I think that when I reflect on my interaction with the world, I frame it as a conversation — frank

I do that too. I noticed that I frame my interaction with the world as something like a conversation while reflecting, but that I retroject the narrative beats (as it were). Like they're conjured by the reflecting state as a summary. I think of the narrative beats as a retrojected framing device that inspires us to act as if the story we've just told ourselves is true. I've had plenty of experiences where I've had to revise the narrative - they're panicky, like missing a step on the stairs or hurting someone unexpectedly.

Like Heidegger, I think this reflective state lives alongside a more fused state. — frank

That makes sense. Heidegger (as Dreyfus reads him) has a related distinction. Stuff like propositions; in the form of subject-predicate expressions; are tacked on after most of what we do, and it's very inviting to mistake the moves we've made in conceptualising the world as properties of the world - even conceptualising it in a manner that it somehow always fits into declarative statements.

I wouldnt need to look everywhere, only where swans live, or in its genetic code where there would be the potential for non- white feathers to be expressed, just as one might have the code for brown eyes in their genes even though they have blue eyes. — Harry Hindu

Yes. The quantifiers need some domain associated with them. The original article goes some way to specifying the kind of domains they're talking about.

Yes.

A statement is verifiable if it can be shown to be true.
A statement is falsifiable if it can be shown to be false.

Consider statements of the form "there exists an x such that p(x)", those are verifiable but not falsifiable. Why? To verify it, all you need to do is find an example, to falsify it, you need to go out and look at everything ever and evaluate whether there's an x in it such that p(x). "There exists a non-white swan" - go out and find it. You think there isn't one? Have you looked everywhere?

Consider statements of the form "all x are p(x)", those are falsifiable but not verifiable. Why? To falsify it, all you need to do is find an x such that p(x) doesn't hold. To verify it, you'd need to go out and look at every x ever and see that it satisfies p(x). "All swans are white" - have you seen every swan?



Those two statement types can be intersected to produce an "all and some" statement. Those go: "for every x there exists a y such that (blah)". Those are neither verifiable nor falsifiable. Why? In order to verify it, you'd need to go out and look at every x. In order to falsify it, for a particular x, you'd need to show that no such y exists and thereby look at everything ever.

If you're coming at philosophy from the angle that all talk which is relevant to finding things out must be either verifiable or falsifiable; like caricatures of postivists and falsificationalists; it would be surprising if those "all and some" statements play any role in scientific discourse. And they do.

"For every collection of masses there exists a centre of mass"
"For every force there exists a medium which carries it"

And so on. Examples abound. So they play a role in scientific discourse, but (let's grant) that they're neither falsifiable nor verifiable. What kind of role do they play if they're neither falsifiable nor verifiable? The article suggests that they play a regulative one. Regulative how? They inspire scientists, or philosophers, to think about the world differently. The world looks much different if you imagine forces without a carrying medium vs if you imagine that such media are required. They inspire the generation of different hypotheses about the world; and so they play a coordinating role in how we find things out about the world.

Neither verifiable nor falsifiable but shapes how we think about the world - sounds like metaphysics to me!

Someone who really disliked metaphysics playing a role in coordinating scientific conduct might respond to this by; yes yes, such statements play a coordinating role in the generation of hypotheses, but that coordinating role is strictly normative. It tells us what hypotheses scientists and philosophers believe ought to be investigated, not anything about the world - talk about which is confined to falsifiable or verifiable statements. All and some statements are confined to norms of methodology; they're methodological prescriptions not conceptually related to descriptions of reality.

There are two problems with that; the less interesting and easy problem is that there are people who distinguish between the prescriptive and descriptive aspects of all and some statements in their conduct. Someone might believe nature is in general random (descriptive) but believe that scientists ought to treat it as if it is not in circumscribed contexts (prescriptive), so the two have a distinction in practice.

The more interesting and hard problem is that all and some statements don't just inspire research hypotheses, they are conceptually related to research hypotheses and thus inspire research hypotheses. "All and some" statements purport to tell us how stuff works, so we go out looking as if it works that way.

And if all and some statements play this regulative role in science, what stops them playing a similar regulative role in politics and morality? The article looks there too, but I won't.

Why do you need a statement to express the proposition at the time? — frank

I guess I don't really know how to think about a proposition if it's not associated with a statement, or a class of statements, that sets out a state of affairs. How do you think about it?

