1. If there is no grass, how can I have a belief “about the grass”? What would such a belief be about? — Srap Tasmaner

Whatever it is I'm modelling as 'the grass'. My model, in this scenario, turns out to be so bad that there isn't even anything other people are also attempting to model as grass, I'm on my own, so I scrap that model and start again.

Imagine we're looking at the stars. I point out Orion and say "look, there's his belt, there's his bow" etc. You can either say "yes, I see, that would be his dagger then..." or you could say "nope, I'm seeing a dog, look, there's his teeth". If everyone in your language community is seeing Orion, you might want to scrap your dog idea. Equally, if, you keep looking and find all sorts on non-dog stars, you might ditch your dog idea.

The thing we're attempting to refer to is the hidden states (like the pattern in the stars). 'The grass' is the model (like Orion).

"Orion has a dagger" is true if I can look at Orion and see his dagger (and any other test I can think of). "Orion has a dagger" is false if I look at Orion and can't see any dagger (nor any other test I can think of). But If I'm thinking the whole thing is a dog, then there is no Orion at all.

But the stars were always there either way.

2. If I am referring not to the grass but to my belief, then am I predicating, of my belief not the grass, that it is green? My beliefs can be green? — Srap Tasmaner

I wouldn't say you're referring to the belief (in the sense of some arrangement of neurons or mental state), rather the content of it. I can ask you to imagine a car, and then ask you what colour it is, no? There's no actual car, only your mental state in which you picture one. Yet there's still a coherent answer to the question "what colour is it?" The modelling process does not need to be triggered by external sense data.

That the grass is not green, is the case when, for instance, it’s brown. — Srap Tasmaner

What exactly. You look at the grass and find it doesn't seem green? Someone tells you the grass isn't green?

What I'm asking here is, in your mind, what does a true statement seem like. What distinguishes it, in your mind, from a false one? What is it about "I am the President of the United Sates" that feels different to "Joe Biden is President of the United States", why exactly would you say one is true and the other isn't? What mental resources would you engage to supply the right answer?

Meanwhile we have a pandemic to deal with — jorndoe

Yes, we do. We also have a malaria crisis to deal with, an obesity crisis, an opioid crisis, an AIDS crisis, a poverty crisis, a TB crisis, a diarrhoea crisis, a child labour crisis...

The death rates now are no different to those a few years ago. There's nothing world-shattering about Covid, it's just one more in the long list of killers. It's just one that has a newly patentable drug to peddle as the only solution.

Virtually all of the WHO's top interventions to save lives globally and nationally are more cost effective than the $300,000 per QALY invested in the Covid response. More than most medical treatments, more than almost all mooted interventions in the developing world. So, if not corporate intervention. You tell me why the governments have decided to save the covid-threatened at almost seven times the cost they were previously willing to spend on the poor, the starving and the sick.

Then goes on to cite the pharmaceutical companies. :lol:

I think you missed the point. — Xtrix

You said...

we're losing the battle of education, knowledge, facts, information, communication, etc. — Xtrix

...then said...

Our powerful corporate and political (but I repeat myself) masters, through their ownership and control of media and their infiltration of the education system, have really done a number on the populace. — Xtrix

Since the most powerful group in that list are the pharmaceutical companies themselves, who are pushing the pro-vaccine agenda. So it's hard to see how you're blaming them for ignorance (wherein I assume - perhaps wrongly - you're referring to anti-vaccine sentiment)

Basically, if we're making irrational choices about vaccines and you're blaming that on corporations then you're either saying that it's supporting the vaccine that is irrational (which I merely assumed you weren't from our previous exchange), or that the corporations have been encouraging us to reject the vaccine (which is clearly nonsense). Or, I suppose a third option that the corporations have been persuading us to take the vaccine but it's backfired and caused us to reject it, which is one of the issues I've been arguing all along.

Alternatively, I have indeed missed your point entirely - in which case perhaps you could make it slightly less opaque.

When 20 or 30 percent — being conservative — refuse vaccination, I’d say that’s become a major player, yeah. — Xtrix

But this argument is completely circular. The idea that 20-30% of people's failing to take the vaccine is problematic is something you've repeated because it's been told to you by government agencies and media. The organisations you've just admitted are rife with corruption and corporate influence. You can't say that the corporations are right on this occasion because of the data the corporations have just given you showing how right they are.

If, on the one hand you're going to say...

Corporate media and social media (but I repeat myself) are leading more and more people into conspiracies and bogus beliefs and into silos. That is clear. — Xtrix

... you can't then use the information you've acquired from the very sources you've just accused of misleading, to argue that they're not (on this occasion) misleading. We have one source of data on Covid spread and extent - government data. We have one dominant source of data on the vaccine efficacy - pharmaceutical company (and corporate sponsored) studies. If you'd want to say that those organisations can't be trusted (and you'd be right) then you've no ground at all to make strong claims about the nature of the pandemic or it's efficacious treatment. The data you're basing such assessments on comes from the very organisations you've just indicted in leading us astray.

1. There are facts, independent of beliefs and statements — Michael

Yes.

2. If the facts are as we believe them to be then our beliefs are true, otherwise they're false — Michael

According to us, yes. Despite anyone's protestations to the contrary, I don't see it as possible to genuinely conceive of a notion of 'true' that is not simply the same as 'well justified'. When I imagine some proposition being 'true', all I have is the idea of a proposition which survives any interrogation of it. But that's the same as 'justified'.

"I went out to look and saw that the grass was green", is a justification.

"I checked with my spectrometer and it said the grass was green", is another justification.

"The grass is green" being true, just means that it will survive all such interrogations ie, it is maximally justified. There's nothing more to a thing being 'true' than this, for me.

If I'm missing something, then perhaps you could put it into words for me. Imagine "the grass is green" is false, then imagine it's true. Describe the difference between the two states you're imagining.

Corporations gather round the things we need. — frank

Neoliberal bullshit. Corporations generate demand for their products. Why the fuck else do you think they spend billions on lobbying, advertising, sponsorship and sales? They sure as hell don't just wait around for a need to organically arise out of the grateful community.

