when I read the two paradoxes you presented, my mind did something infinite each time. — Gregory

Well how come it's finished then?

I don't think "cause" is the right word here. — Caldwell

Well, if you don't think 'cause' is the right word then you've begged the question. You can't genuinely pursue the question of free-will from the presumption that our actions are not 'caused', you've already presumed your conclusion.

The activity of our brains does not bear little labels with 'desire', or 'motivating factor' on them. These are categories applied post hoc to the processes we experience and are largely socially mediated rationalisations for much more complex neural activity.

To say 'we are free to choose courses of action' is trivial in neural term, all our brain does is select courses of action, it's quite literally it's only job. The key part in that proposition is not the selecting of courses of action, but the 'we'. what is this 'we' doing the selecting, as opposed to what? Our spinal chord?

This idea that our instinctive desires are something other from us and 'we' control them are just warmed-over Christian original sin narratives.

And what would you do differently as a result of "This sentence is true"?

It is also, presumably, meaningless? — Banno

Yes. I couldn't hold the belief that "this sentence is true" because there's nothing I'd be inclined to do differently to if it were false. Part of that is meaninglessness (lack of meaningful referent), but part is the self-referentiality. It goes nowhere. "This sentence has five words" is also self-referential, but is affects other beliefs (how easily I could fit it on a page, what number I'd reach if were to count each word out cardinally, how much ink I should need to write it...), so it's not semantically closed.

As a third problem (not that we need a third reason why it's nonsense), such a closed self-referential sentence gives us no context. Is the sentence 'true' like an arrow, 'true' like a true-gentleman, 'true' like straight ruler, 'true like the capital of France being Paris? Is the sentence 'false' like 2+2=5, or 'false' like "make one false move and the bomb will go off".

if it's truly that desires rule our mind and action, then no 'other' motivating factors, no matter how great, would change that. But other factors can and do change the way we behave and think. — Caldwell

How does a 'motivating factor' cause behaviour without a the 'desire' toward a certain response?

Out of £100, you can bet any amount on either LNC being true or false, with, let's say 20:1 odds.

I'd put £50 on it being true and £50 on it being false. 50/50.

Whatever you'd bet, there's your probability.

I don't trust or rely upon polarized news sources of any kind. — whollyrolling

Wow. You must get up very early in the morning to gather all your own news, well done. Stirling effort.

↪Isaac

EDIT: Actually can you clarify what is "it" here? — Judaka

Sure, I mean to ask if one's arrangement can be assessed or evaluated on the same basis as the truths it arranges. It seems that arrangements are generally for a purpose (not just a random selection of facts or presentation method), if that's right, then whether they'll achieve that purpose is more or less an empirical fact and therefore truth evaluable in the same way the facts it constituted were.

So taking white privilege as an example, you could say the 'facts' of racism have been presented by the left in such a way as to sow harmful division. But the left haven't presented them in that way deliberately to sow harmful division have they? So if you're right, then this would give you, and they, some mutual ground for evaluating arrangements.

That truth is only important because I have decided it is important, this is something you could dispute. — Judaka

But I couldn't dispute whether it's true?

if we are debating my evaluation, you are free to disagree with it without having to deal with the "truth" of whether the superficial disagreements turn people away. If you choose to deal with it then you can, if not then that's fine too. — Judaka

I'm not sure how. If your evaluation of your arrangement relies (even in part) on "it turns people away from caring about important issues due to superficial disagreements", then I don't see how we can deal with the evaluation of arrangements without addressing that.

If your evaluation contained nothing but value judgements "I prefer to look at things this way", then there's really nothing further to say, but the moment they contain empirical claims about the consequences of certain arrangements, then their truth value can be called into question.

For instance, my refutation of white privilege is due to how it conceptualises economic issues as race issues, it emphasises the importance of race, it turns people away from caring about important issues due to superficial disagreements. So all of that, it's based on a set of complicated desires from me. I am looking to maximise outcomes that I see merit in and if we moved to a new context then I would have to ask myself what outcomes I want and I'd evaluate the effectiveness of the arrangement at delivering those outcomes. — Judaka

And some of those outcomes are truth evaluable themselves, yes? For example "it turns people away from caring about important issues due to superficial disagreements". It may or may not do so, the fact of the matter is something over which any disagreement would be empirically resolveable.

The principle that facts are selected, arranged and presented in such a way as to serve some purpose outside of the mere promulgation of said facts is, I think, not disputed by anyone.

