the action of believing — frank

Even though "believe" is a verb, it's not obvious to me that believing is an action. Say you believe that X. That looks to me more like a partial description of your mental state than a description of something you're mentally doing.

I suspect a belief is even more like a rule that guides your thought and behavior. If you believe Trump is a good man, among other things when asked if you think he's a good man, you'll answer "yes" (if speaking candidly). If you believe a knife is sharp, you'll handle it carefully, and so on.

Not an action, and not just behavior, but a way of thinking and acting.

Well that goes on the reading list, thanks SX. (There was already a vague entry for "all of Sellars" but this still helps.)

Does he talk about lambdas? Quine, another die-hard nominalist, at some point realized he could use lambdas to get around needing classes (and certainly attributes) as first-class objects for most purposes.

I feel completely in over my head with that comment about the "linguistic and conceptual orders". You see this sort of Kantian view all over 20th century Anglo-American philosophy, even in Strawson's "descriptive metaphysics" (IIRC, they both wrote books about Kant) and I really have no idea what to make of it yet...

?

Maybe I can make my point, if I have one, more clearly: maybe it's hard to figure out what someone is doing when they utter a statement that expresses a proposition because they're not doing one thing, they're doing two. That would make capturing the essence of the one thing they're supposedly doing a fool's errand.

Alright, everyone recognizes that propositions are articulated in this subject-predicate way, but consider that the rules and norms that govern establishing reference are quite different from the rules and norms that govern establishing class membership, and it begins to look more like two completely different activities rather than parts of one.

Still, I'm just speculating. Maybe there's nothing to it, or maybe this ground is already well-trodden...

No, I'm saying that if you look at how people talk about beliefs, there are often two distinct steps that are treated differently.

We're watching a basketball game, and I say, "Man, that kid's tall." You say, "Who, Jones? He's only like 6'4"." Then I point out Smith, and you say, "Oh, wow."

The fixing reference stage is treated as a separate issue from deciding whether he's really a member of the class I suggested. All of this shows up as one claim in the propositional account, and you get puzzles over non-referring singular terms, and so on, problems that rarely arise in everyday conversation.

I don't know if there's any point to this, but I think people have different expectations, follow different norms, etc., for the two different elements of a "proposition".

I think in a lot of ordinary speech, there are really two steps that get compressed in a propositional account, and which make the propositional account somewhat natural until you have to say what propositions are exactly.

People largely believe stuff about things; there's predication, and there's reference fixing. Rather than rushing to "I believe the x is F," it might be fruitful to pause at "I believe, with regard to x, that it is F."

Or maybe not.

Edit: "might" for "would"

Might be some trouble there, because in some quarters "proposition" is the word for the meaning of a natural language declarative sentence. (That makes propositions into sort of equivalence classes, so you can say "the same thing" in different languages, or using different indexicals: you saying, in whatever language, [you're tall] to me means the same as when I say, in whatever language [I'm tall].)

But then propositions don't get to have meanings; they are meanings.

But how does this observation contradict what I've said? — Hanover

This is not an unusual situation on the forum: we seem to disagree over whether we disagree.

We have the actual words you posted, and apparently need to distinguish my interpretation of those words from what you actually intended to communicate. Perhaps you misspoke, as Sam did. Grabbed the knight when you really meant to grab the bishop. Perhaps you didn't misspeak, but I misunderstood. Perhaps we even agree on the meaning of what you posted, but draw different conclusions from what we agree on, like the aging veteran and the 12-year-old.

I would proceed by making distinctions such as these and seeing what works. I took you to have said that I cannot, for instance, distinguish your actual words, your intended meaning, and my interpretation. Am I wrong about that? How do you think we should proceed?

This view is just a basic recitation of indirect realism, and it's correct. — Hanover

In my view, your view is a basic recitation of what we imagine the phenomenal experience of a newborn baby is like. But our cognitive life does not remain an undifferentiated blob of sensation. We experiment and learn and form beliefs, and we continue to experiment and learn and revise our beliefs.

I thought Banno made a mistake once, but--
No, wait, I told it wrong.

BTW: the issue of why beliefs shouldn't be considered to be primary truth-bearers is pretty interesting. — frank

Please continue.

I can't distunguish for you the external object from the phenomenal state, so I can hardly parse out the phenomenal state itself into raw presence sense data and preexisting interpretative data like beliefs. — Hanover

Huh. So you can't distinguish anything from anything else, there's just the endless unified flow of Hanover's experience. Nothing special about beliefs-- they're part of your stream of consciousness like everything else, like me, and rocks.

Bored now. If I had known this is where we were headed, I wouldn't have bothered.

