I personally do not find it useful to hold that belief is a brain state. States of mind(brains) are such things as certainty, disbelief, confusion, arousal, curiosity, happiness, grief, angst, paranoia, etc... All of these are existentially dependent upon pre-existing mental correlations(thought and belief).

"The fluid was in a turbulent state".

It is a mistake to equate minds and brains. A brain is necessary but insufficient for thought and belief. On my view, the mind is nothing more than thought and belief(mental correlations). Well... and their affects/effects of course...

So which one of you is going to offer a sensible and coherent explanation of how Jack is capable of believing, if he cannot form and hold belief, has no language, has no ability to think in statements, and all belief has linguistic content?

:-|

Mental atoms, eh?

Are all thoughts beliefs, or do all thoughts entail (some) belief(s)?

Are all beliefs thoughts, or do all beliefs entail (some) thoughts(s)?

Does all thinking consist in/of thoughts? Does all believing consist in/of beliefs?

Mental atoms, eh?

Are all thoughts beliefs, or do all thoughts entail (some) belief(s)?

Are ll beliefs thoughts, or do all beliefs entail (some) thoughts(s)?

Does all thinking consist in/of thoughts? Does all believing consist in/of beliefs? — Janus

Gibberish.

You've yet to have answered a germane question that shed light on the inherent shortcoming of your account...

The terms "thought" and "belief" are just like all the other terms which allow us to take our own mental ongoings into consideration. I've shown how it works in Jack's case without attributing a statement to him. There is no need for language, except for my report upon Jack's belief.

It all boils down to drawing mental correlations. There are no exceptions. Belief is accrued. Thus, it begins simply. Hence, the distinction between thought, belief and thinking about thought and belief.

So which one of you is going to offer a sensible and coherent explanation of how Jack is capable of believing, if i he cannot form and hold belief, ii he has no language, iii he has no ability to think in statements(or propositions, if you prefer), and iiii all belief has linguistic(propositional) content?

:-|

"The fluid was in a turbulent state". — Janus

"State" here, signifies unchanging, static, passive. You have designated a static turbulence, like in my post I said that repetition without change could be called a state. But without change, and therefore passivity is essential to "state". A turbulence without change is passive.

So which one of you is going to offer a sensible and coherent explanation of how Jack is capable of believing, if he cannot form and hold belief, has no language, has no ability to think in statements, and all belief has linguistic content? — creativesoul

Ever consider the possibility that Jack is not capable of believing? Perhaps your description of what is going on with Jack is wrong. You describe jack as holding a belief, but maybe there is really something else, other than believing, which is going on within Jack.

And don't ask me for an alternative explanation, because this is not necessary, in order to suggest that another explanation is wrong. If an explanation has logical problems it is likely wrong, but it doesn't require an alternative explanation to demonstrate this. In other words, we can dismiss a belief concerning a certain phenomenon, as unacceptable, without necessarily producing an acceptable one.

Meta, at it's core the thread is working from the notion of a non-linguistic creature believing something or other...

Witt talked about belief being shown via behaviour. Banno, Sam, and others have also talked in such terms as well as directly attributing belief statements to Jack and saying that Jack believes.

What a pathetic attempt at evasion! On the strength (or should I say weakness?) of this I have no remaining faith in your good will or desire to learn the truth. Have a nice life, dude...

Brilliant.

There is no "static turbulence". A state of turbulence is a state of change. So, contrary to your previous claim states may indeed, even arguably must be, active. In fact there is probably no such thing as a state of total inactivity.

It would be quite odd to say that nonlinguistic animals aren't capable of believing... unless one is forced to say so as a means of maintaining coherency(avoiding equivocation and/or self-contradiction). If one defines "belief" by describing thinking about thought and belief, then one would be forced to conclude just such a thing...

Hence, my earlier explanations regarding that several pages back...

What would a denial of the distinction between thought and belief and thinking about thought and belief look like?

Certainly no one here would deny the latter. Seeing how in order to think about one's own belief(or others') there must first be something to think about... how could one deny this pivotal distinction?

Jack believes 'X'...

Let 'X' equal "the bowl is empty".

Jack cannot possibly believe that the bowl is empty unless statements are not existentially dependent upon language. But they are. He cannot think in statements.

Contrary to earlier...

