They? And how can a belief itself be anything other than a belief? And certainly how can it be absolute? — tim wood

What is this a test?

Are you exhibiting the dreadful behaviour that you're charging others with?

I never said that a belief can be anything other than itself. I'm saying that we cannot expect to understand belief and how it works if we divorce belief from believer, which is exactly what you suggested earlier. The two emerge simultaneously. Where there has never been a creature capable of drawing correlations between different things, there could have been neither believer nor belief.



I'm certainly not going to pay for that which needs put out to pasture.

It speaks to both the believer and the belief that they form, have, and/or hold.
— creativesoul
They? — tim wood

Yes, they. The candidates under current consideration... you know, the individuals capable of forming, having, and/or holding beliefs. All beliefs are meaningful to the creature forming, having, and/or holding them. Thus, because we report on those beliefs in statement form, and the same statement can have a plurality of acceptable meanings that vary according to the individual, we can certainly understand and see, if you will, that divorcing belief from believer and looking at only what's believed is to look at a statement of belief in general. The same statement can have more than one set of truth conditions, depending upon the believer.

As I mentioned earlier...

The divorce led to Gettier.

It speaks to both the believer and the belief that they form, have, and/or hold. — creativesoul

Have you read the Collingwood essay? I couldn't find an indication in your posts on this thread.

Reading it as we speak actually...

Found this particularly troubling...

I write these words sitting on the deck of a ship.
I lift my eyes and see a piece of string — a line, I must
call it at sea — stretched more or less horizontally
above me. I find myself thinking ‘that is a clothes-
line’, meaning that it was put there to hang washing
on. When I decide that it was put there for that
purpose I am presupposing that it was put there for
some purpose.

...for it flies directly in the face of actually learning what clotheslines are called or what they're used for. He didn't decide either.

However, I think I can see what he means though. This time, on the deck, he 'decided' "that's a clothesline", after wondering about the line he saw, when he could have also suspended judgment and perhaps thought of other things the line could be besides a clothesline. Supposing it's a clothesline, presupposes it's use to hang clothes.

This is as well...

prop. i. Every statement that anybody ever makes is made in answer to a question.

I'm studying his framework of the differences between absolute and relative presuppositions...

...different sets of absolute presuppositions correspond not only with differences in the structure of what is generally called scientific thought but with differences in the entire fabric of civilization.
(RGC, EM, ch 7, part 2) — Pantagruel

As I said previously, they are fundamental to a perspective on a state of affairs, and our shared AP's constitute the milieu of our civilization.

Professional metaphysicians (...who claim for their own work the name of metaphysics because they regard it as a study of absolute presuppositions) may fail to do the kind of work which is required of them by the advance of ordinary or non-metaphysical thought because their metaphysical analysis has become out of date, i.e. presupposes that ordinary thought still stands in a situation in which it once stood, but in which it stands no longer.(Ch 8)

So "ordinary thought" is the manifestation of absolute presuppositions, and it is this which forms the object of study for the metaphysician, and the practical manifestation of Absolute Presuppositions (by the scientist and everybody else). Again, this is the sense in which I am aligning Absolute Presupposition with the concept of belief.

I'd say that our beliefs determine our thought more than our thought determines our beliefs. This is why these core beliefs (APs) are modifiable by way of metaphysical endeavour, rather than subjected to the whims of ordinary thought. They are constitutive beliefs.

I'd go as far as to suggest that the conscious self is that whose being is its beliefs. I think therefore I am as existential-synthesis. I am because (and what) I believe.

Absolute presuppositions are not considered, weighed, and chosen, although some scientific theories do evolve them more consciously — tim wood

How can a scientific theory be conscious? You are talking about thinking people, and the thought of thinking people is based upon beliefs. As I have now repeatedly said, I think what is being quibbled over here is the nature of belief. I think Collingwood has called attention to a very important feature of belief, that it is structured around Absolute Propositions which are fundamental (metaphysical) perspectives on reality that we assume (with more or less awareness, depending on whether we are metaphysicians).

When scientists are forced to do their own metaphysics because ordinary thinking has outpaced current metaphysics, Collingwood calls them "amateur metaphysicians".