Our beliefs, in part, shape our experience. Sure. Why do you think that's the same thing as saying beliefs are experiences, or are an aspect of experience?

My height, in part, shapes my experience. But my height is a physical fact about me. I experience being the height that I am, sure, but that doesn't make my height just an aspect of my phenomenal mental life.

If only I could upvote you! Thank you, my friend.

A belief is an experience — Hanover

Is it? Where's the argument for this?

When you're done eating popcorn the experience is over, but the belief that you were eating popcorn persists indefinitely. Recalling that you were eating popcorn is also an experience, but not the same as eating popcorn, and neither is the belief that you were eating popcorn.

The process of acquiring a belief may be an experience, or it may be something you can have an experience of, but really the differences between beliefs and experiences are so numerous, I can't imagine why you you'd think beliefs are experiences (rather than, say, like a good empiricist, thinking they have their origin in experience) except that you think they are both mental somethings.

I don't believe the present king of France is bald.
<ducks>

I don't just experience a bird as a single raw image, devoid of beliefs, ideas, anxiety about work, hunger from not having breakfast, etc. A phenomenal qualitative state is an entire experience presenting however it does. It's my internal state at a given time. — Hanover

Sure, but here you're not saying the phenomenal state is the belief, or that having a certain belief means being in or having been in a certain phenomenal state.

Taking a step back here: phenomenal states are complex and fleeting; beliefs on the other hand can be simple and persistent. They don't look like the same sort of thing, do they? It's one thing to say that our phenomenal experience is generally accompanied by beliefs, but quite another to say our beliefs are those experiences.

I'm going to indulge in labeling for once and call this empiricism. Would you be cool with that?

What puzzles me a little though is that you want to call those foundational phenomenal experiences beliefs. How do you see the connection between sense experience and belief?

because I have the same reasons to believe it when I'm thinking about it even when I'm not — Hanover

Even if you're not thinking about those reasons? And is holding a belief the same as having reasons for holding it? Are you still talking about the belief existing in different senses, some phenomenal some not?

It exists in a different sense when I am thinking about than when I'm not, but to the extent the same data and rationality exists over time that causes me to believe I live in Georgia, I continue to have that same belief in some sense even when I'm not actually presently experiencing that belief. — Hanover

I'm not following this at all.

My belief is a phenomenal state I suppose — Hanover

Hmmm.

That's introspection, surely. Doesn't your belief that you live in the great state of Georgia persist when you happen not to be thinking about it?

We both have phenomenal states. I experience mine, you yours. — Hanover

Is the phenomenal state the belief itself? When you see the beetle scuttle under the porch, is your belief that he's there identical to your phenomenal state of imagining the beetle there in the dark?

Three ways of making the wrong move:

1. When I pushed that pawn, I was kicking myself because I knew I had to move my king first.

2. When I pushed that pawn, I was thinking you had to capture. Totally missed that check in-between.

3. When I pushed that pawn, I was thinking about that girl I saw at the bookstore today.

In chess, there's a strong sense in which these are all the same move and the differences are only a matter of curiosity. Interesting maybe, but irrelevant to the game itself. I lose in every case.

Is talking like this? How much or how little like this?

Might be helpful to use a word like "development" for changes an individual undergoes during its lifespan, and reserve "evolution" for populations.

I think I'm largely with you here, with the proviso that we do have experiences that falsify our beliefs sometimes. (And of course science sets out to produce just such experiences.) So while self-contradiction might rule out a possibility, contradicting some belief or beliefs of ours does not.

And I come back also to the sense of an epistemic community with shared norms of evidence and rationality. Those are, similarly, not absolute.

I think you're being too casual with the word "probability" there, is all.

If there are 500 million government-issued ID cards in the US, and an additional, say, 200,000 fake IDs, does that mean the odds of any given ID being a fake are about 3.8%? No, of course not. Because IDs don't randomly appear. The driver's license in my wallet came directly from the Georgia Department of Transportation; I don't have to wonder if it might be a fake.

But if you're the owner of a bar, and some kid presents you with an ID showing that they're of legal drinking age, then you might have a responsibility to look closely at that ID. As with counterfeit, that's a situation where people are known to present a fake ID and we know why they do it.

EDIT: dropped some 0's, but never mind that.

No I'm inclined to agree with you, because I take the justification to be a practical thing. It's a matter of applying your knowledge of circumstances in the way members of your epistemic community do. In retail, for instance, you exercise slightly more caution accepting large bills than you do as the customer at a bank because it's a known fact that people try to pass counterfeit bills at stores. If you have no reason to think someone's ID is fake, and if members of your epistemic community would as a rule see no reason to think the ID is fake, then I think you're justified in assuming the ID is genuine, even though you know there is a non-zero chance that it's not.

