I have a belief that the pub is at the end of the road means I have a tendency to act as if the pub were at the end of the road. My cat believes the floor is solid means my cat has a tendency to act as if the floor were solid. — Isaac

I like this. I think we 'believe' in language this way, trust in it radically, as we trust ourselves to step around furniture. To question its reliability or intelligibility is to trust it like an organ as intimate as the hand.

Hello, and nice addition. — creativesoul

Thanks!

Welcome path. I agree with much of what you said. However, would you call this "tacit know-how" a belief (or set of beliefs), like @Sam26 does? — Luke

I think 'belief' is OK as a metaphor, but I do see how it can work against expressing the stuff we may agree on. (I like what you have posted on this thread.)

Hello, everyone. Great theme.

I checked out an excellent source mentioned earlier.

Logical pragmatism is the view that our basic beliefs are a know-how, and that this know-how
is logical – that is, that it is necessary to our making sense. — Moyal-Sharrock

To me it makes sense to stress social know-how as our immersion in a form of life. 'Bedrock beliefs' are 'what everyone knows,' with the important twist of this 'knowledge' being primarily tacit. It's doing/saying the 'right thing' in the context of a world with others. We can, with effort, articulate some of this tacit know-how. The lexicographer constructs plausible definitions of words like 'belief,' but this itself relies on the same 'blind' or 'pre-rational' know-how displayed in ordinary language use, even as it also relies on more conscious training and education. (We could all define a familiar word that we've never bothered to define or look up before. I don't think the definition we'd come up with was already there in our minds somewhere. We'd be employing skill in articulating for the first time what was reliably automatic.)

Related issue: It is only after we are trained into a form of life and a language that we can absurdly pretend to doubt the existence of others or the external world. This doubt is absurd insofar as it is articulated. The very language of the (impossible) 'radical skeptic' or 'solipsist' deploys a know-how that cannot intelligibly be doubted. In this sense language 'presupposes' a world with others, though it's important to stress that this 'presupposition' need not be conceptual or verbal. That we can, after the fact, articulate plausible explicit renditions of tacit knowledge does not IMV suggest that such tacit 'knowledge' was already made of concepts.