What does this have to do with whether people should get vaccinated? — frank

Really? Just read back over literally any section of this interminable thread. It's not about whether any individual should take the vaccine. It's about whether government (and indeed society's) policy should be to throw everything it's got at one single aspect of the solution (the one that makes their primary sponsers richer), rather than focus on those areas where their attention yields most benefits. Just putting the same effort into clean water supplies or malaria nets could have saved twice the lives for half the cost.

Question. Do you think we'd have made greater advances in modern medicine if it were a) nationalised, b) more heavily regulated, or c) less heavily regulated?

If you answered (a) or (b) then you admit that medical advances have happened despite the profiteering of the pharmaceuticals, not because of it. If you ananswered (c), then this conversation's over. I just can't take you seriously.

Opioids make life saving surgery possible. Modern medicine is among the greatest accomplishments of the species and you think a few cases of abuse make it entirely evil. That's ridiculous. — frank

I haven't even mentioned modern medicine. My comments were about the pharmaceutical industry, if you're only referring to the medicines, then I'm not sure what your point is.

As if modern medicine has an evil agenda. — frank

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/opioids

The point is, the corporate interest driving government, media and scientific responses is overwhelmingly pro-vaccine. There's not a single major corporate player with an anti-vaccine agenda, and one of the largest, most powerful industries in the world is the main beneficiary.

So either the corporate agenda just happens on this rare occasion to be a good one (tragically failing to defeat the forces of ignorance), or the corporate agenda is responsible for the failure to defeat this crisis.

Either way, the idea that the anti-vax movement is the major player here, overwhelming a spirited defence by those plucky underdogs - the US government and the pharmaceutical industry - is laughable.

Our powerful corporate and political (but I repeat myself) masters, through their ownership and control of media and their infiltration of the education system, have really done a number on the populace. — Xtrix

Bullshit.

Largest lobbying power over governments - Pharmaceuticals https://www.investopedia.com/investing/which-industry-spends-most-lobbying-antm-so/

Largest control over mainstream media- Pharmaceuticals https://trofire.com/2017/04/11/big-pharma-owns-corporate-media-americans-waking-fighting-back/

Media coverage has actually overall become more pro-vaccine during the pandemic - https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.07.21266018v1

Largest funding control over medical science - Pharmaceuticals https://www.bmj.com/content/348/bmj.g3058.long

Influence over government regulators - Pharmaceuticals https://www.science.org/content/article/fda-s-revolving-door-companies-often-hire-agency-staffers-who-managed-their-successful

Best performing hedge fund in the world's favoured investment - Pharmaceuticals https://portfolio-adviser.com/will-baillie-giffords-big-bet-on-moderna-pay-off/

But apparently it's not the influence of the multi-billion dollar corporation in every aspect of government, media, science and investment you're concerned about. No. It's the influence of some right-wing nutjobs and a few yoga loving health freaks. Yes. I can hear Wall Street quaking in its boots right now at the prospect of the shocking influence Proud Boys have over some corner of Farcebook. How will they ever cope?

The "perception" dispute is not like that. It's instead a disagreement over how the term is defined. — Andrew M

I think that's a gross deflation of all the work that neuroscience has done on this. Most of the neuroscientists I've spoken to or listened to consider themselves to be investigating the matter of what perception is as a scientific investigation, not one in philology.

Because the "veil of perception" model takes the ordinary term "image" (or "veil", or "representation") which is defined in terms of perceptible objects and then defines "perception" in terms of images (or veils or representations), which is circular. Also see the example below. — Andrew M

I don't see any of the works on active inference, or neural modelling using the terms that clumsily.

That is, this red flower here is the intended object of my perception. — Andrew M

I agree with this. It's the 'realism' bit. The object we're all trying (with our modelling processes and our social interaction) to react to is the red flower, out in the world. I don't see how it being the object of our intention somehow removes the 'veil' between us and it.

If I'm mistaken about what is there (because, like the above instrument's operation, things can sometimes go awry) then I haven't perceived anything. — Andrew M

This just doesn't seem to make sense. You're saying that any time we're mistaken about the properties of the object we've instead perceived nothing? If I perceive a flower, but in my mind it had red petals (I only briefly glanced at it). I return to it for a closer look and find I had merely assumed the petals were red - expectation bias - they were, quite clearly pink). Now I have to admit that I perceived nothing at all? I've got some bad news for you - literally all of our perception involves such assumptions in place of actual signals from the object. So you've never perceived anything in your whole life.

I'm working on what is involved in the intentionalist approach. It fits with Wittgenstein via Anscombe, and seems compatible with your comments about neuroscience, but there are some issues I'd like to clear up before committing to something like it. — Banno

Cool. I look forward to reading your thoughts (should you commit them to writing here at any time). It sounds like a really interesting approach.

Thanks. I appreciate the exhaustive summary, it's made things clearer in terms of why there's such lot of confusion (on my part) about the various terms being bandied about. I think maybe just 'realist' is safest.

Now I think I understand just where your confusion is. — Janus

Last I checked, you and I were at least epistemic peers. If you're only here to find out where (not if) I'm confused, then this conversation's not for me. If I wanted to check where my understanding of JTB was confused on this matter, I'd return to the text, or just ask someone in the Philosophy department.

So, justified belief is not enough to constitute knowledge because the belief must be true. When people thought the world was a flat disc that was not knowledge because it was subsequently discovered that the world is (roughly) a sphere. — Janus

They subsequently came to believe it's a sphere. They could still be wrong. They believe it to be a sphere using exactly the same fundamental process those who believed it to be flat used - justification. We've not gained some magic additional access. We just have much, much better justifications than the flat-earthers had.

