Was that a statement or a question? :lol:

So Frank, you think I don't know what I'm talking about, because you find some error in wording. If that was the case none of us could make a claim to knowledge.

Propositions are statements that can be true or false.

Let me think Janus, I'm not sure.

Propositions are statements that can be true or false. — Sam26

Try this: Propositions are usually considered to be the

Primary
Truth
Bearer

Beliefs were once in the running for the role of truth-bearer, but that's not widely accepted now. Why is that?

:cool:

I'm not going to play your silly game. If you don't want to read what I write that's your prerogative.

I've got plenty written on epistemology, all you have to do is look it up.

I'm not going to play your silly game. If you don't want to read what I write that's your prerogative. — Sam26

Ok. Honestly, I really don't care that you were wrong. It happens to most of us sooner or later. There was something you were sure about and: Damn! You were wrong. I would just rather you wouldn't moan about how uninformed people are on this forum and how sometimes you just have to abandon trying to explain anything to them.

I now officially pass my role of dick over to Banno.

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

I would just rather you wouldn't moan about how uninformed people are on this forum and how sometimes you just have to abandon trying to explain anything to them. — frank

Oh no, definitely not, and you're one of those who definitely fits that description. I'll continue moaning about people who think they know something, and act as though they do, when they clearly are ignorant. Especially if they want to press the point.

We run into this kind of thing on the internet all the time. People who tell you are wrong, when they know little about the subject matter. It would be like me sitting down with a biologist and arguing with them, when I clearly know very little about biology. It's the height of arrogance.

Now if you want to translate my confidence as arrogance, that's your choice. I stop talking to people when I can't make headway, or I'll take a break from the subject matter, or from them for a while. There are people on this forum that I've argued with for years. Some of them I can't even make sense of what they're saying. Moreover, they would never admit they're wrong.

I've made plenty of mistakes, with typos, and also I've misunderstood facts. Hell, even the greatest of philosophers have done that, and considering the fact that I'm not near their level, I should also expect to make mistakes, even grave ones.

How's that for moaning. :groan:

You were just wrong again about what propositions are. Want help?

We use grammar in a way that seems to point to mental furniture; but that is an artifice of our grammar. — Banno

Back to front. We use the structure of language to constrain our phenomenological state so that it has “mental content”.

That is, the way to avoid the dualism of idealism vs realism is to recognise that language creates the self that has the point of view along with the mental furniture it now appears to be observing.

A relation that starts in an embodied or enactive fashion - out in the world as a habit of interpretance or behaviour - is internalised as a meta model of a self that is in interaction with the world.

The human mind comes to experience the world as a place with ourselves in it. The animal mind only experiences the world, with any selfhood as merely a running intentional context, not a further “mental object”.

So language use and truth telling rely on this semiotic displacement. There has to be a model of the modeller. We have to form a (social) concept of “our self” - the self whom experiences the observable facts - to be public creatures having private states.

That’s what’s funny about your naive realism here. It has to combine a naive realism about the mental furniture - pretending it doesn’t exist, the facts just are - with a naive realism about the self. You argue the self has to drop out of the picture because it is private, yet the self is the socially constructed bit, the necessary creation of the public discourse.

Check out symbolic interactionism or Vygotskian psychology. The pragmatist cleared all this up ages ago.

The dynamics of belief

Our beliefs change over time.

How do we tell? — Banno

Access memory?

Sure Frank I can always use help.

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

Please continue.

Excellent. Read the SEP article Structured Propositions. Start a thread to discuss it. I'd be happy to explore the issue with you.

That's definitely an in depth article on the nature of a proposition. Most of my time is devoted to reading and trying to understand Wittgenstein. I have a few threads going already. Why don't you read the article and study it, and start the thread up yourself. I'm sure you'll get plenty of responses.

I now officially pass my role of dick over to Banno. — frank

I'm beginning to think you are better at it than I. Sam made a mistake; move on.

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

The dynamics of belief

Suppose that our beliefs change over time. But we don't notice.

I make plenty of mistakes. Some even on these pages.

If your argument is founded on the pretence that they share nothing, it fails. — Banno

They share their observation of the film, but you're committed to the idea that a Vietnam vet's experience of watching a film reminding him of the horrors of the war is the same as a 12 year old child's?

Suppose that our beliefs change over time. But we don't notice. — Banno

Suppose our collective use of a term changes over time and we don't notice it to where we now mean dog when we used to mean cat and all our old books confuse us and we start trying to teach our cats to fetch. It'd be a crazy topsy turvy world. Hopefully someone would remember the mistake and beat it down our throat, like Frank.

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. — Srap Tasmaner

This view is just a basic recitation of indirect realism, and it's correct. Making a claim about what truly exists outside of your interpretation is incoherent. My position was not that I could not distinguish between beliefs and visual impressions of objects, but only that they all formed part of the experience and were all just as much part of the phenomenal state, a claim you seem to be denying and are trying to put the mental objects of beliefs and visual impressions into different categories.

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

If your time was important and you limited it to things that had some impact on your life, you wouldn't post in a philosophy forum, so get over yourself.

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.

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

Hopefully someone would remember the mistake and beat it down our throat, like Frank. — Hanover

How do you beat something down a person's throat? With a plunger? Wait, that would make them throw up.

Anyway, as I was saying before the plunger issue came up: why not analyze belief a little more? What kind of action is believing? And what is the object of belief?

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?

Why not analyse belief a little more? What kind of action is believing? And what is the object of belief? — frank

A cognitive action, and depends what you mean by "object of belief".

A cognitive action, and depends what you mean by "object of belief". — Sapientia

Banno has brought up this problem:

You and I may believe the same thing, but my cognitive act of belief is not your cognitive act of belief.

Some people say that the thing we both believe is a proposition. For various reasons that scenario is suboptimal. What's the alternative?