The sensations are easy to construe as an eternal abstract object? That's weird. — frank

Sorry, ambiguous "it", I meant seeing the proposition as an eternal abstract object.

I think it's as specific as it needs to be. — frank

I think the author expressed that the sensations were caused by the bird. I don't think the author expressed which sensations were caused by the bird, or anything about the nature of the sensations. Other than that they were caused by the bird.

It's like the difference between "I saw a bird" and "I saw a bird with black wings".

My point was that the author expressed the garden-person's beliefs as a proposition. — frank

So I agree that they expressed that the sensations were caused by a bird as a proposition, I don't believe that implies that the sensations which were caused by the bird were expressed as a proposition.

I didn't get the impression the author thinks people actually say things like "the rustling is caused by a bird." — frank

I didn't either.

So yes, I think it's apparent that prior beliefs can shape our actions in a time frame that doesn't allow articulation. — frank

:up:

Maybe this comes down to a modality thing; if you see a proposition as an eternal abstract object, whatever sensations were caused by the bird are easy to construe as one. If you see a proposition as associated with a real (set of) statements or language items, that the time frame blocks (simultaneous) articulation in a statement is more troubling; as there's no statement to to bear the proposition at the time.

The bold section refers to a proposition. — frank

Perhaps! It reads like a class of propositions with unspecified content to me. Which sensations? What's the character of the perceptual features formed? To me there seems to be a big gap between having sensations caused by a bird's actions, and, say, "I saw the wings of a starling fluttering by". The former class of phenomena underdetermines the latter, the latter is an aggregation and stabilisation of the multiple instances of the former (bird caused sensations leading to bird caused stable perceptual features of the bird as an explanatory hypothesis for those sensations).

Are latent portions of your worldview really down there in the hardware? — frank

My specific account? I don't know, I just hope I'm right. People's worldviews in general? I think so. Priors are a thing, it's rare that we find something we have no frame of interpretation for.

It's hard to picture what sort of intentionality could be connected with uninterpreted data. — frank

I don't think it's uninterpreted, nor do I think it's interpreted in the manner we'd usually associate with words, essays, statements and so on. I think it relates to your thread on types of information; is semantic content restricted to words? Maybe not! The underlying ideas motivating my post were regarding salience as director of actions and as a driver of the formation of intentional content. Do you characterise intentionality as a property of already formed spaces of perceptual features and agents, or do you characterise it as guiding their formation?

That underlying theme could've been developed more, and I agree that it's a hole in the account.

My attempt at arguing against "belief content is propositional" in response to 's most recent post.

Intentionality is the capacity of agents to have directed states towards things which are not themselves and for those states to have content regarding what the state is directed towards.

Eg, I grasp the cup; my body and mind are directed towards the cup in a specific way, to grasp it, to reach for its handle, to lift to to my mouth etc. This state is directed towards the cup. The content will include the location of its handle, the type of liquid in the cup, that the cup is to be grasped for drinking and so on. SEP characterises intentionality as:

In philosophy, intentionality is the power of minds and mental states to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs. To say of an individual’s mental states that they have intentionality is to say that they are mental representations or that they have contents. Furthermore, to the extent that a speaker utters words from some natural language or draws pictures or symbols from a formal language for the purpose of conveying to others the contents of her mental states, these artifacts used by a speaker too have contents or intentionality.

I will call an instance of intentionality an intentional state. The state in the example was an example of an intentional state. I will call the content of an intentional state intentional content. IEP describes intentional content as such:

The intentional content of an intentional event is the way in which the subject thinks about or presents to herself the intentional object. The idea here is that a subject does not just think about an intentional object simpliciter; rather the subject always thinks of the object or experiences it from a certain perspective and as being a certain way or as being a certain kind of thing. Thus one does not just perceive the moon, one perceives it “as bright”, “as half full” or “as particularly close to the horizon”. For that matter, one perceives it “as the moon” rather than as some other heavenly body. Intentional content can be thought of along the lines of a description or set of information that the subject takes to characterize or be applicable to the intentional objects of her thought. Thus, in thinking that there is a red apple in the kitchen the subject entertains a certain presentation of her kitchen and of the apple that she takes to be in it and it is in virtue of this that she succeeds in directing her thought towards these things rather than something else or nothing at all.

