If you claim that we can establish if “At t1, Jack believes that broken clock is working” is more accurate than “At t1, Jack believes that clock is working”, based on what we take belief to be, and your definition of belief is “meaningful correlations drawn between directly and/or indirectly perceptible things”, then I expect you to show exactly how this definition helps you establish “At t1, Jack believes that broken clock is working” is more accurate than “At t1, Jack believes that clock is working”, all the more because you claim that your definition of belief is of “immense explanatory power”. But in your last post you never used such a definition. That’s fishy. — neomac


There you go again, making claims for me that I've not made. — creativesoul

We can set all the other stuff aside for now and focus upon what counts as belief. Then, we will see how much sense it makes to ascribe belief to another, because we will have some standard of belief for comparing our ascriptions/attribution to. — creativesoul

I'm attributing a belief: beliefs are intentional cognitive states/events with intrinsic mind-to-world fitness conditions expressed through behavioral attitudes in a given context. These intrinsic fitness conditions constitute - broadly speaking - the p.o.v of the believer. So I take the task of identifying the intrinsic fitness conditions of a given belief in a given context as equivalent to providing an explanation of P’s behavior in a given context based on her cognitive intentionality. Since what better explains the cognitively-guided behavior of P at time t1 based on cognitive intentionality (i.e. P's belief at t1), to me, is the p.o.v. of P at t1 than any other alternative (like the p.o.v. of Q at t1, or the the p.o.v. of P at t2), then belief ascriptions about P at time t1 are accurate in so far as they match the p.o.v. of P at time t1. — neomac

The terms "of" and "that it" are superfluous. We can remove them entirely and lose nothing meaningful. The simplest explanation is the best provided there is no loss in explanatory power. — creativesoul

Indeed, there is loss of explanatory power, b/c by removing those parts you are attributing to Jack a contradictory belief so you can not distinguish a case of ignorance from a case of irrational belief, nor identify the different scopes in belief ascriptions (the p.o.v. of the one who makes the belief ascription about Jak is different from Jack's p.o.v). Not only, but if we assume that Jack's belief is a case of ignorance and not irrational belief, then your rendering is a case of misattribution, so it's a false explanation of Jack's behavior.
Besides the explanatory power of belief ascription should be based on your definition of belief, as you claimed, this definition is “meaningful correlations drawn between directly and/or indirectly perceptible things”. But you are not using it at all to prove that there is no loss in explanatory power. So how can you justify the claim that there is not loss in explanatory power? — neomac

↪creativesoul


> Jack draws correlations between a broken clock and the time of day while believing a broken clock is working. Jack does not believe "a broken clock is working". Jack believes a broken clock is working.

Seriously?! I don't get the structure of this argument at all, if it has one. For sure it is not a deduction. BTW what happened to the “meaningful correlations drawn between directly and/or indirectly perceptible things” in the case of “Jack does not believe ‘a broken clock is working’” and why are we talking “Jack does not believe ‘a broken clock is working’” instead of “Jack believes that a clock is working”?! — neomac

I did see the difference. But I find your answer not only unsatisfactory but also fishy. Assuming your convention, you distinguish between quoted (“S believes that ‘p’”) and unquoted belief content (“S believes that p”). The first one is a propositional attitude and the second one is not. Here is the convention applied to the example of Jack: “Jack believes ‘that broken clock is working’” and “Jack believes that broken clock is working”, in both cases the belief content includes 3 items: “clock”, “broken”, “is working”. So it’s true but suspiciously incomplete to claim that the latter rendering of Jack’s belief has broken clocks as content. The non-propositional content of Jack’s belief has 3 items in it, not just broken clock, but broken clock is working.
Besides what kind of entities are these items? Are they linguistic terms? Are they meanings? Are they referents in the real world? What are they? And isn’t there a meaningful correlation drawn between these 3 items since they are the content of Jack’s belief? What is this meaningful correlation? Isn't this correlation supposed to show an impossible situation b/c broken clocks do not work? And how come that it's impossible that broken clocks do not work if not for the fact that the same clock is attributed or appears to instantiate contradictory properties ("broken" and "is working")?
Looking forward to hearing your answers. — neomac

