Do either of you see a tension between "most of our engagements with the world are (prelinguistic)" and "I agree, and those engagements target statements"? — fdrake

One source of tension is rather obvious: Talk about what is prelinguistic is done IN language and logic, that is, is propositional, and what can logic and language "say" about things outside of logic and language? Didn't Wittgenstein warn us about this? But this tension has not at all gone unnoticed. Hermeneutics is the only recourse. It is the deferential nature of the meanings of terms, and this runs smack into Derrida, doesn't it?

Hermeneutics is the only recourse. — Constance

Nuh. But it helps, when done well.

I'd like us to consider that solipsism is not valid. Without that assumption the following will be meaningless.

Belief is a probability knowledge. You don't know if the king has a beard; but if you believe that it does, then your bets are on the king having a beard.

Knowledge preempts belief. If you see the king, and he has a beard, your belief assumes a probability of one, which is knowledge.

Do either of them need to be propositional? In a sense that all beliefs have the feature of not defying description, whether the description exists, is thought of, or written down in some way or form... all beliefs are propostional.

You don't need to propose them to know they can be expressed as a proposition.

Instead, you wish to disprove this by describing a belief that is indescribable. That would be a valid way of destroying the argument that all thoughts, including beliefs, are propositional.

...what are you counting as language? — bongo fury

Naming and descriptive practices.

My purpose there was to distinguish them in a dependency sense. First-order beliefs are about the world. Second-order beliefs are about statements about the world. — Andrew M

That's close to what I've argued in the debate. Second post particularly. Existential dependency. However, some belief about 'the world' does not need/require language, and some does.

OK, so consider the scenario where a cat watched a mouse run behind a tree and then chased after it.

That the cat chased after the mouse suggests that the cat believed that the mouse ran behind the tree.

If we agree about that, then the question is what to make of the that-clause "the mouse ran behind the tree". I think we would agree that it describes an event that occurred independently of the cat's belief, and also independently of language.

Now I think that is what you mean by language-less belief. And also that this characterizes much of human belief as well. Is that correct? — Andrew M

The clause describes what happened(an event). Nothing above strikes me wrong.

Naming and descriptive practices. — creativesoul

Cool. And,

a creature capable of attributing meaning — creativesoul

might do so by other means or in other ways than are implied by such practices?

This is about metavalue, which I wont' go into unless you want to, but I say it moves the discussion to value because the content is, of course, not discussable. Presence qua presence cannot be spoken, and if the understanding is all about pragmatics, what we call reality, truth and the rest is really ready-to-hand instrumentality of Being in the world. — Constance

@Banno, @Andrew M

If we're using terms in the same way, I don't think it's surprising that "presence qua presence cannot be spoken", words aren't identical to the things they stand in for after all. When we make an assertion, a whole process of interaction has lead to the uttered statement. "This rose is red", what are the boundaries of the rose? How many thorns does it have? How many petals? What is its hue? How reflective is it? How tall? A condensation of the rose's constitutive patterns occurs when using words to stand in for them; what counts as a rose, what counts as red, and what is irrelevant for both instances of counting as.

To say that "x" and x pick out the same thing is quite different than saying "x" is true iff x, the equivalence between the x on the left and the x on the right occurs only after the rose has been counted as red and counted as a rose; that is to say after it has been picked out. A whole regime of phenomena; of representation, of perceptual exploration of the environment, of how word is tailored to world; is hidden if the x on the right is treated as an uninterpreted event in the world. The perspective, norms, use of language, go into x, that is why it can be matched redundantly with "x" being true. In other words, that x on the right is theory ladened, and the theory it is ladened with is set up by how the statement counts as the state of affairs.

Which provides a problem, if how "x" counts as x is internal to norms of discourse - it is indeed part of their execution -, those discursive norms must be taken as a given in order for disquotation to spell out the sense of a declarative sentences. ""x" and x pick out the same thing" works as an account of the sense of "x" only insofar as the means by which they do pick out the same thing is taken for granted. For declarative sentences, this is all buried in truth; truth as direct but interpreted contact between what the sentence is and what it picks out. That burial is also an inversion; what counts as an event becomes the substrate of the declarative sentence, rather than the speech act of its assertion containing within it a generation of what counts as what in interaction with an event. Displacing the generative component of the speech act's content with the norms by which the speech is judged by that generative content. This is an intellectual magic trick; a conjuring of the given by which the relationship between "x" and x is judged as a redundancy. In reality, that relationship is a generative process of interaction, and the conformability between "x" and x can be seen, retrospectively, as its output.

Naming and descriptive practices.
— creativesoul

Cool. And,

a creature capable of attributing meaning
— creativesoul

might do so by other means or in other ways than are implied by such practices? — bongo fury

Yes. Some language-less creatures are capable of attributing meaning.

If there is some state of affairs, then there can potentially be a statement that picks out that state of affairs. Symbolically, x and "x" pick out the same x.
— Andrew M

So, is the second sentence a typo, or deliberate sophistry? Which the otherwise unacountable banality of the first sentence is designed to camouflage?

Or have you convinced even yourself that the picker-outer is properly identified with the picked-out? — bongo fury

It's worse than I thought, if "x" isn't even abbreviating "x" is true.

