Some Remarks on Bedrock Beliefs
There seems to be no doubt that Wittgenstein's view of Moore's propositions are such that his propositions are of a very special sort (e.g., "I know this is a hand." or "I know this is a tree."). It also seems to be a correct interpretation of On Certainty that these kinds of propositions are foundational (e.g., OC 448, 449). The term foundational is a general term used to describe many kinds of foundational beliefs/propositions. For just as any structure is made up of many building blocks which can be said to be foundational, so too is our language. Our language is made up of many kinds of beliefs that can be called foundational or even bedrock, but not all foundational beliefs have the same structural significance. For example, what's foundational to a chess game (the pieces, the board, and the rules) doesn't have the same significance in our life as the bedrock belief "This is my hand." In terms of structure (as in a building) "This is my hand," is a bedrock belief/proposition, i.e., it's structurally more significant than what's foundational to a game of chess. In these two examples you can see what's foundational, but you can also see the difference between foundational structures (bedrock as opposed to other foundational supports higher up in the structure - steel beams and wooden beams). The structure rests on bedrock. What is the structure (rhetorical)?
Comments (599)
I think that:
1) Language is a code (specific and structured data) consisting of a set of symbols having paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations, hence; semantic content.
2) Codes have a vocabulary (sign set common to and/or understood by both message source and destination) and syntax (laws of structure).
3) Language components are:
a) Morphemes
b) Words
c) Phrases
d) Clauses
e) Sentences
f) Phonemes
g) Graphemes
4) Structure is component (element) arrangement.
In other words: since beliefs are propositional attitudes, I consider them to be a component of mind, not language.
Can you guarantee uniqueness of the structure? It seems to me "Here is one hand" is a bedrock for philosophy. But not for examining the self reports of a delusional phantom limb patient waving their hand about.
?Galuchat Here we are 'brains in vat' endlessly discussing how to get a grip on reality with ever more sophisticated language.
Quoting Galuchat
I thought the same thing when I read that. Language is made up of many kinds of letters and words, not beliefs. Minds are made of beliefs, but beliefs aren't the foundation of minds. There are the brute sensory experiences that are the structure of our beliefs and the root cause of changing (restructuring) our beliefs.
Our beliefs are composed of shapes, colors, sounds, feelings, etc. The words and letters of any language are themselves composed of these things. You need to see and hear (or feel in the case of using braille) to learn and then use a language. So the structure of language and the beliefs it symbolizes are composed of sensory impressions.
It seems to me that a more fundamental belief in the kind that Sam26 is trying to get at would be the belief that there is an external world. You need that as the foundation before you can build a structural understanding of what language even is. The idea of language is built on the idea that there is an external world with other minds, and that my mind is a representation of that world including how human being communicate. Language would have no foundation to stand on if there wasn't the foundational idea of an external world, for what purpose would language serve to a solipsist? How would the idea even come about in a solipsist mind?
You might say that our senses, with all of their brute sensory impressions informing the mind of how the world is, are using the language of sensory impressions to communicate the state of the world to our bodies. The mind's interpreter tries to make sense of those impressions, which the shapes and sounds of language are a part of. Learning a language entails interpreting the correlation between the shape, color and sound and what it represents, just as learning that the redness of an apple means it is ripe.
?fdrake
?Galuchat
Here we are 'brains in vat' endlessly discussing how to get a grip on reality with ever more sophisticated language.
Describing the shadows on the wall of a cave will never give you a satisfactory understanding of your surroundings no matter how sophisticated you are able to formulate your description of them.
Fair enough.
Then being familiar with On Certainty, perhaps you could explain in what sense beliefs are elements (or foundational parts) of language?
I don't see shadows. What I see is much more detailed than shadows. Not only that but I have other senses that give me even an even greater resolution on reality by way of providing more information that can confirm what one other sense is telling me. Notice how the location of objects in your visual field match up with the location you can feel and hear those objects in your tactile and auditory fields of consciousness. If we only had shadows to go by in how we understand the world, we wouldn't be as adaptable as we are, and survive as long as we do.
As to your second question or comment, the problem is epistemological, and as you say philosophical, and since philosophy has something important to tell us across all subjects, it even has something to say about phantom limb pain. Especially Wittgenstein's philosophy of language, which I believe is important to understand.
Very interested in your continued exegesis, then!
You are living in Plato's Cave, you can only see shadows.
The structure as I see it, consists of the world, minds, and language; and the relationship between these three. The world is the backdrop, and we find ourselves existing in it. Our mind helps us to interpret the world (it's in the relationship between our minds and the world that bedrock or basic beliefs form); so in a sense our mind is the center between the world and language. However, before we get to the language of beliefs, I want to say a few things about prelinguistic beliefs.
Without language we have the most basic of all beliefs. These beliefs are formed (I believe) causally between the mind (sensory experiences) and the world. More importantly these most basic of beliefs (states-of-mind) are not revealed linguistically, but are revealed in our actions (remember I'm talking prelinguistic beliefs). They are mostly seen in animals and children (and prehistoric man - OC 284). This is not to say that you don't see these kinds of beliefs in the language of modern man, it's only to say that they are most clearly seen in the actions of animals and very young children.
What is the relationship between my mind and the world? The initial relationship seems to be between our sensory experiences and the world. We come into direct contact with the world through sensory experience. We observe this initial contact (between the world and sensory experience) in animals and in young children. However, I'm not saying that adults don't exhibit these kinds of beliefs, only that they're most clearly seen in the actions of animals and young children who only have a rudimentary language.
One of the problems in seeing prelinguistic beliefs is language itself. It's difficult to look past the beliefs we express in language in order to see the beliefs I'm referring to. The key to doing this is in our actions. Actions express beliefs. In some ways actions tell us more about what we believe than statements (written or verbal).
Try to keep your responses limited to two or three paragraphs, or about the length of this post. It's difficult to read anything longer.
Hey Sam! Good to see you. Hope this finds you well.
As you may remember, pre-linguistic beliefs are pivotal to my own position. It seems that we agree regarding the problems 'seeing' these beliefs. I also agree that non linguistic beliefs are causal in the sense that one acts upon them.
I think that the largest hurdle we have in front of us is overcoming the limits that conventional notions of belief impose upon us. It is common, perhaps most common, to hold that beliefs are propositional attitudes. Of course, that notion has significant difficulty straddling the divide between prelinguistic belief and linguistic. I mean, it doesn't make much sense to say that a language less creature has an attitude towards a proposition, or has belief that consists of such a thing.
The content of belief is important here, it seems to me. If belief is prior to language, then it exists in it's entirety before our awareness of it. Keeping this in mind as a guiding principle will better serve us to help discriminate between the sorts of things that such foundational belief can consist of, and that which is just simply cannot.
What do you think of this approach?
Actually Harry this is a pretty good summary of some of my thoughts. I've been trying to work on a theory of epistemology based on some of these ideas.
I would also concur.
That's probably the case. However, others become aware of these kinds of prelinguistic beliefs by observation, but only if they have the concept of belief. In other words, it's backward looking, it only happens, that I can say there are prelinguistic beliefs, from the perspective of language. It's only in language that we can talk about such beliefs. This causes confusion.
Yes, but perhaps it's a confusion that can be easily resolved by realizing that knowledge of prelinguistic belief requires language, talking about prelinguistic belief requires language, but prelinguistic belief does not... cannot. What we're taking account of is not equivalent to our accounting practices. Prelinguistic belief is akin to Mt. Everest in this way.
We learn conceptual norms by trust, initially, through language, and we subsequently develop our own, which we in turn pass on.
Quoting Sam26
For myself I think 'prelinguistic' is a red herring, though I know many are wedded to it. Instead I feel that it's a mistake to distinguish the linguistic from action. To use or interpret language is to act, it's not an alternative to action. It may be that this will eventually amount to a similar argument to the one from the 'prelinguistic', but for me it has different foundations: all our engagement in language games is a way of acting, as the form of life we are.
Hello Mcdoodle.
Prelinguistic is just a way of talking about particular kinds of beliefs "wedded" to actions apart from linguistic actions. I agree that to use language is an act, but I also believe that all beliefs are actions of a sort. If someone walks into the woods with an axe, walks up to a particular tree and start chopping it down, it would be weird to say that the person doesn't believe there is a tree in front of them, or that they don't have an axe in their hand. Our actions, linguistic or not, show that we believe certain things apart from the linguistic act of saying (verbal or nonverbal) "I believe..." There are all kinds of things we do on a daily basis (opening doors, starting our cars, brushing our teeth, etc) that reveal that we believe certain thiings, all of which are acts of a kind.
It seems to me that people can display knowledge without saying so. I know that you know how to tie your shoes by me observing you tie your shoes. No words need to be spoken. From this observation I can see that you have a belief about shoes and their laces being tied. Only if I never observed you tying your shoes would it be relevant to say so. Observing you tying your shoes and you saying that you know how to tie your shoes would be redundant information.
Knowing how to tie your shoes is knowing that there are shoes to be tied and that if you don't tie them they will fall off. You telling me that you know how to tie your shoes isn't a truth about your tying your shoes. It is a truth that you know how to say, "I know how to tie my shoes", not a truth that you actually know how to tie your shoes. Tying your shoes displays to both you and I that you do know how to tie your shoes, not saying it, and doing entails knowing that there are shoes to be tied or else they will fall off.
Learning that your shoes fall off when they aren't tied can be learned without language use. It can be learned without someone telling you so. So your belief that your shoes will fall off when they aren't tied can be learned by the experience of someone telling you or by you experiencing your shoes falling off more easily when they aren't tied. The experience can lead one to inform others that are new to wearing shoes why it is important to tie them.
