Given your belief that DJT is a good man, you might also vote for him, campaign for him, give him money, etc. — Srap Tasmaner

But aren't those more the consequences of belief? How do you arrive at saying the consequences of the thing are the thing?

Btw, grammatical form isn't necessarily logical form. Classic example — Srap Tasmaner

Could you tell me why you're pointing this out? I'm afraid I'm getting a little lost.

There's a test (used by Locke, Hume, and Kant): can you imagine X without Y?

Can I imagine belief without consequences? Try this:

John is an atheist who lives in a world where atheism is a lethal diagnosis if it's discovered. He lives out his life throwing himself into the role of believer so thoroughly, that even he occasionally forgets that he believes there is no God.

Were there consequences of John's belief?

The object of belief can't be a physical object anyway. I believe that brick. That makes no sense. I believe that the brick is red. That makes sense. — frank

What about during language acquisition?

The student must first believe that something is there prior to believing that it is(called) a brick, and then(called) a red one at that.

What about during language acquisition? — creativesoul

Two words: Noam Chomsky.

Without a clear criterion for what counts as belief, at a minimum, there is no means for establishing which account of belief, based upon behaviour, is correct. That is particularly true regarding non-linguistic belief.

The student must first believe that something is there prior to believing that it is(called) a brick, and then(called) a red one at that.
— creativesoul

Two words: Noam Chomsky. — frank

You'll have to do better than that.

Could you tell me why you're pointing this out? — frank

Sorry-- you suggested an analogy between believing and slapping. I think there is only a surface, grammatical similarity there.

But aren't those more the consequences of belief? — frank

I don't have a full-blown theory to offer, but I think this is the right stuff to look at.

When you walk down the sidewalk in a big city, you're behaving as if the buildings you walk by won't fall on you, as if the cars you walk by won't explode, and so on. We could you say you behave as if you hold such beliefs. Do you? If asked, you might assent. Would we say such beliefs cause you to walk down the sidewalk, or even that they are reasons for doing so? Doesn't sound quite right. And yet attributing such beliefs to you makes sense. And if you did not hold beliefs such as these, would you behave the way you do?

The chickens in the yard believe that they're about to get fed when hearing the sound of the food container lid being opened. They do not believe that "they're about to get fed" is true. Rather, their belief is drawing correlations between the sights, sounds, and smells of the container, the sights of myself and/or others' walking towards it, and what always happens afterwards. That is the content of all belief... the content of the correlation(s).

There is a certain rooster which I throw rocks towards. I do not aim to hit him, and haven't yet. I intend to keep him from bullying another younger rooster whom I'm more fond of. That younger one eats out of my hand. The older rooster remembers having rocks thrown at him. In fact, most times anymore, I need not even actually throw one. The movement itself is enough.

Sorry-- you suggested an analogy between believing and slapping. I think there is only a surface, grammatical similarity there. — Srap Tasmaner

A person can believe without believing anything in particular? ?

And if you did not hold beliefs such as these, would you behave the way you do? — Srap Tasmaner

So answer this: John was an atheist, but there never was any behavior that followed from that. Would you say it's unreasonable to say that John actually was an atheist due to the lack of behavioral consequence?

So answer this: John was an atheist, but there never was any behavior that followed from that. — frank

That's just plain false.

He acted otherwise.

When you walk down the sidewalk in a big city, you're behaving as if the buildings you walk by won't fall on you, as if the cars you walk by won't explode, and so on. We could you say you behave as if you hold such beliefs. Do you? If asked, you might assent. Would we say such beliefs cause you to walk down the sidewalk, or even that they are reasons for doing so? Doesn't sound quite right. And yet attributing such beliefs to you makes sense. And if you did not hold beliefs such as these, would you behave the way you do? — Srap Tasmaner

This is similar to many an account of belief being expressed here in this thread.

To believe that this or that will not happen, one must first believe that it could, and then decide that it won't...

One who doesn't know(believe) that cars can explode cannot believe that they won't.

One who doesn't know that buildings can fall down, cannot believe that they won't.

A cat walks down the same street as one who was in New York City on 9/11. It doesn't make sense to say that both the cat and the person believe that the buildings won't be the target of an airliner. They both display the same behaviour...

The content of belief matters. It must be gotten right if we are to report upon belief correctly.