What seems to be in dispute is whether some arrangements are 'better' than others.

You've given a mixed bag of reasons why you prefer your arrangement of the facts about racism. Some appear themselves to be facts (x causes y). If the selection of a preferred arrangement really does boil down the the truth of just more facts, then we're not really playing any different a game by admitting the effect of this 'arrangement'.

How one discriminates is not really crucial to understanding my OP — Judaka

But you said...

Thus the question becomes, how do I judge a good conclusion from a bad one. — Judaka

It seemed (not unreasonably) that the question of how one discriminates was exactly crucial to your OP.

Even without ever disagreeing on what is true, you can arrive at a near infinite number of different conclusions by arranging the facts differently. Thus the question becomes, how do I judge a good conclusion from a bad one. — Judaka

Firstly, you can't arrive at a near infinite number of different conclusions by arranging facts differently. That matters because it's means that there's some set of conclusions which cannot be reached without denying or ignoring one or more of the relevant facts.

Secondly, once you're within the set of arrangements which can be arrived at legitimately from the relevant facts, why would you further need to judge a 'good' conclusion from a 'bad' one? If the arrangement has been legitimately arrived at (neither denying nor ignoring a relevant fact), then what could a further judgement of 'goodness' within this set possibly be evaluating?

Yes. I tend to go further to say that we need know how we would behave if it were the case. I can't form a belief about whether it is the case that "this sentence is false" because I don't know what I would do differently if it were.

behavioral psychology attests that we can. Studies show we can. Children can learn to control their desires/emotions. — Caldwell

What is it that motivates them to do so?

This seems to indicate an interesting approach. If the Liar were changed to "This proposition is false" we might ask "which proposition?". There is a sentence there, but is there a proposition? — Janus

Yeah. As has been said - more authoritatively than I put it, the ability to evaluate the truth value of a proposition seems to depend on the nature of the proposition. It does seem rather odd to me to persist in having truth as a property of certain propositions without noting the features which those propositions share and how such shared features allow truth evaluation where lack of such denies it.

It seems that the sorts of propositions which allow truth evaluation are those which are about beliefs, and propositions which do not are those which do not reference a belief. So it's far more productive to talk about the truth of the belief rather than the truth of the proposition which references it.

The truth predicate applies to sentences (or propositions). It does not apply to any other object. — Kornelius

So what does it mean when I say my friend Jack is a 'true gentleman'?. What am I seeking if I seek the 'truth'? How is the 'true cost' of something different from its apparent cost? What sentence am I aiming for I I try to be 'true to my cause'? When we ask "Is the story of Jesus's resurrection true?" would it matter what the actual sentences constituting that story were, or are we asking something more general?

We often speak this way, but I think what we mean is that the content of a belief is true. And the content of a belief is a proposition — Kornelius

When I yell some obscenity after stubbing my toe, what is the proposition that constitutes the belief which drove that behaviour?

You're right to think along these lines, and indeed Kripke's solution can be understood as a formalisation of that idea. — Banno

Interesting. Is there any paper in which this is expounded?

Edit - found your link - thanks.

Ah, sorry, I get you. Yes, the token is about itself — bongo fury

So is a token the sort of thing that can be 'true'?

The token is about the things it is about. The proposition is an unnecessary abstraction? — bongo fury

But in the Liar, the sentence is about the sentence, so if it were to act as a token it could only be for some kind of assertion or proposition. There's no real state of affairs it's referring to. That's why I thought it was strange to give it a truth value.

Thanks. So if the sentence is a token for the proposition, then is the proposition about the sentence (token) or itself?

Maybe something analogous to "hammers are for hammering", "this coin is worth two cents", "this note is a middle-C". — bongo fury

Not following you at all I'm afraid. Any chance of an expansion?

Consider the following sentence (Li): (Li) is not true. — Kornelius

Something I'm missing about the Liar...

"(Li) is happy" doesn't cause any such issue. We don't spend hours working out what "This sentence is happy" could possibly mean because sentences aren't the sorts of things which can be happy.

But sentences aren't the sorts of things which can be true either. Beliefs can be true, propositions can be true, mathematical equations can be true...sentences themselves can't. It's like saying "This horse is true", I don't know what it would even mean?

Which, ultimately, makes the function of this idea be entirely its discursive role. What ideas you throw the idea at to criticize. — fdrake

I think you've hit the nail on the head here.

