What do you have in mind as counter-example? For example, "I believe that I'm special". Would that count as a belief that is not about a statement? — Marchesk
The other way I tried to approach it with Banno is: if you believe snow is white, is your belief directed towards snow or the statement "snow is white"? — fdrake
So what your'e saying in the previous response is that perception involves all sorts of beliefs about the world, but they're mostly not the sort we put into language when acting. — Marchesk
The snow, unless it's during one of these discussions. — Marchesk
But all this maths is unconscious. It would be straining things to say that the fielder believes that the acceleration of the tangent of a will be zero if he's at the right spot. The purported beliefs in your counterexample are subject to the same criticism. — Daemon
The other way I tried to approach it with Banno is: if you believe snow is white, is your belief directed towards snow or the statement "snow is white"? — fdrake
A proposition is a state of affairs. — frank
No. I'm just saying that phrases can have different senses depending on how they are used. Practical contact is going to be different in some sense for a human than it is for a robot, even though the same phrase might be used for both. — Andrew M
Experience is a term that applies to humans but not to robots. Not because humans have Cartesian minds (where they have internal experiences), but because humans have different capabilities to robots. A human's practical contact with the world instantiates differently to a robot's. — Andrew M
From Lexico, touch means "Come into or be in contact with." while feel (in this context) means "Be aware of (a person or object) through touching or being touched."
If I felt someone touch my shoulder, then I have become aware that someone is there. That's my experience of the world.
What I felt was not "in my mind", it was in the world. It is only the introduction of a Cartesian theater that makes what I felt internal to a container mind. — Andrew M
It is worth pausing to consider the seriousness of the problem of knowing others. While some draw a parallel between the problem of gaining knowledge of the past and of another mind, there is an important asymmetry to be noted here: in the case of the past it is at least logically possible that there should be direct knowledge, while in the case of another mind such knowledge seems to be logically ruled out. — SEP article on Other Minds
Sure, it's not impossible that we have the wrong understanding of what constitutes matter. But it does seem vanishingly unlikely, given the predictive success of quantum physics, that it could be completely wrong — Janus
You agree that qualia are ineffable? — Luke
— Daemon
I don't understand this insistence - from you and from others. What similar experience could you have to my looking at a tree? You could start by looking at a tree. — Banno
Here:
This seems to be the perennial trick of the idealists and woo-merchants. To point out that empirical data has flaws (subjectivity, the necessity of an observer etc) and then for some reason assume this counts as an argument in favour of alternative methods of discussion. — Isaac — Olivier5
That's my intuition too. I believe snow is white, language competence (piggybacking off object recognition/segmentation/categorisation) does the chunking things into related bits with labels on them for me - what counts as snow, what counts as white, what it means to describe a thing as white and how that's wrapped into the "is" - but what I've got the intentional state toward is snow. — fdrake
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