My reformulation was aiming at rescuing your proposal also from the line of reasoning you just drafted, which I find simply catastrophic, even if we forget the aforementioned objections. Why? Because “accuracy” as an intrinsic fitness-condition of beliefs is what grounds our expectations about our honest reports, like the expectation that a factual report about facts at time t1 should match them, and the expectation that a belief ascription to P at time t1 should match the belief prospective of P at time t1 (i.e. the way P would express her belief at time t1). While what you are trying to do is to blend the 2 distinct expectations in a belief ascription that matches neither the prospective of the believer nor the relevant facts: a broken clock is working is neither a fact nor the perspective of P at time t1, just a blend of what you take to be a correct description of the relevant facts ("the broken clock") with P’s perspective (“is working”). The utmost preposterous consequence of your approach is that all false beliefs are equated to contradictory beliefs (since, the belief ascription subordinate clause "a broken clock is working" is a contradiction). This amounts to a categorical confusion between epistemology and logic: a false belief is not a contradictory belief (!!!), since a contradictory belief is always false, while a false belief could have been true, and this depends on the relevant facts not on its internal logic. Indeed this would also make the believers look always irrational, when they could have been simply ignorant about the relevant facts.
Why would you do such a catastrophic move? My impression is that you are misled, by your unaccounted knowledge claims (“we find ourselves discussing another's belief that they themselves do not know that they have”), into thinking that belief report accuracy is based on knowledge (track knowledge or lack thereof). This is wrong for 2 reasons: 1. belief ascriptions by S are themselves beliefs and do not warrant S’s knowledge of the relevant facts, nor need for such a warrant 2. knowledge ascriptions about P presuppose belief ascriptions about P (and not the other way around). In other words, a theory of belief ascription can not settle issues about belief and belief ascription by presupposing knowledge, b/c knowledge presupposes belief, therefore accurate belief reports should be understood in terms of intrinsic fitness-condition of belief, not in terms of extrinsic fitness-condition of belief (as knowledge is). — neomac

Can Jack look at a broken clock? Surely. Can Jack believe what the clock says? Surely. Why then, can he not believe that a broken clock is working? — creativesoul

>It is not contradictory at all, not in least little bit, to believe that broken clocks are working while doing so. so. The reason why is simple:when believing such things we do not knowingly do so! We are unaware of the fact that we believe what a broken clock says when we do. We cannot knowingly do so.

What did you just write?! That’s the craziest thing I’ve heard so far! Contradiction has to do with logic not with your awareness. The fact that one does not realize to have a contradictory belief doesn’t make it, not in least little bit, less contradictory. And the problem is not that we are not aware of a contradictory belief, the problem is that a false belief is not a contradictory belief! (Not to mention, again, the unaccounted knowledge ascriptions…) — “neomac

> Do you not find it odd that Jack would agree, if and when he figured out that the clock was broken?

Seriously?! By “Jack” you mean a fictional character in a story that you just invented? Oh no, that’s not odd at all, it would be indeed much more odd if you invented stories where fictional characters explicitly contradict your theories, and despite that you used those stories to prove your theory. — neomac

The terms "of" and "that it" are superfluous. We can remove them entirely and lose nothing meaningful. The simplest explanation is the best provided there is no loss in explanatory power. — creativesoul

• At t1, Jack believes that p (first task)
• At t1, p is false (ex hypothesi)
• At t1, Jack mistakenly believes that p (second task)
• if at t1, Jack mistakenly believes that p, then at t1, Jack believes that p (logic dependency between the 2 tasks)
• If the belief content p is ‘that clock is working’, then p is not contradictory (not analytically false) and p can be either true or false.

• It is false that at t1 Jack’s belief content (i.e. ‘that clock is working’) is true and false.
• If the belief content ‘that clock is working’ is false, then the belief content ‘that clock is working’ is not true, and vice versa.
• If the belief content ‘that clock is working’ is false, then it is false that Jack knows that clock is working.