I'm torn, for I want to say that believing his bowl is empty doesn't require language. I mean he need not know the name of the object that we call a "bowl" in order for it to be significant to him... apart from other bowls. He knows where to find food. In the food bowl. If he goes there looking and there is no food to be found, he also knows how to get fed. He seeks Banno and behaves like earlier times when getting fed followed his purring, rubbing up against Banno's leg, and looking up while vocalizing(or whatever he does).

Deliberately seeking out Banno in order to get fed presupposes believing that Banno will feed him. However...

My own cats want me to pour food in the bowl, regardless of whether or not it is empty. One of the two leads me to her bowl, meowing the whole time, even though there is already food in it. The interesting thing is the amount of food I pour into her bowl doesn't matter. As soon as she hears the kibbles hitting the sides of the bowl, she's satisfied and begins to eat. It could be six kibbles or half a cup.

That tells me that she has no conception of quantity. "Empty" is precisely such a conception. It also proved to my better half that she didn't care about the food being 'old'.

;)

If an explanation has logical problems it is likely wrong, but it doesn't require an alternative explanation to demonstrate this. In other words, we can dismiss a belief concerning a certain phenomenon, as unacceptable, without necessarily producing an acceptable one. — Metaphysician Undercover

Are you charging my explanations here with having logical problems?

Gratuitous assertions won't do here Meta. I'm in agreement regarding whether or not valid refutation requires an alternative explanation. It does not. It does however, require a valid objection. So, if you mean to charge my arguments with having logical problems, then you need to justify that claim.

Witt talked about belief being shown via behaviour. Banno, Sam, and others have also talked in such terms as well as directly attributing belief statements to Jack and saying that Jack believes. — creativesoul

Belief is definitely shown by behaviour, I think that's beyond question. I can't think of any other way to show anything other than through behaviour. The question would be if there is a special type of behaviour which shows believe, so that we can separate behaviours which are demonstrating beliefs from behaviours which are not. The defining feature, of "showing a belief", might be the expression of propositions, statements, claims, and assertions. These are expressions of language.

The problem being, that if we don't define "belief" in some precise way, so as to draw the line between what behaviour does and does not show belief, then the argument will be made that all animals, and even plants show belief. The panpsychos will even argue that rocks show belief. But there seems to be a natural division in types of behaviour, between language use, and behaviour which is not language use, which serves as a good basis for the definition of belief. Belief is the type of thing which we express with statements and propositions, so why not define belief in this way, as the thing which is expressed by the proposition? Then those types of behaviours, that you mention, like Jack's, which appear to show belief, don't really show belief under this strict definition, they show something else. The something else we would have to explain with other words, such as "habit", "instinct", or other mental capacities which aren't quite as specialized as "belief".

Are you charging my explanations here with having logical problems? — creativesoul

I am saying that there are logical problems involved with not producing a clear and precise definition of "belief", which distinguishes behaviour which demonstrates a belief, from behaviour which does not. Otherwise, it may be argued that any behaviour which demonstrates consistency demonstrates belief.

A state of turbulence is a state of change. — Janus

Since my OED defines "state" as the existing condition of a person or thing, and "change" as the act or instance of making or becoming different, I think that you ought to recognize that you have just stated a contradiction. There is no such thing as "state of change", it's no less contradictory than the square circle.

In the sense you are using it 'state' refers merely to an abstract conception. if you want to say that inactive states exist, or are real, beyond our representations, then you are committing the same kind of error of hypostatization as Creative.

I'm quite sympathetic to what you're getting at Meta.

It can be summarized as follows:When there are two or more competing theories about the same thing, how do we discriminate between them? What is the standard for judging/valuing the differences?

Evidence?

That is measured in terms of it's adequacy and it's relevancy. But first...

Are our theories talking about the same thing?

I'm talking about not only Jack's behaviour(the evidence) but also Jack's mental ongoings... Banno rejects all things mental(I think).

I am saying that there are logical problems involved with not producing a clear and precise definition of "belief", which distinguishes behaviour which demonstrates a belief, from behaviour which does not. Otherwise, it may be argued that any behaviour which demonstrates consistency demonstrates belief. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well...

Surely by now you've seen my definition for "belief", "thought", and any/all other terms referring to mental ongoings? It is as precise as they come and has the broadest possible scope of application. There are no exceptions.

