Again, this leads to saying that there is no meaning prior to language, that meaning is a language construct, that language is necessary for meaning, and/or that meaning is existentially dependent upon language.
Some language less creatures are capable of forming, having, and/or holding belief that is meaningful as well as true or false.
— creativesoul
Your view seems reasonable to me, but I prefer to use/understand some of your keywords differently. — Pie
The philosophers who want to find truth and meaning in full-fledged language are reacting to problems in their context, naturally trying to make sense of claims that a play a role in inferences --- of what they themselves, already at a high level of development, are doing.
I don't think philosophers must or even do insist that other understandings/uses of 'meaning' are invalid.
If a language less creature is capable of forming meaningful true belief, then meaning and truth are prior to language, and not all belief is equivalent to a propositional attitude.
— creativesoul
Another implicit premise here seems to be that languageless creatures can't have propositional attitudes. To me the question arises...how could we tell ? — Pie
Can we, locked in language, help but attributing such 'attitudes' in trying to understand such creatures ?
Which is to prefer doing different things with the very same words/marks. There's nothing - in and of itself - wrong with doing that — creativesoul
They knew they were fallible. The general aim was to minimize the likelihood of being mistaken(of forming, having, and/or holding false belief) while increasing the likelihood of better understanding the world and/or themselves . — creativesoul
Language less creatures do not have language, do not understand words, and thus cannot understand propositions. Propositions are utterly meaningless to language less creatures. — creativesoul
I am quite curious to see exactly what you're going to do differently than me. — creativesoul
They most certainly did not have any attitude at all towards the proposition "the stopped clock is working" when and while they trusted what a stopped clock said about the time. — creativesoul
The issue seems to be whether beliefs are best understood or not in terms of propositions. — Pie
I am quite curious to see exactly what you're going to do differently than me.
— creativesoul
Lately I find Sellar's myth of Jones illuminating. Note that Jones lives in a implicitly behaviorist society. They don't even think of themwselves as such, because it's Jones who first postulates 'internal speech' or 'talking without talking.' In the same way that the atomic theory could prove itself with increased powers of prediction and control, Jones' peers come to embrace thoughts as useful fictions. With practice, they even get good at guessing what they are thinking.
Now Jones could even extend his theory to creatures who never talk at all, explaining the beaver's movements in terms of its belief that food was waiting on the other side. Note that beliefs are still propositional] here, without us being committed to the animal 'having' them 'directly ' (inside their postulated ghostly consciousness.)
Given that there are any number of possible reasons why we may exhibit some behaviour or another, behaviour alone cannot always reliably inform us of anothers' thought and belief. — creativesoul
Reliably true conclusions about the thought and/or belief of others requires more than just outward observable behaviours. — creativesoul
I've more recently witnessed writers claim that certain species of crows somehow performed some sort of language less 'Bayesian reasoning'. — creativesoul
What is needed is a bare minimum criterion for what counts as thought and/or belief. — creativesoul
...is to be the kind of antiessentialist who, like Dewey, sees no breaks in the hierarchy of increasingly complex adjustments to novel stimulation – the hierarchy which has amoeba adjusting themselves to changed water temperature at the bottom, bees dancing and chess players check-mating in the middle, and people fomenting scientific, artistic, and political revolutions at the top (ORT, 109).
When we try to parse the cat's belief in propositional terms, we're confusing the contents of our report with the content of what we're reporting upon. — creativesoul
When we try to parse the cat's belief in propositional terms, we're confusing the contents of our report with the content of what we're reporting upon.
— creativesoul
It need not be confusion. What if we tried to understand aliens who seemed to have a language ? Less confusion there, intuitively, but we are still trying to model behavior using postulate internal entities ( attributing human-like beliefs to a non-human, probing for explanatory/predictive power.) — Pie
I feel like the alien or the cat. i’m not sure I know what a human-like belief , or a proposition is. I don’t think it’s simply my own ignorance, but the fact that when concepts like ‘belief’ and ‘proposition’ are analyzed rigorously in terms of their conditions of possibility, we find no ‘there’ there. — Joshs
Some argue that human intentionality is continuous with animal intentionality, more a matter of difference of degree than of kind. — Joshs
I really am open to what you say, but my theme lately is that...here we are public with only words to trade. I don't know how else to settle belief rationally. — Pie
My point is that belief is only one of myriad ways of sense-making , and far from the most important. — Joshs
Thus, by investigating the logical form of propositions, we can legitimately claim to be investigating the structure of our whole language. — Joshs
— Pie
My point is that belief is only one of myriad ways of sense-making , and far from the most important.