I don't believe he's a troll — EricH

AFAICT his positions seem consistent. — EricH

1. Moral imperatives are imperatives of reason
2. Imperatives of reason have a single source: Reason
3. Only a mind issues imperatives
4. Therefore, moral imperatives are the imperatives of a single mind
5. The single mind whose imperatives are the imperatives of reason will be omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent (God). — Bartricks

If m then r
If r then s
If i then n
—————
p
q

Bart's an obvious troll. Why are you responding? — Banno

Haha, you really don't know your stuff. Undergrad are we? — Bartricks

The first argument is obviously deductively valid. — Bartricks

Now, each argument was deductively valid, yes? — Bartricks

And they are also sound. Deal. — Bartricks

"But you made a typo in your first premise, so I win and your argument is stupid and dumb and just so stupid. So there." — Bartricks

What's next is the sinking feeling that you are massively out of your depth followed by humiliation — Bartricks

It's the most stupid claim I've read so far in this thread to consider this argument (as it is) deductively valid. — neomac

1. Moral imperatives are imperatives of reason
2. Imperatives of reason have a single source: Reason
3. Only a mind issues imperatives
4. Therefore, moral imperatives are the imperatives of a single mind
5. The single mind whose imperatives are the imperatives of reason will be omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent (God). — Bartricks

Is that argument form valid? — Bartricks

If you don't know that it is deductively valid it's because you don't know what that means. — Bartricks

• It’s not evident that that DCT argument is committed to such a claim of yours: “A common way to think about God, both in philosophy and religion, is as the greatest possible being. A being which we can not even imagine anything to be better than.” Even if this assumption sounds plausible (due to our background knowledge), depending on how it is properly unpacked it may lead to different consequences.
• It’s not evident that all the “good characteristics” attributed to God by the definition “God is the greatest possible being” are so judged wrt a moral standard (is omniscience, omnipotence or being eternal morally good?) while the DCT argument seems focused on standards for moral evaluation.
• It would be more consistent with the DCT argument to explicitly claim “those properties are only morally good because God wants them” instead of “those properties are only good because God possesses them”.

↪neomac
It is deductively valid. It'd be stupid not to notice. — Bartricks

As that argument is deductively valid it will, if sound, refute all other views about the matter. — Bartricks

If you are debating with a theist, I would say for them belief implies truth. — javi2541997

The sort of belief I intend to discuss is not the sort found in church, and that might better be called faith. The beliefs to be examined are the common everyday stuff, that the cup is on the shelf or that the sun is rising. Nothing too transcendent here. But if we start with the everyday, we might work towards such profundity.

1. if the universe was temporally infinite, then there would be no 1st moment
2. if there was no 1st moment, then there was no 2nd moment
3. if there was no 2nd moment, then there was no 3rd moment
4. ... and so on and so forth ...
5. ... then there would be no now
6. since now exists, we started out wrong, i.e. the universe is not temporally infinite — jorndoe

• False beliefs are not to be equated to contradictory beliefs
• Mere false beliefs can be occasionally false (like "that clock is working"), but they could have been true (counterfactual), while a contradictory belief is always false (as you yourself claimed “a broken clock is working - is always false”).

• A deviation from common practices of belief ascriptions are tolerated and perceived unproblematic for pragmatic reasons (shared assumptions in the given context), not for accuracy concerns.
• My claim, since the beginning, is that “At t1, Jack believes that broken clock is working” is not a more accurate belief ascription than “At t1, Jack believes that clock is working”, assumed that Jack was simply ignorant about the condition of the clock.

The proposition, assertion, claim, sentence, statement, thought, belief, and/or utterance - a broken clock is working - is always false. Broken clocks do not work. — creativesoul

it is not contradictory at all, not in least little bit, to believe that broken clocks are working while doing so. The reason why is simple:when believing such things we do not knowingly do so! We are unaware of the fact that we believe what a broken clock says when we do. We cannot knowingly do so. — creativesoul

if “Jack’s believes that a clock is working” is true, does this imply that “a clock is working” is true? — neomac

Seriously?! I don't get the structure of this explanation at all, if it has one. For sure it is not a deduction. BTW what happened to the “meaningful correlations drawn between directly and/or indirectly perceptible things” in the case of “Jack does not believe ‘a broken clock is working’” and why are we talking “Jack does not believe ‘a broken clock is working’” instead of “Jack believes that a clock is working”?! — neomac

However, we seem to be having difficulty focusing upon what I think is of importance. That's on me. — creativesoul

False belief cannot be true.