One of the fundamental beliefs that we have is communication. Organisms communicate. One might even say that a more fundamental belief would be "aboutness" - that there are things that are about other things. Symbolization and representation seem to be an integral part of any belief as beliefs are about things.
In order to be able to learn a language, one must be able to symbolize, or understand that things can be about other things, and those other things can be outside of our own immediate experience (object permanence) of having a belief about that thing. Language is only useful to communicate things that aren't known by the other party. It would be redundant, and a waste of energy, telling someone something they already know.
People can communicate their ideas and knowledge to others without language. Body language and sounds babies make communicate their needs to their parents. Think about how you'd communicate with someone who speaks a different language. Pre-linguistic societies had many ways to communicate their ideas. Language is just a more sophisticated tool for communicating those ideas and knowledge.
In these types of discussions I often bring up Ildefonso, who is a man that didn't learn what a language was until he was in his late 20s.
IIdefonso had beliefs and he communicated them to others. The problem was that he wasn't using a shared language where others used the same means to communicate. In learning a language, one isn't learning new beliefs other than what scribble and sound symbolizes some other belief or idea that isn't a use of language.
One of the things that Susan says in the video is how it was difficult to teach someone what a word is by using words. We do this all the time when we teach babies how to talk and write. So it seems to me that, at least humans, already have this built-in feature of their minds to interpret symbols, or to assume that things can mean other things - that things are about other things.
She also says that he could obviously think and that she wanted to meet him and the only way to meet him was to teach him a language he could use to express himself - what was already there before language.
There is knowledge as a belief, and there is knowledge as a skill. We can observe knowledge as a skill, for example, tying your shoes, but there are many other examples. Riding a bike and counting to ten are skills. Knowing that bikes have wheels and that 2+2=4 are beliefs.
There have been times in the past where I stated that prelinguistic man doesn't have knowledge, but I was mainly thinking of the language of knowledge in terms of propositions/statements. It's clear though, if you want to be precise, that prelinguistic man and even young children display certain kinds of skills, which is another aspect of knowledge. You don't necessarily need language to demonstrate a skill, but you do need a language to demonstrate knowledge as a belief. Knowledge as a belief is necessarily linguistic.
So, I agree that you can show that you have knowledge (knowledge as a skill) without the use of language. Your example of tying your shoe is just that.
Beliefs are much more basic than knowledge, so the act of tying your shoe or skinning an animal shows that you have certain beliefs about the shoe and the animal. In both these cases we see very basic (bedrock) beliefs and knowledge as a skill.
Knowledge as a skill is simply applied knowledge as a belief. You can't apply beliefs that you don't have.
Skill has nothing to do with belief.
I totally agree with you. Practical skills have nothing to do with belief. How you apply your skills does but that is something entirely different.
It's not. Knowledge by skill is simply the means of testing, or justifying, your knowledge as a belief, by applying it.
Quoting Sam26
I don't disagree because as Ildefonso shows, he had both beliefs and skills in being a gardener. He had no formal teaching. He taught himself by experience without any language. Organizing nature into neat little groups is what the mind does and language is a tool that helps us do that more efficiently - especially for communicating. Observing plants grow over time provides you with the same information as some professor and textbook does. Using what you have learned tests your knowledge. There are gardeners of varying skill - all based on the beliefs that they have about plants which were accumulated through learning by doing and/or taught. Even the best still learn new things. Your skill is a reflection of what you know.
When Ildefonso learned what words were for, he started asking what the shared name was for door, window, etc. He already knew what a door was, he just didn't know it's shared name. He already had beliefs about the door, but simply didn't know the symbol that we use to communicate the idea of them. When he learned what words were for, he wasn't shocked that there were suddenly doors and windows. He was shocked that there was a shared symbol for those things, and that people use those symbols to communicate the idea for those things. He could already use doors. He just couldn't use the word, "door". He had a belief in doors, but not in words.
Second, how do we know that Moore's beliefs are not knowledge? We know for various reasons. As I pointed out above we know this belief is formed without justification, it's part of our inherited background. I find myself believing that I have hands as I interact with them in the world around me. These beliefs are causally formed through sensory experience. It has nothing to do with knowledge as a belief, especially since knowledge as a belief requires language.
Another reason that these beliefs are not what Moore thinks they are is that they cannot be doubted sensibly, which is why Wittgenstein points out the negation of Moore's propositions - "I don't know this is a hand." Remember we are talking about normal circumstances. Wittgenstein points out that there are instances where it would make sense to doubt such a claim, but Moore's context is not such a context. What would a doubt or mistake look like in Moore's context. Moore is giving a lecture before an audience and holding up his hands.
If you know something such as Moore is suggesting, then you are able to justify how it is that you know it, but what would such a justification look like? Do I observe the hand from different angles to make sure it's my own? Do I feel it or pinch it to make sure I know it's my hand? No, none of this happens. We find that we believe such things and many others as part of the world around us, outside the language-games of epistemology. These are some of the reasons why they are referred to as bedrock beliefs or foundational beliefs.
I'm interested in what you're saying and hope you don't mind continuing comments.
As I've said I don't understand the primacy you give to 'belief'. What for example is added to the above phrase by the word 'beliefs'? It seems to me 'bedrock' and 'foundation' would be perfectly clear without them, as metaphors.
It feels like you are shifting away from your Wittgensteinian core, as in my eyes language games are all about knowing-how: skilful use. 'Belief' is relatively unimportant then. As Harry says, to proclaim a belief is to exhibit the skill in making such proclamations; it's the tying the shoelaces that counts. It counts for me, as something the shoelace-tier knows. They may believe they are solving the final problem that makes the universe whole, but to me they are tying shoes, and their beliefs are their own affair.
I don't understand this mcdoodle, the whole subject revolves around the idea of beliefs, if we're not talking about foundational or bedrock beliefs, what are we talking about?
Quoting mcdoodle
You're correct, languge-games do involve skills, Wittgenstein was skillful in showing us the different uses of words in different language-games. However, Wittgenstein not only showed us his skills in doing this kind of philosophy, he also showed us his beliefs about what language-games told us about language as a whole. His beliefs about language are what's important, and that's what I've focused on.
Keep in mind that I am not trying to give a Wittgensteinian view, although I am using some or many of Wittgenstein's ideas, i.e., I am trying to expand on the idea of bedrock beliefs.
I asked in the OP, "What is the structure of our beliefs?" In a later post I suggested that the structure consisted of three things (the world, minds, and language). There is a kind of scaffolding of beliefs that takes place between these three. However, if we look at history, the world and minds come first, i.e., before language (at least before a sophisticated language). This is why I have talked about prelinguistic beliefs, which I believe is essential to understanding bedrock beliefs, at least prelinguistic bedrock beliefs. My idea of beliefs is that beliefs extend beyond language, and that the best evidence of the existence of such beliefs is in our actions. Our actions show what we believe. If I open a door, this action, shows that I believe there is a door there. Our actions are a constant source of what we believe apart from statements or propositions. Wittgenstein suggests this very thing, "...we can see from their actions that they [primitive man] believe certain things definitely, whether they express this belief or not [my emphasis] (OC, 284)."
If we want a good representation of what a prelinguistic bedrock belief looks like, then we simply need to look at those actions that express beliefs apart from statements or propositions. Almost any interaction with the world (the background) shows that we believe certain things. Even moving from point A to point B within the world shows that we believe in certain relationships between ourselves and the world.
What is the significance of these beliefs? The significance is that these beliefs arise quite apart from any conceptual or linguistic framework, which, I believe, is partly why Wittgenstein imparts a certain status to Moorean propositions. The belief, "This is my hand," although expressed linguistically using a statement, arises quite apart from language, i.e., my actions everyday demonstrate or show my belief that I have hands. A further point of significance is that such beliefs (bedrock) are outside any epistemological justification. Why? Because these kinds of beliefs arise quite apart from epistemology. Epistemology is linguistic, and the concepts used in epistemology are linguistic. There is no sense of justification when I open the door, I just do it. Many actions are like this, especially when looking back before language.
Wittgenstein talks about bedrock or foundational beliefs within the scope of language (for the most part), and it is with this scope that many other kinds of bedrock beliefs are formed. For example, the game of chess is based on rules, and these rules are foundational to the game. However, the difference between these foundational or bedrock rules, and the ones I demonstrated above, is that the rules of chess are expressed in language. The context drives the difference between these kinds of bedrock or foundational beliefs. This is partly what I mean by a scaffolding of these beliefs.
You can say that this type of action requires "belief", but is that really true? Perhaps it's better to say that there is something categorically similar to belief involved with these actions, which are not necessarily "belief" as we normally use the word.
We see that plants respond to sunlight. Would you say that this means that the plant believes that the sun is there? If not, then how does this differ from your door example?
Quoting Sam26
I would go as far as saying prelinguistic beliefs are the foundation of all thought. I explain with example:
1. Baby is hungry
2. Mother comes in room, turns on light
3. Baby is happily drinking milk
4. Mother stops feeding, turns off light, and leaves room
Darkness -> Light = good
Lignt -> Darkness - bad
Persistence of association: permanent.
What is known rests on a chain of reasoning, however, that chain comes to an end at some point. That end point is what is bedrock, viz., a bedrock belief. No further grounds can be given, no further doubts entertained.
What Wittgenstein found interesting about Moore's propositions is that they seem to play a peculiar role in our epistemological framework. Bedrock beliefs fulfill a special logical role in epistemology. They support the structure of epistemology. Understanding this, solves two problems, 1) the infinite regress problem, and 2) the problem of circularity.
