Ok; not where I was heading.

I agree that animal behaviour might be explained without mentioning belief.

I made the point that belief implies a choice; it involves believing one thing rather than some other. Instinct does not involve choice.

If I know how to do something, it makes no sense to say that I might not know how to do it. — Janus

Hm. Verging on certainty. I am pleased. :wink:

I made the point that belief implies a choice; it involves believing one thing rather than some other. Instinct does not involve choice. — Banno

Yes. Perhaps the choice is between possible worlds.

He could always fail to do it even if he knows how to do it.

Sufficient but not necessary

I hope we do not need to go that far.

It's based on the suggestion of Dawnstorm that belief and instinct are aspects of the same thing. I like the idea.

So is the distinction between instinct and belief that one is a more of less set pattern of behaviour while the other involves some sort of choice?

It is only in the context of thinking about deductive certainty, where it is logically possible that I am dreaming that I know how to do something when I really don't, or whatever other silly, logically possible scenario could be imagined, that it becomes possible to doubt such things. — Janus

And you know the difference between dreaming and wakefulness.

So it would be odd to allow your dreams to instil doubt.

So we have a spectrum of belief, from the dubious through the unsettled to the certain.

Think of sensory apparatus. In the most primitive of animals, sensation provides the means to interact with the environment.

Some "learning" takes place by natural selection. Those who act inappropriately die. The survivors don't know why they behave as they do. There is no belief.

Maybe belief is kin to this, but the ability to learn is no longer a matter of selection. A single individual can learn, but it's key that this individual is capable of understanding what it means to be wrong. Belief is an aspect of that.

See?

@Sam26 hasn't participated in this thread, which is a pity, since in many ways it is a response to his suggestion that our certainties - what he calls hinge propositions - are caused, physically, buy our interaction with the environment. .

If belief requires choice, then beliefs cannot be caused in such a fashion.

Similarly, that beliefs require choice will serve to differentiate belief from instinct.

In effect, Sam may have been proposing that our certainties are instincts.

I wouldn't choose the word certainties or certainty because these words also have epistemological implications, although not necessarily. Also, I don't like Wittgenstein's use of the term hinge-propositions, because a proposition is a linguistic phenomena. I would say that some beliefs, especially those that are pre-linguistic have a causal explanation, which I explained in other threads.

And I'm not talking about instincts. :smirk:

Right, no genuine doubt; just the faux-doubt attendant upon the logical possibility that I might be dreaming that I am not dreaming. :grin:

is such faux-doubt reason enough not to be certain?

It's reason enough to be faux-uncertain. :cool:

Doubt is so important to belief that we must manufacture it. :up:

Ah. The sort of uncertainty that is confined to philosophers.

The sort of uncertainty that is confined to philosophers. — Banno

So when you go to watch the cricket, you complain that all the bloody chaps on the field are not playing rugby?

Really, could this thread have less point?

I don't like Wittgenstein's use of the term hinge-propositions, because a proposition is a linguistic phenomena. I would say that some beliefs, especially those that are pre-linguistic have a causal explanation, which I explained in other threads — Sam26

But for W, to identify a belief is not to identify a thing in the head. To call it a proposition, and to say, "she believes she has legs", is not to suggest that she has a matching thought, an internal statement, "I believe I have legs" or "I have legs". A belief may be pre-linguistic in your sense, or in W's appeal to forms of life, but also linguistic in the sense that it can be stated (later). It becomes linguistic when we talk about it, and it is as a propositional attitude that we must talk about it--she believes that...

This makes belief an odd kind of post hoc thematisation.

This makes belief an odd kind of post-hoc thematisation. — jamalrob

Or it simply lifts things into an importantly different register.

At the animal level, we are embedded and embodied in our habits of understanding. Language turns that into the someone who is believing some state of affairs. It translates the biological situation into one that is displaced from some actual place and time, some unalterable history, into one that now lacks those constraints and so gains new freedoms.

So it in about there being a troubling lack of secure foundations for theories of truth. The whole bleeding point of the language turn - in Homo sapiens history - is to create a foundation for rational thought.

And a big part of that is the social construction of the self as the believer, doubter, or whatever-er.

If we have to build this fiction too, this idealised observer and knower, then that is central to any epistemic discussion.

I'm sure you guys already went through this, so chalk it up to my attempt to catch up. But we should step back and witness ourselves sorting out our own beliefs about beliefs.

Do the same sorts of justifications come to bear in a meta-belief discussion that hold for beliefs on the ground in real life?

It's really here in the realm of justification that externalism and internalism appear as opposing paths. But the externalist approach will falter in the meta-discussion simply because there is no settled answer.

I've more thoughts on that but it continues to percolate.

Do the same sorts of justifications come to bear in a meta-belief discussion that hold for beliefs on the ground in real life? — frank

No. In assessing the nature of belief we're attempting to pull ourselves free of our time and place to occupy a vantage point on who and what we are.

My assessment is that the little of apokrisis' posts that I read are on point. The issue is: what is the believer?