Summarised, then, intentional content is the character of the agent's intentional state, what kind of disposition is held - for what, for what purpose, what is felt and so on. .

SEP gives "loving", "admiring" as examples of intentional states. They are thus marked by a few properties:

(1) Intentional states are relations between agents and some other domain; it might be an agent and an object (I grasp the cup), an agent and an agent (Sally loves Mary), an agent and some social institution (Robespierre was critical of monarchy), an agent and an abstraction (I believe 1+1=2) and so on. The agent comes in the first place in the relation, the other domain comes in the second place.

(2) Intentional states are directional; logically and in terms of disposition. logically - Sally loves Mary doesn't mean Mary loves Sally - it might be unrequited and so on. Dispositionally, Sally's love of Mary is a disposition Sally has towards Mary; it has behavioural commitments, emotional resonances and so on.

(3) The relation ascribes some content to the relation which characterises the relation in terms of the agent; Sally loves Mary ascribes an understanding of love to Sally which she directs towards Mary. These contents coincide with the character of the disposition.

(4) The content ascribed is somehow a representation of the item of the other domain (the cup) that the agent (me) embodies.

For the remainder of the post, I will use "intentional state" to refer only to states which satisfy the first three properties. "Intentional content" will refer to the content of an intentional state with the above restriction. I'm doing this because I don't believe the dispute turns on the representational aspect of intentional states, and I believe it is contentious to claim that beliefs are representational.

I claim that belief is an intentional state in the weakened sense. This can be checked by going through the three items.

(1) The state of belief is directed towards some other domain; I believe 1+1=2, I believe my cup is on the table and so on. So belief satisfies (1).
(2) Belief is directional: I believe that 1+1=2 doesn't mean the same thing as 1+1=2 believes in me. Belief is also dispositional; I believe that 1+1=2 tells you an opinion I hold regarding 1,1 and 2 and engenders other commitments, things I will find obvious and so on. So belief satisfies (2).
(3) Belief has content: that I believe 1+1=2 has specificities to it, regarding the relationships of 1,1,+,= and 2 - I understand what role the terms play and how they relate, and in doing that I believe the statement. The specificities serve to explain the disposition I hold towards the statement as well as characterising my disposition.

At this point, it is worthwhile to take stock of what (1) to (3) demonstrate; the intentional content of my belief that 1+1=2 regards 1+1=2, the intentional content of my belief that my cup is on the table regards the cup on my table. In the latter case, I do not believe any item of language is on my table. What this shows, then, is that belief as an intentional state can be directed towards pretty much anything; there is no privileged domain of entities - like agents, statements, substances etc - that serve as the sole targets of belief understood as an intentional state. The important result is that belief can be directed towards things which are not items of language. So they need not, and typically do not, occur with accompanying statements. Statements expressing them them occur afterwards.

The phenomenology of intentional content is multifaceted; shapes, colours, textures, purposes, goals, moods, context all superimpose to give an agent's disposition in an action its character. Lois Lane's beliefs about Clark Kent are much different from her beliefs about Superman, despite that the two names co-refer.

Fleeting images, recollections and impressions stabilise into the emerging landscape of our interpretation of the world. It raises the question; does the intentional content of belief require any kind of linguistic expression to have its intentional content? In other words - does having intentional content require that it can be stated somehow? By whom and when?

An indicator that intentional content does not require a statement for it to have the character it does is that intentional states occur without being directed at statements; statements play no part in most beliefs we hold, except to express some of them afterwards. A strong indicator is that we can observe intentional behaviour in animals that do not have statements, concepts, or any of the social furniture we expect to surround opinion and belief, and they behave intentionally to such a degree that it is appropriate to attribute beliefs to them for explanatory purposes.

One attempt to sweep this line of questioning away would be: that the intentional content of belief is simply irrelevant to another sense of belief content which is propositional, but I do not believe this is the case. The intentional content of a belief is what makes it a belief and not any other dispositional state, and that can be seen by mucking with it. A statement of belief that some event is occurring is a commitment to the claim that it is occurring. Statements of the form "It is raining but I do not believe that it is raining" are weird. paradoxical even, and the intentional content of asserting that it is raining comes with the rider that the asserter believes that it is raining, because the act of asserting that it is raining in normal circumstances is rightly assumed to come along with the intentional state of believing the statement! The intentional content of belief is a necessary part of a statement of belief in its normal function.

