How do you know it isn't possible to communicate with lions? — Pseudonym

It’s an allusion.

You're creating a definition in such as way as you already know everything that's in it. That's fine, but philosophically useless. — Pseudonym

I can see advantages in making the definition explicit.

The aim of this thread, for me, is not so much to set out a true and faithful definition - there's no such thing - but to explore the pros and cons, work out what might be consistent and what doesn't work.

But hang on - can't one believe something that is indeed true? — Banno

Yes.

So believing is something the mind does? — Banno

No, it is something human beings do.

it is something human beings do. — Galuchat

SO would you explicitly rule out non-human belief?

I wrote, "...it is unlikely that animals have beliefs." Here

On the grounds that they do not understand propositions. So what is involved in understanding a proposition?



Does the crow show an understanding of displacement? Does he show that he understands that water will be displaced, but not sand?

Bed time. No doubt Apo will be along soon to tell us all how Peirce thought of it first and explained it in terms of the semiotic grounds that beliefs constrain semantics in useful, purpose-serving fashion such that there is always a creatively open freedom when it comes to interpretation, coupled to the principle of indifference that allows us to limit the interpretive freedom.

So what is involved in understanding a proposition? — Banno

Language comprehension. The crow's behaviour provides criterial evidence of understanding (a mental faculty), not of verbal modelling.

No doubt Apo will be along soon to tell us... — Banno

All about dissipative structures, triadic relations, heat death, habit, blah, blah.

It’s an allusion. — Wayfarer

Alluding to what?

I can see advantages in making the definition explicit.

The aim of this thread, for me, is not so much to set out a true and faithful definition - there's no such thing - but to explore the pros and cons, work out what might be consistent and what doesn't work. — Banno

What might an inconsistent definition look like (inconsistent with what?), or one that doesn't work (what is the job it has to do that it might fail at?).

Take the famous black swans. When defining what a Swan is we can either pick a set of criteria which are the bare minimum required to isolate swans from other birds, or we can select those criteria which we want to be associated with swans.

If we do the former, then when we encounter our first black Swan we can claim to have learned something new about swans (that they can be black).

If we do the latter (as it seems we're doing here deliberately trying to eliminate thermostats from the definition) then we learn nothing, we simply decide if 'whiteness' is one of the things we want a Swan to have, if it is, then the new things are not swans, if it isn't then we don't have a new fact about swans because we're not using ascribing properties based on necessity.

To bring it back round to belief. In the former, most useful sense, we need only give properties to 'belief' which are actually purposefully required to delineate it from something otherwise similar.

So the question is what is the useful consequence of delineating those attitudes to propositions which can be expressed in a language we can understand as some epistemologically distinct thing? Ascribing definitions based on some subjective ability of the observer is certainly not the 'normal' way to go about defining things.

Philosophical Investigations, p.223.

I think, rather, the colonists already knew what a swan is, in virtue of being competent speakers of English, and hence without regard for the writings of some Swedish biologist.

Further, if Linnaeus lived a bit longer and decided that these Australian upstarts were not swans, he would have been laughed at.

That is, definitions are created post hoc; that is certainly the case here.

And my intuition, which I think I share with at least a few others around here, is that thermostats do not have beliefs.

A belief is a propositional attitude.

That is, it can be placed in a general form as a relation between someone and a proposition. So "John believes that the sky is blue" can be rendered as

Believes(John, "The sky is blue")

B(a,p)

No belief talk ever helped a pitcher pitch a 'no-hitter'.

Language comprehension. The crow's behaviour provides criterial evidence of understanding (a mental faculty), not of verbal modelling. — Galuchat

So the crow can solve the problem, but can't tell us how?

I want to build on the idea that a believer must understand their belief. That for me means that the believer act on and express the belief. That the belief shows in their actions.

Or, to ward off the obvious objection, a belief would be expressed as the occasion arose.