It may seem for all the world to be justified according to our experience, but does it follow from that that it is is in fact justified?. Perhaps the JTB formula could be modified to become 'knowledge consists in truly justified belief' which incorporates the 'justified' and the 'true' such that it follows that any belief which is not true is not justified and any belief which is not justified cannot be true. — Janus

Then we'd be in no better boat. No-one would use the word knowledge because everyone would be quite aware that they could not demonstrate their belief was 'truly' justified. Since we do use the word knowledge, it must be some other threshold that we mean by it.

None of this changes the fact that we can never be absolutely sure we possess knowledge. I think the idea of dropping the 'true' part is fine if you are also happy with dropping the 'knowledge' part. Then we would never claim to have knowledge at all, but merely beliefs which seem more or less justified, or not justified at all, depending on what we take to be the criteria for saying what constitutes evidence. — Janus

How odd. You're so wedded to a particular definition that you'd rather we just never use the word than admit that since we do use the word, the definition must be wrong. Is that how you see the rest of language working. Some philosophers decide what the definition really is and and if we're not using it right then we don't get to use the word at all, they'll just take their ball home if we're not going to play by their rules?

Where have I asserted that the actual weather is a belief? — Isaac

Here:

I'm saying that the 'actual weather' you're referring to is inside your skull ie what you claim is the 'actual weather' in that sentence is, in fact, a belief about it inside your skull. — Isaac

You were very explicit not only in saying this, but in specifically saying that you were saying it.

The underlined is exactly the claim I'm making. — InPitzotl

...and yet despite my being so explicit you've taken no notice of the underlined as indicated. I don't really know there's much more I can do, I'll try one more time...

I'm saying that the 'actual weather' you're referring to is inside your skull ie what you claim is the 'actual weather' in that sentence is, in fact, a belief about it inside your skull. — Isaac

Look at the writing in bold...

...or alternatively, continue flogging the notion thatI do actually believe the weather is just a belief, but am now denying it out of, what? Capriciousness. No reason at all? Honestly, if you think that little of your interlocutors then I can't honestly see what interest you'd get out of continuing to engage with them.

The prerequisite need not be believed for the claim to be true — InPitzotl

Maybe not. I'm not sure what that's got to do with my argument. You'll have to make clear the connection.

Big "if". — InPitzotl

Not really, it seems irrefutable. Perhaps you could explain why you see it as so 'big'.

Even if I presume the flower exists, that does not compel you to agree it exists. — InPitzotl

No indeed not. Again, whsg this fscg has to do with my argument remains opaque.

No, the assumption is a prerequisite. It might be a belief; it's probably typically a belief (at least in the case of standalone claims); but the belief is optional for aboutness. — InPitzotl

Granted. The proposition might sometimes be about an imagined object. I'm not seeing how that helps your case.

We must find out what the T is through J. — InPitzotl

Which is exactly, and only, what I'm arguing. T is just more J, not something different.

If someone wants to verify the T that it's green, whether or not that someone is Joe, before or after Joe knows it, they can test it by looking at said grass; on passing said test they have attained J that the grass is green. The test may also fail, in which case they (again, possibly being Joe) attain J that the grass is not green. — InPitzotl

All of which talks about J. The question is about T.

The statement is about a part of the world meeting a condition. The part of the world should be specified somehow at the time of the statement — InPitzotl

But I'm talking about expressions where it later turns out that that part of the world doesn't exist - the flower, the alien...

So "when pressed" and "admit" is just spin; narrative; dysphemism. The spin reflects your bias, which is severely interfering with your comprehension. — InPitzotl

Do you really want to open up psychological analysis as fair game in these discussions. It's literally what I do for a living. Quite happy to to a discussion about the possible psychological motivations for our positions, if that's what you're interested in, but I expect citations Otherwise we could just charitably assume each other to be genuine and relatively unbiased.

You've used spin, narrative, and dysphemism to reformulate this into a red herring argument about certainty. It is, in fact, a direct response to and refutation of your pet theory that the claim is about a belief. — InPitzotl

...or alternatively, it's the conclusion that seems to make most sense to me, as yours is to you...

Again, if you're going to treat your interlocutors with such condescending disrespect, I really don't know why you'd bother engaging at all.

it is a test whose results are measured by observations, not beliefs. — InPitzotl

OK, so there's some aspect of neuroscience that I've missed because everything I've been studying for the last decade or so absolutely necessitate that observations form beliefs in order to be used for judgements. There's no neural network I know of that directly connects the early regions of the visual cortex with the frontal lobe. Can you explain the route an observation takes to the formation of a judgement without passing through the stage where a belief is formed?

now you’re trying to say that truth and being wrong have nothing to do with the facts or the actual weather? — Michael

No. Not 'nothing to do with', the actual weather is a major contributor to our beliefs about it, to which we then refer in our knowledge claims. That's not nothing.

A more straightforward position is that there are facts - like the actual weather - that are independent of what we believe or claim or experience. When the facts are as we experience them to be then our experience is veridical. When the facts are as we believe or claim them to be then what we believe or claim is true. — Michael

I agree with that position. It doesn't mention the meaning of our expressions.

yet everything you’re saying contradicts this. I don’t even understand what you’re arguing. — Michael

Seems an oxymoron.

Do you not see the incoherency here? — Michael

No, because of the error in attribution in...

...our beliefs have nothing to do with the facts... — Michael

...as mentioned above.

You can have a belief in the manner you describe that refers to your psychological concept of "future". But from a physical and causal perspective, your beliefs cannot refer to the physical future and can only refer to your physical history, making your beliefs a conceptually redundant way of talking about the causes of your perceptions, from a physical perspective. — sime

Yeah, I see what you're saying. I agree with the analysis, but not the conclusion.

When I say "the grass is green" I'm attempting to refer to the grass, I'm actually referring to my belief about the grass (there might be no grass, yet I still refer). The former is important for realism, the latter for meaning.

So when I say "I'll win the lottery tomorrow". It doesn't seem to be any different. I'm attempting to refer to the actual lottery, I'm actually referring to my belief about the actual lottery.

So I don't see how this leads to...

...implying that "belief states" are necessarily infallible or that the notion of truth is superfluous. — sime

Missed this...

