I don’t see any pragmatic defect on the part of those by my account. The extra bits besides just “I believe P” are adding back in (some of) the impressive force that the “I believe” took away from just “P”. — Pfhorrest
Curious that ↪Michael, ↪Pfhorrest, ↪Pierre-Normand and ↪Srap Tasmaner seem to be vehemently agreeing with each other... — Banno
...confusing truth and belief.The problem here is caused by the contradiction between a philosophical commitment to correspondence theory, and the actual psychological reality that the truth of a statement is always a judgment and always based on the belief of the person doing the judging. — Isaac
We aren't quite all on the same page regarding what it is exactly that it is suggestive of. — Pierre-Normand
...there's nothing wrong with the sentence "it is raining and I don't believe that it is raining". The only problem is when you infer from this that the speaker believes the sentence to be true, — Michael
from A Defence of Common SenseThe strange thing is that philosophers should have been able to hold sincerely, as part of their philosophical creed, propositions inconsistent with what they themselves knew to be true; and yet, so far as I can make out, this has really frequency happened
his predilection for psychology — Banno
It's not the truth of a statement that is a judgement; the judgement is whether one accepts the statement. Issac doesn't accept this, and hence finds himself in all sorts of bother. — Banno
The root source seems to be
The strange thing is that philosophers should have been able to hold sincerely, as part of their philosophical creed, propositions inconsistent with what they themselves knew to be true; and yet, so far as I can make out, this has really frequency happened
from A Defence of Common Sense — Banno
I should like to tell you how glad I am that you read us a paper yesterday. It seems to the that the most important point was the absurdity of the assertion "There is a fire in this room and I don't believe there is".
If I ask someone "Is there a fire in the next room?", and he answers " I believe there is", I can't say "Don't be irrelevant, I asked you about the fire, not about your state of mind!"
Couldn't we also say the tutor's job is to ensure that Williams gives the correct answer when asked a direct question? I can just hear Wittgenstein describing this scenario as "training". — Srap Tasmaner
The "aboutness" of a sentence is not always a simple matter. What one can and can't say is almost never a simple matter. Why then should we expect to reach simple conclusions about what one can and can't say about what? — Srap Tasmaner
That difference in perspective explains, I think, why qualifying an assertion with the modifier "...believe(s) that..." can both be used to stress what one takes to be the good standing of one's epistemic credentials (when used first-personally) or be used to bring into question (and thereby attempt to weaken) someone else's credentials (when used third personally). — Pierre-Normand
Supposing that you can get aboutness here, how do you pick which cause in your chain is the one the utterance was about? — Srap Tasmaner
I would like to hear if anyone else here thinks that “I believe...” strengthens rather than weakens an assertion, because that sounds very unusual to me. Even “I strongly believe that P” sounds weaker than just “P” to my ear. I asked my English major girlfriend her opinion, within letting her know mine first, and she said the same thing. — Pfhorrest
In any case, whatever specific wording conveys whatever specific force, the point of my impression/expression distinction is just that there is a difference in force there, where one can express a belief without fully asserting its truth, or impress it upon others. The later normally implies the former, but in the case of dishonesty doesn’t necessarily have to. — Pfhorrest
Well, on pain of being unable ourselves to say what our own utterances are about, it had better be something we have access to during the construction of those utterances, and that isn't the state of the world, only our inferences of it. — Isaac
I'm just not following this. Do we make inferences and form beliefs about the world and its state, even though we don't have access to it? — Srap Tasmaner
The absurdity of suggesting that "there's a fire in the next room" is about one thing and "I believe there's a fire in the next room" is about another. — Isaac
All we have then to select from are the inferences about those states, our beliefs. — Isaac
Do we make inferences and form beliefs about the world and its state, even though we don't have access to it? — Srap Tasmaner
Inferences are formed from our perceptions (formed from our senses). Utterances are not the direct result of our senses (except in very rare cases). So they must arise from our inferences. During the construction of sentences (that being the key caveat) we are not accessing the world. We are accessing our inferences about it. — Isaac
This is very strange. It's oddly parallel to Stove's Gem: we only have access to our inferences about the world, and hence we do not have access to the world... — Banno
Unless, apparently, one is Isaac, whereupon, displaced by philosophical contemplation, one only infers or perceives that one eats oysters. — Banno
There is a distinction between the statement "there is a fire in the next room" and the assertion "there is a fire in the next room. — Banno
This is very strange. It's oddly parallel to Stove's Gem: we only have access to our inferences about the world, and hence we do not have access to the world... — Banno
Unless, apparently, one is Isaac, whereupon, displaced by philosophical contemplation, one only infers or perceives that one eats oysters. — Banno
Yes, well, I drive a car by sitting like so, and moving my arms and legs thus. But moving my arms and legs thus is not driving a car. — Srap Tasmaner
a naive realist (among which I count myself) and representational realist (in the sense that we interact with the world only using representational processes) agree on the causal chain of eating oysters. — fdrake
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