Yes, Wittgenstein is simply correct. "I know I have a hand" or then more basic sense experience that makeup that "knowledge" if you prefer (i.e. I know there's something I grab things with that people call "a hand"), is not knowledge but belief. It's simply the axioms that makeup our knowledge framework. It's knowledge in the sense that we believe it to be true, but it's not knowledge in the sense that we have prior knowledge to justify it. It's a confusion that results from simply having no practical need to distinguish between what is fundamental and we believe true and everyone agrees with what we believe is true that is not fundamental.
We can also criticize the word belief because we only "use" the word belief when a choice is involved. For instance "I believe the witness" implies there's a plausible choice not be believe, just as "I believe in Christ" implies there's a plausible choice not to believe. Foundational beliefs aren't this type of belief either, they are closer to knowledge as is colloquially used. "I know I have a hand" makes more sense in common situations than "I believe I have a hand".
Quoting Sam26
Obviously this is true, but it's not a new analysis (it's just the categories of Aristotle), rather (I would argue) it's rediscovered analysis after descriptive historical-psychological theories of our beliefs created a philosophical paradox that we need beliefs to understand those psychological theories of one sort or another. In an age where foundational beliefs are no longer widely agreed (philosophers before didn't have this issue because they had enough foundational beliefs that everyone did actually agree on to have constructive debates) a meta-explanation of people's beliefs and even our own becomes tempting (I don't know what's true, but I am comforted by a feeling that at least I know why people believe incompatible things and my own beliefs are at least explained by this same meta-theory even if I don't feel my own beliefs are really true).
However, we can't actually get to a meta understanding of how our beliefs emerge personally, psychologically, dialectically or historically without beliefs that make sense of those theories. The attempt at a meta understanding of ourselves as a "true theory" is useless as we already need foundational beliefs for a theory about foundational beliefs to be intelligible (therefore it resolves nothing other than that our foundational beliefs imply our foundational beliefs; which we should expect, it would only be a concern if this wasn't the case, and therefore our beliefs about how foundational beliefs emerge cannot be knowledge as there is no option for analysis to lead to different conclusions that chains of reasoning will resolve; we can already know we are going to believe what we already believe at the start of the knowledge process (i.e. we already foundationally believe the beliefs and that our meta-analysis will conform to these beliefs; it is to claim otherwise, that I have meta-knowledge that leave my own foundational beliefs open, as any meta theory would need to actually do to be a meta theory, that is the analytical mistake that we can know we shouldn't ever believe); I believe a key point of Wittgenstein, though I don't foundationally believe it to be so, as I could be wrong about what I think I know about him).
Wittgenstein also clearly understood that you can make as many symbolic substitutes for foundational beliefs as you want, but that never creates new knowledge, just mostly new philosophical sounding babbling (coming up with new words to replace old words), nor does it ever create new options of different foundational belief, only new options to confuse ourselves (about what we think we know and why, including what we think we know about ourselves).
I'm not sure if Wittgenstein or Moore ever placed things in the context of culturally what goes wrong if you try to prove or deny foundational beliefs (as happens in every scientism), but After Virtue is a good discussion of what happens culturally when foundational beliefs are no longer in sufficient agreement to have constructive debate.
In simpler terms, a meta theory of beliefs we can know exists, but is to us an intellectual noumena of which our self-justification is the phenomena we observe (including our speculation about the belief process thing in itself).
I can think of a way around this, at least for some aspects of experience. As you later note, belief is hard to pin down, so I'll here be assuming something along the lines that all experiences are tacitly believed.
That “I know I have two hands” might not be the best example, so, instead, I’ll make use of “I know that I experience having two hands”.
As a caveat: Being a fallibilist, I could come up with a general argument for why this belief is not infallible. Rather than saying it outright, inklings of this argument might indirectly show up in what follows. That said:
The tacit belief that I experience myself to have two hands, upon enquiry, is something for which I cannot find any justifiable alternative to once I explicitly address this belief (let an unjustifiable alternative be, for example, the just-so statement that I make, without grounding in either experience or reasoning, stipulating that “I don’t so experience having two hands). Firstly, any conceived (and justifiable) alternative to the given state of affairs introduces some degree of potential error, irrespective of how small this degree of error might be. Nevertheless, one can go so far as BIVs and Cartesian daemons – and my experience of having two hands would still lack justifiable alternatives to me which so experiences having two hands. That my experience of having two hands is, to me, devoid of any justifiable alternative I can fathom relative to this experience will not of itself prove the truth of my so experiencing to have two hands with infallible certainty: The lack of justifiable alternatives can well be due to my subjective faculties of imagination being, by their very nature, limited; and were someone to hypothetically know everything there is to know in principle, maybe such alternative would then be fathomed. Notwithstanding, it could also be the case that I cannot fathom justifiable alternatives to this experience on grounds that no such alternatives in fact exist – and if no conceivable alternatives to my so experiencing can in principle exist, then my so experiencing would necessarily be true. (A tangential emphasis: this doesn't hold vice versa: sometimes what is true can be fathomed to have alternatives.) This state of affairs would then necessarily be the only actual state of affairs that is ontologically, even metaphysically, possible – and not even a supposed omniscient being could discover a scenario of how it could be otherwise.
So, I (or anybody else for that matter) can thereby obtain a JTB account of “I experience having two hands”. I cannot fathom any possible (and justifiable) alternative to my experiencing having two hands while I experience having two hands, which is what would occur were this experience to be true. My bedrock, and typically tacit, belief that I experience having two hands is thereby justified to be true. And, here taking a shortcut, I have as much reason to believe it’s true as I do to believe anything else is true. That I experience having two hands thereby is a JTB and, hence, a known.
The only potential flaw I see in this argument is going from something being justified to be true to something being in fact true. But this has more to do with epistemology in general than with particular bedrock beliefs such as that of “I know I experience having two hands”.
This is not really an issue. There is no problem in knowing that the noumena maybe otherwise than what we are inclined to imagine about it, that whatever my hands are "in themselves" maybe different to what I naturally assume (a Cartesian Demon induced hallucination or the modern ersatz equivalent of a simulation); the "foundational belief" is that, whatever society calls them or I call them and whatever it is in itself that I don't really know: I experience having two hands and this is a foundational belief.
Yes, I can't conceive of believing I don't have two hands right now, but this isn't a meta-theory explaining why I believe I have two hands, it is simply the definition of believing I have two hands and nothing else.
A scenario that would lead me to believe I don't have two hands wouldn't invalidate my foundational belief I was experiencing having two hands before (assuming I remember so experiencing), it would just reveal I have other foundational beliefs that allow me to interpret the experience of not having two hands and the experience of realizing I was under such intense hallucination that I previously experienced something else. The truth value is not about the noumena of the hands, but about the phenomena of experiencing and believing those experiences in a foundational sense. I can conceive of new experience, including hallucination and simulation, but I cannot conceive of new experience that would not be the new foundational belief of what I would then be experiencing: I think with the category of time and I conceive of every experience at every moment as foundationally informative.
The point Wittgenstein, and Kant before him and Aristotle before him, are all making is that our foundational beliefs (our categories of thought) cannot be analysed beyond a simple clarification of ordinary language. To say something "is true", "is actually true", "is the case", "is the case that's it's true", "corresponds to a state of affairs that exists", "obtains", "a valid and sound conclusion", "coheres to everything else I know and the alternatives would be incompatible with every other thing I believe or know", and so on, do not create new philosophical content; they may usefully clarify ordinary language on occasion, but are just different ways of saying "it's true", and our foundational belief that some things are true and what that means has no further analytic content.
I agree with the contents of your reply. My emphasis, however, was on bedrock beliefs holding the capacity of being justified to be true. And, by extension, of certain bedrock beliefs then holding the capacity to constitute knowledge in the JTB sense of the term.
Quoting boethius
I'll argue that we are psychologically incapable, even in principle, of forsaking the notion of truth as that which is in accordance with what is real. We might abstract the term truth in multiple ways, going even so far as to say there is no truth, but in all these cases there will remain our psychological dependency on what is existentially real.
Would this not qualify as "further analytic content"?
That there cannot be a justification is the concept of bedrock beliefs.
Quoting javra
Sure, but this adds no content to our idea of truth. Real is just another word for truth to add to our list; useful in certain situations to clarify ordinary language but adding no new content.
This kind of process as not creating any knew knowledge, just potential confusion, is exactly what Wittgenstein is talking about from what I understand. Certainly what I'm talking about.
Not that it's false, that's the key to understand, it can be a trivial true extension of what we already believe. However, it is easy to make a false analytic step and enter confusion -- we cannot abstract our concept of truth away without our current concept at every step and at the end: a proposition cannot be true and false at the same time and with the same respect.
That it's enticing to try to "make" new knowledge with the sort of meta-theory you describe is what's to be guarded against. Our meta-theory about belief cannot but confirm what we already believe, the reasons for believing our meta-theory is "actually true" are trivial extensions of what we believe without the meta theory; we cannot find new knowledge there, we only risk confusion by extending trivial implication beyond what we are able to properly analyse.
In a way I agree. Yet, as per Aristotle, this addresses the laws by which beliefs become justified. However, as to so termed bedrock beliefs such as that of experiencing having two hands, I gave an example of how such may be justified.