But it could have been true — neomac


Well, here is one place that our respective positions diverge. — creativesoul

• You wrote: “It is not contradictory at all, not in least little bit, to believe that broken clocks are working while doing so. so. The reason why is simple:when believing such things we do not knowingly do so! We are unaware of the fact that we believe what a broken clock says when we do. We cannot knowingly do so.” So the problem was - according to your claim - that we are not aware of the contradiction, so it is not a contradiction.
• Even if you want to talk about the referents of a belief (according to your questionable understanding of propositional attitudes), then Jack believes that a broken clock is working, is linking together “clock”,”broken”,”working” within the same content of Jack’s belief, which is an impossible state of affairs as much as a squarish circle, b/c the working broken clock has contradictory properties while the state of affairs believed by Jack was epistemically possible and didn’t have contradictory properties.
• Not to mention the fact that your made-up convention based on the quotation marks is still de-facto a linguistic representation, only with a contradictory function b/c it plays the vicarious role of the state of affairs but in this case it can not be true/false in any sense since state of affairs are not the kind of things that can be true or false, but at the same time it must be true or false, otherwise you could not claim that is more accurate than my belief ascription.

• By our common understanding of belief ascriptions, “Jack believes that a clock is working” may be true or false, but “Jack believes that a broken clock is working” is attributing to Jack a false belief b/c it is attributing to him a contradictory belief (“a broken clock is working” is a contradiction!), which also implies that this belief would be always false in any context (while merely false beliefs are not always false in any context). The point is that we do not take “Jack believes that a broken clock is working” to be an accurate description of Jack’s merely false belief b/c a false belief should not be equated to a contradictory belief. While you, on the other side, seemed to claim that “Jack believes that a broken clock is working” is not attributing to Jack a contradictory belief, but then I don’t know what else would make apparent that Jack’s belief “a broken clock is working” is false, as you claim.
• To repeat the point I already made, I don’t take “Jack believes that a clock is working” as an accurate belief ascription of Jack’s belief in your example. What I would take to be an accurate belief ascription in your example is more something like “Jack believes that clock is working” since belief ascriptions need to be taken in the context. It’s true that “that clock is working” implies “a clock is working”, but what explains Jack’s behavior in the given context is not the belief that a clock is working instead it’s the belief that that clock is working. If I used the example “Jack believes that a clock is working” is just to contrast it with “Jack believes that a broken clock is working”, remark that while the former may report Jack’s merely false belief the latter would report a contradictory belief, and therefore conclude that the latter is inaccurate b/c false beliefs are not to be equated to contradictory beliefs.
• By our common understanding, belief ascriptions are not required to deal with beliefs’ truth-value or knowledge assessments. On the contrary, truth-value/knowledge assessments presuppose belief ascriptions, and our reports are designed to express this accordingly, with statements like “Jack believes mistakenly that clock is working” or “Jack believes that a clock that ex hypothesi CreativeSoul believes broken, is working”. Truth/knowledge assessments of a given belief are a distinct task wrt to belief ascription, and a task that presupposes belief ascription.

You also seem to want to say that I am somehow attributing a self-contradictory belief to Jack, but I've yet to see you explain how I have done so. Thus far it's been gratuitously asserted along with other charges as well. That said, granted, going by the standards you're working from and one absolute presupposition they rest upon, it would be contradictory to say that anyone believed that broken clock was working. However, if we acknowledge the fact that we can and do hold belief that we are unaware of holding at the time of holding it, it is not at all contradictory to believe that a broken clock is working. — creativesoul

Pls focus: “a broken clock is working” is a contradiction (!!!). — neomac

While believing that a broken clock is working is not.
It's the difference between understanding that believing a broken clock is working is not the same as believing "a broken clock is working".
The latter is how those who hold all belief as propositional attitude would render Jack's belief that a broken clock is working. Not all belief can be successfully rendered as such. — creativesoul