Now we need to swerve into Banno's argument:

"The belief is not a statement" is not the same as "the belief has propositional content". It is not something I wish to defend. — Banno

Very well!

The event is not a statement. But that the event occurred can be stated. The belief is not in the form of a statement. but it can be stated. And so on. The flow of your argument seems to be that there is an analogy to be draw between "The event is not a statement" and "The belief is not a statement" such that the conclusion is that the belief does not have propositional content. — Banno

There is a major tension between the lack of requirement for a belief's intentional content to be stated and Banno's requirement that the content of belief must be able to be stated. So let's examine it.

It seems the construal of "content" being propositional is that "that the event occurred can be stated". Let's focus on the modality and scope of that "can". Clearly agents have intentional content which they cannot state at the time the intentional state occurs for various reasons. That content could be fuzzy, temporary, weird, ultra specific, highly contextual, anomalous, idiosyncratic etc. To give an example from a detailed description of eye movement patterns when someone is looking into a box of teabags to pick one out to make tea: "during the search phase, subtask relevant teabag features are attentionally prioritised within the attentional template during a fixation" - "subtask relevant teabag features" are whatever aspects of the arrangements of teabags in that box of teabags which facilitate the belief that those teabag aspects are useful for using those teabags to make tea. At the time, the agent cannot articulate what teabag features promoted their actions. Notice that the agent's attention was drawn about the box without requiring any beliefs at the time towards statements of which teabag features were subtask relevant. In that respect, intentional content occurs irrespective of later translation into language. So there are circumstances where people have beliefs and they cannot be stated.

However, there is still the possibility that "can" has a much more ambitious scope; that there exists a statement, even if purely hypothetical and never uttered, which expresses that the belief occurred and its character. With this, we are quantifying over hypothetical objects that bear no relation to the context a belief is formed in and gains its character and content in. That seems sufficiently absurd to conclude the argument. If beliefs attain definite content absent the formation of statements which describe them at the time, why would the content of those beliefs depend upon hypothetical objects which are made later?

I am sure that there is a way to thread the needle there, to describe the sense of that modality without absurdity, but I don't see it in @Banno's argument. Yet anyway.

We can be short about this one. Banno is applying the common linguistic meaning of proposition and creative soul is talking about the philosophical term. Both right but talking about different things. Next! — Benkei

Very much yes. It's why I wanted the debaters to refine the sense of proposition before engaging in the debate.

If your sense of the proposition is like: so long as there exists a string of words which states the belief content at some point in time then the belief content is propositional because it can be stated, then yes of course it's propositional.

But if your sense of the proposition has the modality associated with that italicised "can" be temporal - IE there are some beliefs in some organism, or some beliefs at some points in time which cannot be stated at that time, then no of course belief contents aren't always propositional.

I do not expect @creativesoul and @Banno to ever argue this crucial point regarding the modality of expression of belief statements in their debate, so I expect it to be a clash of worldviews without any interfacing - an exchange characterised by attempting to shift frames of interpretation for belief than regarding any thematisation of belief

Maybe general philosophy?

You might find googling around about "dynamical system" and "dynamical system subsystem" useful! "splitting up" a complex system into component parts has some interesting philosophy associated with it, as the subsystems' interactions tend to be part of what makes the complex system "complex", see the discussion around non-aggregativity in that link.

I went on an extended and incomplete acid trip rant about some (maybe?) related topics here. There was some other metaphysical discussion related to how parameters individuate themselves out of pre-established systems in this thread.

That's brilliant. :lol:

If you're going to do a debate you should agree on a motion. All key terms in the OP's question are vague, and each of you can use that to hedge.

So, to save it from being Banno arguing that propositional content is a property of statements (or more generally speech acts) and since belief is a propositional attitude, the content of the belief is the proposition it's directed towards, and so concluding it must be propositional content.

And you arguing that belief content is a broader semantic category - I don't know what kind of things you throw in it, other than that it can be "pre-linguistic" - and so since not all of that content is even "linguistic" (presumably not all words or symbols, I don't know where you come from on this), not all of that content can be propositional; since propositions must be linguistic.

If you continued like that, Banno could assert his definition of belief, you could assert your definition of belief, and there's a strong chance you'll both address none of the other's points and retreat to hedges.