You're working from the presupposition that behaviour alone is adequate for establishing belief demonstration...

It's not.

There's a bit of critical thinking involved as well, particularly when the beasties in question do not or cannot tell us what's going on 'in their heads'...

The bowl on the right isn't empty. The bowl on the left isn't full.

Cats do not find themselves in the position of attempting to make sense of their own thinking. They do not arrive at piles of sand...

Yep. They don’t act on a belief. Their actions simply show they believe. Where we - linguistically, hence metacognitively - can also speak of the belief upon which we might, or might not, act. — apokrisis

It seems that it is the human ability to think symbolically that allows for "holding beliefs"; where holding a belief is conceived of as being in an unchanging state of assent towards an absolutely fixed content. That's why I said earlier that I think holding a belief could only consist in reciting one's belief as a stable formula while maintaining an unchanging attitude of of assent to it, or something along those lines. It seems that even in the human case the idea of holding a belief is an abstract idealization.

If people are conceived of as being able to hold beliefs in this kind of static sense, it would seem that they routinely do it without 'thinking about thinking', though, and that is why I said it has nothing to do, necessarily, with metacognition. Holding a belief, if the idea is sensible at all, would seem to be possible simply by virtue of the ability to think symbolically, but not otherwise.

I'm talking about not only Jack's behaviour(the evidence) but also Jack's mental ongoings... Banno rejects all things mental(I think). — creativesoul

Yes, I'm concerned with mental ongoings as well. The position I'm taking is that we need to distinguish what type of mental ongings constitute belief, from those which are something other than belief. As I was saying in another post, we talk about "holding" a belief, so it is implied that belief is a static thing, which remains unchanged. If a belief changes, it is no longer the same belief, so a changing belief is not a belief. This I compared to our ability to maintain a memory. If one's memory of some incident changes over time, it is no longer a true memory. And though the person might insist, I remember this, if it is inaccurate, it cannot qualify as a memory. When the person's memory is wrong, we can't truly say that it is a memory which the person recollects, it's a sort of fabrication.

Surely by now you've seen my definition for "belief", "thought", and any/all other terms referring to mental ongoings? It is as precise as they come and has the broadest possible scope of application. There are no exceptions.

You're working from the presupposition that behaviour alone is adequate for establishing belief demonstration...

It's not.

There's a bit of critical thinking involved as well, particularly when the beasties in question do not or cannot tell us what's going on 'in their heads'... — creativesoul

Actually, what I'm thinking is that behaviour is an indication of the mental ongoings. What I want, is to be able to say what type of behaviour indicates the existence of mental ongoings which would qualify as belief. And so I say that making statements and proposition is a natural choice as that type of behaviour. When mental ongoings are put into words, there is a type of stability which is provided by this. Words are much easier to remember in a precise way, than observed images and other sounds, and things like that. So when we memorize something, we put it in words in our minds, then we remember the words, telling us what happened. So the use of words, as static, unchanging symbols, provides that stability which I am looking for as the qualifying feature of "belief".

Try telling Jack that.

It seems that it is the human ability to think symbolically that allows for "holding beliefs"; where holding a belief is conceived of as being in an unchanging state of assent towards an absolutely fixed content. — Janus

I think that's a really important point. Language shifts belief into a timeless register. It makes a truth claim transcendent of the usual continuous active engagement of the world. And then the truth-making is also turned into a search for "the facts", the "states of affairs".

Which is where Banno and Sam go astray in trying to treat the truth-makers as some uninterpreted ground of experience. It could also be where Creative goes wrong, but after many years, I still have no clue what thesis he is trying to promote. He can't seem to answer a single straight question about it.

So anyway, that is what is important - what I keep referring to as Pattee's epistemic cut (which was also von Neumann's deal with self-reproducing automata and Peirce's triadic metaphysics). The animal mind is embedded in the flow of the moment. It is responding directly to the here and now in terms of some adaptive system of conception and exploration. There is just no mechanism to transcend that flow. So an animal doesn't "hold beliefs" in that it could objectify a thought and wonder whether it is actually true or not. It just expresses a belief in interpreting the world a certain way. And the "truth" is then discovered in terms of the pragmatic consequences. The animal prospers or suffers.

