...again, not a literal interpretation. The meanings are symbolic. — ButyDude

Funny how apologists run away to metaphor at the first sign of critique. "I didn't mean it..."

Fine Tuning, Cosmic Cause and Effect, etc. It’s a quick Google search — ButyDude

I'm guessing you won't want to fill these out, and if we were to critique them, you'd say they also were "metaphor".

So why are you here? Why pretend to present your ideas for inspection, then doge and weave?

If it is that bad, it should be easy to disprove. — ButyDude

When an argument so badly misrepresent a whole field of knowledge, a short reply will not suffice. And I'm not too happy about drawing attention to this particular patriarchal self-absolution. Read an introductory anthropology text that is less than fifty years old.

Welcome — Tom Storm

I admire your civility.

The anthropology in this is dreadful. But I'm guessing mere facts are not as important to you as maintaining the rage.

Laugh and walk away.

...there are scientific arguments for God — ButyDude

And they are...?

...We... — ButyDude

What's with the "we" bit? No one around today ever lived in the Garden of Eden, nor ate from the tree there. Rather, your god thinks that children should be punished for things done by their father - grossly immoral.

How did Adam and Eve choose to eat the apple, if it was the apple that made them conscious? If they were not self-aware, how was it that they wanted more?

How could your god "discover" their conscious state? There are things that god can discover - things that he doesn't' yet know? So he's (I bet your god is a "he") not omniscient, then.

Not very impressive.

There's something a bit mad in continuing here, but...

S's belief is about a broken clock. Do you agree? — creativesoul

There's an ambiguity about that, between the clock being broken and S believing it is broken. S's belief is about a clock, yes. But it's not, for S, a belief about a broken clock. As in, It's not true that "S believes that (the broken clock is not broken)"; but that, to get the scope right, "Of the clock, S believes (the clock is not broken) AND the clock is broken.

"The clock is not broken" has to stay within the scope of S's belief. And it seems to me that you miss this.



I don't think you have explained how this leads to a counterexample to belief being a propositional attitude.

I'm only guessing, but is it that you think the belief is about the clock, which is an individual, and so not propositional? But that's not right; since the belief is about whether the clock is working, or not, which is propositional.

On the one hand, if you could present a clear case of a belief that could not be put into propositional form, I'd give reconsideration to the proposal. But on the other hand, that beliefs are propositional is foundational; having a belief that p simply is having an attitude towards p such that p is the case - that's what belief is. So if you do provide a proposed example of a belief that is not propositional, it's unlikely that I would see it as a belief. It might be a sentiment, a feeling, but not a belief. You ma call this paragraph "poisoning the well" or some such, but if you will not present a coherent account of what you are claiming, I'm only left to make such guesses.

You say that my reply is all over the place. If so, that is a result of your own incoherence. The point of nearly all my replies has been to attempt to make clear the scope of the various beliefs about the clock. But again, in your most recent post, you seem to want to mash that scope. Hence again, this:

The clock is broken and S believes (the clock is not broken)

It seems to me that you cannot accept this rendering because it pretty much mashes your account.



You seem to want us to put your argument together from your hints, rather than presenting it clearly. If you are going to make accusations of straw man and so on, but not present your account, there's little more that I can do. If you really do doubt my good faith, don't bother replying.

Unlike you to resort to ad hom and mischaracterisation. Oh, well. I don't see anything new to respond to in your post, yet your argument remains obscure. Might leave it there.

, , Yeah, sure. All that trite bullshit. Just not today.

Oh, be my guest. But making shite up is not philosophy.

Depends on how it is formulated. — Manuel

Yes, it's just a question of how you choose to talk about stuff; of grammar. So some folk choose a non-bivalent logic, such that there are propositions about the thing-in-itself that are neither true nor false. I prefer to stick with a bivalent logic, and say that there are no propositions about the thing-in-itself. I take this as discouraging mysticism.

Only Hegel comes with a whole new set of problems.

Yep, and there is a step further: that there is not anything beyond our experience and cognition - that the notion of a thing-in-itself doesn't get off the ground.

To call P true is basically [only] to communicate (and, secondarily, reason about) [ one's belief that ] P. — plaque flag

The unaddressed point remains: to believe the p is to believe that p is true.

We add belief to truth because what we believe is not what is true. Sometimes we are mistaken, or we have a different opinion to someone else, or we find out new things. These three things rely on there being a difference between what is believed and what is true.

I think it time you did the work of setting out your issue clearly.

Perhaps it's a language issue, but to say that something is true, is to say that it is reality, it is what is the case.

To say that we cannot have the truth, is to contradict yourself. You can't consistently claim that you do and don't have access to the truth.

That is, your arguments are inconsistent.

Because neither I, nor you, nor any other material being has access to the truth. — Ali Hosein

Ah, we cannot have access to the truth. And so it follows that what anyone says must not be the truth, else we woudl have access to the truth. Yet since you said it, we have access to it.

It follows that what you have said is not the truth.

Yep. As in my initial reply,

There's an ambiguity here that can be expounded by getting the scope clear. It might be

There is a broken clock X and (S believes that X is not broken)

Do you see a problem with that?