Given that some people take X=all the evidence about the shape of the Earth and conclude A=The Earth is flat, and some people conclude B=The Earth is approximately a sphere. The only distinction between concluding A based on X and B based on X is taste in your account. It makes it entirely useless at assessing arguments on their strengths and weaknesses. — fdrake

There is a way of salvaging some of the merit though, without losing this ground, I think. None of our epistemic peers think the earth is flat. It doesn't seem to be a conclusion it's possible to honestly derive from the evidence. Is it reasonable, do you think, to say that some arrangements of the facts are not reachable by use of reasonable thinking, but that those which are don't then become more or less true by virtue of that function? In essence, some arrangements are wrong, but those which are right are all equally right? Is there one single arrangement it is 'most reasonable' to reach (and we all simply strive for it), or is reasonableness simply a threshold which must be met?

There's two elements to your summary which I feel I need to clarify.

1)

Moore's paradox rests on the understanding of two processes - the selection of a referent for an utterance, and the truth-valuation of that utterance. Each of these may change depending on the context, the words alone do not give us the processes being used in any given case. We do, however, require a judgement of both to obtain the paradox, reference alone won't do it, it's also that the utterance appears to be true (or capable of being true) when uttered by another, so we have assumed both reference and truth evaluation.

I don't see a problem, as we discussed with regards to stories, with the referent of an utterance being treated as an imaginary object (Santa Claus could be the referent of "Santa Claus wears a red outfit"), so if we wanted to talk about our shared world (socially constructed), then we can have it that in that language game the referent is the convenient fiction of weather and rain - our (hopefully) shared model.

The problem in Moore's paradox is that someone's belief about the weather is being treated as evaluable by an outsider with an accuracy that the first person somehow is assumed to lack. IF A and B are the only people in the context, whether it's raining (as a socially constructed fiction) is a fact by virtue of A and B agreeing on the matter. A cannot be mistaken simply because B thinks it isn't any more than B can be mistaken simply because A thinks it isn't. So B's saying "A doesn't believe it's raining but it is" can amount to no more than "A doesn't believe it's raining but I do" which then means that when A utters the sentence "It's raining but I don't believe it is", he's similarly saying "A doesn't believe it's raining but I do" - only here 'I' refers to A whereas for B's sentence 'I' refers to B so they're not the same sentence.

So it's not quite a matter, for me, of saying that the referent can only be our model. I have no problem with a language game in which the referent is a fiction, a shared model, a social construction...whatever. It's just that the truth evaluation has to match the nature of the referent, otherwise we end up with saying something like "Santa Claus wears a red outfit, but he doesn't wear a black belt because he doesn't exist and so he can't" - either we're talking about Santa Claus the fiction, or Santa Claus the (lack of) reality, we can't just mix both and expect to make any sense.

Which leads to the second part...

2)

We could interpret (though abnormally) "I believe..." as having the shared model of states of mind as a referent. We can model our own thinking, even though we use some of our thinking to construct such a model - I don't see any intrinsic problem with that. We can share that model with others and come to some mutual agreement about it such as to make a socially constructed reality out of it. But then A is simply saying something different to B. A is saying "I believe (as a description of my state of mind) it's raining, but (I believe - meaning my model of the weather is such that) it isn't", which is a clear contradiction. B is saying "A believes (as a description of A's state of mind) it's raining but (I believe - meaning my model of the weather is such that) it isn't"

Either way, B is not saying the same thing (in terms of truth evaluation) as A.

I hope this hasn't been too long-winded. Basically I'm saying that all we can ever judge about the external world is our beliefs about it, and we can judge them by evaluating the response of the world to our actions upon it (in fact I go as far as to say that it the reason we act upon it, but that's another story), we update our beliefs such that acting upon them minimises the likelihood of surprise. So truth only really makes sense to me as an assessment of belief. That belief can be about a shared idea (belief about what is in other people's minds) like Santa Claus, or even a belief about my own beliefs like neuroscience or psychology - either way the truth evaluation comes from treating it as if it were the case and measuring the degree of error from doing so.