The problem is that a pitcher does not have to believe to pitch, all he has to do is to pitch, and even if he had beliefs about pitching, a theory of pitching, his understanding of that theory would just be another belief. Practice can't be so easily resolved into theory.

Philosophical Investigations, p.223. — Banno

Yeah, great philosopher, lousy zoologist.

That is, definitions are created post hoc; that is certainly the case here.

And my intuition, which I think I share with at least a few others around here, is that thermostats do not have beliefs. — Banno

And so ends any philosophical interest. You already hold a set of beliefs and we're just playing around with words until our descriptions of the world force it into your preconceived notions.

You've heard the one about the Buddhist pouring tea into an already full cup...

Are beliefs somehow represented in the mind?

I would reject outright a language of thought. The private language argument shows it to be problematic, and connectionism shows it to be unnecessary.

One will not find a belief by dissecting a brain. Beliefs are found in behaviour, including spoken behaviour.

So what more is a belief than a disposition to act in certain ways?

But then one can have a repressed belief; one not expressed in behaviour.

Do you think beliefs are shown in philosophical discourse in the same way(s) they are shown in non-philosophical activity? In other words, do the actions that constitute doing philosophy show/evince belief in a different way from non-philosophical ones?

It seems strange to say that a belief can be found by dissecting sentences, in the same manner they will not be found amongst neurons. Something goes missing in the, at face value, sense of belief when it is distributed relationally over constitutive components. Regardless, philosophy can be characterised in some way by looking at connections between beliefs, philosophers, and philosophical language, and to act philosophically (in terms of debate/essay) is to exhibit those connections through language use - probably with regard to a chosen theme (question/problem) which highlights appropriate connections.

It may still be that to believe is to exhibit a psychological-neuronal-motor pattern, but this does not speak as to how beliefs are to be found in the use of language. Is it really true that beliefs take the crystalline form of attitudes towards propositional content when it is so hard to find a belief amongst words? What uses of language are sufficient to show a belief in play? And how, in turn, do they implicate a particular belief?

Besides X believes that P.

attitude which accepts a proposition as true with insufficient evidence (i.e., having mind-to-world fit). — Galuchat

Not necessarily so, though I am sure applicable to some people. No need to superimpose truth in to of all beliefs.

False beliefs contribute to bias, illusion, and error. — Galuchat

As everyone has beliefs as per their life experiences, one might say everyone has biases. Forget about illusions. What one experiences is what one experiences for whatever reason (s). Error? I have no idea what that is. Things happen and are unpredictable. Something may not turn out as expected and that is part of living. Maybe things will turn around and be closer to what one expects. Life zig zags and we learn from these experiences. There is only error if it is possible to precisely predict outcome and there isn't, not anywhere.

belief is a mental function — Galuchat

That it is. It is some expectation forged in memory. There can be weak beliefs and strong beliefs. Strong beliefs are intense memories that are sometimes called dogma. If lots people hold the same dogma it is frequently codified as truths. Thus the mind builds a spectrum of intensity of beliefs in memory.

With this one can speculate that any form of life that can create memory may have beliefs, even in its most rudimentary forms of expectations. But this cannot be known directly but some experiments may show it indirectly.

I think is safe to assert that you believe yourself to be writing English...

Is my conclusion based on dissecting sentences? Probably not.

Regardless, philosophy can be characterised in some way by looking at connections between beliefs, philosophers, and philosophical language, and to act philosophically (in terms of debate/essay) is to exhibit those connections through language use - — fdrake

And we have a logic of belief:

If John believes A and John believes B then John believes A and B; and so on. Louis Lane believe superman can fly but does not believe that Clarke Kent can fly, despite clark and Superman being the very same individual.

Is it so hard to find beliefs amongst words? Perhaps not.

I think is safe to assert that you believe yourself to be writing English..

I'm not sure I believed myself to be writing English, I was simply writing a response in English. The belief never 'entered my head' as it were. Where is it being derived from?