A more straightforward question relating to the OP: Do you see a place for some notion like "qualia" in your work? — Banno

Frankly, none at all. When I was doing research, I studied the role of social construction in beliefs, toward the latter end of my academic career, I became interested in the social influences on perception, and got peripherally involved with some neuroscientists looking at the same problem (hence my interest here). At no point did we use 'qualia', the term was considered as archaic as 'phlogiston'. But, that's a very limited experience, I know many in the field do use it, although in my experience they do so primarily to communicate with others, rather than as a modelling commitment.

If I brought it up in my current work, I think I'd be shown the door.

Like the Snark there are many still hunting the quale, and good luck to them, but I've neither seen any compelling evidence it exists nor any reason to think it might.

I think I can believe those things and draw a direct realist conclusion from Friston's work. Direct in the sense of the contact in ( 8 ), rather than perceiving reality 'unfiltered'. I don't want to conclude that we 'perceive the objects of the external world as they are' from that, I want to conclude that the values of external states actually saturate the perception process. (Box 1 here). — fdrake

Yes, we're in agreement here. The hidden states have to form a part of the process. What's more, their properties have to be such that two people's models of them is at least in the same ballpark, we cannot possibly just 'make it all up' I don't see a way that a process which seems to mathematically match one aimed at reducing surprise could function in a state where no nodes were outside it's Markov boundary.

I've been lumping in sensory states with internal states and action states with external states. Hopefully that hasn't done too much damage to what I've said. — fdrake

No, not at all, but it's what I was getting at with my clumsy introduction of stochastic resonance. What's inside or outside any Markov blanket is not necessarily the same as indies or outside a skull. That's true of our sensory receptors (for whom their first 'inside' node os actually outside the body) and it's true for our internal models (which may have nodes outside their Markov boundary - my stochastic resonance example - but inside the brain)

I don't think it follows from what I said above that "I perceive the state of the external world exactly as it is", just that "I perceive the states of the external world (using some model process)" and "That modelling process is in direct contact with the external world". — fdrake

Yes. Completely agree. And if that's what 'direct' realism is, then you can sign me up, but if so, I'm left confused as to what 'indirect' realism could possibly be. Same for @Banno's use of the term. I don't think I've ever been clear on this.

Can you flesh out why from that it follows that we perceive mental images, memories, concepts etc? I don't see the connection. — fdrake

If I've said 'perceive' then I've messed up somewhere. My intention here is to give a model (only one among others) of what we talk about, act on, believe etc. I wouldn't (shouldn't have!) describe this as what we 'perceive' because perception is a process which involves parts of the brain which are outside of the Markov blanket for the models which produces the objects we talk about, act on and believe (in this model).

I'm probably labouring many of these points, but to get it clear;

We have a model which assumes there are hidden states causing our conscious states (those we log). I don't think we can do anything about this model and doubting it or pretending it's up for discussion is disingenuous - I think we all agree there.
We make further models that are guesses as to what those hidden states will do next. Guesses based on priors and sensory inputs.
Note (this is really important for understanding my position) it's not that we guess what they are, we're not interested at this stage in what they are, only what they'll do next of we prod them (or not).
We then check that model by looking again, fiddling with it (and sometime making it fit the model better), this being, as you say, a continuous process - guess, fiddle, re-guess
One of these checks is to interact with these hidden states in social environment (we could say to pick it up and throw it at some other hidden states - people)
For this particular test, we use a combination of object recognition and social meaning (things like the name for it, what we in our culture use it for, etc.). One could simplify this as saying "I'm currently modelling this thing as a 'cup', if that's right, I should be able to say 'pass me the cup' and it work, I should be able to pour tea into it and not have everyone look at me funny". The social function is one of the continual tests we use to update our models.

So I see the social world of objects as a kind of current mutual agreement about how we're going to treat hidden sates, kind of an insurance policy against hallucination, insanity, or just plain bad eyesight. It makes sense to have our models pretty close to those of the people around us we want to co-operate with so we include those people in our modelling process. Thing like language are part of that inclusions, which is why I tend to put word meanings within the top level modelling process, not outside of it (as the object of it).

I see "the grass is green" as meaning (from the perspective of our world-modelling mental processes) "if I say 'grass' do you look at the thin leaves sticking up there, and if is say 'is green' do you nod in assent or do you look at me confused". This is not to say that confirmatory behaviour is the only option, I might (as part of my surprise reduction process) try to get you to agree, or try to get you to change the grass so it fits my model better, but either way, I'm using the social interaction with the modelling process, not as an object of it and the 'word for it' is a token used in the social interaction, so also within the model, not the object of it.

I should stress though, that treating things this way is just a frame I find useful, not a claim to the way things are.

This seems to fit quite neatly into...

...the intentionalist approach to the problem of perception. intentionalist approaches draw on the intentional character of perception: seeing things as a cup or as a tree or as a person. — Banno

...have I got that right?

Indirect realist, right? — frank

I'm not sure I have the meaning of that term right. @fdrake and @Banno both seem willing to accept that our brain guesses, filters and modifies sensory data prior to the next step (whatever that might be), yet are 'direct' realists. I've described my position before as model-dependant realism, which is a term I heard some chap use in a lecture I attended, but I'm wary of these labels, they've come back to bite me before, people says "Oh, so you believe..." where I don't.

As I see it you are still conflating what is involved with taking ourselves to possess knowledge and what is involved with our actually possessing knowledge — Janus

'Knowledge' is just a word, it's not an external object with properties we discover by scientific investigation. Something 'actually' being knowledge (as opposed to us treating it as if it were) is a nonsense, it assumes that some external reality determines the sorts of things we call 'knowledge' and we can all be wrong about it. We invented the word 'knowledge', we decide what sorts of thing go into the category, it's our category. It's like you saying "actually we've all been using the word 'tree' wrong - we assume 'trees' are those tall woody plants, but actually they're a type of washing machine".