My assessment is that the little of apokrisis' posts that I read are on point. The issue is: what is the believer? — frank

You will find that Banno will never answer you on this. He is trying to arrive at naive realism via Witgensteinian quietism. So the pretence is that the question of who has the point of view is essentially idealistic and to be summarily dismissed.

If it is illegitimate to even mention the believer as the issue, then we can all get on talking with naive realism about all the incontrovertible truth we see just looking around with our open eyes in our everyday world.

You are dealing with high level sophistry here. It’s quite entertaining to watch. Just don’t expect a productive engagement.

Well the discussion was fruitful for me anyway. :)

The issue is: what is the believer? — frank

And what do you think might be the answer?

Well the discussion was fruitful for me anyway — frank

And for me. See the OP.

I find this thread extremely interesting, but since I'm no experienced philosopher, I also find it hard to follow, since I don't always understand the terms an expert would. I apologise if I don't always follow up on posts, but I sometimes need to take the time and read up on related concepts, and by the time I'm done there's almost always something else to read up on.

For me, having a belief about believing is motived directly from social interaction, where different people are comfortable with different levels of certainty, and if you can only take one course of action some people might prefer to minimise risk while others might prefer to maximise (potential) reward, and this in turn is dependant who feels what outcome the most. So "belief" might be a factor that gives people advantages through various avenues: less anxiety, less time spent thinking...

Now, the degree to which belief needs to be justified in the first place is a matter of social negotiation, too. I'm not quick to make up my mind. The result is that not only do I not often get my way, by the time I get any way I'm usually not sure what my way would have been, and in a sense this means I always have to deal with other people's decisions. This can lead to frustration and motivate a world view that suggests that "all belief is unjustified". But I'm not sure I actually belief that, see?

But I do see a continuity here: belief about belief is not that different from the belief that the sky is blue or that sandwiches are nutritious. It's just that the more abstract terms become, the harder it is to describe and circumscribe the referential objects as well as the concepts in our minds. And this is why we have this thread to begin with. What is belief?

So, if we talk about animals in terms of expectation and frustration of expectation, as Janus suggests, then I have to ask why we don't do the same for humans? Do we reach limits? Is there something we can't express? And if so, is the same true for animals, but in different ways? It's very hard to imagine what human language use would like from a different system, perhaps one we can't understand. When we hear a word, we hear a word. When we hear a language we don't understand and whose prosody we're not used to, we may not know where one word ends and another begins, but we still recognise language. The less "like us" things become, the more meaning disappears, but how do we deal with it?

When we talk in terms of expectations for animals but belief for humans, what becomes difficult is comparison. In a sense, making that distinction is a comparison in itself - but what it means isn't clear other than that humans are different from all other animals, which is trivial (and true for all other animals as well).

So when we move away from humans towards thermostats on belief-similarity slide, how do we map the journey semantically? What about belief do we share with apes? With mammals? Vertebrates? Life? Inorganic Matter? At what point does the comparison stop yielding results.

One thing about the thermostat discussion that's drawn my interest is the formulation "The thermostat believes it is cold." What struck me here is the word "cold". The thermostat activates at any temperature we set; the distinction between warm/cold doesn't come into it. This is a judgement that goes away from the very specific temperature. It's an abstraction, and one that has different implications. There's a hidden should-proposition in that word: the thermostat should activate because it is cold. And it's not a should-proposition we can lay at the thermostat, because it's us who set the temperature. All the thermostat can "belief" is that it is time to activate (according to its setting).

But if we set activity pairs (activate/don't activate in this case) as an indicator for belief (and the thermostat has two belief settings: it's time to activate/it's not time to activate) - then what does that mean for the distinction between value judgements and facts. Theoretically, the thermostat can be wrong about the specific temperature, but to what extent can it be wrong about "when to activate"? Does the origin of the setting matter?

When a dog who misses its previous owner refuses to eat, have the should-settings changed? When *I* refuse to eat, because I miss someone I can directly detect whether my should settings have changed: I should eat, but I can't bring myself to. When it's you, I can ask. With a dog? There is no shared language, but does that mean there is no dog-internal language whatsoever? How would we know?

What I wonder is whether we need an inside-view to talk about belief, and if so, when we stop granting an inside-view. I'd say the gradiant is one of similarity with the only inside-view we know directly (our own) as the initial point of comparison.

And what do you think might be the answer? — Banno

I believe the answer, as it relates to belief, is twofold.

1. Man is the measure of all things. We're limited in the ways we believe we are. We're free in the ways we believe we are.
2. We're just bits of dust clinging to a little blue globe. An eternal Truth resides beyond us. Our beliefs are imperfect attempts to capture that Truth.

Man is the measure of all things. — frank

Indeed, this seems to be so. I take this as being pretty much the same as that the limits of our language are the limits of our world.

But note that it is a plural, not an individual, man, not a man. This is how we move past solipsism, private languages, relativism and the worst sort of phenomenalism.

An eternal Truth resides beyond us. Our beliefs are imperfect attempts to capture that Truth. — frank

While I have sympathy for this feeling, I'm not very keen on this wording. After all, some of our beliefs are true.

If the limits of language are the limits of our world, then language also limits our beliefs?