Or it might be that

There is a broken clock X and S believes that (X is broken and not broken)

S is irrational or some such. — Banno

Belief presupposes a belief in truth, not the possession of it. — Janus

Sure, Janus, if you like. The salient bit is that to believe that p is to believe that p is true.

If the truth cannot be determined, it is a mere human presumption that says there must nonetheless be a truth. — Janus

Yep. the presumption that truth is divalent. The alternative is anti-realism. Help yourself.

You claim that the clock in S's belief is both... broken and not. You first claimed that the clock in S's belief was not broken, then agreed entirely with me when I claimed in was. — creativesoul

The whole apparatus developed here shows the opposite. It's pretty simple.

You believe (the clock is broken)
S believes (the clock is not broken)

As it turns out, you are correct. Nowhere in here does S believe the broken clock was not broken.


________
You might construct the odd locution "S believes that the broken clock is not broken". By that you might mean either that

You believe ((the clock is broken) and (S believes (the clock is not broken)))

Which contains no contradiction; or

S believe that (the clock is broken and the clock is not broken)

which is not justified by (does not follow from)

S believes (the clock is not broken)

...which I pointed out back at the beginning of this exchange.

Then for all our sakes, set out how!

I'm not seeing it. It seems pretty straight forward to me, but ten years of apparent disagreement seem to show that I am mistaken.

Banno holds that belief is imputed/attributed to another creature as a means for explaining its behaviour. I do not disagree completely with that idea. We do just that and we do it quite often. It's just not an explanation for how belief emerges onto the world stage nor what belief consists of. — creativesoul

Beliefs "emerge onto the world stage" as ways of expressing what folk hold as true, as opposed to what is indeed true. S beleives the clock to be broken when it isn't.

Beliefs consist in an attitude of some agent to the effect that some state of affairs holds: that some proposition is true. "S believes that the clock is not broken" means that S holds that the proposition "The clock is not broken" is true.

What is it that is missing from this account?

This looks suspiciously like unnecessarily multiplying entities. — creativesoul

There is only one clock. x.

What differs is the propositions you, I and S take as being true of that clock

The clock in S's beliefs is the one they looked at, and it is most certainly a broken one. On this... I'll not budge. — creativesoul

Sure. I agree entirely.

Banno's account of my position on belief contradicts my own position on belief. — creativesoul

Good. I am glad to be wrong here.

So, am I correct in thinking that you're claiming that S's attitude towards the broken clock at time t1 does not count as S believing that that particular broken was working? — creativesoul

Let's try a slightly different approach. "The broken clock" cannot refer to the clock in S's beliefs, because that clock is not broken.

To be able to refer to the clock in S's beliefs and in our beliefs, we need to introduce a rigid designator, which I did above with "x". Let x be the clock.

In S's beliefs, x is not broken.

Hence S is not committed to the proposition "S believes that the broken clock is not broken", but to "S believes that x is not broken".

So yes.

I'm simply claiming that at time t1 S believed that a broken clock was working. — creativesoul

Indeed, you believe both that x is broken and that S believes (x is not broken). There is no contradiction here.

How's that?

I once saw you exclaim that the easiest way to win a disagreement with someone else(yourself at the time you said it) was to begin by misunderstanding it. — creativesoul

Banno's law: the easiest way to critique some view is to begin by misunderstanding it.

But the issue I have here is that I havn't been able to put together what it is that you are arguing. So you insist

I've asked you several times to explain the proposition that S had an attitude towards at time t1 such that they believed it to be true. We agreed that S's attitude - at time t1 - was towards a broken clock. Broken clocks are not propositions. So, either S's attitude towards the broken clock - at time t1`- was not a belief about the broken clock or not all belief is equivalent to a propositional attitude, because broken clocks are neither propositions nor attitudes. — creativesoul

And I've replied several times, most recently with

At three o'clock, (there is a clock, that clock is broken, but S believes (that clock is accurate)). — Banno

...and tried to see what it is you are getting at, but I haven't been able to see it. You put me in the position of having to work out both what it is you are arguing and how to reply to it.

What is the relevance of time?

I dunno. There's stuff about reference here that has been dealt with elsewhere; perhaps you take "the broken clock" as some sort of rigid designator such that everyone must think the clock broke, and so conclude that S thinks the clock both broken and accurate.

But if I am not to attribute beliefs to you, there's not much more to be said.

You've given me pause to reconsider things more than once, but here I am at a loss to understand your point.

That's just you reading in your own biases, as far as I can tell. — plaque flag

I'm sorry you can't see the arguments. Here's the first, set out explicitly.

The first argument is simply to note the difference between truth and belief. Belief is between someone and a supposed state of affairs, it is an attitude towards a proposition. It is dyadic. Truth relates to a proposition (sentence, statement...) and is monadic. They are not the same. But further, the attitude adopted is that the proposition is true.

A corollary of this is that to say that you believe p is to say that you believe that p is the case; that p is true. Hence belief presupposes truth.

Your reply is that all we have is better and better beliefs. This does not actually address the point made above. But further, a better belief is exactly one that more closely approximates the truth. This was Peirce's view, he did not drop truth entirely, the way you propose.