But if be said thatbsomeone holds a presupposition is that not equivalent to saying that they believe it? — Janus

If we allow a supposition to be a belief, which is not contradictory, then from mere language we see a pre-supposition makes explicit that which has yet to meet the criteria of belief. If belief is the consequence of some cognition relative to a thing in conjunction with a judgement made upon it with respect to the subjective validity of the cognition, it follows that presupposition does not lend itself to any of those cognitive faculties relating thought to an object, but, if anything, given their validity, are necessarily antecedent to them. Hence, in Collingwood, the notion of “logical priority”.
(In Kant, “logical priority” is the transcendental condition making the categories possible, which Collingwood modernizes to “absolute presuppositions”, in his attempt to modernize post-Kantian metaphysics in general, in order to accommodate advances in the hard sciences)

So the question, at least from one point of view, attempts to misuse our cognitive faculties, which leads to self-contradictions. Throw in “absolute” as a quality of presupposition, and it makes that idea not even contained in cognitive faculties, from which arises the ground of the contradiction, re: the absolute is the unconditioned, for which no object is possible in human experience. In addition, with respect to Collingwood, to further qualify absolute presuppositions as, A.) that of “to any question it is never an answer” (Def. 6), and B.) “never verifiable” (pg 32), in that absolute presuppositions are in and of themselves not contained in, are indeed never even subjected to, the faculty of cognition at all. And that which is never cognized can never be a belief.

Problem is, of course, neither Kant nor Collingwood venture an altogether satisfactory origin of the categories in the former, nor absolute presuppositions in the latter. They each arrive at his own version of some irreducible metaphysical necessity, and each recognize they’ve tacitly boxed themselves in.

Same as it ever was......

If belief is the consequence of some cognition relative to a thing in conjunction with a judgement made upon it with respect to the subjective validity of the cognition, it follows that presupposition does not lend itself to any of those cognitive faculties relating thought to an object, — Mww

Why should we construe belief so narrowly? Beliefs apply to things like cultural norms and habitual practices and for the vast majority of people take the form of presuppositions. This overly-formalized academic construal specifically misses the sense in which these core beliefs determine the course of thinking, both scientific and everyday.

Absolute presuppositions are not considered, weighed, and chosen — tim wood

Agreed, and sustained in Prop. 5, “absolute presuppositions are not propositions”, and if not a proposition, cannot be considered in propositional form, which weighing and choosing would seem to require.

Agreed, and sustained in Prop. 5, “absolute presuppositions are not propositions”, and if not a proposition, cannot be considered in propositional form, which weighing and choosing would seem to require. — Mww

If they are presuppositions, then they are "pre-supposed". I would be interested to learn what kind of psychological mechanism "pre-supposing" is that does not involve choice. Unless you consider it a more primitive kind of choosing. They are "fundamental hypotheses" about the nature of reality, not expressible in propositional form directly but consonant with some set of relative propositions, which are taken for granted and acted upon as if they were real, in consequence of which is engendered all actual behaviours, including scientific theorization.

One could almost call this a natural "direction" of one's thought, I think that Bergson uses this metaphor.

Why should we construe belief so narrowly? — Pantagruel

Because metaphysics is the science of thought, and any science is grounded by basic principles, axioms or conditions.

The best answer is the reduction to the the capacity to distinguish belief from knowledge. And if certainty is one of two fundamental human interests, the other being some moral disposition, it is all the more metaphysically pertinent to disseminate the conditions for its possibility scientifically, as opposed to the contingency of mere belief.

Beliefs apply to things like cultural norms and habitual practices and for the vast majority of people take the form of presuppositions. — Pantagruel

These are at best in the purview of psychology, which, according to Collingwood, is “anti-metaphysics”, probably because those applications are in the public domain. Besides, “Beliefs apply to.....”, while correct from the view of practical reason, still makes no allowance for that which justifies both the content and the applicability of belief in general, which only arises from pure reason. One must, after all, think a belief before applying it.

If they are presuppositions, then they are "pre-supposed". — Pantagruel

Yes, but these are relative presuppositions, and according to Collingwood, may serve as answers to previous question, re: Prop 5. Answers must be subjected to rational predication, which permits them propositional form, which in turn allows them to be supposed antecedent to the question they are intended to answer.

They are "fundamental hypotheses" about the nature of reality, not expressible in propositional form directly but consonant with some set of relative propositions, which are taken for granted and acted upon as if they were real, in consequence of which is engendered all manner of actual behaviours, including scientific theorization. — Pantagruel

And these are the absolute presuppositions. Although, while certainly fundamental, I’d hesitate to call them hypotheses, which implies the very propositional form denied to them.

Yes, but these are relative presuppositions, — Mww

There is no reason to believe that absolute presuppositions are not presupposed.

And I qualified the sense in which they were 'functional hypotheses'.

There is no reason to believe that absolute presuppositions are not presupposed. — Pantagruel

Hey.....no fair confusing me, dammit!!! I had to go back through all my comments to see if I indicated absolute presuppositions were not presupposed, and I couldn’t find where I gave that indication. I’m arguing contrary to your claim that presuppositions are beliefs, which I emphatically reject on purely metaphysical grounds. So, no, there is no reason to think absolute presuppositions are not presupposed. In fact, it is no other way possible for them to be logically viable, then to be presupposed.