So a simple answer to your question would be that we can have whatever we want as the referent within a language game, but when it comes to truth evaluation (in a pragmatic sense), I see no way to meaningfully achieve this without having our belief as a referent.

in the context of use you describe above, the pair of statements "I believe it's raining" and "It's raining" both have the same meaning. But why doesn't the same paradox arise for the same pair of statements in the same context in the past tense? In the past tense, the same pair of statements do not have the same meaning (as each other). — Luke

The pair of statements "I believe it's raining" and "It's raining" have different meanings in different contexts, we agree on that much I think.

Each meaning in each context has a past, present and future tense. So if there were two meanings, A and B, Wittgenstein is comparing present tense A with past tense B. Understandable because we hardly ever use meaning B in the present tense, and we hardly ever use meaning A in the past tense, but we could do, neither are logically impossible.

people worry all the time about whether their beliefs are true, and they do so within the shared model, accepting those presuppositions. — Srap Tasmaner

I don't see how they do. Within the model (where we talk about certain well-accepted shared beliefs as real objects fo the world), when I'm getting wet from standing outside and I can see droplets of water falling from the sky, so I really 'worry about' whether my belief that it's raining is true? I can see people worrying about certain edge cases, but not in the main. Notwithstanding that, my locus of attack here is the notion that Moore's paradox is solvable without questioning correspondence theory. If people are concerned whether their beliefs correspond to states of the (in-story) world, then there's no paradox. If "It's raining" means 'the socially agreed in-world state is that of raining', then Macintosh might very well disagree with that, he could quite logically say "It's raining, but I don't believe it is" by substitution, it just means the same as "The socially agreed in-world state is that of raining, but I don't agree" - a perfectly common situation.

The point is that the paradox only works as odd in this sense if one takes the view that "It's raining" is truth-evaluable, not only in a way separate to "I believe it's raining", but in a way where one could not reasonably believe otherwise (hence the oddity of saying so). This is not the state of shared assumptions you're now describing, one could reasonably believe otherwise in that case.

If "It's raining" is about the state of some external world, then we have the question of how that state caused us to form the sentence without passing through models of belief (which them become the object of the sentence, lest the object be something we're not even in control of).

If "It's raining" is about those of my beliefs which are shared and unquestioned in society (the 'stroy' we all inhabit), then we have the problem that it's perfectly reasonable to question that story, something akin to "I've been brought up to believe in God, but I don't think I do believe"

If, however, we simply accept that for certain classes of belief, in certain contexts of use, "I believe it's raining" is simply the same as "It's raining" and the same as "It's true that it's raining", then the paradox is solved Macintosh is saying "I believe it's raining, I believe it isn't raining" which is a contradiction, McGillicuddy is saying "Macintosh believes it's raining, I don't believe it's raining" which is not a contradiction". Wittgenstein's objection to this solution I've covered above with Luke, is only a problem if one mixes one of the many other senses in which "I believe" could be used, many of which would also make sense in the present tense, as has been shown here (A description of a psychological state, an expression of uncertainty, an expression of surprise...)

an individual can clearly believe it's raining when it isn't. — Srap Tasmaner

in what sense is my at this moment belief not truth-evaluable by me — Srap Tasmaner

Your at this moment belief is not truth-evaluable by you not because you are prisoner of your at this moment mental model, but because you have already evaluated its truth. — Srap Tasmaner

All seem to be about the same issue, and I'm not sure what it is you have in mind. By what process do you imagine I go about evaluating the truth of my beliefs that would not simply constitute the updating of my mental model?

Because in-world I lives in a world that has actual tables and actual books to put on them. In-world, these things are all quite real. It's the whole point of having the model. It's the whole reason our brains generate the virtual reality to start with. The tables in in-world-I's world aren't artifacts of the in-world-model of the in-world-world in in-world-I's in-world brain; they're just tables. — Srap Tasmaner

I completely agree with you, but this is exactly what I've been trying to argue all this time, sentences which cross worlds [hierarchies of models] can only really be made sense of in very careful contexts.

Have you ever read a fantasy story to a child? There's been some experimental work on this, as well as just anecdotal evidence. Children have a limit of acceptability in fantasy stories. You'll be telling a story about a flying carpet (fine, no problem) then say, "and then I ate carpet and flew home", they'll invariably say something along the lines of "That wouldn't work, you need to sit on the carpet for it to fly you home, it won't work if you eat it!" - The story is treated as a purported model with it's own rules (most of which are simply our rules). There's just a higher level model above it within which it's just a story. Sentences which cross models or break out of models aren't easy to make sense of.