Quoting boethius
I'll acknowledge that for all of Wittgenstein's sometimes profound insights, I don't find things to be a game of words all the way down - such that turtles are replaced with words. To me, meaningful words have referents to their users - and sometimes, as with the word "real", these referents hold objective existence, rather than being the concoction of individuals who find agreement in that which they invent, or create . "What is real" is therefore to me not a word game. I'm hoping, or presuming, that we don't find too much disagreement in this.
If "real" as a conceptual abstraction has a referent that impartially applies to all - thereby, imv, making truth likewise meaningful - this referent will occur regardless of the words used, or even if any words are used at all. Yet there clearly occurs numerable disagreements of what "real" as sign signifies. That a coffee mug is real in no way addresses, for example, whether or not physicalism is real. So analysis of what is and is not real seem to me to be appropriate.
If language use via word-game rules was all there is to it, to me it would be on par to saying, "stop thinking about things and be ignorant". Yet this implicit commandment of what one must do is antagonistic to, at the very least, any and all discovery - rather than, as you say in your latter post, to the "making" of new knowledge.
This is the tricky part in all this; there's no problem in conceiving of a justification for our foundational beliefs. It is not incoherent to add to a system in which A is true a justification that A is true (insofar as it does nothing else); we can add as many such justifications as we want. What those justifications don't do is give reason or "more reason" to believe what we already believe.
If I start with a proposition A in a system, and later on I prove that A is true using other propositions; I have created a justification of A which (can be, but is not necessarily) true. But, I haven't created new reasons to believe A, "nor more reasons to believe it", it was already there, I've just re-extracted it from other propositions it was already contained within.
Our foundational beliefs contain all the attributes of knowledge and justification. It doesn't matter whether we say "I foundationally believe it", "I have complete justification for believing it", "I know it and can't conceive it's wrong", "this is just really, actually true", "it's the real reality", "I am totally committed to this axiom", "this is me". One or another expression may clarify our ordinary language in one situation or another, but they can all be the same behind the linguistic expressions (if there is difference, it's because it's not foundational belief, just expression of high degree of confidence we haven't made a mistake; that we engage in such hyperbole is why we need to clarify our language on occasion: "I'm absolutely certain I will win the game" is obviously not an expression of absolute certainty; the beliefs we would use to recognize a mistake are the "real foundational beliefs").
Also tricky, that we cannot access a meta-theory which explains our beliefs does not mean such a meta-theory does not exist and is not true and does not explain all our beliefs; indeed, we must assume such a thing must exist. That we cannot access the noumena (know it's true-true) does not mean the noumena does not exist in a true form.
Have to go soon, however: If a so deemed bedrock belief - such as that of experiencing two hands - can be justified, why do you then object to it being termed a known? This, btw, is what my initial post was in reply to.
As a reminder, it is widely held that the law of non-contradiction cannot be justified on account of being a first principle. Again though, if it can, why would it not then be a known?
I don't.
"Belief" and "knowledge" and "justified" are applicable to our "foundational belief"; our ordinary language has no normal utility to name what we won't normally ever inspect.
Wittgenstein was pointing out it's not knowledge in the sense of resulting in a chain of reasoning nor ever could result from a chain of reasoning. He would not object to say "I know it" in the sense of "I super believe it". He's focused on the word knowledge to emphasize we can't create new knowledge using a theory about our knowledge (that of believing we can justify what we already believe and make it new knowledge is the path to confusion).
Yes, it's a foundational belief. You can try to justify it without first using the law of non-contradiction. What's widely held is that no one ever has nor anyone ever will; first principle is again just another word for foundational belief (in this context).
When it comes to bedrock beliefs or foundational beliefs, my point has been consistently that they are not beliefs that can be known, i.e., they are not epistemological. They are beliefs that are shown in our actions. The best way to understand this, is to think of them nonlinguistically, as I have already pointed out in other posts. The difference is connected with Wittgenstein's saying and showing.
Wittgenstein was addressing the various psychological scientisms that was the rage of his day; pointing out it's mostly just confusing and new knowledge beyond ordinary understanding of these things is impossible.
Aristotle was addressing Plato and the theory of forms. Yes, we have first principles from which we reason; no we can't therefore conclude there is a world of true forms and we "re-remember everything we learn" precisely because we believe what we already believe and therefore cannot come to new knowledge without extending our existing beliefs which mean we already believed it and it isn't new.
Where did you get this idea from? On Certainty, which was written in the last year and half of his life was addressing Moore's propositions.
I'm not disagreeing with this.
We know what we foundationally believe in the sense that we know it because we believe it. We do not know it in the sense that we have carried out some chain of reasoning.
Since we cannot make a meta-theory that results in new knowledge content, I will agree with any meta-theory that simply reiterates what is already believed.
You seem to be contradicting yourself, to know is to give a justification in some form. I'm saying and I believe Wittgenstein is saying that we don't know it period, i.e., in any form of knowing.
I read the Tractatus to be motivated by hyper-pschologizing philosophy, which are forms of scientism. But as I mention, I do not foundationally believe that's true.
Yes, but you can give justification to what you already believe without contradiction. It is knowledge in this sense, it is not "new knowledge", reasons to believe it apart from already believing it, nor "more reasons" to believe it.
I've been pretty clear that ordinary use of language does not address this issue, therefore if someone makes an ordinary statement to express their belief I have no issue. If you want to bait and switch the ordinary meaning for a technical philosophical one, that's not my problem.
If we specify knowledge as only conclusions distinct from foundational beliefs, then, sure, foundational beliefs aren't knowledge, but this distinction is not given to us in the ordinary word knowledge. It makes sense to me if someone says "I know I have two hands".
You've now switched back to Wittgenstein's early philosophy, which really has nothing to do, or very little to do with his last work called On Certainty. Moreover, the Tractatus is not motivated by "hyper-psychologizing philosophy." I have a thread that summarizes the Tractatus, that should give you some idea of what the Tractatus is about.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/8056/a-summary-of-the-tractatus-logico-philosophicus/p1
Wittgenstein doesn't abandon his early philosophy, only mellows out a bit about it; maybe backing away from his claim "every philosophical problem is a language problem" and that he's literally solved every philosophical problem and can go garden. But, insofar as he's looking at philosophical problems as language problems, he is saying all we can hope to do is express what we already believe. "This is the general form of a proposition. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." is to me a profound rebuke to pschologizing belief which was a total rage when he's writing, which I assume he was knowledgeable of what's going on in philosophy and psychology and smart enough to be aware of the implication of what he's saying (you cannot go deeper, you cannot psychologize the proposition, you must be silent). But I maybe wrong about what he thought, as I mention above.
I will look into your summary, but here's also a summary:
[quote=Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy;https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/]Having developed this analysis of world-thought-language, and relying on the one general form of the proposition, Wittgenstein can now assert that all meaningful propositions are of equal value. Subsequently, he ends the journey with the admonition concerning what can (or cannot) and what should (or should not) be said (7), leaving outside the realm of the sayable propositions of ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics.[/quote]
Psychologizing philosophy in the sense I am using is exactly to explain, and even to judge "really true or false" (i.e. that our foundational beliefs are more valid), what someone believes is their ethic, aesthetic and/or metaphysics. For instance, "Republicans like authority and so want family values and a strong leader etc. and prefer negative rights over positive" is a sort of pseudo-aesthetic psychologization of what kind of ethic and metaphysic they gravitate to resulting in what they believe; I reject such kinds of meta-theories offering new knowledge about what people believe and why, and I would assume Wittgenstein would say similarly (as I assume, so would you).
I don't see Wittgenstein abandoning this basic idea, and it's clearly incompatible with scientism in general and in particular psychologizing forms of scientism.
(Also, in the same summary, "Other writings of the same period, though, manifest the same anti-dogmatic stance, as it is applied, e.g., to the philosophy of mathematics or to philosophical psychology." so I will try to find these writing and see how he directly addresses psychology, which I wasn't aware he did, but can't imagine he'd be suddenly promoting dogmatic psychologization of belief, presuming to know the true nature of the noumena that is other people in themselves, of exactly what they believe and why.)
Yes, Wittgenstein even met Freud in Vienna, didn't agree as I suspected.
I don't know why I didn't consider he would have just directly commented on Freud at some point.
[quote=Wittgenstein 1966, p. 43]Freud in his analysis provides explanations which many people are inclined to accept. He emphasizes that people are dis-inclined to accept them. But if the explanation is one which people are disinclined to accept, it is highly probable that it is also one which they are inclined to accept. And this is what Freud had actually brought out. Take Freud’s view that anxiety is always a repetition in some way of the anxiety we felt at birth. [...] It is an idea which has a marked attraction. It has the attraction which mythological explanations have, explanations which say that this is all a repetition of something that has happened before. And when people do accept or adopt this, then certain things seem much clearer and easier for them.[/quote]
Quotes I lifted from this essay (in a journal-psychoanalysis.eu, which seems to be making some sort of psycho-analytic apologetic of some sort in view of this criticism). There seems to be a whole tiny cottage industry discussing Wittgenstein's views on Freud; revolving around to what extent Freud is useful even if obviously untrue. However, it's quite clear Wittgenstein rejects all forms of scientism and pscychologization of belief, as is implied in Tractacus, but there's varying opinion to the extent he rejects the new symbolic language game of psycho-analysis as inherently useless (that it is not a science but "being good at it" could be a form of practical knowledge, in a sense).
I posted this in another discussion here recently but got no response. Perhaps it will find more readers here since it refers to the common thread of grammar that runs throughout all of Wittgenstein's work. I find this quote especially salient in terms of this discussion:
Quoting Daniele Moyal-Sharrock
It's a difficult thing to see, viz., that grammar goes beyond the proper use of, say, the verbs was and were, and extends into the arena of sense itself. The logic of sense is a grammar in and of itself. One can see this in his later works, especially in On Certainty.