The sorts of things which are 'knowledge' are exactly the sorts of things we use the word 'knowledge' felicitously to describe. There's no God-given 'real' meaning behind that.

So to take ourselves to possess knowledge is to take our belief to be both true and justified — Janus

How exactly do we 'take' a belief to be true? This is the crux of the issue. We 'take' a belief to be true when we have sufficient justification to believe it. So all you've said is that we take ourselves to possess knowledge is to take our belief to be both justified and justified.

Correct according to the common understanding of knowledge; you know, like the legal "beyond reasonable doubt". — Janus

The legal "beyond reasonable doubt" is exactly what I'm claiming. You're adding 'true'.

Right, but what has your present psychological state of uncertainty, including your memories, imagination and thought experiments, got to do with a future interaction with your cupboard? — sime

Prediction of it.

Doesn't your self-professed ability to distinguish your beliefs from actuality preclude you from interpreting the objects of your beliefs as being in the future? — sime

I don't see how. You seem to be saying that I can't have a belief about the result of a coin flip because it hasn't happened yet but I'm not seeing why.

"the actual weather condition" are asserted to be beliefs — InPitzotl

Where have I asserted that the actual weather is a belief?

In the types of claims you're talking about, the claim presumes the part exists. That presumption is not part of the assertion; so if it fails, the truth value of the statement is undefined. There are other cases. — InPitzotl

The underlined is exactly the claim I'm making. If we first 'assume the flower exists' and then describe it's properties, the properties we're describing are those of the assumed flower. The assumption is a belief - "I believe there is a flower"

But it sounds like the alien example works for you, so we could talk about that. — InPitzotl

Yes, I prefer your example.

It's not like there is a meaning fairy that's going to prevent us from talking about things that don't exist; we're the ones that have to figure that out. — InPitzotl

But your claim is that (for JTB purposes) "the grass is green" is not about a belief, but rather about the actual grass. Now you're saying we have to 'figure that out'. Do we do so first, or later? If later, then what was the statement about at the time?

in your flower case all we need do is look in the box; and in the hat case, look at your head. — InPitzotl

You keep coming back to 'just look' and then when pressed admit that we could still be wrong even after looking, so I don't know why you keep coming back to it.

I believe the flower is green because John told me so
I believe the flower is green because all flowers I've ever seen are green
I believe the flower is green because I looked and it seemed green to me

These are all just justifications for believing the flower is green, the last one isn't of some magically different sort which distinguishes the 'truth' of the matter. It's just

We also say that someone's claims are true when we believe that their claims are true. But as you (sometimes) admit, our beliefs can be wrong. — Michael

Yeah, our beliefs can be wrong, where 'wrong' here means l (the speaker) believe that acting as if it were the case will yield surprising results. I believe the beliefs of others are sometimes of that sort, ie sometimes wrong.

For me...

"I believe the grass is green"
"I know the grass is green"
"It's true that the grass is green"
"It's not wrong that the grass is green"
"The grass is green"

...are all just different ways of saying the grass is green with different emphases for different contexts. If I'm confident I might use 'know', if I'm hesitant I might say 'believe'. If you first doubted me, I'd repeat using 'it's true', if you said I'm wrong I might retort that 'it's not wrong'...

They're still all just expressing that I have a belief that the grass is green, which in turn means that I've a strong tendency to act as if the grass is green.

I'm not normally in the habit of insisting that when I use the word 'tree' I really mean 'thing I believe is a tree' because I think it's implied in normal conversation (as above). "That tree" is sufficient. The problem with JTB is that it tries to occupy this 'normal' level in one condition (justification) and then jumps to a meta-level with 'true'. It's incoherent. We end up with nonsense sentences like "I know it's true" (I'm justified to believe it's true and it's true that it's true), or "he has absolutely exhaustive and flawless justification to believe X but X is not true" (what grounds for 'X is not true' that wouldn't constitute a lack of, or flaw, in justification?)

I'll add; the reason we say that someone has knowledge when we believe that their claim is true is because we understand that being true is a requirement for knowledge. — Michael

If that were the case then we'd wait until X was true before describing the belief as such.

Let's say that the factor which distinguishes a 'tree' from a 'shrub' was whether it had a particular molecular structure in it's Xylem cells. Are you seriously suggesting that in such a case we would merrily go around labelling things 'tree' and 'shrub' regardless of our clear understanding that the distinction is hidden from us (without specialist equipment in this case)? It's not how we normally approach such things. The distinction betweenAgrimonia eupatoria and Agrimonia procera (two wildflowers in my neck of the woods) is in their seed. If we can't see their seed we call it Agrimonia spp because we lack the information required to make the distinction - in other words, we come up with a new word (or expression) to reflect our uncertainty).

Alternatively...

From a deflationary point of view, "'the grass is green', is true" is the same as "the grass is green".

JTB wants to say "I know the grass is green" is equivalent to "I believe the grass is green" and "'the grass is green' is true".

But "I know the grass is green" and "I believe the grass is green" can't be distinguished by saying "'the grass is green' is true" is part of the claim in (1), where it isn't in (2), because both claims use the expression "the grass is green", which we've just established is equivalent to "'the grass is green' is true"

They use the expression "I know X" when they believe that X is true... — Michael

So, if that's how people use the word 'knowledge' then in what sense can you claim that "I know x", doesn't mean "I believe x is true"?, making the meaning of 'to know', 'stuff I believe is true', not 'stuff that actually is true'.

If their belief is true then their claim of knowledge is true. If their belief is false then their claim of knowledge is false. — Michael

But this is just pie in the sky. It's not at all how we assess knowledge claims. We say someone has 'knowledge' when we believe that their claim is true.

Imagine we were discussing the meaning of terms around the sorties paradox. You might say "a 'pile' is when there's more than 103 objects". I'd say "that's not how we use the word 'pile' because we definitely don't actually count the objects". You seem to be responding with "but there either are 103 objects or there aren't, are you saying us using the word 'pile' determines how many objects there are?"

It is one question whether there are objective facts which pertain regardless of our beliefs about them.