Yes. Some language-less creatures are capable of attributing meaning. — creativesoul

Still cool, perhaps. How, though?

By virtue of drawing correlations between different directly perceptible things.

It's worse than I thought, if "x" isn't even abbreviating "x is true". — bongo fury

Yeah. A simple substitution exercise shows the error of equivocation nicely.

Ok, and then what counts as "drawing correlations" that isn't some kind of a game of symbol-pointing?

Just interested.

From the debate...

It seems natural that we attribute beliefs to animals and small children, despite their lack of language. — Banno

Indeed it does. We may make some headway here.

What would count as a misattribution of belief as compared/contrasted to correctly attributing belief to such language-less creatures?

Drawing correlations between different directly perceptible things, none of which are language use.

Drawing correlations between different directly perceptible things, none of which are language use. — creativesoul

Example?

What would count as a misattribution of belief as compared/contrasted to correctly attributing belief to such language-less creatures? — creativesoul

Smart phones ? — bongo fury

The notion to be avoided is that different statements can say the same thing, and that hence there is a thing called the proposition, which is what the statement means. — Banno

Here we agree.

Drawing correlations between different directly perceptible things, none of which are language use.
— creativesoul

Example? — bongo fury

Mice, trees, spatial relations between mice, trees, and the creature themselves...

Believing the mouse ran behind the tree...

(Scratch that. I see now you want misattributed not mistaken.) — bongo fury

Yes, and for very good reason. I'm invoking the distinction between our reports of an other's belief, and an other's belief.

Good. See edit.

Not seeing the relevance of "smart phones"...

Attribution of beliefs to phones is a misattribution.

Drawing correlations between different directly perceptible things, none of which are language use.
— creativesoul

Example?
— bongo fury

Mice, trees, spatial relations between mice, trees, and the creature themselves... — creativesoul

But an example of how the languageless creature draws a correlation between two or more of these?

Smart phones are not the sorts of things capable of attributing meaning by virtue of drawing correlations between different directly perceptible things, including but not limited to themselves...

...and that is how all belief systems emerge/begin. Smart phones do not attribute meaning.

Smart phones do not attribute meaning. — creativesoul

Cool. Agreed.

An artificial neural network can have the nameless anticipation (surge in action potentials). Oughtn't we reserve "belief" for the anticipations of a more restricted class of machines?

I suggest: those very much future machines skilled not merely in the chasing of mice, but in the chasing of the imaginary trajectories of the pointings of mouse-words and mouse-pictures. A skill which is ascribable literally to humans from infancy. Only anthropomorphically to cats and present-day robots.

That's too restrictive for people who are sure cats literally have beliefs, of course. They must exclude robots some other way. If at all. — bongo fury

an example of how — bongo fury

This makes no sense.

The how part is autonomous. It requires certain biological machinery, etc. It just happens(at first anyway)... the drawing correlations, I mean.

an example of how
— bongo fury

This makes no sense.

The how part is autonomous. It requires certain biological machinery, etc. It just happens(at first anyway)... the drawing correlations, I mean. — creativesoul

If not how, then in what ways? How am I to think of a cat as drawing correlations? By (perhaps?) appreciating how it is

disposed to respond to the event as to a mouse-running-behind-tree event? — bongo fury

How am I to think of a cat as drawing correlations? — bongo fury

My cats know the sound of my car, as a result of drawing correlations between it and me. They believe I am home when they hear it. The sound of certain kinds of plastic is also meaningful to them by virtue of being part of the correlation they've drawn between it and getting treats, etc. I've already offered the directly perceptible things in believing the mouse ran behind the tree. Some other things are of course the cat's own hunting desire/instinct, or perhaps hunger pangs, etc. The cat wants to catch the mouse.

Banno's cat has drawn correlations between the sounds and smells of other cats(unfriendly ones) and those other cats. Hence, she spits and hisses because she believes that an unfriendly cat is outside. Certainly these correlations between her past fighting with such cats develop into a predisposition towards those cats and those sounds and smells, that's part of how belief about the world and/or ourselves effects/affects how we think about current events(what we believe is happening).

Ok, so drawing of correlations between things is formation of dispositions to respond to them which are relative to each other? Maybe?

If we're using terms in the same way, I don't think it's surprising that "presence qua presence cannot be spoken", words aren't identical to the things they stand in for after all. When we make an assertion, a whole process of interaction has lead to the uttered statement. "This rose is red", what are the boundaries of the rose? How many thorns does it have? How many petals? What is its hue? How reflective is it? How tall? A condensation of the rose's constitutive patterns occurs when using words to stand in for them; what counts as a rose, what counts as red, and what is irrelevant for both instances of counting as. — fdrake

A name is not a description. Nor does a name refer only in virtue of its somehow being the same as a description.

But yes, words are not identical to the thing they refer to; "Banno" is not Banno. However, "Banno" is used to refer to Banno, and Banno is Banno.

T-sentences do not claim that the thing on the left is the very same as the thing on the right. The equivalence is one of truth-function, not of identity. Any interpretation that applies to the proposition on the left also applies to the state of affairs on the right. Hence, they cancel out, like paired variables in any equation.