I like this because it expands my thinking a bit more.
Quoting Sam26
At least part of the reason for my posting this was because I tend to agree with what others have said re: your comments on beliefs not being in line with Wittgenstein's philosophy; or a "shifting away from your Wittgensteinian core", as @mcdoodle put it.
Quoting Sam26
I think what Moyal-Sharrock is saying is that Moorean propositions lack sense because they are rules of grammar (in the "thick" sense). As I quoted in my previous post, propositions such as Moore's "cannot meaningfully be said in the flow of the language-game as if they were open for discussion because they are bounds of sense (rules of grammar), not objects of sense."
Quoting Sam26
Me too. :smile:
You'll have to explain this a bit more. Keep in mind that I'm not necessarily trying to keep my thoughts in line with Wittgenstein. I disagree with some of Wittgenstein's ideas, and I'm trying to go my own way on some of his thinking, for better or worse.
I'm not sure what you're asking me to explain, but I don't think Wittgenstein had any interest in exploring the "prelinguistic" or "non-linguistic". I'm not going to try and prevent you from doing so, but I have to admit I still don't know what point you're trying to make in this thread.
The only point I'm trying to make about prelinguistic beliefs, is that they are the starting points of all beliefs. They are the most basic of all beliefs. The structure of all beliefs rests on prelinguistic or nonlinguistic beliefs.
The best interpreter of Wittgenstein I've found.
(1) The World
(2) Minds
a) Beliefs (prelinguistic and/or nonlinguistic)
b) Beliefs (linguistic and nonlinguistic)
That is, not just beliefs which have not been stated, but beliefs which are un-statable?
How would such ineffable beliefs differ from beetles in boxes?
Yep.
Do language less creatures state anything?
To followup on creativesoul's comment, other animals can't state their beliefs in language. They might communicate them in a variety of other ways. But not necessarily and not always. Think of how long people have argued over what exactly their pet dog or cat thinks.
I'm in agreement with the thrust of Sam's thoughts here, or at least what I think they are based upon what's been said by him, and my own reading and/or understanding of Witt's On Certainty, which was of course published posthumously.
Witt was an adherent of JTB, and was looking to avoid the problem of justificatory regress. Hinge propositions were his attempt. They are defined as the ones(beliefs) that lie beyond the scope of justification... somehow. They need no justification. Witt never clarified how. Witt also seemed to believe that all knowledge is dubitable. Being able to doubt 'X', was part of Witt's own personal criterion for being classified as a bit of knowledge(as knowing 'X'). His remarks on Moore support this interpretation as well.
Sam's participation here seems to be shedding some much needed light upon pre-linguistic belief. It is worth noting that it exists in it's entirety prior to being named. It certainly does not consist of propositions.
As mentioned earlier, Witt was a proponent of JTB, and as such also held that all belief content is propositional. Hence... the most basic and foundational beliefs were dubbed - in Witt's framework - "hinge propositions".
This is where I part ways with Witt upon this matter. I suspect Sam may agree, at least in part.
???
Language less creatures do not make claims about private ineffable beliefs(or meaning). Witt's beetle in a box is all about such claims.
:brow:
Right?
I don't think this is true. I pointed out where in OC 284 and 285 where Wittgenstein seems to hold to the notion that some beliefs aren't propositional at all, i.e., they are reflected in our actions. But of course this isn't the thrust of OC.
Perhaps Sam. That would seem to be incommensurate with his talk of hinge propositions... wouldn't it?
Clearly he did not finish that part of his project, so his thoughts on the matter are only as has been recorded. Too bad we can't ask him. It seems he had not yet come to acceptable terms with all of it(concerning basic beliefs and/or hinge propositions and how they did not require justification).
Well grounded true belief does not always consist of language.
Exactly. Yet they have beliefs. Those beliefs do not have propositional content. Our reports of them do. It would behoove us all to keep that in mind.
Our looking for something shows that we believe that something is there to be found. Here, Witt offers a candidate that is statable, for it is a belief that has propositional content. He gets kudos from me for attempting to remain consistent.
Langauge less creatures can look for things as well. Witt's framework struggles to take proper account of what that belief consists of.
Wittgenstein's hinge-propositions aren't propositions in the normal sense. In fact, one could argue they aren't propositions at all. They look like propositions, but don't function as propositions. Moore, of course, would argue that they are functioning propositions, but W. is saying that they are something very different.
Forget the idea that we can state the belief, we can see or observe the belief without the stating. I don't think he is offering a candidate that is statable, just the opposite. As far as I can see, there is nothing inconsistent here. It's just a different kind of belief, i.e., a state-of-mind reflected in our actions.
This makes it no different from beliefs in general (reflected in our action or sayings).
I can think of only two ways to interpret the idea that there are linguistic and prelinguistic beliefs:
1. To say that a belief is linguistic is to say that it is somehow made of words, that there are attitudes, comportments, or mental states that have an inherently propositional form, perhaps that they are identifiable thoughts. As if the holder of the belief is talking to himself: "I believe the world existed before I was born". This would be in contrast to prelinguistic, built-in expectations and habits.
2. Or, it means that some beliefs cannot be stated (hence Banno's question).
Both are anti-Wittgenstein. Unless there's another interpretation, the distinction cannot be one that is found in Wittgenstein's thinking.
A belief just is an attitude to the world (or a mental state if you like) when rendered as a statement. Or, as photographer might have said, a post hoc thematization (or maybe it's schematization, not sure). We can say that he believes--or he "has a belief"--that the world existed long before he was born, but in doing so we are not identifying any individuated object, an aspect or element of thought or behaviour that exists prior to its rendering as a statement. What we mean is that he acts in a way that shows he expects such and such to be the case, or just doesn't expect not-such-and-such to be the case.
If all belief consists entirely of mental correlations between different things, then we cannot observe them in any reasonable sense of the term "observe".
Quoting jamalrob
I realize that this was not directed towards me, but I'm an advocate of non linguistic and linguistic belief.
It's the elemental constituency(the ingredients, so to speak) that matter most when talking about non linguistic and linguistic belief.
All belief consists entirely of mental correlations drawn between different things. Non linguistic belief consists of correlations drawn between different things, as does linguistic belief. That's the commonality that makes them what they are. The difference is the content of the correlation(the different things). Non linguistic belief consists of mental correlations drawn between different things, none of which are language use. Linguistic belief consists of mental correlations drawn between language use and other things.
Actually it kinda was. :grin:
A belief that the world existed long before oneself is most certainly a linguistic one. That belief is the result of holding two very complex notions side by side for comparison. The age of oneself. The age of the world. Comparing the two requires naming and descriptive practices.
Drawing a mental correlation between a specific sound and eating food does not require naming practices, nor descriptive ones. We can observe such situations. With a creature that has already drawn them, hearing the sound - again - after the correlation has been drawn between the sound and eating causes them to exhibit behaviour that clearly shows us that that connection has long since been made. It does not consist of propositional content. It need not be stated by the creature, for it has no language.
We can use language to acquire knowledge of belief that exists in it's entirety prior to being talked about.
:razz:
Hey Jamalrob. hope this finds you well!
That's Witt's idea.
Weren't many of his most trusted contemporaries proponents of JTB?
I don't think it does. Take a person with no language at all, present them with a time machine (which works by reading your desires) and demonstrate it's use (perhaps by making several marks on the ground, taking him back in time to before those marks were made, or smashing some identifiable vase and taking him back in time to before the vase was smashed). Do this repeatedly and at some point the person may use the machine to undo unwanted damage of their own (we can train mice, even flatworms by repeated demonstration so we know this works without language, we also know pre-linguistic animals can interpret the intentions of others, and have a sense of time passing, or at least sequential events, so he could easily see how and why the machine was being used). If, at some point, the person uses the machine to travel beyond his own birth, then he holds a belief that the earth (the place he's expecting to end up) existed prior to his own existence), if he never does, we might assume he does not hold that belief.
A more simple example. Putting a seed in the ground from a tree one recognises as having been there all ones life, and expecting a similar tree to grow shows a belief that that tree grew that way and so must have existed as a seedling prior to one's own existence.
There's no belief in which language is actually required. There's just beliefs which are constituted of a tendency to certain linguistic responses most of the time.
This, of course, is not the same as saying that language did not, in practice, act to create sets of beliefs which would unlikely have arisen without it. The naming and reference process obviously proved instrumental in the formation of the vast majority of human belief. But a thing's being instrumental in something and it's being essential to something are not the same.
Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "belief". No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a belief is only by looking at his belief. --Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. --But suppose the word "belief" had a use in these people's language? --If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. --No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.
Coincidentally the same problem as on the other thread about direct/indirect realism. In removing the mental state of belief from discourse you remove the ability of those interested in the component parts of the process to talk about it. It may well be that the mental state component of belief drops out of most language games, but not that which takes place between two neuroscientists discussing how best to manage some patient with damage to parts of the brain responsible for certain beliefs.
Yeah, then he sets out 286, showing that he was having a bad day.
A belief can be a particular neural network. It would function in exactly the same way - a tendency for some action to result from some circumstance. My belief that the pub is at the end of the road could consist entirely of the arrangement of neural connections which are responsible for my walking to the end of the road when I want to go to the pub.
So if you want to avoid this possibility, you'd have to declare it axiomatically, or demonstrate how it cannot be the case by conflict with some other definition. It's not valid to declare that it simply does not have anything to do with pointing to something in the mind, it doesn't follow from what you have specified so far about beliefs. Unless, of course I've missed (or misunderstood) the argument dismissing such a definition.
