First of all that sentence says that subjectivity is a flaw, not that it itself is flawed — Isaac

Semantics.

secondly it is attributing such a view to a rhetorical opposition, not claiming it as my own — Isaac

Well then your rhetoric is misdirected, because I never ever said subjectivity was a flaw.

Why are you so pissed all the time? You can’t take a little contradiction without behaving like a petulant child? Or is it some misplaced sense of entitlement? You should work on this.

if you believe snow is white, is your belief directed towards snow or the statement "snow is white"? — fdrake

Belief is an endorsement of a state of the world. You're saying we don't endorse a representation made of sounds or marks. We endorse the thing represented. That's true.

Maybe the problem is that it makes no sense to say "I believe snow." "I believe car." The thing represented is a state of things. A state is not a physical object. We understand states by comparing and contrasting with other states. Maybe a state is like a pattern, I don't know.

A proposition is proposed, it seems. As a result, it requires a creature capable of proposing something; language use. — creativesoul

You could use the word that way. There's another thing that's call a "proposition" though. It doesn't have to be stated, ever.

Sure. All sorts of definitions for "proposition". I do not know, nor understand them all. Banno's use was the one under consideration, as it pertains to belief and statements thereof.

Sure. All sorts of definitions for "proposition". I do not know, nor understand them all. Banno's use was the one under consideration, as it pertains to belief and statements thereof. — creativesoul

Uh huh. Banno's may or may not be an Austin-Davidson mash-up. He mentioned Davidson, but Davidson dealt with sentences, not statements, so, who knows.

Yea, it's like them, too.

Beliefs are used as part of intentional accounts of acts. An action can be explained, accounted for, as the result of a belief and a desire.

I believed the pub was at the end of the street.
I wanted a beer
So I walked to the end of the street.

Davidson argued that such explanations are causal. I've some sympathy for that view.

Davidson argued that such explanations are causal. — Banno

I think that's quite sensible. But...

I believed the pub was at the end of the street. — Banno

It's not an account of what a belief is! Linking them to perceptual expectations would be.

A sentence is any more or less well formed string of words, so it includes not just statements, but questions and commands and such.

Statements are in the province of logic; we don't usually subject commands and questions to propositional calculus; we don't consider things such as "what time is it? if and only iff put the cat out!" well-formed.

Davidson does talk as if sentences can be the subject of propositional calculus. He thinks any sentence can be reduced to a string of propositions that basically report the speech act involved. Grossly oversimplifying, he might render "Put the cat out" as "Banno commanded you to put the cat out".

A statement has at least one subject and one predicate. They can have more.

A true statement sets out a state of affairs. A state of affairs is a fact.

That simple explanation is correct, but will cause all sorts of bother as folk try to say that facts are things in the world while statements are just words - as if words were not also things in the world. T-sentences set this out as clearly as possible:

"Snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white

The left hand side is about words, the right hand side is about the world, and truth is what brings them together. The stuff on the right hand side is in unmediated contact with the world; that is, it just says how things are. And it does this simply because that is what words do.

Propositions are a more abstract notion, supposedly they are what "Snow is white" and "Schnee ist weiß" and "Tha sneachda geal" have in common. I'm not convinced, so I tend to avoid that use.

It's not an account of what a belief is! Linking them to perceptual expectations would be. — fdrake

Wait, what? Why does perception need to be part of belief? I believe life exists somewhere outside Earth, but I can't perceive it. I have all sorts of beliefs like that which are not directly tied to any perception on my part, and not always tied to perception on anyone's part, such as life beyond Earth.

I also believe there's a possible world where the present Kind of France is bald, which cannot be perceived.

Perceptual expectations can be put into sentence form: "He expected to see a nose there". You can even put them into the form of beliefs: he believed a nose would be there.

Yes, they happen too fast for this to actually occur, but that is beside the point. Consider:

He believed the ball would hit him in the face if he did not duck.
He did not want to be hit in the face
He ducked.

This works as an explanation as to why he ducked, despite the cogitation taking place post hoc. Indeed, arguably most such explanations are post hoc. Add that to and I don't see that what you call Perceptual expectations work as a counterexample to beliefs ranging over statements.

He believed the ball would hit him in the face if he did not duck. — Banno

What does his belief consist in? Would he have believed the ball would hit his face if he did not assess its trajectory and formed a perceptual expectation that it would hit him? I doubt it. That belief is about the ball's trajectory, not about a post hoc rendering of all those assessments into the statement "He believed the ball would hit him in the face if he did not duck". Who cares if it can later be expressed in a statement?

A corollary of taking beliefs as ranging over statements is that it shows how they can be used in intentional explanations of actions. Back to:

I believed the pub was at the end of the street.
I wanted a beer
So I walked to the end of the street.

Bolding the propositional content of the belief, it is this mooted state of affairs that allows the explanation to work. If it were not a statement, not about how things are, it could not follow that walking to the end of the street was a way of attempting to satisfy the desire for a beer.

It's their propositional content that makes beliefs useful in providing explanations for what we do. IF you deny them, you deny the whole structure of intentional explanation.