I suggest that your motion be both more specific and thematise that conflict explicitly? "content" is vague and disputed, "belief" is vague and disputed, "propositional" is at least vague, every key term in the question is vague or disputed. I suggest something like "Beliefs are always about statements"? Do you agree that's effectively the same dispute? Presumably Banno takes "Yes" and you take "No"?

Thomas Metzinger, Hubert Dreyfus. I've been on a David Graeber binge since he died, though he's more of an anthropologist.

Wait, what? Why does perception need to be part of belief? I believe life exists somewhere outside Earth, but I can't perceive it. I have all sorts of beliefs like that which are not directly tied to any perception on my part, and not always tied to perception on anyone's part, such as life beyond Earth. — Marchesk

I'm not trying to say that every belief is directly associated with something perceptible; I don't think there's anything I could perceive that would make me revise my belief that 1+1=2. What I'm trying to get at is part of belief comes from perceptual expectation. One way of putting that might be; perceptual expectations and beliefs mutually evince and constrain each other. I might not believe that my cup is beside my laptop had I not seen it there, if I had not seen my cup beside my laptop I might not believe it was there.

Let's take your belief that life exists somewhere outside Earth. Would you believe that life existed somewhere outside Earth if you did not expect to perceive it given an appropriate circumstance?

Would the person in Banno's example be able to state "I believed that the ball would hit me" if they did not have a perceptual expectation about the ball's trajectory? And what more is there to the belief than a statement of the perceptual expectations they held?

...and concrete events can be stated; therefore any belief that ranges over a concrete event also ranges over a statement. — Banno

You agree that concrete events are not statements - word is not thing -, and that someone who expected the ball to hit them could later state that "I believed that the ball would hit me", why does that imply that their belief that the ball would hit them at the time is directed towards a statement which was only constructed after the fact?

Part of the logic of belief is that they are intentional; they are a directed stance taken toward something. What they are directed towards is an important thing to address in an account of them. Why would humans have an intentional ability which had the sole purpose of rendering their beliefs post hoc and claiming that one way of interpreting T-sentences made that secretly about the world?

Do you really want to do that, fdrake? — Banno

What I want you to do is...

What does a belief consist in? It consists in treating some statement as true. — Banno

Provide an argument for this claim. Why can beliefs only apply to statements? I agree with you that beliefs can apply to statements, I also think that they can apply to concrete events.

He believed the ball would hit him in the face if he did not duck. — Banno

What does his belief consist in? Would he have believed the ball would hit his face if he did not assess its trajectory and formed a perceptual expectation that it would hit him? I doubt it. That belief is about the ball's trajectory, not about a post hoc rendering of all those assessments into the statement "He believed the ball would hit him in the face if he did not duck". Who cares if it can later be expressed in a statement?

Davidson argued that such explanations are causal. — Banno

I think that's quite sensible. But...

I believed the pub was at the end of the street. — Banno

It's not an account of what a belief is! Linking them to perceptual expectations would be.

Nope — jamalrob

This one work?

None of the ways of editing a mention into a post work then. (quotes, replies, @-ing).

Test 3.



This one?

Test 2.

Nope — jamalrob

This one?

That one was the old edit bug, still not fixed then.

Test. @jamalrob

Receive that one?

But all this maths is unconscious. It would be straining things to say that the fielder believes that the acceleration of the tangent of a will be zero if he's at the right spot. The purported beliefs in your counterexample are subject to the same criticism. — Daemon

I think it's true that whatever modelling process a human does won't resemble how we'd calculate things on paper. People do calculus at high school but catch balls as children. I think the trick there is that the world tends to develop in patterns, and however our bodies are wired is very good at guessing what comes next given an input pattern and what we need to do with it.

Sorta like a thrown ball "needs" to fall in a way that roughly resembles a parabola, our bodies "need" to guess what happens next given what we've learned about how balls fall. Perception as less of a manual calculation we'd do - more like perception as a way of adapting to nature's next move based on her play.

So what your'e saying in the previous response is that perception involves all sorts of beliefs about the world, but they're mostly not the sort we put into language when acting. — Marchesk

If it's appropriate to call those perceptual expectations beliefs, yeah. I think there's some intuition that a belief labels an "entire" state of mind, a unified disposition of an agent towards a thing which can be expressed as a statement. I just think it's a case of using words to talk about things and forgetting that "how the statement expresses the belief" isn't the same thing as the statement; "snow is white" is about snow. Words aren't the things they're about.