If I say "pass the salt" I don't need to explain the whole inference-model, my dining-companion's model is sufficiently similar that my words have the expected result. Which I think is what you're saying. But then you seem to think this an answer or counter to my position here, and I'm not sure how that works. Answers in either world make sense, answers which cross worlds are more difficult to understand "It's a sleigh pulled by eight reindeer but reindeer can't fly so they'll have to run really fast", wouldn't make sense.

That's the trouble with Moore's paradox (or the solutions to it) that I'm trying to explain. "It's raining" is 'in-world' as you put it, your 'rain' is similar enough to my 'rain' that we can just talk about rain and its properties without getting into how they're modelled in the brain. Fine.

"I believe it's raining" (taken as a psychological statement) is not in the same model as "It's raining", it's talking about how the model of 'raining' is being formed - by my believing it to be the case. Truth values, when treated as simple correspondence, then go further the other way, treating the in-world as if it were the only one and there is no story "Santa is real and that's all there is to it". This constant crossing of worlds without any note given to the fact that we're doing so is what causes the confusion.

If we're in the shared model where "It's raining" just means that in-world clouds are dropping in-world water, then "I believe it's raining" is not truth-evaluable by me. My beliefs about this model are assumed to be the case, that's the game we're playing when we talk about stuff in-world. We can't talk about Santa in-story and simultaneously talk about the properties of the writer of the story.

If we're in the next model up, where the real world is not directly accessible to us and we can talk about "my beliefs about it", then "It's raining" is not truth-evaluable. We've no idea if it's actually raining or not, and even the very concept of rain is just a shared model which may be slightly different in each mind sharing it.

What those analysing Moore's paradox as having two conflicting truth values are doing is trying to have both, exactly what you've just shown does not make sense (except in very careful circumstances).

If one wants to claim that "It's raining" has a truth value within that world-model. It's true iff it's raining. Then there's no problem with doing that, but we can't then simultaneously talk about our beliefs about whether it's raining and evaluate such propositions by the same standard. Our beliefs about whether it's raining are the authors of the story in which it's raining.

The following two (present tense) statements have the same meaning/use:

(1) "I believe it's going to rain"; and
(2) "It's going to rain"

Both (1) and (2) mean the same as (2). — Luke

No, they don't and I've already given the sense in which they don't (someone reading their own super-advanced fMRI scan). Another might be a schizophrenic talking about his condition, or someone with lesions in the ventral perception pathway, or any of several psychological conditions that can lead to split perceptions. There are two sense of "I believe" and two tenses (past and present), all four combinations are available to us in our language and the context determines which we might mean.

something is getting garbled when you also tell the causal story of how we produce an utterance, and then call what caused the utterance what the utterance is 'about'. I'm just not getting the connection you see between the causal chain or process that results in an utterance and 'aboutness.' If I assert, by making an utterance, that this is how things stand, what I'm talking about is how things stand. Your occasional use of 'about' to mean something else has me befuddled. — Srap Tasmaner

Much as I said to Luke above. If we want to talk about the object of our sentences, to answer questions such as "What are you talking about", we only have access to the selection of object identification models that we have in our brain. Imagine it like a bag full of marbles, we pick out a marble and show it to someone (form a sentence about it), then someone says "which was the marble you showed us?" - you can only delve back into that bag to produce the answer to that question.

Objects are stored as such in our brains, belief models which store recognisable breaks in the symmetry of reality to more rapidly infer predictions about them the next time they're seen (this is a 'table', tables hold cups). Outside of our brains, they are not objects, they're just matter, or processes or whatever, we'll never quite know, but they don't have objectively defined edges and properties, we do that bit inside our minds. So if we want to talk about the object of our sentence, to answer questions such as "what are you talking about?", then we'd be better off, I think, using these models as an answer (most people have very similar ones so it makes communication easier). But if we use these models as an answer, then the object of a sentence is in our minds, not in the outside world. The model (the thing that gets the label 'table') is in our minds. That which it is a model of is what's in the outside world.

Not all beliefs can be properly expressed as propositions. — Isaac


Example? — Srap Tasmaner

I couldn't very well do that without thereby disproving my theory could I? There are activities in the brain which we do not properly understand yet, yet they produce action and as such count, for me, as a belief (disposition to act as if...). As such, I think there are probably beliefs which cannot be properly expressed as propositions. It seems unlikely on the face of it that we have words for processes and concepts we've been thus far unaware of.