It's all about the content.

Behaviour can indicate belief, but behaviour alone is utterly inadequate. We must also have a good grasp upon what's being indicated...

A very young child has a pacifier. S/he drops it and begins to search around for it, looking and feeling around. Certainly the child believes that it is there... somewhere... despite it's not yet seeing or feeling it...

The same holds true of my cat and the bird that it just lost...

Belief that something is there is rudimentary. It is unquestioned trust in physiological sensory perception. Correlation presupposes the existence of it's own content, no matter how that is later qualified(imaginary, real, or otherwise)...

Would you say it's unreasonable to say that John actually was an atheist due to the lack of behavioral consequence? — frank

Oh I see no reason not to include what he thinks. There may be no outward behavior, if that's what you mean, but I wouldn't demand that. You can keep a belief secret.

Oh I see no reason not to include what he thinks. There may be no outward behavior, if that's what you mean, but I wouldn't demand that. You can keep a belief secret. — Srap Tasmaner

OK. Imagine that Tom is also an atheist. Like John, he keeps it secret. We'd say Tom and John believe the same thing. Should we think of this as merely a figure of speech? Is there really anything Tom and John hold in common?

Of course there is something they have in common; it's pretty obvious.. There are certain ideas they both don't accept.

Of course there is something they have in common; it's pretty obvious.. There are certain ideas they both don't accept. — Janus

Sounds kind of Platonic. Is it?

The content of belief matters. It must be gotten right if we are to report upon belief correctly.

It's all about the content. — creativesoul

I think so much wrongness flows from this view that meaning pre-exists as "content". You have the image in mind of a semantic load that has a definite existence in its own right and simply has to be shovelled into a convenient syntactic container.

The container is an a-causal structure. It simply holds the meaning for you and so becomes an arbitrary or contingent part of the equation. It doesn't affect the meaning it transports from one place, or one mind, to another.

The container might have its inadequacies. It might be leaky, too small, inconvenient in shape to handle. A word like "cat" would seem to spill over in messy fashion if we tried to shovel every possible sense of what we could mean by cat into its little box shape. But still, "catness" would be treated as something quite definite and pre-existence.

So it wouldn't be the semantics that is in question as a putative content, just whether we had a big enough syntactic box to hold enough of what we could intend to mean in some speech act or propositional statement.

But I argue for a very different (yes, Peircean) conception of the relation between semantics and syntax.

Syntax acts as a constraint on semantics. So there is no definite pre-existing content. Semantically, there is just unlimited potential meanings. Beliefs start with unbounded ambiguity, vagueness or indeterminacy. It is all just undefined possibility. The laws of thought do not yet apply.

And then syntax is what shapes up this semantic potential into something more rationally structured and definite. The box is there to stamp an organisation on whatever gets poured into it. Or rather, what gets poured into it is our radical uncertainty, and we have to decide how well it seems to fit the structure suggested. There is a further part of the story where we have to decide whether the fit is good enough to serve our purposes - and so any fine grain ill-fit becomes a difference that doesn't make a difference ... to us.

So these are two different mental pictures of what goes on. You are pushing the semantic content story, the mental object story. Words describe ideas. There is this semantic stuff floating about in the shadows of our mind in a definite pre-existent fashion. We just need to shove it in the right boxes so we make it syntactically expressible.

Alternatively, you can fail to solve the same problem with Banno's behaviourism. Our behaviour becomes the physical substitute for the mental objects. Behaviour seems nicely public and definite. That makes it suitable for treatment as a pre-existent semantic content to shovel into syntactic boxes.

But a constraints-based view of things starts with unbounded semantics. Anything could mean anything. There is just noise, no signal.

And then habits of interpretance or organisation can develop to produce a robust system of a mind in a pragmatic semiotic relation with a world. The blooming, buzzing confusion can become structured so that it a useful and regularised view.

Propositional strength statements then become an end of the line type deal.

Taking this relation to its extreme, you get the kind of universal syntax that would reduce the blooming, buzzing confusion to its theoretical minimum. The words would force the possible meanings into the most logically water-tight, or computationally constrained, formulas. They would wind up having the simplest kinds of properties - the counterfactual possibilities like being true or false, right or wrong.

