Clarification question: Are "Belief X causes action A," and "Instinct causes action A," two mutually exclusive propositions?

I'm asking because different definitions of words lead to different slots in a causal explanation: under some definitions "belief" and "instinct" can occupy the same slot.

I have this little narrative in my head:

A: I'm hungry. There's an apple on the table. I eat the apple. I'm no longer hungry.

B: I'm hungry. There's something on the table that looks edible, but I'm unsure. I either choose to take a risk, or I form an ad-hoc belief that surely this is edible (to avoid paralysation from anxiety).

But that would result in it's own definition that has something to do with the bracketing of risk. You might - under such a scenario - model belief as the deciding factor in a battle of basic emtions (e.g. fear of starving vs. fear of poison). It's not that you think A or B is true: if you're completely honest you have no idea. You've just decided to chose A over B, because inaction is disastrous either way and psychologically unable to face the risk head-on. Belief mitigates the risk of inaction and drives you to act. (In a slightly different take, the ability to form believes might keep Burridan's Ass from starving.)

If you think that blief is something more basic, though, this won't work - for example, what decides which "belief" you form? The belief that what you see is nutritious? The belief that what you see is poisonous? Certain learned cognitive preconditions might come into it (in addition to the relative strength of the respective fears), and you might want to call those part of "belief". But in that case, they wouldn't be just "propositional attitudes".

Am I making any sense?

Well, there is a problem here.

"X is hungry" restricts X to objects that can have the attribute hungry. This includes both humans and dogs. This isn't controversial.

But if we then ask why being hungry leads to eating certain things and not others, we look for explanatory principles. What motivates us turn towards "belief" when we talk about humans, but "instinct" when we talk about dogs?

There are quite complex discussions on that with regards to leaning and coming equipped with the knowledge; it's not the details that matter here. Rather: for our purposes,what we're doing is to position "belief" and "instinct" as rival explanations. So what is the relationship? If "hunger" is roughly the same humans and dogs, why would the underpinnings for eating be so very different?

That is: can we assume belief in human actions, when the behaviour is learned, automatic, uncontroversial, and usually not formulated? My default assumption is that when chosing what to eat, we're not that different from dogs, where it doesn't actually matter whether we had to learn what is "good to eat" or came equipped with it.

I think guessing at beliefs from behaviour, we might actually be overextending the reference for "belief". Or differently put, I'd probably reverse this: "I am hungry. I believe eating X will satiate my hunger. Therefor I eat X." to "I usually eat X to satiate my hunger. Therefore I believe X satiates my hunger."

What makes us do things? Instinct, habit, etc. Belief is a factor, but usually only when we actually contemplate our actions. My hunch is that the belief gets activated only when someone or something casts doubt on the things "we usually do". (Under quotes because I consider thought-habits a form of doing, and I'm not quite sure of the range of referential objects I'd associate with that.)

This would also solve the question of taste, here: if you set an apple and a banana before me when I'm hungry, I'll always go for the apple, because I don't like bananas. No belief comes into it, but there's no significant thought going into that decision either. If you replace the banana with a brick, my mind's not going to be busy thinking "Well, I'll have trouble digesting the brick, so I go for the apple." My mind's going to be busy questioning your motives for offering me a brick. Is this a Monty Python's skit? If I take human agency out of the equation, I'll just ignore the brick completely and take the apple. Basically, my semantic register doesn't tag the brick as food, and doesn't tag the banana as "good", and there's a decision hierarchy in place that makes me pick the apple. Belief might come into it with "brick vs. apple", while taste might come into with "banana vs. apple". But it's essentially the same process of elimination.

I think beliefs are attached to actions, and may sway decisions in the presence of doubt, but they don't motivate decisions. I think it makes more sense to place "belief" into a sort of feedback-control system rather than a motivating system.

Whether or not it's a category error to place "instinct" and "belief" as rival explanations for action depends a lot on how we define things. But my default reaction is to treat it as a category error. In simple terms: I don't think "belief" is something as basic as "instinct"; they operate on different levels.

Maybe I should stay out of this thread, because I've never read Descartes myself, but here's a reply based on what I've read about this:

• Thinking isn't the basis of your existence. It's the only thing you can't doubt (and that makes sense to me, since doubting is also a form of thinking: if you don't think you don't doubt, and there's no problem left to discuss - not that that's any sort of argument; it's just a good place to stop.)
  
• You don't prove that you're thinking, you just intuit it. And unlike many other things you intuit, you can't doubt it away. (If you can, I'm immensly curious to learn how.)
  
• It doesn't matter whether or not anyone controls your thinking. If you're not thinking there's nothing to control. I always sort of assumed this was about direct experience, and about thought in particular because radically doubting things is a thought process.

Again, this comes from someone who's never read Descartes, so take this post in accordingly.

Under these definitions: do I have to understand the proposition "God exists," to be an agnostic? Or differently put, is not understanding the proposition "God exists," sufficient to make me an agnostic? Is the difference between not understanding a proposition, and understanding a proposition but believing it to be undecided (or undecidable) relevant?

When faced with a proposition, how do I find out what it is that I blieve? If I believe that two contradictory propositions are true, but I am unaware of the contradiction - do I hold at least one mistaken belief or am I wrong about at least one of my beliefs? Is this meaningful distinction in the first place?

— Banno

• A belief is a relation between an individual and a proposition.
• The individual must understand the meaning of the proposition in order to correctly be said to believe that proposition.
• The individual thinks the proposition is true.

Given this formulation, how would you distinguish a belief from a working hypothesis?

For example, I'm an atheist. I intuitively reject the proposition "God exists," and so it's not that hard to maneuvre me into situations where I commit myself to saying "God does not exist," is true. Is this already a belief, or is it a clue that I hold a belief that is incompatible with the proposition "God exists?" and it is politically expedient to claim that I believe "God does not exist."