I'm just trying to make sense of Moore's paradox by way of McGinn's article. I tried to answer the question you raised about her article. I'm not interested in a debate over realism/idealism. — Luke

It's not about idealism. recognising that the access we have to the real world is indirect does not entail idealism. All I'm saying here is that if you're trying to make sense of Moore's paradox, it limits your options to simply assume that the proper object of an utterance is the real world and the truth judgement of that utterance is the state of the world. You may well have ideological commitments by which you'd like to assume that from the outset, and that's fine. I'm only saying that my understanding of the paradox doesn't assume those things and so we're not going to get any further if yours does.

Wittgenstein's point is that the meanings of the present-tense statements "I believe it's going to rain" and "It's going to rain" are equivalent, but the meanings of the past-tense statements "I believed then that it was going to rain" and "It did rain then" are not equivalent. It's not simply that the meaning of each statement changes due to tense, but that the meaning of the two statements is not equivalent in the past-tense, as it is in the present-tense. — Luke

That seems the same to me. "I believe it's raining" can be a description of one's state of mind (as I gave the example of someone reading off a super-advanced fMRI scan of their own brain), it just rarely is, but nothing is preventing it from being so. As such, it is this meaning which is implied when the sentence is in the past tense. The other meaning ("It's raining") is expressed in the past tense as "I believe it was raining". I don't really see what insight Wittgenstein is pointing at here. We have two different meanings (description of state of mind and description of states of affairs) and a way of expressing both in either present or past tense. I'm not seeing the significance of the actual structures we use to form those expressions, we still have all four combinations available to us in our language.

Wittgenstein's example intends to demonstrate that these different statements do not "all amount to the same thing" or have the same meaning in the past tense. — Luke

I think they do, it's just the grammatical rules for expressing them that Wittgenstein is getting wrong "I believe that P", "P is true", and "P" are all present tense. The past tenses (in terms of assertions of belief about states of affairs) are "I believe P was the case", It's true that P was the case", and "P was the case". Saying "I believed that P" is the past tense of the sense of an assertion about my state of mind. A legitimate use (uncommon in the present tense, but common in the past tense).

How do you get from 'making assertions about the world' to 'the world tells me which words to choose'? I can't make any sense of this. — Luke

?I'm simply trying to make the pragmatic point that we run into problems of intent if we assert that the object of our utterances is something further back in the chain of causation than we can identify. Here is a chain of causation...

The actions of sub-atomic particles cause edges to form in matter where properties change

The reflection of photons off that part of the world into my retina cause an electrical signal to be sent to my occipital cortex.

The activity of that cortex causes several feedback loops (including the selection of more samples from the world) eventually releasing signals to higher level cortices.

---

After several iterations of this process, that particular pattern of particles and edges is associated with my concept of 'table'

(skipping quite a few stages)

I want to make someone aware of what I see, Various linguistic cortices send and receive signals from those areas which send out object recognition signals and produce the vocal twitches which sound like "There's a table", or "I believe there's a table", or "Watch out for that table!" to get that job done.

You want to say that the 'object' of the utterance is located at the 'outside world' point in that sequence (above the dotted line (sub-conscious activities in our brain are also outside of our conscious Markov blanket). But note, it's not a 'table' at all at those points, it's not a 'table' until well within the inference levels of conscious awareness, quite deeply within our own belief models.

I think the proper 'object' of a sentence is something we assign (it's not a state of the world we can be right or wrong about. So we could have it at the actual state of affairs the sentence was ultimately prompted by if we want. I'm just saying that this would be confusing, as we don't even know what that is, we just infer it.

That last bit of writing was really confused and I've edited it too many times already.

What I mean to say is that I think the word 'true', or 'truth' means what it is used to mean - and what it's used to mean is "I really, really want you to act as if this were the case", so that's what it means as far as I'm concerned. This becomes a classic deflationist position (as per Early Ramsey) because we simply don't say "'It's raining' is true" we just say "It's raining". We only add "...is true" to anything for rhetorical effect, or shorthand "everything he said was true" (saves us from just repeating everything he said).