Quoting Sam26
I'm presuming that from your answer to @Banno's earlier questions, you're not referring here to beliefs which cannot form statements or propositions, but rather beliefs which are not statements or propositions? But also, given the above, beliefs which also are not features of the mind (otherwise we very well could point to them in exactly the manner you rule out)?
So what forms are we left with that a belief might take?
My only point in saying that it has nothing to do with pointing to something in the mind is to address the beetle-in-the-box question, i.e., it's not like the beetle-in-the-box question, because our actions point to beliefs, viz., something happening in the world. So, for example, if I open the door, the action of turning the knob reflects the belief that there is a door. If I sit in a chair, that action reflects the belief that there is a chair.
I'm not saying there isn't something going on in the mind. I'm only saying that we don't point to things in the mind to defend the idea that we have beliefs. No more than we point to something in the mind to define a word. There are things that occur in the world that reflect these things. In particular, certain kinds of actions that give voice to what is happening in the mind.
Quoting Isaac
I am referring to beliefs which are not linguistically formed, not that they can't be, but that they need not be. All beliefs that are reflected in our actions (linguistic or non-linguistic actions) are products of the mind. In fact, that we have a mind is reflected in our actions.
There are three ways beliefs can be demonstrated, (1) simple actions, as in the opening of a door, (2) stating one's belief, and (3) writing out the belief. All are actions of a sort.
Ya, it could have been a bad day. :gasp:
OK, that makes perfect sense, but you asked about the 'form' of a belief and that still confuses me. I understand your three ways in which a belief can be expressed (although I prefer to just call them all actions and have done with it), but I'm not seeing what type of answer you want to the question of 'form' that wouldn't simply be 'neural architecture'. The form of a belief is neural architecture, it's identified (in the absence of being able to read that architecture directly) by behaviour. Acting as if some state of affairs were the case indicates that we have some particular neural architecture which is responsible for our tendency to do so. Is there still something missing from that description?
Time machines require language.
There is no one to one correspondence between particular beliefs and neural pathways/networks.
The content of the belief(about-ness, I've seen it called).
Instead of talk of belief, let's talk about what is taken to be the case, and to do so without further definition except as may come in the discussion that follows.
So I take it to be the case that this is a sentence of English in a thread about Wittgenstein. I take it to be the case that I am typing this post, and presumably you might take it to be the case that you are reading this post.
So one observation we might make is that taking something to be the case is a relation between some state of affairs and some individual, or if you prefer, some agent.
We might also find that on occasions what we have taken to be the case turns out not to be so. We may have taken it to be the case that the cat is in the kitchen when the cat was in the hall. In such cases we are mistaken.
So the next observation might be that, because we can be mistaken, what we take to be the case is distinct from what is the case.
Now to what some might see as a more controversial topic, but which in present company we might accept without too much debate: we learn from Wittgenstein that everything that is the case can be stated; that the limits of our language and the limits of our world coincide. The word limit here needs to be seen as malleable, since of course both the stuff of the world and the words used to set out what is the case are in a state of constant flux. Hence a state of affairs that at first blush might seem unstatable can be stated with the addition of new terms or the modification of old.
So if we follow Wittgenstein here, what we take to be the case can be stated.
Note, and unfortunately experience tells me that this needs to be pointed out, that it does not follow that what is the case must be, or have been, stated. There are plenty of states of affairs that go unstated; but they have in common that they might be stated.
A corollary of this is that the agent who takes such-and-such to be the case need not state that such-and-such is the case. Indeed, they may not be capable of making such a statement.
Further, most things that are taken to be the case are indeed unstated. One need not state that one has feet, nor that the floor and walls are solid, for one to take these to be the case.
My cat takes it to be the case that the floor is solid. He does not, for example, tentatively test the floor with his paw to check for solidity before walking on it. He takes it to be the case that the floor is solid, despite his not being able to articulate this in English.
I think it goes without saying - despite my having to say it - that there is no particular neural network that in some sense corresponds to or represents my cat's taking it that the floor is solid.
If we must find a place in my cat's neural network for his taking the floor to be solid, it will be evident in such things as his capacity to make his legs work in such a way as to walk across the floor, to jump, run, and otherwise to engage with a solid floor.
That he takes it to be the case that the floor is solid is not something that is represented in a part of my cat's brain.
______________________________
Now what one takes to be the case is what one believes.
And hence, what one believes can be stated.
And what one believes need not have some corresponding neural network.
But in so doing I also hope that the difference between a state of mind and what is taken to be the case is made more apparent.
And I hope it is now clear that taking something to be the case is not the very same as having some particular state of mind.
A belief is not an item of mental furniture.
Well done Banno...
I could certainly raise issues, but those would be based upon our frameworks. What you've set out here is perfectly in line with your own... and Witt's as far as I can tell.
Kudos. I second Jamalrob's notion.
I'm in for a minor medical procedure later today and have been off solids for two days; perhaps my hour of need is leading me to seek approval.
The fundamental misapprehension of which I spoke is evident in the very phrasing that "there are linguistic and prelinguistic beliefs". It's not clear how this could even be stated in terms of what is taken to be the case and what is not...
That's the long-term objection I've had to much of what @creativesoul has to say on this topic.
Quoting jamalrob
No! A belief is not a mental state.
How can this be so. The belief that the cat is in kitchen has merely been replaced with one that she is in the hall. That too might be mistaken. They are not two different kinds of thing ("what we take to be the case" and "what is the case") they are two instances of the same type of thing ("what we take to be the case" in response to some evidence, and "what we take to be the case" in response to some new evidence). I'm not seeing what the concept of "what is the case" is usefully doing here.
Quoting Banno
Where are you getting that idea from? Could you cite me the source(s) you're working from on this.
How do you explain, for example, how some patients with damage to the parietal lobe, are unable to reach accurately towards visual targets that they unequivocally report seeing, if there's no neural network corresponding to "taking its spatiotemporal position to be the case" then why does damage to some network destroy that particular belief (as demonstrated by behaviour)?
Yes, I see that now. Maybe I was pandering to the masses.
Fixed it. :up:
Think it through. Are you going to argue that there is a particular neural net of some sort for the floor's being solid? Another for the cup being in the cupboard? Another for there being a poppy in the front garden and another for that poppy being pink? One for each of the innumerable unstated things that are taken as true as I get up to open the window?
One for every conceivable belief that might be stated?
And notice that while there is no neural net corresponding to the belief that the floor is solid, there are presumably neural networks that account for being able to walk across that floor. And presumably for reaching towards something.
Perhaps its not that neural networks correspond to or represent beliefs so much as that they embody them.
Actually, one might have either belief, and yet still be wrong. This is simply the grammatical distinction between such-and-such being true, and so-and-so believing it to be true. The salient point being that the distinction has been made.
Overall good post, but here I sense a problem. What gives your cat confidence the floor is solid so that it moves its legs confidently across it? It's not the ability to move legs confidently. There must be some other neural network that provides confidence in your kitchen floor, corresponding to past experiences from which the cat gained the belief in solidity of that surface or surfaces like it in general.
Compare that to when your cat is not confident in something, such as hiding when hearing a strange person.
Isn't it? Isn't that precisely how a neural network does learn, by reinforcing specific outcomes?
If a kitten on occasions encountered a fluid floor, it might well learn to test first before it walks confidently. SO the ability to move confidently reinforces the confident movement.
I think animals do more than what the current neural networks are capable of. And that that would be form concepts about the world. For animals, this would be non-linguistic. It's conceptual in different way, maybe based on combining related images and smells and what not to make inferences about the world, particularly novel situations.
More mental furniture.
The argument I presented above treated belief as what is taken to be the case, and in so doing I hope undermined the reification of belief as a neural structure or a state of mind.
In treating beliefs as what is taken to be the case, we stop treating belief as a thing and start seeing it as a way of behaving.
It's not too hard to do the same with other supposed pieces of mental furniture such as concepts. What you call "forming a concept" is not creating a thing in one's mind so much as learning to use words in a certain way. So learning the concept "blue" is no more than learning how to use the word "blue".
That's my belief, right or wrong.
Yes. I asked you for sources, you do realise you're espousing a theory about how the brain works (or in this case, doesn't) you're own incredulity does not constitute evidence.
Let'ssstart with what you think is wrong with there being a neural network for each of these beliefs. Do you think the brain will run out of space, if so how much space do you think a belief such as the ones you list takes up, and how much space do you think we have. You must have some pretty clear ideas on this for you to be so certain there isn't room. Or is there some other reason you find the concept so incredulous.
Secondly, if the belief (the tendency to act as if) is not stored in the brain, where do you think it is? In the air, the ether, some dualistic field?
Quoting Banno
One for every 'conceivable' belief? With what do we do the conceiving if there's not room in our brains for all the conceivable beliefs?
Well, it walks like a behaviorist and talks like one. A more hip, modern one, but when you say:
Quoting Banno
My behaviorist alarm is triggered. And then you wish to empty my head of all the mental furniture!
While I still admire the clarity in your post, it does not make for much of a valid objection to a differing position, such as my own. I'm actually not sure how far apart we are. I suspect that we're very close, aside from my tendency to speak about belief in terms of it's elemental constituents(ingredients) whereas you're prone to talk about it in terms of what's taken to be the case.