It is an entirely unrelated second question as to whether we refer to these facts when we use the expression "I know that x".

My answer to the first is 'yes'. My answer to the second is 'no'.

Requiring that a belief is true doesn't necessitate certainty. — Michael

If you claim...

"people use the expression 'I know x' when x is true"

...it requires that they are certain about x. Otherwise your claim becomes...

"people use the expression 'I know x' when they believe x is true".

Which deflates to..

"people use the expression 'I know x' when they believe x"...

(since 'x is true' is just to state 'x'). But that's the claim you're arguing against.

On a causal account of belief states, the psychological state of expectation cannot be interpreted as being future directed. The object of this person's expectation isn't the future lottery, but merely the dream that they had. — sime

I don't see why not. There are psychological states regarding 'the actual lottery' as much as there are regarding 'my dream I had last night'. I can quite coherently now distinguish between my concept of what's actually in my cupboard and what I believe is in my cupboard, that's how I'm aware of the fact that I might be wrong, by holding those two concepts to be different. If someone says to me "what might be in that cupboard?" I could give them several answers, none of which correspond to what I believe is in that cupboard. I could even imagine myself opening the cupboard and being surprised by the contents.

It's the way we ordinarily use our words. That thing there that I'm pointing to (cue, a red rose in a vase on the table) is what I understand a red flower to be. I can see it, take it out of the vase, and react if I drop it.

That a scientist could potentially put probes on my brain and view an image of what I'm looking at doesn't change anything about what I'm looking at. — Andrew M

That seems like an odd position to take. It implies that science is a pointless exercise, forever subsumed by whatever it was we 'reckoned' was the case prior to its discoveries. We used to talk as if the sun went around the earth, we talk of sunrise, the 'movement' of the stars. Should we then say that cosmology needs to change how it talks because we had a prior linguistic convention which assumed a geocentric universe?

If we start out with a very direct form of realism (because we have no idea how the brain works), and create linguistic conventions around that, I don't see why it has primacy over any new linguistic conventions arising from knowledge we've gained as to just how much internal states affect our perception and understanding of external objects. Edit - Actually, I'm not even concerned about 'primacy' here. The counter-claim being made is that it's not even 'allowed', let alone, secondary. Secondary I'd accept, even support.

I think its a logical/linguistic issue. Our (public) use of words derives from our interaction with things in the world that we find ourselves a part of. — Andrew M

I don't think they do, at least not exclusively. Our public use of words is derived as much from social beliefs, dynamics and feedback (often chaotic), as it is from the properties of objects.

those abstractions depend on the concrete things we perceive and interact with. — Andrew M

I agree.

The "veil of perception" is an alternative conception that breaks that logical dependency. — Andrew M

I don't see how. They just seem like two models to me. Why does the fact that one of them governs everyday interaction (including interaction with brains, fMRI scans, EEG etc) and one of them govern talk about how minds work mean that one breaks a logical dependency on the other?

If I use an instrument which relies on electricity to investigate electro-magnetism my results are thus constrained. I'm not told "you can discover anything you like, but you cannot change how we think electro-magnetism works because the machine you're using relies on electricity"

I have vanishingly little reason to believe that the statements I make about people I know (which compromise the bulk of statements I make about people) are not about actual people. — Janus

Right. But vanishingly little is not none.

If, in a Dog show, there's a single tiny category for 'best cat', you'd be well within the remit of being understood to say "it's a dog show, it's about dogs". The point here is when someone says "there's a 'best cat' section " You don't say "no there isn't it's about dogs", you say "yeah, I know, it's really about popular pets, but mainly about dogs".

What do you mean by certainty? A feeling of certainty? How could our subjective feelings of certainty determine whether or not statements we make, or beliefs we hold, are true? That just isn't what truth is commonly understood to consists in. The truth is the truth regardless of whether we believe it, or feel certain about it. — Janus

I'd dispute your definition of 'truth', but that's not relevant here, I don't think. The point is you said "knowledge cannot consist in absolute certainty, but in true beliefs we take ourselves to have good reason to hold" So when I say X is knowledge, I'm lying. X hasn't actually met the 'true' bit. I just think it has. But thinking it has is exactly the same as the 'good reason to hold' bit, so that can't be a new component. Your saying that to be knowledge, X has to have two properties...

1. Be true
2. Be justified

...but then you seem to say that certainty about 1 is not part of what knowledge is ("knowledge cannot consist in absolute certainty"). You says that reasonable grounds to believe 1 is sufficient ("I have vanishingly little reason to believe that the statements I make about people I know ...are not about actual people"). But reasonable grounds to believe 1 is exactly what 2 is, making the addition of 1 redundant.

The correct answer to "do you know that" (if you do take yourself to know that) is 'I have no reason to believe that I don't know that'. — Janus

'Correct' according to whom. I still haven't had an answer from any of my interlocutors here to this question that keeps arising. If the way we actually use a word in real conversations is not the measure of how it 'ought' to be used, then what is?

I can't determine just where the cause of your apparent confusion seems to originate on this point. — Janus

...and yet steadfast about whose apparent confusion it is. That epistemic humility you spoke of not two sentences prior seems to have proven somewhat ephemeral.

Thank you for those responses. I don't see anything here to criticise on philosophical, conceptual grounds. It is consistent with what I would call a realist position since it takes for granted that there is stuff that is independent of perception and action. — Banno

Cool. 'Realist' is what I was aiming for!

Isaac proposes to infer 9 is about 8 from 9 was caused by 8. — Srap Tasmaner

Not infer, declare. It's a choice we make, not a fact we discover.

And a fair amount of a human's interaction with its environment is reflexive and explained post hoc. So again, what we call perception has to be tuned to needs. — frank

As above, yes.