You might suppose (and at times seem to propose) that you can get by this by working with what is most useful, regardless of it's truth. Here you have dropped both truth and belief, in favour of what is expedient. The trouble here is that what is useful depends directly on one's goals, and you are immediately thrown into a trumpian relativism. The consequence of rejecting truth is that anything goes, which of course means that the nature of the world is determined by those with power.

One cannot speak truth to power if there is no truth.

The next argument is simply to point out that there are things you take as true. That you are reading this post, for example. The list from there quickly become innumerable, everything from that you love your partner to that you have a body through that the bishop in Chess stays on it's own colour. There are things that it makes no sense to doubt, that you admit you take as true by your very actions, say in replying to this post.

The next argument is a simple ad populum; very few of the folk who have paid attention to these issues have come to the conclusion that you have. Correspondence and semantic theories of truth hold the high ground, with pragmatics making a small appearance in response to scepticism.

And so on. I think the underlying issue here is giving too much import to truth, so much that it becomes frightening, inspiring the desire to dislodge it altogether. Truth is, after all, a small thing, as shown by deflationary and semantic analysis. It has a small role, but it is indispensable, since it sets the place of our words in the world.

None of this presents the classical arguments against pragmatism, which might also be addressed.

God is beyond reality — Ali Hosein

Yep.

I'm guessing creative thinks I think dogs have unspoken propositions in their minds.

Glad that I'm not missing something obvious, then. I was wondering.

I'm not seeing how time makes a difference here - a bit of a prejudice of mine, as an emphasis on temporal issues seems to often accompany phenomenological accounts.

So I'd start with the time at the widest scope:

At three o'clock, (there is a clock, that clock is broken, but S believes (that clock is accurate)).
And again I don't see how it changes the story. Compare

At two o'clock, (there is a clock, that clock is broken, but S believes (that clock is accurate)).


What's the point of specifying a time?

Ah, that was a reply to , not Janus.

Ok, did that. You take belief to be some sort of mental furnishing, while I take it to be some sort of stopgap imputation used in explanations of intentional acts. So you are unhappy to say these folk do not believe I am at w, because you can't find that piece of furniture in their minds. While I'm happy to say they do not believe I am at w, because it explains why they did not look for me there.

Where does that get us?

May I suggest attending to what I've written? — creativesoul

I am. Maybe your position is not as clear as you suppose.

According to the practice you're defending, all of them believe that you're not at w. — creativesoul

Yep.

What's the problem?

I've already answered that question: — plaque flag

I don't think so. You just hid truth in "better and better". You are just paraphrasing "A statement is better if it more closely approximates the truth".

Or will you say that a statement is better if it is more strongly believed? Disney method: Just believe with all your heart, and it will come true.

Intereference (sic.) can't occur between photons travelling at the same velocity. — Benj96

What to do with this?

Cheers, benj. Photons all travel at the speed of light, mitigated only by the refractive index of the medium. And they do interfere with each other.

I'll leave you to it.

what I'm pointing towards is the fact that no one would say so at the time. — creativesoul

But someone who believed the clock was working would say that it was working. Not following you at all.

Russell's example is usually used as an early version of the stuff Gettier latter built a name around.

There is the man who looks at a clock which is not going, though he thinks it is, and who happens to look at it at the moment when it is right; this man acquires a true belief as to the time of day, but cannot be said to have knowledge. — Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits

There's nothing here to indicate an argument against beliefs as propositional attitudes.

Following the practice you've defended, five different people can believe that you are currently in five different places, but the practice in question will render them all as having the exact same belief about your spatiotemporal location. — creativesoul

I don't see how. A believes that Banno is at x; B believes that Banno is at y; C believes that Banno is at z; and so on. Each has a different belief.

Not following your point at all.

Earlier we agreed that S's attitude was towards the broken clock. Broken clocks are not propositions. — creativesoul

Sure, the clock is not a proposition, nor an attitude. . But "The clock is broken" is a proposition, and to believe that the clock is broken is to adopt an attitude towards that proposition.

I'm saying that this and other examples show the inherent inadequacy in the conventional understanding of belief as propositional attitude as well as the belief that approach. — creativesoul

I still don't see how.

I've a bit of time tonight, so... — creativesoul

I don't. Trip to Bunnings, then a couple of meetings and seedlings to plant out. Maybe in between.

I'm still thinking that the way forward is to do with Moyal-Sharok's book, which seems to take your side of the discussion.

I'm sorry, I still can't make sense of this. I see that you are using curls to mark sets, and it seems you are using "f" for both a non-specific function and something else... the set of facts? Is "t" a transcendent fact? I cannpt see what system you are using here for the formalisation.

That comment is an ad hominem — Gnomon

Well, no. Pointing out that you repeatedly produce bad arguments is not an ad hom. It would be an ad hom if I'd said your arguments were bad because of some irrelevant personal characteristic of yours. But your arguments are bad because the conclusions do not follow from the assumptions. Or, often, the assumptions do not cohere.

And what you cite from @Benj96 is an obvious false dilemma.