The snow, unless it's during one of these discussions. — Marchesk

That's my intuition too. I believe snow is white, language competence does the chunking things into related bits with labels on them for me - what counts as snow, what counts as white, what it means to describe a thing as white and how that's wrapped into the "is" - but what I've got the intentional state toward is snow.

The other way I tried to approach it with @Banno is: if you believe snow is white, is your belief directed towards snow or the statement "snow is white"? Is your belief about snow, or about words?

What do you have in mind as counter-example? For example, "I believe that I'm special". Would that count as a belief that is not about a statement? — Marchesk

I gave what I thought of as a counter example earlier. When you record where people's eyes move about on faces while forming a stable image of them - if someone's fixated on a facial feature, where they tend to look next is where they expect another facial feature to be. Those expectations and actions come out so fast no statement like "Given that I am looking at their nasal septum, I believe that if I rotate my eyes up and left a little bit my eyes will land approximately where I expect an eye to be, given what I know about faces in general and this face" enters the process, but that's the kind of thing that goes into a perceptual expectation informing eye movements promoted to explore someone's face.

Since no statements come to mind during that activity (brief fixations regularly last around 0.15 seconds), and certainly not any of the required complexity to state the event, it seems whatever intentional state the body is in during that time cannot be directed towards a statement; statements about the face are not within the scope of the exploratory process at the time. If perceptual expectations counted as beliefs, they'd be beliefs that aren't intentional states directed towards statements.

Those perceptual expectations get called beliefs. In the absence of necessary and sufficient conditions for a mental+behavioural state to count as a belief (help, @Banno?), here's a list of things perceptual expectations look to satisfy that beliefs also satisfy.

(A) Perceptual expectations inform actions.
(B) Perceptual expectations can be used to explain actions.
(C) Perceptual expectations can cause actions.
(D) They do all the above in functioning as dispositions toward actions "He was hungry so he made a snack" vs "he expected to see an eye there so he looked".
(E) Perceptual expectations can be more or less accurate; if I expect to find an eye to fixate on on a face by moving my eye pupil one degree upwards from its current position, I'm more right if the eye is located at 1.1 degrees than I am if it is at 1.2 degrees. Correcting for inaccuracies is already part of the process (if your eyes overshoot something you're looking for, they move back); so inaccuracies are already part of the process.
(F) Perceptual expectations are information carriers; if you see a glowing red ring on the hob, you infer that it is hot. There's something modelling-y or representation-y about them.

They look a lot like beliefs to me in terms of the functional roles they play and the properties they satisfy. Maybe they don't count all count as beliefs, maybe beliefs can count as perceptual expectations: "I believe that my cup is behind my laptop" - where else is there to that than expecting to perceive my cup behind my laptop if I looked?

...as are all observations. — Banno

Yes.

SO I don't think I'm alone. — Banno

I don't think you are either. What convinces you that beliefs can only be about statements?

The argument is simply an observation. It's a commonplace, and that you can't see it is what is extraordinary here. — Banno

I can see the appeal of the position, I just don't agree with it.

I rather think you nailed your flag to the mast too early, and would rather take it down now. — Banno

Nah. It's that I don't think I'd be able to make you doubt your position regardless of what I say, and I don't want to try a fifth strategy (fifth!) to start the discussion when you've yet to present a positive argument for your position. "simply an observation" won't do, it's theory ladened.

Fair enough. I was finding this frustrating too, if you decide to come up with an argument for your position (that beliefs can only be about statements), rather than requiring me to do all the legwork, I'd be down to discuss more.

Tell me what you understand "substitution salva veritae" to mean?

And?

Sure, substitution salva veritate. Fdrke might not believe "Schnee ist weiß" despite believing "snow is white". Nevertheless, Fdrake's belief is a propositional attitude: Fdrake believes that snow is white. — Banno

The student believes x is a group.
The student believes x is a semigroup with identity and inverses.

The first is true, the second is false. By substituting in the second for the first, you're changing the truth value of the belief statement, you're just not changing the truth value of the statement which is believed. It is not substitution which preserves truth value for the belief statements, then.

Fdrake believes that "snow is white" is true.

"snow is white" is true IFF snow is white.

Hence,

Fdrake believes that snow is white.

It amounts to the same thing. — Banno

I have two different approaches to get you to see the problem, then.