What about the person who just knows they have the winning ticket?

Have you ever seen the game show "Deal or No Deal?" Fascinating exercise in probability which in its heyday sparked long math debates on the internet. You could always see someone on there turning down hundreds of thousands of dollars because they just knew they had picked the case with a million dollars in it.

Those people drove me nuts. Only time I was tempted to yell at the television. "No you don't! You don't know any such thing! It's random! Take the money!"

The more we talk about this example, the more I'm inclined to agree with @Metaphysician Undercover that you are no more justified in claiming that a given ticket will not win than you would be in claiming that a given ticket will.

In the lottery case, the urge to say "Just do the math" is almost overwhelming. 1 in 3.2 billion is a small number but it's not 0. It's just not, and saying that it is is just wrong.

What about the chair I'm sitting in? Is there a vanishingly small but non-zero chance it will disappear as I sit here, or turn into pudding, or whatever? Maybe? The difference is that knowing how lotteries and probability work, we know the mechanism responsible for uncertainty. Even if I'm a good Humean and accept that my knowledge of this chair is only probable, I think we should still call my beliefs about it justified because an unknown mechanism having unforeseeable consequences can have no place in our reasoning. Only probable, yes, but still justified because the only factors I have not taken into account are factors I cannot possibly know anything about.

Gettier cases frequently rely on coincidence. We all have lots of experience of coincidence, but no experience predicting the occurrence of a coincidence. Hence, the subjects in Gettier cases have beliefs that are indeed only probable, but still justified.

It's true that you're not justified in believing that the entire sample of tickets loses, and I think that shows that justification isn't necessarily inherited — Michael

Wait -- does it? I think in this case, it's that the inference that would preserve justification is faulty. (You just can't go from "each individually" to "all taken together" like that. It's like the Logic 101 example of inferring there's someone everyone loves from everyone loving someone.)

Right, I had forgotten about this.

My hot take is still that this is a muddle that arises from ambiguity over what constitutes a trial. The closure principle relied on here is no substitute for doing the math right. That can mean the math seems counterintuitive (e.g., the Monty Hall problem), and that's interesting as a fact about our epistemic biases but nothing more.

Maybe @fdrake could chime in.

I'll think about it some more...

A particular counterexample is that of a lottery. Given the high odds, I am justified in believing that any given ticket won't win. But I am not justified in believing that no ticket will win, even though that no ticket will win follows from the conjunction of each given ticket not winning. — Michael

Hmmmm.

1. Is there a hidden premise here that some ticket will win? Because the way the big lotteries work here in the States, it's quite common for no ticket to win for months, and that's how the jackpot grows into hundreds of millions.

2. Given some such premise, you just have to be careful with quantifiers and sums, I think. If you have ye olde urn of a hundred marbles, 99 white and 1 black, the chances of having drawn a black marble are 1/100 for as many individual trials as you'd like, but obviously if you draw more marbles per trial your chances are better, right up to guaranteed success if you draw all of them. I don't think there's a problem here.

((Btw, this slippage from individual to collective can be really interesting. It's thought one of the earliest examples of a game-theoretical problem is a story somewhere in Plato about a soldier who reasons thus: we're either going to win or lose this battle; my participation can't make much difference to the outcome and I run the risk of dying; therefore I should desert. The reasoning isn't bad for an individual, but doesn't scale up very nicely.))

Interesting that — Banno

No it isn't.

"Trust that ..." sounds pretty close to "expectation that ..." I think this is all to the good, Javra. Fits comfortably with my ridiculous chair that I continually trust will not disappear whilst I sit upon it. I think this is the right place to look for belief.

My claim is that it is impossible to believe that a conclusion drawn from a belief which is believed to be false, is a justified conclusion. — Metaphysician Undercover

What about just the premise?

Is it possible (whatever you mean by "possible") for me to believe that your claim is reasonable but wrong?

I'm increasingly convinced that beliefs are a folk-psychological back-construct; that they are an invention that serves, however poorly, our attempts to explain what we do; but which does not correspond to anything real. — Banno

I'm deeply sympathetic to this view, Banno. I'm not sure though that I'd want to say beliefs are not real, or that concepts aren't real. They're just not, you know, objects. I think they're more in the space of habits or rules, the sort of thing Ryle leaned on with all his talk of dispositions.

If you like, you can say that I believed the chair I was about to sit in would not disappear, and that as I sit here typing I continue to believe it. I've been believing it all day. There's just no call for saying this. It's an explanation in search of a problem, but otherwise not different in kind from belief ascriptions that do serve a purpose.

