warrant into being a non-issue.

Suppose that someone described themselves to be a gambler, but that they always bet on the least frequent outcome without offering any justification and regularly lost. Is there any difference between describing them as a being bad gambler vs denying that they are in fact a gambler?

Is there a clear distinction between predicting badly vs not making a prediction?

Doesn't the difference entirely rest upon the normative and hence subjective context by which we judge behaviour to be future-anticipating?

If a man's beliefs are identified with his non-verbal behaviour, then it is no longer clear to me when he isn't making an induction. Which suggests that epistemological warrant for induction might not be needed simply because it is vacuous to even speak of consenting to 'ceremonies' of induction, for if all behaviour can be regarded as future-anticipating then induction is just another word for behaviour.

It won't be, because it's infinite. — BlueBanana

I used to think that way, but that is to dogmatically assume that mathematics must serve practically intelligible purposes, as opposed to purely fictive or aesthetic purposes.

Yes, the aesthetic reasons for defining finitely unconstructable hierarchies of infinitely large numbers are entirely subjective, practically meaningless and involve a degree of self-deception i.e. are what many irreligious non-platonists would call "bullshit", yet for some reason it is still fun.

For some reason, convincing oneself that it is possible to exhaust countable infinity say via a non-standard construction of the integers, can produce pleasant feelings of expansiveness.

The fact that infinite cardinals do not represent our intuitions of the relative sizes of countably infinite sets shouldn't feel problematic. After all an infinite cardinal is merely one suggested measure of size. You're still free to think of A and B as having different sizes and could even create your own formal definition of size satisfying this purpose.

Unless a definition rules something out it isn't useful.

There are a huge number of both partially-overlapping and distinct uses for the word "entity", e.g in software-modelling, psycho-analysis, law, supernatural fiction,....

Each particular use rules out something as not being relevant to the considered application.
So in conclusion, we can ask "what is an 'entity' in this particular context?" but not "what is an entity in general?".

It is better to follow Wittgenstein's example and argue that logic reduces to the practical use of ordinary language with additional constraints to describe a more precise (but not infinitely precise) collection of states of affairs and associated behaviours.

If for any sentence written in logic we cannot think of a use for it, then we can signify this by baptising its negation with the name "logically-necessary".

Yes, I see how you arrived at your statements with regards to reference, given a causal reference theory, what I'm saying is that you do not have to adopt a causal reference theory at all. If your references are merely descriptivist, or even mediated, but in some non-causal way, then a sentence can refer to a determined future by reference to the predictions of the users, which are a current state. — Pseudonym

But how can descriptivism be irreducible to the causal theory of reference if causal determinism is true? I don't see what non-causal semantic options are available to the causal determinist. Either his utterances reduce to their causes, or they do not.

All I can fathom is that for the causal determinist, predicting the future is synonymous with responding automatically to the past, hence the determinist has no reason to believe that his future-contingent beliefs amount to anything except for disguised summaries of his past experience.

The situation seems analogous to the determinist going for a walk backwards so that he only sees where he has walked and saying in response to his observations "this is determined" "now this is determined", which is to say nothing meaningful, and with the determinist having no idea what he is about to walk into.

Unless a determinist asserts retro-causality (which would seem to nullify his position), I don't see how it is possible to both accept what the determinist says and to understand his sentences as being future-referring. Hence if he is correct, I can only understand him as describing the past which is essentially to say nothing of predictive value.

Where precisely does this argument go wrong?

Let the following proposition S represent a theory of causal determination:

S: "For every event A, the state of A is determinable by a particular function of the states of all prior events {B,C,D,...} "

If S is true then it is vacuous and says nothing:

Proof:

1) Causal determination implies that the causal theory of reference is true.

2) The causal theory of reference implies that signification of future events is the signification of past events in disguise.

3) Therefore if S is true, its meaning is fully determined by past events and refers only to past events.

4) Therefore if S is true, S is equivalent to asserting that the past is describable by a function.

4) The past is identical with itself, and hence constitutes such a function of description.

5) Therefore if S is true, S says nothing.

Think of the following example. You like vanilla ice cream more than chocolate one. Of course choosing vanilla ice cream is a rational choice. You buy the ice cream and decide to put it in garbage bag which is irrational. Of course you use your freedom to do this. The question is what is the point of free will when it could lead to absurdity in our decision. — bahman

I didn't think the idea of free will consisted of having a point, but rather consisted in there being no external fact-of-the-matter that precisely determines one's choices, either because of under-determination of choices relative to external matters of fact, or because the 'externality' of the determining matters of fact in relation to one's mental state is disputed under an extended-mind thesis which renders talk of determined choices as meaningless.

The way you framed your original question implies that knowledge of one's personal preferences can play the role of such external matters-of-fact in the sense of weakly determining one's choices, whereby one still has a final say in which option to choose. Yet if I remember correctly, in another thread you disputed whether conscious choice was in fact possible on the grounds that in appraising the value of one choice, one is no longer aware of the value of the other choices. But if conscious appraisal of actions is not possible , then one doesn't have knowledge of one's personal preferences, and hence personal preferences cannot play the role of determining external matters of fact here, which as a consequence implies that one cannot conclude that one's choices are determined with respect to knowledge of one's preferences.

To attribute a belief to an agent is to explain the agent's actions in terms of folk-psychological ego-centric reasoning from the perspective of agent when the agent can be pragmatically considered to be maximising a utility function.

We do this all the time, even when describing computers that crash. "It believes the library object is in the wrong folder".

Unless one is a platonist, explanations of behaviour are no different to descriptions of potential behaviour. Nobody defines beliefs and other mental states in terms of the processing of neurological tokens but purely in terms of the overt potential behaviour that agents display that could be physically instantiated in an infinite number of ways.

Remember, neuroscientists can only be said to identify brain-states as constituting belief-states if such brain-states directly manifest the behaviour satisfying the definition of the belief. So functionalist ascriptions of belief-states are not in contradiction with logical-behaviourist definitions of belief, and in fact are dependent on them.

Does Excalibur exist? In terms of a role within literature, yes - hence the reason the question is meaningful and can be answered in spite of the absence of any particular sword being baptised with the name "Excalibur".

The question is, does thinking of names as designating roles rather than particulars resolve anything? For can't roles also be destroyed? and if they can, for example by burning all literature referring to Excalibur and through cultural amnesia, then isn't to say that "Excalibur exists as a role" also meaningless?

If the meaning of a name is the particular it refers to, then the name won't possess meaning until after the particular has been created, and the name will become meaningless if the particular is destroyed.

In which case, suppose "Luna" refers to the rock we know of as "the moon". Then to say "Luna no longer exists" or that "Luna will one day exist" is meaningless. Which in turn implies that "Luna exists" is at most vacuously true and says nothing.

Of course, this isn't how our existential predicate works when we use names. This implies that the meaning of names are not the particulars they refer to. Rather, names like "the moon" refer to roles that particulars play in a language-game. And the meaning of these roles is atemporal.

The premise of the OP is what ought to be in question, namely that there is a particular utility function U(a) that represents the value of the set of choices available to an agent, that can be identified independently of the choices the agent actually makes.

For if a utility function cannot be identified and justified independently of the choices the agent actually makes, then one's proposed function is at best describing the agents past history of decisions, which says nothing for or against the idea of the agent having determined vs free-willed choices.

And to merely ask the agent "which choice do you prefer?" before he appears to make a decision isn't to obtain independent information of his preferences.