So beliefs are all about a sharpening up - the imposition of syntactic limits on semantic possibility. A belief is an active reduction on our potential uncertainty. It draws the line on where - for now - we have decided to cease to doubt.

And to make that work, you have to include the pragmatist's principle of indifference. Truth becomes not something ontic of the world but ontic of our relation with the world. It is us who get to be indifferent about the truths or semantic contents being good enough to serve our purposes. And so now it becomes critical to define this "us".

Pragmatism does that in terms of the notion of the limit that would be reached by a community of like-minded rational inquirers. If the world actually does exist in any recalcitrant and mind-independent fashion, then inquiry should be able to arrive at a view of the constraints that make reality itself that way.

What do you mean "sounds kind of Platonic"?

What do you mean "sounds kind of Platonic"? — Janus

What's an idea exactly?

It draws the line on where - for now - we have decided to cease to doubt. — apokrisis

Floating in a sea of doubt, are you?

I think belief is the filling in of blank created by the Cosmic First Question: Que Pasa? :D

Are you seriously suggesting you don't know what an idea is?

Are you seriously suggesting you don't know what an idea is? — Janus

Yes I am. I know how to use the word properly, but I have zero confidence that I know what I'm talking about.

What's an idea? I mean, we know it's something that hypothetical atheists can jointly oppose even though nobody except the respective atheists are aware of it.

Two people, opposing the same idea. Hmm. Thoughts?

Floating in a sea of doubt, are you? — frank

Not exactly the right metaphor.

I think belief is the filling in of blank created by the Cosmic First Question: Que Pasa? — frank

Well that is precisely the ontology I've just criticised.

You imagine a void, a blank, a generalised nothingness, and ask how could that kind of a-causal container suddenly gain a manifest content. How could the meaningful appear as creatio ex nihilo? Why anything?

That is the dominant mental image in metaphysics - the classic reductionist way of thinking about situations. And it creates all the confusion when we get down to fundamental issues.

I instead argue for a boundless potential - an everythingness that is a nothingness - which then becomes something, some structured set of things, by the emergence of constraints. Structure organises the confusion and leaves you with something substantial.

So belief is not filling in the blank of the unknown - finding what answer pre-exists the questions. It is about systematically reducing the possibility of our notions being wrong. An answer emerges as that which proves itself to eliminate the most uncertainty.

That is why you would have me floating on a sea of doubt. Instinctively, you want to find a concrete foundation on which all the other turtles can rest. And it is funny that this foundation would be "unbounded doubts". What kind of concrete foundation is that, you ask merrily?

So try imagining it the other way round. It is constraints on doubts all the way down to the point where we no longer find a reason to care. And that then is our epistemic foundation. Our own indifference.

We don't float on a sea of doubt in helpless fashion. We begin to believe where we ourselves have rendered doubt impotent and insignificant - in terms of "us" and our desires, our intentions, our purposes.

Every poster here pretty much is stuck in the bind of wanting foundations for beliefs or truths that might be given to them by reality. But even reality - according to our best quantum models of it - doesn't have that kind of foundational realism.

And yet still, despite the Universe itself floating on a sea of quantum doubt or indeterminacy, it seems to exist. Or persist. It is stabilised by emergent structural limits. It is "collapsed" or decohered so that it enjoys classical strength certainty, given a sufficiently generous spatiotemporal scale.

So the pragmatic/constraints-based view works as ontology as well as epistemology. You just need to switch up your mental metaphors for something more holistic and relational.

I think so much wrongness flows from this view that meaning pre-exists as "content". You have the image in mind of a semantic load that has a definite existence in its own right and simply has to be shovelled into a convenient syntactic container. — apokrisis

Some... belief is prior to language. All belief is meaningful. Some meaning is prior to language.

I'm not sure what else it is that you're going on about, for it is waaay too entrenched in your current worldview's taxonomy.

It is constraints on doubts all the way down to the point where we no longer find a reason to care. And that then is our epistemic foundation. Our own indifference. — apokrisis

Could be. Where would you place the temporal genesis of this foundation of indifference? Homo Erectus? Neanderthals? Us? If us, when exactly? It's not like we're the result of any particular mutation we could blame it on.

I know how to use the word properly, but I have zero confidence that I know what I'm talking about. — frank

Which isn't a slight towards you, personally... Rather, it shows that sensible use doesn't always equate to getting it right...