But language gives humans a mechanism to objectify their own "states of belief" and compare them to "states of the world". And as I stress - or as Peirce and other modelling relations guys like Robert Rosen stress - The states of the world are understood as acts of measurement. They too have to be translated into the transcendent register. We don't check the world directly to see if a belief is true. We check our conception of what the world would look like if such a belief were the explanation of some particular set of measurements.

We are looking not for the thing-in-itself, but the signs we conceive as speaking the truth of the thing-in-itself. The umwelt. And that is conceived of in the same timeless and placeless fashion - despite being a conception about some "physical state that exists at a time and place".

Take Banno's confusion over mountain heights or Sam's attempts to tie mental states to brain states.

Banno is imagining that if he got out a ruler - a measurement in terms of some transcendent co-ordinate system - he could tell you how high a mountain "really was". Well he can tell you the results of a measurement act in terms of some world transcending viewpoint. But already he is imagining a measurement act in an ideal Platonia where mountains aren't eroding or still growing, or where he never makes an error as he lays his ruler end over end several thousand times, while trying to keep count.

Likewise Sam is imagining that the brain has "states". At some instant in time, you can take that instantaneous snapshot view which gives you a timeless representation of how the brain was, in a way that will forever after be recorded as such. But the causality of neural activity is spread over multiple timescales. There's habits that take decades to form. There's attentional action that spans seconds. There's working memory action that spans minutes. There's neural level processes anywhere between 5 and 100 milliseconds. You have the biological pace of activity inside the cells that is just a frantic blur.

So any neurobiologist knows that no timeless snapshot could capture the temporally-complex structure of what the brain is doing. The best we can hope for is to figure out what collection of measurements might best match the predictive needs of some theory. We can't just measure "the reality". We already have to have formed a mental picture of what signs or observables can meaningfully stand for our concept of "a brain state".

So the measurables - the truthmakers - are not grounded in "the world", or even "our direct experience of the world". The truthmakers are grounded in our conception of how the world should look in terms of some set of signs, some set of measurements, that usefully converts a running temporal reality into the kind of timeless representation of reality that our theories of the world can deal with.

Yet in post after post, you just get folk claiming that minds perceive the state of the world in untroublesome fashion. The beliefs might be conceptual things, but the perceptions are veridical things. But what are qualia except our efforts to imagine a timeless and placeless version of the experience we would otherwise just live? And in objectifying qualia, we might get to say something useful, yet we also leave behind so much that we haven't manage to say anything about.

So truth is a pragmatic choice about how much of reality we can afford to ignore. We gain something by objectifying and creating a set of signs - a set of "timeless facts" that serve as truthmakers. But it is an art, a skill. And good epistemology is about bringing out the tricky nature of what we claim to do.

If people are conceived of as being able to hold beliefs in this kind of static sense, it would seem that they routinely do it without 'thinking about thinking', though, and that is why I said it has nothing to do, necessarily, with metacognition. — Janus

Creative has some special private understanding of metacognition. He certainly hasn't managed to explain it to me, or relate it to the literature.

I think it is a bad term in fact. It is normally used by psychologists who don't take a linguistic or discursive view of the human mental difference. The construct of metacognition presumes that the human ability to recollect, or be self-aware, or to have voluntary control over attention and imagination, are all aspects of some higher genetically-evolve cognitive faculty. So the thesis is not that the structure of language gets internalised to structure individual minds, but that the minds evolved that structure, therefore that's why they knew how to speak. In evolutionary history, the thoughts were there before the means of the expression.

So metacognition is how a cognitivist would think about things. And a social-constructionist would see metacognition as merely the kinds of things you can learn to do once you live in a community where speech is a shared thought-structuring skill.

But as you say, most people "hold beliefs" in the sense that they don't think you are crazy when you ask them to give explanations for why they just did whatever they just did. They accept the rules of that particular language game and will play along. They will come up with a reason that seems reasonable, according to whatever cultural context is in play.

Psychologists can then argue over what this "metacognitive" discourse tells us about the structure of human cognition.

I still have no clue what thesis (@creativesoul) is trying to promote. — apokrisis

He isn't trying to promote a particular thesis; rather he listens and comments on what is being said. That's what makes Creative worth talking to.

X-)

Sometimes.