• I’m here in the first place to discuss about your debate with Banno as the main post title is suggesting.
• My main motivation is simply and only my own fun as long as the “philosophical game” we are playing here is challenging to me (based on lots of factors: analysis sharpness, definitional/argumentative clarity, internal theoretical coherence, logic rigor, argumentative originality, honest effort in avoiding sophistry, etc.).
• You are my direct interlocutor in this exchange right but whatever answer I’m giving to you is aiming at a more general audience (whoever is following or might follow our exchange, and find my arguments at least, as interesting as yours, if nor more)
• “My accounting practices” are the common ones, you are the one who wants to reform them. So I’m not personally invested in this exchange as much as you should be.
• I gave up on the idea of convincing people of their own philosophical mistakes ages ago, b/c most of philosophical debates I engaged in or witnessed almost never ended up in a change of philosophical convictions, but at best in an open ended reciprocal challenge. So I take the objective of convincing you as improbable from the start, but also of little interest.
• Concerning my effort of unpacking my ideas, you shouldn’t complain too much, given that you drafted at best only the necessary conditions of the notion "belief", while I drafted necessary and sufficient conditions.

• The claim that “Jack believes that a broken clock is working” is not accurate, is not directly linked to my specific understanding of belief.
• The claim that your argument “Can Jack look at a broken clock? Surely. Can Jack believe what the clock says? Surely. Why then, can he not believe that a broken clock is working?” Is a preposterous example of propositional calculus, is not directly linked to my specific understanding of belief.
• The claim that Jack believes that a broken clock is working is attributing to Jack a contradictory belief, is not directly linked to my specific understanding of belief.
• The claim that belief ascription I can not be based on unaccounted knowledge claims, b/c knowledge ascriptions are based on belief ascriptions, is not directly linked to my specific understanding of belief.
• The claim that belief can not be reduced to “drawing meaningful correlations”, is not directly linked to my specific understanding of belief.

• Sententialism is but one way of understanding belief as propositional attitude. So at best you questioned one specific way of understanding belief as a propositional attitude.
• For Russell and Frege, “S believes that p” (without quotation marks around p) is a propositional attitude. And “S believes that ‘p’” (with quotation marks around p) is not an analysis of “S believes that p” (without quotation marks around p). But probably there are implications between the two statements. For that reason, your idea that “S believes that p” (without quotation marks around p) does not render a propositional attitude while “S believes that ‘p’” (with quotation marks around p) renders a propositional attitude, is quite incomprehensible wrt to authors I’m more familiar with.

Show me again, because thus far you've changed Jack's belief in your translation. — creativesoul

You're the one who has issue with the fact that we do sometimes believe that broken clocks are working. — creativesoul

While believing that a broken clock is working is not.
It's the difference between understanding that believing a broken clock is working is not the same as believing "a broken clock is working".
The latter is how those who hold all belief as propositional attitude would render Jack's belief that a broken clock is working. Not all belief can be successfully rendered as such. — creativesoul

• Does believing a clock is working (without quotation marks) have the same truth conditions of believing “a clock is working” (with quotation marks)? If they differ, what is the difference?
• If “a clock is working” is true, does this imply that “Jack’s believes that a clock is working” is true? If not, why not?
• Take the statement “Jack believes that a broken clock is working” and the statement “a broken clock is working”, do they share the same content? If they differ, what is the difference?