The extent to which I agree with later Ramsey is that I think it a useful distinction to have a technical category of beliefs which, when acted upon as if the were the case produce the expected results. Using 'true' this way as a technical term seems advantageous. we just need to bear in mind that it's not how the majority of the population use it.

what you called the belief's 'content' above, that's the inference about the state of the world. (And 'inference' you're using here not in the sense of 'an act of inferring' but in the sense of 'a conclusion reached by an act of inferring,' — Srap Tasmaner

Yes.

a proposition, yes? — Srap Tasmaner

No. I don't see the results as propositions, just 'tendencies to act as if...'. A proposition is a speech act. It could be done for all sorts of reasons. I know philosophically, a proposition need not be spoken, but I think this is where a lot of the confusion comes in. We do not necessarily think in words, so converting all beliefs to propositions muddies the content of those beliefs by injecting rhetorical syntax into psychological processes - we might well 'talk as if' such-and-such were the case, but if we do not 'act as if' such-and-such were the case then we have cause to doubt that our grammar actually reflects our psychology.

So beliefs are about the world and assertions are about the content of beliefs, namely, inferences that have been made about the world. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, mostly. As I said, speech acts are performed for all sorts of reasons, so an assertion might be about the content of some belief, but not necessarily the one people listening to it would take from the words used.

suppose I have inferred that Dewey defeated Truman, and I hold a belief the content of which is 'Dewey defeated Truman.' If I were to assert that Dewey defeated Truman, for instance by saying, 'Dewey defeated Truman,' I would be, as I understand it, saying something about the proposition (expressed here as) 'Dewey defeated Truman,' the content of a belief I hold. What would I be saying about it? That it is true? — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, in that instance, bearing in mind the caveat about using propositions as proxies for mental processes. This is how I agree somewhat with Ramsey's conclusion that truth is more rightly thought of as a property of beliefs, not of propositions (Ramsey got there another way). Not all beliefs can be properly expressed as propositions.

Also, according to later Ramsey, for a belief to be true is merely for you to have the expected results from acting as if it were the case. So your believing 'Dewey defeated Truman' to be the case results in a likelihood to say such things as "Dewey defeated Truman", it's a true belief to the extent that when acting upon it, the result you get is what you'd expect it to be if it were the case that Dewey defeated Truman.

I'm generally more emotivist about truth. 'Truth' is just a label applied to things we really, really want other people to act as if were the case. I think our actual beliefs are more subtly graded in terms of Bayesian probabilities, but we could hold that 'true' ones are just some subset (I just don't think that's mostly how people use the word).

To be clear, you said...

We associate certain areas of the brain with certain types of mental activity because they consistently correlate - the subject reports some type of activity, or is placed in some recognised situation and the same area consistently registers. — Isaac


The drawing of such implications from fMRI studies, especially psychological or ethical implications, is precisely where many major issues of replicability have been found in the ‘replication crisis’. — Wayfarer

And also

The review I linked to draws on a large study of fmri data and raises fundamental questions about its accuracy and replicability in many respects. — Wayfarer

You're clearly here implying that lack of strict rigourously controlled replicability casts doubt on the findings arising from any such experiments. A level of rigour you are now abandoning when the results point toward something you favour.

It's a completely different issue. 'The nature of reason' is a philosophical question par excellence. I dispute that it will ever be subject to empirical analysis, for the Kantian reason that without reason there can be no empirical method. The faculty of reason is not something you're ever going to see in data, because it is of its nature abstract, and because you can only ever find it by using it. — Wayfarer

I understand these reasons, they're beside the point. The replication crisis was not raised in support of the above argument (it would be irrelevant to it). It was raised as a completely separate issue attempting to cast doubt on the results of neuroscience in general. It is in this context I'm raising the issue.

If you truly believe that such simple, uncontrolled, un-analysed, unreplicated experiments tell us something about the nature of reality beyond death, then it is duplicitous to raise the replication crisis at all, in any context. It's simply not a crisis as far as you're concerned.

I would concur... completely... if... we added beliefs about ourselves too... we are both objects in the world, and subjects taking account of it, and/or ourselves. — creativesoul

Yes, absolutely. I think a lot of confusion about much of what I write here results from the fact that we can at times treat ourselves as objects about which we form inferences. The whole of psychology is the forming if inferences about the human mind as an object, despite using the human mind, as ourselves, to make those inferences.

Some see that as problematic, I don't, but it's worth remembering which we're talking about and not mixing the two.