To use that difference, or apparent translation difficulty as reason for objection/rejection is to reject another position because of the inherent incommensurate/incompatibility of translating one into the terms of the other. I'm reminded here of your rejection of the very idea of incompatible conceptual schemes. Yet, here we are. It's not clear how "there are non linguistic and linguistic beliefs" could be stated(translated) in(to) terms of what is taken to be the case and what is not.
A vein of thought deserving more of my attention.
Again... I commend that post!!!
:smile:
@StreetlightX has been prepared to defend this kind of barbarism but doubtless he has no shame. :worry:
And you, Sir?
But that would seem to be what is implied, if every belief is a particular neural network. Of course what you said was that "a belief can be a particular neural network", which might be more indicative of the development of a technical sense of "belief" in neuroscience.
Notice that I am not making the claim that some particular neural network could not also be described in terms of some belief.
Banno's suggestion here to stop treating belief as a thing is spot on. Belief is not a single thing. Belief certainly does not have a spatiotemporal location.
If it is saying that there are beliefs that have not been expressed in language, then it is trivial and I agree.
If it is saying that there are beliefs that cannot be expressed in language, then I think it wrong.
If it is saying something else, then I know not what.
A question is whether your approach to belief can explain all of your cat's behaviors. Animals need to problem solve and adapt to a changing environment. Deep learning has been very successful in limited domains involving lots of data to train on and fixed domains. But animals don't always have that luxury.
There seems to be more going on in your cat's head than you allow yourself to believe.
Hope your procedure has the best possible results...
Much of my admiration for you is had in the helpfulness of your participation. You and several others here have broadened the scope of my own understanding by bringing up stuff that I had not yet considered...
We have sharpened one another's thoughts. Of course, that's true from where I sit regarding consequences of my engagements with you, but I'm assuming it goes both ways...
:wink:
Again, kudos on that post!
Let's take tool use. I know how to use some tool. But the tool doesn't solve my current problem. Upon thinking over the situation, I realize that if I combine use of this tool with another tool in the right way, my problem is solved. The combining of the two tools to fix the problem isn't something I learned. It's novel. And we see animals do things like this when they figure out how to get to get at some food for the first time.
The ability to solve problems, assuming it's not just trial and error, means having some conceptual understanding of the world that can be manipulated in novel ways.
Yep.
Quoting Marchesk
...so what exactly was conceptual doing there?
Too much philosophy.
There are two kinds of belief. Linguistic and non linguistic.
That's all it's saying.
What exactly distinguishes one from the other?
That's all I'm asking.
If it is saying that there are beliefs that have and others that have not been expressed in language, then it is trivial and I agree.
If it is saying that there are beliefs that cannot and others that can be expressed in language, then I think it wrong.
It's the elemental constituency(the ingredients, so to speak) that matters most when talking about non linguistic and linguistic belief.
All belief consists entirely of mental correlations drawn between different things. Non linguistic belief consists of correlations drawn between different things, as does linguistic belief. That's the commonality that makes them what they are. The difference is the content of the correlation(the different things). Non linguistic belief consists of mental correlations drawn between different things, none of which are language use. Linguistic belief consists of mental correlations drawn between language use and other things.
Ah. The Dogma.
If my previous argument is successful in showing that what is taken to be the case is not the same as a state of mind, then perhaps it might also show that what is taken to be the case is not the same as some mental correlation between different things.
But this perhaps leaves open that what is taken to be the case might be some correlation between different things - sans the mental furniture.
You know I've good reason(s) supporting this. Thus, you know it's not unsupported. Dogma always is.
Better.
Best.
The problem you have is shared by me. Translation is not readily forthcoming. That's where we were earlier, and we remain there. I do anyway. Still mulling it all over.
Taking it to be the case that this is a sentence of English in a thread about Wittgenstein requires thinking about language use while using it. It is existentially dependent upon language use. It involves language use. It's about language use. The same holds good of the other two examples above. Thus, they are all linguistic beliefs.
This one, however...
Quoting Banno
...is not. Cannot be.
Quoting Banno
The floor is solid. <--------that's what you are proposing your cat takes to be the case and/or believes.
That doesn't sit well.
Yes, I'm gathering that very strongly from your repeated dogmatic dismissal of the idea. What I was actually asking for was any evidence or reasoning whatsoever to support that belief. Do you have some neuroscience demonstrating it to be the case? Do you have some idea that there isn't room in the brain for all that data? Do you just really really really not want it to be the case?...
Quoting Banno
I said it 'can' be because it is yet unproven to be. we can't measure individual neuron activity yet, only clusters of activity. since we can't measure individual neurons we can't see what's going on at the scale required to code for such specific beliefs as "this bit of this particular floor is solid at this moment in time". Hence I try to still refer to it (when I remember) as a possibility.
We have about 86 billion neurons. Since each neuron can have as many as 10,000 synapses, that's 8.6 x10^13 architectural elements. Are you telling me you can think of more than 8.6x10^13 different beliefs that you and your body require at any one time, because even if you exercised a unique individual one of those beliefs every microsecond you could still go nearly three years without repeating one.
Quoting Banno
I can't make sense of this. How could a particular neural network be described in terms of some belief if
Quoting Banno
Are you suggesting that there are neural correlates for some beliefs but not others? That, in some respects, would seem even more odd than what I originally thought you were claiming. What would distinguish those which 'make the grade' and get coded as neural architecture from those which don't? and again, where would the others be?
A brick is not a cow because if I asked any for a cow to build a house with I would not get what I want. If I asked for a brick to milk I would not get what I want.
A brick is not a cow because no one uses the words 'brick' and 'cow' in that way. That's not the kind of case we have here. If that were the case you would not have to be telling us how to use the words correctly, there would be no discussion.
On classes, a brick is not a cow because one is an inert clay cuboid for building and the other is a type of animal from which we can extract milk.
It's not difficult. So humour me...
What is your evidence that there is no neural net corresponding to the belief that the floor is solid?
No.
Really? That's the quality of discussion you want? You just espouse some dogmatic opinion and any contrary view is silenced with the standard cliche that it's "too wrong to even respond to". It's not the Solomon-like crushing blow you think it is, it's just boring.
I found @jamalrob to be quite clear:
Quoting jamalrob
Therefore, beliefs are not pre-linguistic or non-linguistic. Unless a belief is something else?
But isn't this just begging the question? If a belief is "an attitude to the world (or a mental state if you like) when rendered as a statement." then it obviously follows that it must be linguistic, but this is no more than to say "if a belief is linguistic, then it is linguistic "
I think what @Sam26 is asking (though I'm not so sure now) is whether this need be the case. Obviously if we simply declare that beliefs are statements, then they are de facto linguistic, but that doesn't answer the question of whether declaring beliefs to be statements covers everything we need beliefs to do.
As I asked, if that's not a belief then what is? Is it something that cannot be expressed in language?
Then we're possibly on the same page. I asked the same question about the assertion that a belief is not a mental state. If it's not a statement, not a mental state, not state of some dualistic realm, then it seems to me that we're running out of things it could be.
I certainly think it's a mental state. I think whether it's a linguistic rendering is up to us, I mean it's just a word we can define it how we like, to a point.
The problem I have with restricting the term to statements is it just leaves us wanting of a term for 'that which causes a tendency to act as if something were the case' when it is not rendered as a statement.
In binocular rivalry experiments, for example, actions can be generated in response to a combined image set despite the subject only being aware of the dominant image. How are we to talk about such a tendency toward action if the word belief is reserved for that which is rendered as a statement?
Maybe we could distinguish the two types of tendency to act, but I'm not sure I see either the advantage or the precident. Other states of mind (such as affect) are described in terms of the state itself, not the linguistic rendering of the state.
Not sure that I follow. Can you name any cases where we talk about beliefs in terms other than 'the belief that B', where B is a linguistic rendering of the belief?
It wasn't so much that we talk about beliefs in terms other than linguistic renderings, just that we don't, in other areas, infer this to mean that they consist of linguistic renderings.
We cannot talk about physical laws other than by their linguistic rendering. The law that "less dense materials rise relative to more dense ones". But we don't say that the law consists of the linguistic rendering, we say that the law consists of some physical relation between the two materials.
The same would be true, I think, of any such description of our models of how the world is, all the relations and patterns we see have to be rendered into statements in order to talk about them, but we also talk about them as if the had some physical existence in the world. I'm just not getting why there'd be any resistance to treating beliefs in the same way.
I think we must do so here because 'that which causes a tendency to act as if something were the case' is something linguistic, or at least can only be attributed (especially to other animals) in those terms; in our linguistic community's terms.
So how do you see this differently from, say, laws of physics? They seem to me to have the same property, yet we talk about the relations as consisting of physically manifest patterns, not the statements thereof.
The laws of physics are not typically what we say 'causes a tendency to act as if something were the case', unless you want to try and reduce language use to physics.
No, but the statement of a belief is not what causes the tendency to act either, is it? Its the arrangement of neural connections in a certain form.
What I'm trying to draw a parallel between is the idea that a belief can actually be a certain arrangement of neural connections in the same way that a physical law or feature can actually be some arrangement of matter. We have to render both into statements to talk about them, but neither actually consist of the statement.
You seem to be saying that beliefs are necessarily a different kind of thing where the fact that we have to render them into statements carries some additional burden not applicable to physical laws or features. It's this step that I'm not understanding.
Might it be better to think of belief as an explanation of behaviour? Therefore, that the individual holds the (stated) belief is an explanation of the tendency to act.
Quoting Isaac
Maybe something got lost along the way. I agree with @jamalrob's statement that a belief is the linguistic rendering of an attitude or a mental state.