[Edited, left out "no".]

I think you'll have to lay out for me what you mean by "material implication". — Metaphysician Undercover

Just the usual. I think Gettier actually talks about "entailment" but it's not clear whether he means something special by that. We can come back to this.

Your example of a conditional is irrelevant because it doesn't utilize a false premise. — Metaphysician Undercover

Let's start there. How do you know the premise isn't false?

All I said was "IF I have good reason to believe my keys are in the kitchen, THEN I have good reason to believe they're in my house." I think this conditional is true whether or not I do in fact have good reason to believe my keys are in the kitchen. Do you disagree?

Let's vary the example slightly. Suppose I remember leaving my keys in the same place I always do, and that memory is veridical, I really did that. There's my reason for believing they're where they usually are. Now I could be wrong -- maybe I'm forgetting that later I put them in my coat pocket when I went out. I still have reason to believe they're where I usually leave them, just not conclusive reason. Does that reason suddenly become conclusive if I didn't move them later? Do you see anything here, in either case, you'd consider me justified believing?

The Gettier version would be this: you grab my keys to head out, recognize your mistake and put them back, all unbeknownst to me. Now I have that original reason to believe the keys are where I left them, and they are, but now my belief about where my keys are is true by luck.

The issue I take against Gettier is that he seems to be arguing that an unsound (because it's based in a false premise) conclusion, may be a justified conclusion. I think that's contradictory nonsense. — Metaphysician Undercover

He doesn't argue for this position; he asks us to accept it as a premise. You don't.

The word "justified" is really not particularly important here -- you can substitute any epistemic virtue you like. What Gettier discovered is that if we assume, what seems reasonable, that material implication preserves epistemic virtue in much the same way it preserves truth, then it is trivial to construct counterexamples where our intuition is that the conclusion is not known even though it is believed, true, and has whatever virtue it inherited from the premise (that it is reasonable, rationally believed, that we have warrant to believe it, that we are justified in believing it, whatever). What the conclusion doesn't inherit from the premise is truth -- that it usually gets somewhere else.

If you can honestly state that the conclusion is unsound then you cannot honestly state that it is a justified conclusion. — Metaphysician Undercover

In the Gettier literature this is the "no false lemmas" view, I believe. So you would say that material implication only preserves epistemic virtue when the premise is true. I'm inclined to disagree. If I have good reason to believe my keys are in the kitchen, then I have good reason to believe they're in my house. If I can't say that sort of thing, of what use is material implication?

If someone is going to use a falsity to support a conclusion, they''ll probably use one which supports it well — Metaphysician Undercover

Hmmm.

Here's another way to look at the issue. The word "reason" is ambiguous in an interesting way: we reason from our knowledge of effects to their causes and call those beliefs about effects our "reasons" for our belief about their causes; on the other hand, the cause is the "reason" for the effects. That I can see an iceberg is my reason for believing it's right in front of me; that an iceberg is right in front of me is the reason I can see it. We strive to perfect our conditionals, to believe that we can see iceberg right in front of us if, and only if, it's right in front of us. Thus our reasoning would be not a groping about in the dark, but our way of discovering the true structure of the universe, the real connections between things. We want to believe the universe is itself rational, has a rational structure, a structure we can come to understand through reasoning, a process of matching the movements of our minds to the movements of the universe without.

The interesting case is when we hold reasonable beliefs but derive from them a conclusion that turns out to be false. What has gone wrong? We have a choice: we could give up the vision sketched above, draw in our horns a bit, and take reason to be something we do, setting aside faith in the rational structure of the universe; or we could say that we must've failed, that reasoning that reaches a false conclusion cannot be "true reasoning" -- that the premises must only appear to support the conclusion but could not really support it.

Responses to Gettier along the lines of, "Well, he had a false belief -- garbage in, garbage out," rather miss the point, I think. Do we allow falsehoods to have real connections? Traditional logic says yes, valid but unsound, But how can this be? If our reasoning mirrors the rationality of the universe, those connections must also be only seemings, conditionals that cannot ever be perfected, for there is no truth underlying them.

"She looks twenty," is indeed a reason to believe she's of the age of consent, but maybe not a very good reason.

So you're saying that if a person has reasons for one's belief, even if those reasons involve falsities, then that belief is reasonable? — Metaphysician Undercover

It's a soundness/validity kind of thing. Reasons that actually support the conclusion, if imperfectly, are what we want, not just any old stuff.

We distinguish between how well a claim supports a conclusion and whether that claim is itself factual.

Do you not understand the distinction, or do you reject it for some reason?

Honored to be on that list, but we both know I learned more from you than you did from me.