According to a causal understanding of mind, each and every psychological state refers only to the situation that caused it, implying that "belief states" are necessarily infallible or that the notion of truth is superfluous. — sime

Still not following I'm afraid. 'Truth' is a predictive function, it says that if I act as if A I will get the response expected if A were the case. I don't see how a notion of mind-state causality affect this. We can model all the prior causes of the the belief that X and still find that acting as if X doesn't yield the results we'd expect if X were the case.

beliefs exist in relation to social-conventions for classifying thoughts and behaviour. To say "John's beliefs were shown to be false" is to say "Relative to our epistemic-conventions, the belief-behaviour exhibited by John was classified as "false" - which isn't to say anything about John per-se. — sime

So in "the cat believes the food is under the box" 'believes' should be replaced with what? Or do our epistemic conventions apply to cats?

"It's raining" is hocus. "The actual weather" is hocus. "It's raining" cannot be "the actual weather" because they're both hocus? — InPitzotl

Not sure how you're getting that out of what I wrote.

"The flower is green". Propositions assert conditions about a part of the world. — InPitzotl

Even when there is no such part?

how does one "trick me with a powerful hallucinogen" to say "the flower is green"? — InPitzotl

Really? Are you unfamiliar with thought experiments? It's not generally considered within the scope to explain the detail of the mechanisms involved... "imagine you're on trolly speeding toward a junction...", "wait, how exactly does the brake mechanism work?"

Try this: — InPitzotl

Yeah, good example.

You can't just search high and low for some example where some mutation of a scenario is about belief and claim victory. — InPitzotl

So statements are about things in the world, except when they're not. Got it.

Now, how do we tell which is which...?

the belief is revised to match the information — InPitzotl

When do we get 'the information' as opposed to just another belief?

A belief can be true even if it isn't certain. — Michael

I don't follow. Certain (to me) is a state of a person, "I'm certain", not a belief. Do you mean a belief can be true even if the person whose belief it is isn't certain of that? If so, then I agree with that.

You've repeatedly accepted that our beliefs can be wrong (and even that the language community can be wrong), so it seems that at least sometimes you understand what it means for a belief to be true or false. — Michael

Yep, or at least, I hope so.

You just don't appear to be very consistent in this acceptance. — Michael

Not incredibly helpful without the examples!

I don't know if noises are even uniquely associated with environmental or internal state variables in Friston's work. — fdrake

No, as far as I know they're not. That was the point I was trying to make. I was giving an example of an input where the external/internal boundary made no difference in terms of being Markov separated. I could perhaps have used a hidden physiological state instead (might have been less confusing).

the noises aren't kept track of with state variables in the same way as environmental and internal states? They're instead kept track of with their distributional summary characteristic (the precision matrix of their joint distribution). — fdrake

Not necessarily. It depends on the prior priming of backward acting signal suppression as to whether noise is aggregated by some sort of precision matrix into the signal or if it is 'clipped'. We're interested here only in stochastic resonance effects rather than background noise (which can be aggregated without influencing priors. But... that's not really relevant to the point I was making, which could have chosen an example other than neuronal noise.

Any signal which has a threshold potential to meet can be modelled as it's own Markov blanket as all but the proximate contributory signals will be Markov separated. There's no modelling impact of this on a per neuron basis, but with neuronal clusters, their immediate sources have modelling implication, but the fact that those sources too have threshold potentials to meet, themselves from multiple sources, gives us Markov separated internal states.

if you wanted to look at 'the Markov blanket of neuronal noise and environmental + internal states' it seems to me either to use more than one concept of 'state' (one for errors, one for environmental and internals) or... — fdrake

Yeah, this is correct - as far as I know, but with stochastic resonance, it's a reasonable modelling assumption, I think.

Incidentally, this is (according to Friston himself, in a paper I did understand) Friston's preferred model of neuronal noise (in a paper I didn't understand!)

Putting it in less jargony terms, whatever errors we make in perception act upon the synthesis of sensory data rather than acting as their own sensory data. Errors are formed by the coincidence of discrepancies between emerging features of our perceptual landscape, rather than stored as their own form of sensory or environmental data (state). Part of the model are assumptions about how this error behaves in the aggregate. — fdrake

Except for stochastic resonance in non-suppressed signals from forward feeding neural clusters with specifically modelled 'meanings'. assumptions about input states can be detached from external states by the effect of neuronal noise.

If the transition from 9 to 1 could be thought of as a reset, I'd agree with the emphasis, but isn't it more that 9 provides a very strong prior for the next 1? So unless the prior effect's gone away by the time you get to the next 9, it seems to me too artificial to abstract from the process that 9 is the real content of 1. — fdrake

Maybe (see reservations below), but my main dispute with this analysis is that there's no need for us to use the 'real' content at all. My argument is entirely about the pragmatic content of 9 for various models. I've little time for the 'real' anything...only the useful.

That said, I think the fact the 9 informs 1 is not more special a part of the system (it's what I was implying by having my example continue ...8>9>1>2...), as you say...

Maybe a philosophical way of phrasing it, if you've got a chain like that, you can read the arrow as something like '1>2 = 1 informs the content of 2", if 1>2 and 2>3, you'd still have that 1 informed the content of 3 if that relationship is transitive. — fdrake

Yeah. If I could actually draw in these posts I would have gone for a network with several 1s leading to 2 and several 2s leading to 3 etc. but that seemed beyond my mathjax capability. I'm not sure that the introduction of ambiguity affects how we talk about the content of 9 though. I mean 9 itself will be a lose aggregate with fuzzy boundaries no matter how we divide it up. 'Flower' is too (where does the flower end and the atmosphere begin - is the CO2 inside a stomata part of the air or the flower? So I don't necessarily see a problem with us similarly loosely referring to 'all the 8s' informing any given 9, or 'all the 9s' informing any given 1.

In the real world it probably depends upon the weighting of steps — fdrake

Yeah, this is basically the point I'm trying to make. We weigh steps differently. No-one even has a non technical name fo the activity of the retinal ganglia, but the external hidden states we call 'the world' or 'objects' or 'a flower'... we have names for that stage, it's of huge significance to us. What I'm arguing is that the most proximate stage which we weigh heavily enough to name it, conceptualise it, is what we refer to as 'mental image', 'memory', 'concept', 'motive' etc.