What I was arguing about then was that you couldn't understand the faculty of reason by analysing neurological data. — Wayfarer

The idea you were attempting to refute is irrelevant. The point is simply that the level of replicability you were criticising neuroscience for lacking was already way above the level of replicability you're here saying is unjustified as a reason for rejecting ideas about past lives. If neuroscience can say little about reason because it's results are difficult to replicate, then the same must be true of Stevenson. I'm aware of the fact that you presented other reasons why you think neuroscience cannot speak about the faculty of reason (which I also disagreed with), but that doesn't detract from the fact that you tried to discredit their results using the replication crisis. That, in itself, is duplicitous if you then ask people to take conclusions seriously from an even less rigorous source.

By the way, do you have any knowledge of or views on Hacker and Bennett's book, Philosophical Foundation of Neuroscience? It seems to me that it suggests the kinds of criticisms that I was making in that other, entirely unrelated thread. — Wayfarer

I have read excerpts from it. It think a lot of it is actually quite good, but that's definitely off topic here. Here we're talking about the extent to which the scientific method can be applied to past lives. I think we need to be careful about having a double standard for our acceptance of experimental evidence.

We're equivocating on the meaning of 'belief'. A belief in the sense I'm talking about, is an inference about the state of the world. It already (in it's output) contains a level of confidence. There's no secondary 'belief' about the the original 'belief' by which our confidence in it is measured. we might have beliefs about our general metal state, but they would not speak differently of the confidence the belief about the state of the world shows in it's output.

Because if reasons to question them come up, I will. Someone who does otherwise won't. That's the "blindly" part of "blindly follow": turning a blind eye towards reasons to think otherwise. — Pfhorrest

But we've just established that the single issue is that you might be wrong about something and not correct that error. That is, you agreed, the only thing that is at fault with fideism. You're still not altering that by saying that you might question something in future if the matter arises.

Notwithstanding that, you have not yet met the burden of demonstrating that your method here is at all practically achievable. When faced with simple moral decisions which do not yield the expected results ("don't lie" for example) you say that the 'right' moral decision is heavily context dependant, the right choice for that person at that time in that context. If so, there are 7 billion people in several billion different contexts at several billion different times. Given the raw numbers, the onus is on you, I think, to demonstrate that this idea of yours is pragmatically any different from fideism. It seems clear to me that the vast majority of the time, in the vast majority of cases, your moral decisions will be made without going through this process because the time within which a decision has to be made falls far short of the time it would take to reach anything like the kind of context-specific conclusion you're advocating.

basically, you'll go through life making almost all of your moral choices on the same gut-feeling, peer-group, social-norms basis that everyone else does because you haven't the time or the mental bandwidth to actually do the calculation. The only difference is you get to act holier-than-thou simply on the grounds that your open (one day, maybe) to changing your mind.

This is philosophy, not neuroscience. — Pfhorrest

Then stop making claims which are within the remit of neuroscience.

we're not talking about why people do anything at all, but how to resolve disagreements about what to do. — Pfhorrest

Yet...

Either people accept the outcomes of these processes because they think they’re objectively right (or reject them because they’re wrong), or they accept them because someone will do something they don’t like to them it they don’t — Pfhorrest

This is a direct claim about why people do things. It is of the form "people do X because..."

If someone thinks (whatever caused them to think it) that something is right and someone else thinks (from whatever cause) otherwise, do they discuss it and exchange reasons to try to convince each other to agree — Pfhorrest

Sometimes, yes, sometimes no.

acting like there is something they are investigating together, for which there are reasons to think one way or another — Pfhorrest

This is not the only consequence of talking about it. They might, for example, appeal to emotions, or peer pressure.

It's a simple boolean choice, no wiggle room here: do we exchange reasons and try to reach agreement, or not? — Pfhorrest

Yes, but we don't have to reach the same answer in every case. sometimes we might have rational issues to discuss, sometimes we might pretend we do as rhetorical tools, other times we might just act and hope others copy. In neither of these alternatives to discussion is 'fear of reprisals' the only motivator.

He would record the interviews, then try and validate what the children said by investigating their stories. How is that not 'empirical'? — Wayfarer

Such duplicity! Not less than a few days ago, in a post to me, you were discarding the whole of neuroscience because it's results could not be exactly replicated under precise laboratory conditions with control groups and proper statistical analysis. Now you're trying to claim 'having a chat' counts as the sort of evidence we should be taking seriously?

That is exactly the problem, yes. — Pfhorrest

So how does the fact that you're open to them being questioned alter the issue? We've just agreed that the problem is related to whether you actually do question them, not whether you might do so in future if and when you get the time.