Do you really want to do that, @fdrake?

See above.

What does a belief consist in? It consists in treating some statement as true.

The paraphernalia of perceptual expectations or correlations does nothing more than add superfluous superstructure.

Do you really want to do that, fdrake? — Banno

What I want you to do is...

What does a belief consist in? It consists in treating some statement as true. — Banno

Provide an argument for this claim. Why can beliefs only apply to statements? I agree with you that beliefs can apply to statements, I also think that they can apply to concrete events.

What does a belief consist in? It consists in treating some statement as true. — Banno

This at least has to be part of what a belief consists in, since we all believe things that we do not, and sometimes, cannot act on.

Provide an argument for this claim. Why can beliefs only apply to statements? I agree with you that beliefs can apply to statements, I also think that they can apply to concrete events. — fdrake

...and concrete events can be stated; therefore any belief that ranges over a concrete event also ranges over a statement.

T-sentences again, concrete even on one side, true statement on the other.

...and concrete events can be stated; therefore any belief that ranges over a concrete event also ranges over a statement. — Banno

But they're not always, and never are for other animals (assuming we're the only language users). This way of broadening the definition of beliefs allows for the cat to believe that some better stuff is in the red container thing instead of something worth drinking.

part of what a belief consists in — Marchesk

....but there is an implicit desire to find some "concrete" thing that is the equivalent of a belief; to render belief in physical terms, perhaps, somehow to reduce beliefs to something else.

So Fdrake and co will keep insisting that there is something more to belief.

Ah, well I do not think they can succeed, because we can always state beliefs that have no concrete equivalent.

But I think they have a point about perceptual expectations.

..never are for other animals — Marchesk

I can describe my cat's actions in terms of its beliefs; so that's wrong.

Now we will go off on some bullshit about cats not being able to form sentences and hence their beliefs cannot range over statements and so on. As if the way you attribute belief to a cat is different to the way you attribute a belief to Fdrake.

No idea what that means. I would have said that they probably will never succeed because there need be no correlate between all the sorts of things we call beliefs and the various states of a brain.

We're heading towards anomalous monism. Which I think is probably the best explanation at hand.

No idea what that means. — Banno

Metaphysical beliefs? Come on now! I've been in threads where Platonism was considered meaningless because it had no empirical content to ground the claim that universals exist. Stuff like that, possible worlds, religious beliefs, beliefs about chairs on the other side of the universe, etc.

We're heading towards anomalous monism. — Banno

I don't know what that means? You mean stuff that we call physical? World-stuff? Nature?

I have an expectation that we will defeat Brexit today.

Wait, what? Why does perception need to be part of belief? I believe life exists somewhere outside Earth, but I can't perceive it. I have all sorts of beliefs like that which are not directly tied to any perception on my part, and not always tied to perception on anyone's part, such as life beyond Earth. — Marchesk

I'm not trying to say that every belief is directly associated with something perceptible; I don't think there's anything I could perceive that would make me revise my belief that 1+1=2. What I'm trying to get at is part of belief comes from perceptual expectation. One way of putting that might be; perceptual expectations and beliefs mutually evince and constrain each other. I might not believe that my cup is beside my laptop had I not seen it there, if I had not seen my cup beside my laptop I might not believe it was there.

Let's take your belief that life exists somewhere outside Earth. Would you believe that life existed somewhere outside Earth if you did not expect to perceive it given an appropriate circumstance?

Would the person in Banno's example be able to state "I believed that the ball would hit me" if they did not have a perceptual expectation about the ball's trajectory? And what more is there to the belief than a statement of the perceptual expectations they held?

...and concrete events can be stated; therefore any belief that ranges over a concrete event also ranges over a statement. — Banno

You agree that concrete events are not statements - word is not thing -, and that someone who expected the ball to hit them could later state that "I believed that the ball would hit me", why does that imply that their belief that the ball would hit them at the time is directed towards a statement which was only constructed after the fact?

Part of the logic of belief is that they are intentional; they are a directed stance taken toward something. What they are directed towards is an important thing to address in an account of them. Why would humans have an intentional ability which had the sole purpose of rendering their beliefs post hoc and claiming that one way of interpreting T-sentences made that secretly about the world?

I don't know what that means? — Marchesk

Me, either. It's a dreadful term, designed to turn people off before they have any idea what it is.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anomalous-monism/

Can you mix it in your red coffee cup the way you do bitter and sweet qualia?

Glancing over the SEP article, I've never heard that term before. But I tend to agree with what I see there.

Roughly, it's the view that there is only physical stuff - the monism bit - but we will never be able to reduce psychological explanations to physical explanations - that's the anomalous stuff. So while the mind is entirely the result of physical activity, no one will ever be able to reduce to physics "Fdrake believes 1+1=2"

But there's more...

but we will never be able to reduce psychological explanations to physical explanations - — Banno

With that attitude.

With that attitude. — bongo fury

Do you think we'll ever be able to reconstruct a book from the ashes of a fire, or unscramble an omelette? Some things are practically intractable.

Some things are practically intractable. — Marchesk

This isn't necessarily one of them. Just saying.