Problem is, of course, neither Kant nor Collingwood venture an altogether satisfactory origin of the categories in the former, nor absolute presuppositions in the latter. They each arrive at his own version of some irreducible metaphysical necessity, and each recognize they’ve tacitly boxed themselves in. — Mww

I take Kant's to be a construction, Collingwood's to be a finding. What Collingwood (seems to have) found is that any endeavor is characterized not alone by what it does and how it does it, but also by what it implicitly takes absolutely for granted, its absolute presuppositions, and taking that thus never explicitly questions them. One may call them the axioms of the enterprise. For example, on a cold winter morning you may wonder if your car will start, but you do not trouble to worry if it is there or has quantum-tunneled itself to Palm Beach. Or, to use an RGC example, if you hear an explosion, you might wonder if a hunter is nearby, or a car backfired, or if there's some blasting being done in your neighborhood, but what would be unacceptable would be the notion that it had no cause at all.

RGC was an historian. While I have no idea how or why he came to his conclusions - and would like to - I can imagine a day early in his career as a historian recognizing for the first time that different people at different times thought differently, and, that this thinking in each case was not a deficient version of what came after, but was rather something simpler: a different set of axioms. He observed that folks tend not to question their axioms and instead are likely to jealously guard and protect them on those occasions when they do surface.

His argument is that metaphysics as he finds it in Aristotle, noting first that strictly speaking "Metaphysics" "does not occur there," is either the science of pure being, a science he argues cannot be, or the historical science of identifying what the axioms, absolute presuppositions, of thinking of different people at different times and places doing different things were, including us now. He argues that in fact this is what both Aristotle and Kant were doing, except they were unaware of the historic nature of their efforts.

He says this on Kant. "So acute and conscientious a thinker could not possibly have thought that the absolute presuppositions of eighteenth-century physics were the only ones which human understanding could make had he given to medieval physics and ancient Greek physics the same attention he gave to Galileo and Newton.... The short historical perspective which Kant inherited from Voltaire was at this point his undoing, and made it possible for him to write what was in reality neither more nor less than a history of the absolute presupposition of physics from Galileo's time to his own, without being aware that this was what he was doing, and in the mistaken belief that he was writing an account of the absolute presuppositions of any possible physics" (p. 249).

And this gives the lie to the parish-pump idea that all human knowledge is like a lone tree-trunk that rises straight up endlessly with only a few rag-tag branches, and replaces it with the image of human knowledge as a forest of trees of different kinds heavy with branches, with many dying out and being replaced with others while some endure for a longer time.

Hey.....no fair confusing me, dammit!!! I had to go back through all my comments to see if I indicated absolute presuppositions were not presupposed, and I couldn’t find where I gave that indication. I’m arguing contrary to your claim that presuppositions are beliefs, which I emphatically reject on purely metaphysical grounds. So, no, there is no reason to think absolute presuppositions are not presupposed. In fact, it is no other way possible for them to be logically viable, then to be presupposed. — Mww

Ok. Well, as I said, it amounts to a clarification of what constitutes belief.

Beliefs are more fundamental than knowledge in the sense that you can have belief without knowledge, but not knowledge without belief. Not only that, but you can have true beliefs without knowledge. So is there something more fundamental than believing? I don't think so. Any thetic (positional) consciousness must be coming from some kind of position, which can be described as its "functional beliefs" (because otherwise, what else is it? If it is anything, it is the nexus of all of its most likely reactions.

In what sense is a "presupposition" not a kind of belief?

In what sense is a "presupposition" not a kind of belief? — Pantagruel

Function, function, function. As means of transportation, you can have it that cars and bicycles are the same. But they're different. Can you discern the differences? Which would you prefer to take to the store?

Found this particularly troubling... — creativesoul

I didn't particularly like the clothesline analogy, but I don't know why it would be troubling. It isn't central to his argument.

Function, function, function. As means of transportation, you can have it that cars and bicycles are the same. But they're different. Can you discern the differences? Which would you prefer to take to the store? — tim wood

I don't understand the analogy at all. Believing is the most you can do. You react to something as if it were true. That is exactly what a presupposition is. You do not presuppose in the mode of dis-belief, or even non-belief.

Yes. Trigger happy and tired last night.

The more I read, the more I realized that I needed to study this paper in order to better understand.

I don't understand the analogy at all. — Pantagruel

Maybe I'm misreading you entirely. My bad if I do. What I'm on about is that you (seem to me) to be saying that beliefs and absolute presuppositions are the same thing. There may be a genus that contains both, but my point is that they are different species. That among the differentia is function. Cars and bicycles can be grouped such that as members of that genus they are exactly the same. But that's not the reality, is it.