Is it so hard to find beliefs amongst words? Perhaps not.

Well, it isn't hard to find beliefs amongst words like 'X believes that Y' and pre-formed statements containing 'believes' as the verb. But that isn't all there is to belief, surely. Belief cannot be summoned in this way.

Setting out a logic of belief in terms of propositions is not providing a theory of how beliefs are expressed or implicated in language use. For example, it's difficult to ascertain what you believe belief is from your responses.

As it stands, I have a working hypothesis that you believe beliefs are propositional necessary conditions for doing things, especially with language use practices. Is this the case? I'll assume it's so. Another way of putting it: propositional attitudes without the coalescence of their propositional correlates.

It could be set out that to understand belief is to understand statements of the form 'X believes that P' and the logical relationships between statements of that sort. Can I ask you to carry out the translation exercise for my first post in this thread in terms of its implicated/constitutive beliefs? Or this one?

I don't think how beliefs are implicated in language use is a particularly trivial matter, why would there be so much philosophical scholarship on interpreting great thinkers if it were so cut and dry?

What is it, exactly that you want here? When you ask "what is a belief?", I am tempted to read the question semantically as a question about what the word "belief" means. But then, whos meaning is in question? Are you trying to work out what you alone mean? Or what people in general "ordinarily" mean? Or perhaps just what the members of the forum mean? Or perhaps you just want a definition such that everyone on the forum agrees with it.

In any case, what purpose is served by the excersice in defining? (I don't mean to suggest that there is no purpose to it, or that it isn't intrinsically interesting).

Best
PA

Since I remember you like Austin:

Maybe the difficulty in finding the constitutive or implicated beliefs in an argument is that arguments consist of far more varied forms of interaction in terms of perlocution and illocutionary act-force composites than simply sequences of assertion-belief composites and their formal logical relations.

On the sentential level, there are elucidatory questions in demanding and providing forms, refutational questions as well assertions of belief. Further, in states of belief and unbelief of the writer; the writer also need not hold any specific belief in the negation of a particular statement even if they disbelieve the statement. There are evincing sentences with the illocutionary force of justification to the whole of a unit of debate, refutational ones which serve as counter-examples. Sentences may also be interpreted non-exclusively as expanding on previous points or introducing new ones; particularly good writers can move on and reinforce at the same time. Also, poetic summaries and quips with many possible perlocutionary forces are commonplace...

On the level of chains of sentences, there are elucidatory analogies which are requests for clarification, elucidatory analogies in support of a previously made point, refutational analogies which attempt to reframe a contrary position to absurdity, refutational analogies which attempt to reframe a contrary position towards irrelevance; there are conceptual bridges to transform a subunit of debate into an equivalent form (such as an analogy) - the bridges themselves can take on elucidatory, complementary or refutational perlocutionary forces. Edit: of course, there are accounts of phenomena indicating their place in the argument in relation to the theme of the debate and some constitutive particulars on the level of sentence chains too... I focussed a lot on analogies, but to give an account of a position isn't necessarily to analogise towards/against it.

On the level of whole arguments, subunits of the arguments can be arranged in a complementary position to a theme, a repudiative position to a theme - they can reframe, parody, mock... Suffice to say, there is a lot of variation and a lot of nuance.

To reduce belief to 'X believes that P' and logical relations between beliefs and contained propositions will tell you what to do with, at most, already formed beliefs from engaging with (a narrowly circumscribed set of) phenomena. This is a tiny part of an account of belief.

It doesn't take into account the 'hows' of belief formation when writing or interpreting, or how belief interacts with questions, arguments and evidence. Being unable to ascertain the exact beliefs of a speaker expressed in their words, or a close approximation to a subset thereof, isn't solely explainable by a failure of interpretation - it's also that much is lost when projecting the space of reasoning (rationalised belief formation, in some senses) down to its subspace of propositions and their relations. Much like the difference between formal logic and rhetorical strategy.