Am I rejecting the proposition "God exists," without commiting to its negative? Is what I'm really rejecting the relevance of the proposition, rather than it's truth value? That is, I don't care and don't want to spend the time to figure out what I believe?

"God does not exist," works well enough for me as a working hypothesis: I act as if God does not exist. But acting as if God does not exist is not the same thing as believing that God does not exist. Imagine that theists don't exist. Obviously, I would not have to be an atheist. In many cases I would act the same as I am now, but in situations where the theism/atheism divide is relevan, I do act differently. A working hypothesis like "God does not exist" is only of use, because theists exist (I'm not motivated to invent theism just to deny its existance).

If we define "belief" as a propositional attitude, I have a problem, here: I wouldn't be able to hold an intuitive belief that I find to express in words, but that's pretty much what I experience. I'm uncertain about a lot of things, and that I react more vehemently against theism than say materialism is at least partly down to a defense mechanism against perceived social control. If it's possible to figure out intuitively held beliefs by making propositions and observing your reactions towards them, then beliefs must precede propositions in some way - that is rather than a belief being an attitude towards a proposition, a belief would have to be something more foundational - something that gives rise to your attitudes to propositions.

I find "belief" harder to define that way, but it addresses a second problem I have, here: namely that you have to understand a proposition to believe in it. Intuitively, I don't think so. You can believe that a proposition is true, because you trust the person who utters it. Now, you can easily rephrase things to make it fit: for example:

I do not understand propisition A.

I understand the proposition "Person B understands propostion A," and think it is true.

I understand the proposition "Person B thinks proposition A is true," and think its true.

With these addtions, I could believe a lot of things to be true without understanding them. All I need to do is "trust an expert".

But I think if I do this something gets lost. I have an ill-thought-through hunch that we generalise "trusting experts" from childhood on (the first probably being our parents), so that there's always some sort of social component already included. That is: "belief" may be a mechanism to restrict doubt, so that we don't find ourselves eternally unable to make decisions.

In other words, maybe by judging "propositions" we tag as "important" we're really picking our team; maybe "beliefs" are prepositional predispositions rather than attitudes? The likelihood to respond to a certain preposition either favourably or disfavourably? That way, you wouldn't form an ad-hoc belief everytime you say "that's hogwash!"

I apologise if this doesn't make much sense. It's just that if I see my shoe laces come untied I bend down and tie them. If someone were to formulate that in propositions, like "Your shoulaces are untied" (fact: true/false), "You should tie them," (value judgement: true/false) I can have attitudes to those propositions, but I have a hard time to consider them beliefs just on the ground that they've been formulated. However, when you formulate those propositions beliefs do come into play. So I sort of think that beliefs are pre-linguistic and valuable even if not (fully?) understood.

(I've actually considered that we substitute understanding for belief - that is, we ignore things we don't quite understand in order to contain doubt enough to render us capable of decisions - people with a greater tolerance for doubt would need less belief [tautology?], and we would be predisposed to defend our beliefs because losing them would render us incapable of decisions. The tolerance for doubt might differ not only by person but also by topic. But all that's even more tentative than the rest of my post.).

True, you can rephrase this in many ways. What I'm addressing is the connection between syntax and self-reference that TheMadFool is trying to establisch here:



See Number 3.

The difference between your example and the single-sentence versions lies in the type of reference, I think.

Your example is endophoric (1. is cataphoric and 2. is anaophoric). The single-sentece versions are exophoric: you reference an object in the real world, which just so happens to be the sentence in question. I'm not sure any of this makes a difference, but if it does, that would be *very* interesting, though.

I'll accept that because ''this'' may be defined to self-refer. — TheMadFool

You can rephrase the liar sentence:

"The sentence I am uttering right now is false."

"What I'm in the process of saying right now is false."

What matters is that the subject of the sentence refers to the sentence it occurs in. No single component of the sentence need be self-referiatial by itself for that to happen.

I don't understand why you want to define "this" to self-refer.

But, ''this'' isn't like ''I''. If we stay true to the definition of the word then ''this'' doesn't apply to itself and it should for the liar paradox to be one.

Of course we could invent a self-referential word e.g. ''thes'' and define it as such and the paradox would appear.

If one were to be as exact as possible the definition of ''this'' doesn't include self-reference. It is grammatically incorrect (I'm not a linguistic expert).

However, people do use ''this'' as you have (''this Australian needs a bath'' :D) but note that such forms of language are classified as referring to oneself in the third person. It isn't completely an instance of self-reference. People would find it odd to hear someone refer to himself in the third person.

So, I still think the liar sentence is grammatically incorrect.

However, as I mentioned above we could invent a self-referential word like ''thes'' and the liar paradox still is a problem. — TheMadFool

"This sentence is false," is only self-referential on the sentence level. "This" on its own refers to nothing at all; it's a determiner in the noun-phrase "This sentence", and that nounphrase is also not self-referential (It can't be because a noun-phrase can't be the referent for "this sentence").

Finally, the syntax can only tell you that "this sentence" refers to a sentence that the speaker indicates. The sentence is not inherently self-referential. You could point to any other false sentence while saying this. There's nothing in the syntax, though, that prevents you from picking the sentence the nounphrase occurs in, making that sentence (but not the nounpharse itself, much less "this" alone) self-referential. The liar sentence is perfrectly grammatical, and the syntax is pretty much irrelevant, except that it allows the sentence to have a self-referential interpretation.

Formally, "This sentence is false," is self-referential under the liar-interpretation because the sentence's subject refers to the sentence it is a subject of. To be able to do this, the subject cannot refer to itself (and thus be self-referential on its own).

The liar sentence is perfectly grammatical.