What exactly are you attributing/ascribing to another when you say that they believe something? — creativesoul

We can set all the other stuff aside for now and focus upon what counts as belief. — creativesoul

Have you never believed a clock that was not telling the right time? — creativesoul

• In my comment, I contrasted P’s belief prospective at t1 with both Q’s belief prospective at t1 and P’s belief prospective at t2 (when she understood her belief at t1 to be wrong). And I said our report is accurate when it matches P’s belief prospective at time t1. In your comment, you start denying the need for that match in case of Q’s belief ascription, and then conclude with claiming that my standard is satisfied in the case of P’s belief prospective at t2. These claims are, at least, twice contradictory: first, it seems you are distinguishing 2 cases (belief ascription by Q at t1, and belief ascription by P at t2) even though there is no such difference with respect to what is ascribed to P at time t1 in both 2 cases, according to your belief ascription report (at t1, P believes that a broken clock is working, for both Q at t1 and P at t2). Secondly, since for me there is no difference in belief ascription failure between Q at t1 and P at t2, then you are not satisfying my standard, b/c at least in case of Q at t1 - you claim - there is no need for matching. Not to mention the fact that even the belief ascription by P at t2 is not satisfying my standard either, as I intend it: P at t2 is not offering any accurate report of P at t1 if she used your belief ascription report.
• My reformulation was aiming at rescuing your proposal also from the line of reasoning you just drafted, which I find simply catastrophic, even if we forget the aforementioned objections. Why? Because “accuracy” as an intrinsic fitness-condition of beliefs is what grounds our expectations about our honest reports, like the expectation that a factual report about facts at time t1 should match them, and the expectation that a belief ascription to P at time t1 should match the belief prospective of P at time t1 (i.e. the way P would express her belief at time t1). While what you are trying to do is to blend the 2 distinct expectations in a belief ascription that matches neither the prospective of the believer nor the relevant facts: a broken clock is working is neither a fact nor the perspective of P at time t1, just a blend of what you take to be a correct description of the relevant facts ("the broken clock") with P’s perspective (“is working”). The utmost preposterous consequence of your approach is that all false beliefs are equated to contradictory beliefs (since, the belief ascription subordinate clause "a broken clock is working" is a contradiction). This amounts to a categorical confusion between epistemology and logic: a false belief is not a contradictory belief (!!!), since a contradictory belief is always false, while a false belief could have been true, and this depends on the relevant facts not on its internal logic. Indeed this would also make the believers look always irrational, when they could have been simply ignorant about the relevant facts.
• Why would you do such a catastrophic move? My impression is that you are misled, by your unaccounted knowledge claims (“we find ourselves discussing another's belief that they themselves do not know that they have”), into thinking that belief report accuracy is based on knowledge (track knowledge or lack thereof). This is wrong for 2 reasons: 1. belief ascriptions by S are themselves beliefs and do not warrant S’s knowledge of the relevant facts, nor need for such a warrant 2. knowledge ascriptions about P presuppose belief ascriptions about P (and not the other way around). In other words, a theory of belief ascription can not settle issues about belief and belief ascription by presupposing knowledge, b/c knowledge presupposes belief, therefore accurate belief reports should be understood in terms of intrinsic fitness-condition of belief, not in terms of extrinsic fitness-condition of belief (as knowledge is).

It seems that I am the only one around here who finds the bottom set to be more accurate and/or acceptable than the first. — creativesoul

but only after you learned that is what the scribbles are labeled as. I've been using the term scribble, not word, because they are scribbles without rules and words when rules are applied to scribbles. — Harry Hindu

Isn't it a seven of diamonds regardless of what card game that we are playing? We don't even need a game to define the image as a seven of diamonds, because we have rules about what scribble refers to which shapes (diamonds, spades, hearts, or clubs). — Harry Hindu

By definition, a broken clock doesn't work, so your proposition makes no sense. — Olivier5

• It can be misleading to claim that I’m “railing against propositional calculus”. I’m more precisely railing about the propositional calculus you applied to belief ascription rendering in order to justify the claim that “Jack believes that broken clock is working” is not only fine independently from any pragmatic and contextual considerations, but even better than the de dicto rendering “Jack believes that clock is working”.
• I didn’t make the claim you denounce here “your unknowingly objecting based upon the fact that Jack would not assent to his own belief if it were put into propositional form and he was asked if he believed the statement.” (ironically, you were the one repeatedly suggesting me to stick to what you write), nor my line of reasoning requires the claim “Jack would not assent to his own belief if it were put into propositional form and he was asked if he believed the statement. At least, not while he still believed it.” to be true, independently from pragmatic and contextual considerations (see the way out I suggested you previously).