Louis Lane believe superman can fly but does not believe that Clarke Kent can fly, despite clark and Superman being the very same individual. — Banno

A belief is a habit of interpretation. It reads reality in terms of confirming signs.

If an individual wears his underpants over his trousers, it is inductively more likely that he is a superhero with superpowers. The belief is some established Baysesian model. How you wear your underpants is a sign by which the reality can be predicted.

Of course beliefs aren't infallible. Which is why evolution builds in both a psychological propensity for habit formation and for sudden disbelief or questioning when some chosen sign starts to seem unreliable. The surprise of a mismatch - Clark Kent is noticed to have shifted location at a speed which had to be superhuman - can spark the search for a better habit of interpretation. How he rocks his duds ceases to be a signifier.

The belief that Clark and Superman are the "very same individual" is of course just a further habit of interpretation - an inductive inference open to falsification.

Whether the belief is "true" or not falls out of the picture as some kind of transcendental pipedream. In making belief dependent on "a sign", the believing mind is separating itself from the world to build its own functional relation with that world.

The world presses in with all its myriad messy variety. The mind's job is to reduce that clutter to some set of sharp symbolic responses. To what category can an experience be assigned in terms of some yes/no definite question?

A cat is a cat until something clicks because the world we are reading in terms of a set of predictable features is throwing up too many surprises. This "cat" is rather bulky, bushy tailed, with a bumbling gait and a black mask across its eyes. Hey, it's a "racoon". (Well it isn't. It's the advance force of an invading alien armada as we are next about to learn. Etc.)

So a belief is a habitual way to read the world in terms of a set of signs. It is a theory that is held "true" while it holds up functionally in terms of the acts of measurement which it legitimates. As long as the signs are seen, the interpretation is held to be justified.

But the relation is an indirect one. The signs that confirm our state of belief are part of our psychology, not part of the world in some brute physicalist sense. They are informational not material, phenomenal not noumenal, in being answers to our potential questions.

What is it, exactly that you want here? W — PossibleAaran

A discussion. And I have one.

One of the best things I've read here for quite a while. Thanks.

To reduce belief to 'X believes that P' and logical relations between beliefs and contained propositions will tell you what to do with, at most, already formed beliefs from engaging with (a narrowly circumscribed set of) phenomena. This is a tiny part of an account of belief. — fdrake

It is, indeed; but perhaps it is a start.

I'm off to Sydney for a few days. I'll be giving this some more thought. Cheers.

Entering this very late, but here's what a belief is:

It is trust or confidence in the truth of something.

Beliefs might be rational, irrational, justified, or unjustified, and a belief requires no language skills. A cat can have a belief, as can a pre-lingual baby. I might believe a cat is a hat for no reason at all, but truly believe it. My cat might believe a stick is a snake and attack it, even if it never saw a snake before.

Even if my belief about the definition of "belief" is wrong, it's just as much a belief.

One will not find a belief by dissecting a brain. Beliefs are found in behaviour, including spoken behaviour. — Banno

Behaviorism doesn't hold that beliefs are behavior, but only that behavior is the only empirical evidence we have of beliefs. The belief is in the black box of your mind, and you can't see it because it's a black box and that's how black boxes work.

I can find you a thermostat which clearly 'beleives' it's cold — Pseudonym

If behavior were belief you could, but it's not. Belief references a conscious state, and since we can't observe the conscious state of feeling cold in another person, we rely upon outward behavioral manifestations, which may or may not accurately indicate the content of the conscious state.

And, by the way, when I get cold, I don't behave like a thermostat, as in I don't send an electrical current to the furnace and blow hot air through vents. I say this because we're taking for granted that thermostats are some form of undeniable AI that passes the Turing Test. In truth, it's fairly simple to determine by behavioral observation alone that even the most advanced AI systems are not conscious entities.