First:

What you wrote actually an invalid argument form:
(1) x believes that p
(2) p iff q
(3: Conclusion) x believes that q

Countermodel:

A student is taking a course on abstract algebra. They've covered groups, they've yet to cover semigroups. They don't know at all what they are, yet.

(1) The student believes that x is a group.
(2) x is a group iff x is a semigroup with an identity and inverses.
(3) The student does not believe that x is a semigroup with identity and inverses.

They don't believe that x is a group because they do not yet believe that x is a group iff x is a semigroup with an identity and inverses. Belief doesn't distribute over implication. You're going to have to spell out what lets you move from one to the other and why, what about the function of the t-sentence restores the validity of the argument?

Don't you think "beliefs only apply to statements" goes against my belief that snow is white? Which is an attitude I have towards snow. Not just towards the statement.

A proposition is a state of affairs. — frank

Propositions, we shall say, are the sharable objects of the attitudes and the primary bearers of truth and falsity. This stipulation rules out certain candidates for propositions, including thought- and utterance-tokens, which presumably are not sharable, and concrete events or facts, which presumably cannot be false. These consequences fit well with contemporary usage. — SEP

SEP makes a distinction between propositions and concrete events, I'm using proposition in the sense of what the statements "snow is white" and schnee ist weiß" have in common in terms of truth/falsity; they express the proposition that snow is white. Roughly - sharable truth value bearing aspect of a statement. Snow being white can't be true or false in the way "snow is white" can be true or false, since it's not a statement.

You there? I'd really like to know where this was going. When you have a minute. — Banno

Sure. Since you are either unable or unwilling to provide an argument for the position you hold (that beliefs only apply to statements), I'll provide a counter argument to the position.

One type of account of belief construes belief as a propositional attitude. That is, an attitude an agent may hold towards a proposition. If x is an agent and p is a proposition, that propositional attitude can be expressed as "x believes that p". Keep "expressed" in your mind for later.

So we don't get bogged down unnecessarily in redundancy, I'll grant you that "x believes that p" and "x believes that "p" is true"" say the same thing, in the sense that to assert that p is to assert ""p" is true". In other words, in this account, the following two things are logically equivalent (one is true when and only when the other is true):

(1) x believes that p
(2) x believes that "p" is true

And we can say that because "p" is true if and only if p.

Onto the argument, let's say that x believes that snow is white. Under what conditions is x's belief true? x's belief is true when and only when snow is white. But notice, x may believe that snow is white, and x may believe the statement that "snow is white" is true; but the former is a belief about snow, and the latter is a belief about the statement "snow is white" that is true whenever snow is white. The first has belief directed towards snow being white (as a truthmaker/truth condition/event/state of affairs), the second has belief directed towards a statement that snow is white.

If beliefs can only be directed towards statements, then x will not (definitionally) have beliefs about snow - they can only have beliefs about statements about snow. But I don't just believe the statement "snow is white", I believe snow is white.

Under the account of truth above, when a person believes that snow is white, that does not concern snow. It concerns a statement about snow. Now remember "expressed" earlier - it comes back to haunt us, propositional attitudes are expressed in statements, but are themselves attitudes towards states of affairs.

What the equivalence between (1) and (2) lets you do is to speak as if people only have beliefs about statements, simply because if x believes that p, that is logically equivalent to having the belief about the statement "p" is true (but see the hidden * comment for another wrinkle), despite that one is targeted at a state of affairs - snow being white - and one is targeted at a statement.

That construes beliefs as a relation between agents and states of affairs, rather than between agents and statements. Perceptual expectations are relationships between agents and states of affairs. There will be some overlap; "I believe that my cup is on my table", what else is there to that than seeing my cup on my table and expressing it as a belief statement? If I saw a statement in place of my cup, I would be very surprised. A theory of perceptual expectations can tell you how the "I believe" in "I believe my cup is on my table" comes to apply the state of my cup being on my table. What it means for an agent to form a belief , accounting for that "I believe" part in "I believe my cup is on my table", is what a theory of belief requires. Deflating it into statements just won't do, as beliefs care very much about the truth conditions of belief statements.

Stuff that happens is propositional - you can put it in a statement. — Banno

Do you agree that these two statements don't imply each other?

(1) Everything that happens can be put into a statement.
(2) Every belief regards a statement.