— Joshs
I agree there are lots of ways to make sense. That belief is far from the most important is so far a mere claim. I tend to think it's central for philosophy anyway. — Pie
The familiar epistemological conception of us as believers, who might ideally share a common representation of the world in the scientific image, thus conflates particular moves within discursive practice or the space of reasons with the space or practice itself.” — Joshs
The familiar epistemological conception of us as believers, who might ideally share a common representation of the world in the scientific image, thus conflates particular moves within discursive practice or the space of reasons with the space or practice itself. — Joshs
the opening and sustaining of a “space of reasons” in which there could be conceptually articulated meaning and justification at all, including meaningful disagreement and conceptual difference. — Joshs
Do you actually....believe this ? Do you endorse this as a claim that I should take seriously ? — Pie
There is no more chance of regularizing, or teaching, this process than there is of regularizing or teaching the process of creating new theories to cope with new data in any field—for that is what this process involves. — Davidson
What I invite you to take seriously is Rouse’s articulation of the relation between belief-justification and the space of reasons within which any such claims are intelligible. — Joshs
:up:They are a way of making sense of people's actions using intentional language. John went to the fridge because he wanted a beer and believed that there was beer in the fridge. — Banno
To think that therefore the cat must have a thing in it's brain that somehow corresponds to the belief is a category error, confusing a brain state with an intentional description. — Banno
An inferential semantics explains how claims are intelligible in terms of the inferences that are and are not allowed. "He closed his umbrella while it was raining, because he wanted to stay dry." This is confusion or nonsense, without some context that rescues it. We can't know one concept without knowing many. To cash out the rational in the rational animal, we emphasize inferential. — Pie
As Witt would argue ‘belief’ has a near infinity of potential senses, tied together not by an overarching categorical frame , but by family resemblance, which is not at all the same thing as a pre-existing rule or category. — Joshs
What Rouse is trying to do is show that our participation within normative practices is not simply a matter of conformity ( or not) to pre-established norms, but a continual re-framing and re-configuration. The norms continue to exist the same differently through their use, and their use re-defines their relevance and sense. — Joshs
Presumably you want this very point to be understood and to be right about something that applies or matters to both of us — Pie
What Rouse is trying to do is show that our participation within normative practices is not simply a matter of conformity ( or not) to pre-established norms, but a continual re-framing and re-configuration. — Joshs
Being-there as being-in-the-world is primarily governed by logos…Coming into the world, one grows into a determinate tradition of speaking, seeing, interpreting. Being-in-the-world is an already-having-the-world-thus-and-so. This peculiar fact, that the world into which I enter, in which I awaken, is there for me in a determinate interpretedness, I designate terminologically as fore-having.
Dasein is history.
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Dasein, whiling away its own time in each case, is at the same time always a generation. So a specific interpretedness precedes every Dasein in the shape of the generation itself. What is preserved in the generation is itself the outcome of earlier views and disputes, earlier interpretations and past concerns.
...
The wellspring of such persistent elements lies in the past, but they continue to have such an impact in the present that their dominance is taken for granted and their development forgotten. Such a forgotten past is inherent in the prevailing interpretedness of being-together-with-one-another. To the extent that Dasein lives from (cares about) this past, it is this past itself.
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The world with which we are concerned and being-in itself are both interpreted within the parameters of a particular framework of intelligibility.
...
One has a timeworn conceptuality at one's disposal. It provides the fore-concept for the interpretation. The interpretedness of a 'time' is strictly determined by these structural factors and the variable forms of their realization. And it is precisely the unobtrusiveness of these factors --the fact that one is not aware of them -- which gives public interpretedness its taken-for-granted character. However, the 'fore'-character in the structure of interpretedness shows us that it is none other than what has already been that jumps ahead, as it were, of a present time pervaded by interpretedness. Guided by its interpretedness, expectant concern lives its own past. — Heidegger
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