Ok. from where I sit, something presupposed is 'presumed to be the case'. Does this not exactly describe a belief?

Beliefs are more fundamental than knowledge — Pantagruel

More fundamental only as in less rigorous. Ehhh....not going to get into the speculative subtleties explicit therein. Too long, too deep and not relevant to the topic.

In what sense is a "presupposition" not a kind of belief? — Pantagruel

In ordinary linguistics, they may be, from which arises the relative presupposition, according to Collingwood. In metaphysics, on the other hand, where I stake my epistemological tentpoles, presuppositions are taken as necessary conditions, re: absolute presuppositions, and beliefs, at best, are merely contingent judgements. Only here does it become apparent that the negation of a judgement does not falsify the presupposition that supported it. “Elvis is not dead”, a possible belief, has no affect on the presupposition of Elvis, the condition necessary for the belief. We don’t need to analyze the proposition to grant the necessity of the presupposition contained in it, even while analyzing the truth of the proposition itself.

Also according to Collingwood.....beware customary jargon from “desultory and casual thinking of our unscientific consciousness”.

In ordinary linguistics, they may be, from which arises the relative presupposition, according to Collingwood. In metaphysics, on the other hand, where I stake my epistemological tentpoles, presuppositions are taken as necessary conditions, re: absolute presuppositions, and beliefs, at best, are merely contingent judgements. Only here does it become apparent that the negation of a judgement does not falsify the presupposition that supported it. “Elvis is not dead”, a possible belief, has no affect on the presupposition of Elvis, the condition necessary for the belief. We don’t need to analyze the proposition to grant the necessity of the presupposition contained in it, even while analyzing the truth of the proposition itself. — Mww

Well thought through, by which I mean I agree.

If we allow a supposition to be a belief, which is not contradictory, then from mere language we see a pre-supposition makes explicit that which has yet to meet the criteria of belief. . — Mww

Not according to ordinary usage, and what better determines the meaning of terms? Dictionaries are good to consult because the business of lexicographers is to present concise definitions based on studying common usage.

From the Cambridge English Dictionary:

supposition
noun [ C or U ]
uk
/ˌsʌp.əˈzɪʃ.ən/ us
/ˌsʌp.əˈzɪʃ.ən/
the fact of believing something is true without any proof or something that you believe to be true without any proof:
That article was based on pure supposition.


presupposition
noun [ C or U ]
uk
/ˌpriː.sʌp.əˈzɪʃ.ən/ us
/ˌpriː.sʌp.əˈzɪʃ.ən/
something that you believe is true without having any proof:
Your actions are based on some false presuppositions.
This is all presupposition - we must wait until we have some hard evidence.

I would say that, according to ordinary parlance, there is little difference between the two terms, although a presupposition might be considered more basic. So suppositions and presuppositions are species of belief, but not all beliefs are suppositions in this strict sense, of course ( that is some beliefs are founded on evidence).

Now, Collingwood uses a term,"absolute presupposition" to denote those presuppositions which are bedrock for all metaphysical and physical inquiry. I see no reason to think that he could not equally well have used the term "absolute supposition" or "absolute belief" to denote the same thing. Wittgenstein used the term 'bedrock proposition' to denote very much the same thing.

Also consider this:

And (p.51), "It might seem that there are three schools of thought in physics, Newtonian, Kantian, and Einsteinian, let us all them, which stand committed respectively to the three following metaphysical propositions:
1. Some events have causes.
2. All events have causes.
3. No events have causes."

RGC then points out that while seeming contradictory, each of these stands as a foundational and structural part of the science that presupposes it, and as such, the question as to the truth of any one of them is a nonsense question because their value as presuppositions lies in their "efficacy" and not in their being thought true. — tim wood

"Some events have causes", " All events have causes", "No events have causes": of course these are, whatever else they might be, beliefs. They are also suppositions or presuppositions. If they count as absolute presuppositions, then they count also as absolute suppositions or absolute beliefs; as I said before, the logic is inexorable. (Personally I don't think the "absolute" works very well, 'foundational' or 'bedrock' would have been better in my view).

The point is that if he had used the alternative terms I have suggested it would not change his argument in any way that I can see.

Not according to ordinary usage, and what better determines the meaning of terms? — Janus

The business of language is to express or explain; if language cannot explain itself, nothing else can explain it.
R.G. Collingwood, Essay on Philosophical Method

Not too sure if you are meaning to agree or disagree here...

I'd agree that ordinary language expresses its meaning sufficiently, as apparently does R.G. Collingwood.