Regardless, it doesn't seem to me a valid inference to go from: "X predominantly determined the content of Y's perceptions" to "Y perceived X". Could be made a better inference with a theory of content determination - eg, what makes that inference true? — fdrake

Possibly, but what I'm arguing is that the inference is useful, not that it's true. I'm saying that anything could be substituted for X that's in our model of a causal chain (with the caveat above, that each stage be treated as a loose affiliation of signal, not a deterministic single route), but that not everything should be. Not every X is as useful as every other X, but any X is a valid as any other.

If I think John exists and I make a statement about John, then it is intended to be about an actual John. So I know what my statements are intended to be about. But I am not infallible. — Janus

Right. But you don't know what they actually are about, just what you hope they're about.

Remember that knowledge cannot consist in absolute certainty, but in true beliefs we take ourselves to have good reason to hold. — Janus

Sounds like a contradiction. How can it consist in 'true' beliefs we take ourselves to have good reason to hold, without requiring certainty? The 'true' bit requires certainty. Things are not 'true' by us beliving them to be (on your account). Otherwise it's just 'beliefs we take ourselves to have good reason to hold' (a definition I entirely agree with).

If you are uncomfortable with anything less than certainty, then you can opt for an impoverished understanding of knowledge — Janus

It seems the other way around. I'm saying that 'knowledge' is just 'beliefs we take ourselves to have (specific) good reason(s) to hold'. That seems to acknowledge uncertainty and match the actual use of the term in real life. It's your additional requirement that the beliefs be 'true' that necessitates certainty and renders all actual use incorrect. By your definition, the only correct answer to "do you know that?" is "no" (because we can't say if the belief is true).That seems to render the term useless.

Beliefs cannot be real properties of brains, because the notion of epistemic-error is under-determined with respect to the neurological and physical facts of perception and action. — sime

Could you expand on that?

I find myself trying to protect those around me at a time when booster vaccinations are available but in short supply, while the wider community is engaging in activities that can only lead to greater spread. The return to "normality" posses a very real threat to vulnerable folk. As I pointed out to Tom Storm, open policies will result in the deaths of first nations folk, the homeless and other low social status folk, the sick, the disabled, the elderly and children. That is, it is a form of passive eugenics.

Avoiding those outcomes ought be a high priority, even above combating the greed of Pfizer and friends and the stupidity of governments. — Banno

I understand that, I think our difference is only that I don't believe (unfortunately) that it's possible to separate them such as to prioritise the former.

I haven't had the privilege of working with indigenous communities, but I have worked with many minority communities, particularly working class urban poor. These communities reel from one kick to another. I don't know if it made the international news, but some or our communities are still reeling from being burnt alive inside their own homes at Grenfell. A situation where the government approved something which they knew was unsafe and unnecessary to make their buddies rich.

Now the government wants to approve something which is definitely making their buddies rich, but this time we want to say it's different, this one really is safe and necessary, honest.

The boy who cried wolf didn't only harm himself when the wolf finally came, he hurt the sheep, the shepherd, the farmer...

As I said to @jorndoe, if people are falling for misinformation, and we care about that, it's on us to make the information more convincing. That's what I see transparency as doing, that's what I see reasonable debate as doing - making the crucial key message more convincing.

The key factor is trust and trust is not earned by ridiculing people's justified beliefs (and let's face it "the government are screwing us to make the wealthy richer" is a completely justified belief) - I'm not here suggesting you are ridiculing other people's beliefs, I'm talking about the public discourse - though this thread in general would certainly be a good example.

The smearing of dissenting voices, the refusals to talk about the pharmaceutical companies in anything but glowing terms, the relentless pushing of the one money-making bit of the raft of solutions required...all these erode trust, feed conspiracy theories, hamper efforts to get communities to adopt the strategies needed.

I'm not going to name names, but you'll be aware, no doubt, that psychologists were involved in devising government policy from day one (at least here in England, I suspect elsewhere). There were two camps - 'scare them shitless' and 'earn their trust'. The former won. They shouldn't have.

And when you name the rose, this naming is anchored in a public domain.

So we could say that perception is something whole cultures do. (Just to expand the number of ways we could define it) — frank

Yeah, and then the fact that 'rose' is something frequently said of that flower becomes a world-state which can then be an object of perception.

If many ways of speaking are of equal validity, the simpler way of speaking is to be preferred. — Banno

Yep. If only...But philosophers must earn a living I suppose.

Have I understood you correctly? you are saying something like that the flower is outside the Markov boundary of what we need to understand the behaviour? — Banno

Nearly, yes. The flower is outside of the Markov boundary for the determinates of the action on the world, but I wouldn't want to be read as saying that's all we need to understand the behaviour. I'll try to explain, but (if it's not too presumptuous of me) it'll be clearer if you read my response to fdrake above this, as it covers much of the same ground.

The process of perception is circular, a two way relationship between us and the world with world states being proximately responsible for body states and body states in turn being proximately responsible for world states. Hidden states of the world outside of our Markov blanket trigger mental states we're finally aware of (conscious logging) and that logging triggers behaviours which then affect the hidden states of the world...and so on.

But in this continuous cycle of steps, not all steps are equal. The hidden states of the world are super important for example. They're what we share with others, how we co-operate. The states of our retinal ganglia are not so significant to us, even though it's just as vital a step. We don't talk about it, don't share it, and most don't care about it. The behaviour (the step where we feed back to the hidden state of the world) is also a very significant one for us, not in terms of the physical effect (other people's bodies are world-states to us, so that's the same as step one), but the proximate cause, the step just before it. That's the step we use to predict people's behaviour, it's what allows us to be social beings - being able to predict the effect of our actions on others. So my claim is that in addition to the two steps already really important (not in any way trying to take away from those) - world state and behavioural action on it - I think we have a third step which is also really important - the one just preceding the action, the proximate cause of it, and that's clearly not the world state, it's an internal state.