I'd just like to clarify for anyone reading this that when I say "attitude", I don't mean it in the sense of a way of thinking (although it can be that), but more in the sense of an orientation: a bearing on or comportment towards one's environment, other people, and so on.
Doesn't a tree have an orientation toward its environment? But we wouldn't say a tree believes it should grow toward the sun.
You got me.
Did I misunderstand you?
Yes. I think somewhere in all this most of the disparate opinions seem to still have a locus around the idea that a belief is related to a tendency to act, so referring to it as the explanation of that tendency seems like it might be uncontroversial.
For me, I prefer to use belief in the same way as say 'injury'. Having an 'injury' consists of the actual physical damage, not the description of it. In the terms you outlined above, having an injury might also explain some tendency to behave a certain way (limping, for example though of course one does not 'have an injury that..' ), but I can also locate the injury, I could even cut out the injury and take it somewhere, it's definitely a physical thing despite also being an explanation. This is how I see beliefs, they are physical structures, I could cut one out and remove it in the same way as an injury.
The reason for this is because in my academic work I had to take account of things like the effect of lesions on behaviour and talking about them affecting beliefs enabled this. We could theoretically create, modify or remove a belief by physical interference with the brain.
I understand, however, that such a definition is not going to be useful everywhere. What I object are efforts to somehow rule it out as incoherent or just wrong (not that I'm suggesting you're making such an argument, I'm just explaining my position).
Indeed. I think to capture the use of the term you have to limit it to features of (or linguistic representations of features of) a mind. Ramsey expresses beliefs as probabilities and I think that is essential. Probability requires prediction, which a tree can't do (I don't think they can anyway).
Ya, that statement is clear.
All he is saying, is that he believes, beliefs are statements. I'm saying, as you know, that beliefs can be reflected in non-linguistic ways. We don't need language to show what we believe, at least in terms of these very basic beliefs. Can you tell me how opening a door doesn't reflect a belief about doors, regardless of any statement. There are millions of things we do that reflect our beliefs apart from language. How does language even start without basic beliefs about the world around us?
What is special about the orientations that qualify as beliefs? What do they have that tree orientation doesn't?
Right.
Would this also work for unconscious beliefs?
I think so, but it's difficult to prove. Experiments with conflicting sensory inputs seem to show that subconscious adjustments are still made on the basis of prediction (the actual experiment is quite complex so you might be best reading the paper directly if you don't want to just take my word for it). I don't think they're in any way conclusive, but together with some very successful models based on heirachical prediction, I think it's reasonable to assume that subconscious prediction is possible.
The problem is, if subconscious prediction is possible then computers can have beliefs, and some people don't like that.
This critique is spot on.
Elemental constituency is what matters here. Belief existed in it's entirety prior to being talked about. Prior to language. Thus... such belief cannot consist of language use. Being amenable to language use would bridge the gap and offer some sort of evolutionary explanation...
Correlations between different things is the best bridge I've been able to come up with.
The something is always a statement.
Quoting Isaac
"...can..." - my bolding.
It seems to me that in your neurological musings you want to make use of the word "belief" in such a way that it refers to a neural network and the activity it performs - or something like that.
Now that's fine, so long as it is clear that this is not the same as using it to refer to the way we take things to be - the folk definition of "belief", if you will.
That is, you can use "cow" to mean brick, but you can't build a house out of cows.
I would agree with saying your cat took that to be the case long ago, and am more than happy to expand upon that line of thought. The correlations were drawn at the time between it's own mental ongoings and the noticeable change in the surface; going from wobbly to solid.
Testing for a wobbly surface after being on one doesn't continue on for a very long time after the steadiness of the surface returns to normal(after the change back to solid). One does not check for a wobbly surface while learning how to walk. Testing for a wobbly surface always follows first being on one. One gains stability while traveling on foot while traveling on foot. When one suddenly realizes that the ground has moved, one begins an involuntary balancing act. Uncertainty and discontent make up part of it. We humans do balancing acts intentionally. We create the conditions necessary for performing one. Cats do not.
Cats draw correlations between the moving ground and it's effect/affect upon them. That effect/affect is completely involuntary. Cats draw connections between the uncertainty and fear and the wobbly ground. They test. Only when the ground stops moving under their feet, can they go on their way and no longer think about it.
Hence, I would agree with saying that your cat may have taken that to be the case long ago...
This time however...
The cat did not approach the surface about to be walked upon with a clearly recognizable and undeniable apprehension regarding the trustworthiness of the floor. The cat did not test the surface for sturdiness. The cat did not use a single front paw in a manner which undeniably shows it's own apprehension/reservedness/hesitance/caution/distrust/discontent regarding the steadiness, dependability, reliability, sturdiness, and/or wobbliness of the floor. The cat showed no signs whatsoever that it was paying attention to the floor.
What sense does it then make for us to say that the cat takes it to be the case that the floor is solid, while the cat's not even paying attention to the floor? That is to say that it is taking something to be the case while not paying it any attention.
Add a timeline, and there's no problem I can see aside from saying that the cat's belief is statable. That I'm still mulling over...
Hence... my agreement proposal at the beginning of this post.
OK, but aren't we (the rest if us here) discussing exactly what is meant by 'belief'? Doesn't that very discussion undermine the idea of some clear folk definition from which any other use of the term would be an aberration? I think you perhaps ask too much of language in expecting there to be some use of 'belief' which is a) consistent and b) coherent between uses.
All the term has to do is get the listener to act in the way using it was supposed to do. If I say "I believe you're lying" I expect you to either take offence, admit it, perhaps be less confident about your proposition...some collection of possibilities like that. So long as something like that happens I've used the word successfully. It doesn't have to refer to anything, unless I wanted to you attend to some object by my using it.
So analysis what a term refers to but sticking religiously to all folk uses seems like a search for unicorns.
Nonetheless, I get that a definition such as the one I might use in some specific sub-section of academic work will not be applicable to a sentence like "I have a belief that...". You can't say "I have a [neurological architecture] that..." because what follows is a linguistic statement (describing the state of affairs one act as if were the case), not the actual tendency to act as if. We'd have to say "I have a neurological architecture which causes me to act as if..." before the same statement can follow, which does not have quite the same meaning.
So I understand what you mean when you say that a belief is the (imagined) state of affairs one takes to be the case. But to a physicalist, that definition falls short because we then want to know where such a thing is. Without positing a domain of thought (and I sincerely hope you're not suggesting we do that), we need to know where such a state of affairs is, what does and imagined state of affairs consist of, physically. It's not in the real world outside of our minds - it's not the actual arrangement of such, otherwise beliefs could not be wrong. So what are we physically talking about when we say "an imagined state of affairs"? My answer is a particular arrangement of neural connections, hence that's what a belief is, physically. A belief is 'the imagined state of affairs one acts as if were the case' and all 'imagined states of affairs' are particular neural arrangements in a capable brain. The alternative is dualism.
So to
Quoting Banno
Really? This is the most important point. I understand the rhetorical flourish, but are we really talking about cows and bricks here? In what cases does referring to beliefs as the physical neural architecture cause anything more than a trivial grammatical stumble compared to talking about them as states of affairs? I think this really comes down to the comments you made which are far more objectionable to me than the insistence on the actual referent for the word 'belief'. Your assertion that there is not even a neurological correlate for beliefs. That the taking of some state of affairs to be the case does not have a neurological correlate at all. If you really believe that then I can see how you think we might be talking about cows and bricks, but if you really believe that then you are either manifestly wrong or your fundamental view of the world is so non-physicalist that we will struggle to communicate, you might as well be talking about fairy dust.
All behaviour is initiated by neurological signals (not necessarily in the brain, mind), for all behaviour which has an expectation (acting as if...) that expectation has to modulate behaviour and the only way that can be done is by other neurological signals. thus any expectation that is actually modulating behaviour is coded somehow in neurological signals.
It's this, I think that best answers @Sam26's question, which is why I brought it up in the first place. If one takes a belief to simply be the state of affairs one acts as if were the case then one's ontology (am I using that right?) becomes overwhelmed with every negative belief. I'm currently acting as if a nuclear bomb is not about to drop on my head, so is that a belief of mine? Do I really have, as a belief, the negation of every single possible state of affairs (except the one I take to be the case) because I'm acting as if they were not the case? That seems inordinately messy to me. Looked at neurologically, however, the problem dissolves. The things I have as a belief are those which do, in reality, modulate my behaviour. any state of affairs which is not physically modulating my behaviour is not a belief I have. adding in the reality of what is happening in the brain (or at least our best guess - it's not an exact science) is the only robust way I can see of pruning the otherwise infinite set of things I apparently 'believe' by negation.
And here is a good example (skip to 0:52 or when the treadmill is turned or 1:08 when the cat starts testing the moving surface with its paw). We see the cat adjust to the treadmill over several attempts. A DL network would require a huge training set.
And then around 3:55, the cat jumps onto the control panel and pulls the plug on the treadmill, after which it jumps down and lays on the treadmill while licking itself.
That's not the only alternative.
What correlations do you mean here - are they important to your point?
Quoting creativesoul
You seem to think this is an important point, but I don't see how. The sense in which one might think that the cat takes the floor to be solid is that it does not even pay attention to the solidness of the floor.
Are you now suggesting some extra rule for belief that involves attention? If so, set it out. I suspect such an approach would be fraught with issues.
Nor would I want to argue against physicalism. Further I do not see any incompatibility between what I have said and physicalism. If you are able to link neural events to certain beliefs, then good for you.
But I still think beliefs are not neural events.
The cow/brick metaphor doesn't work for you - perhaps cows and bricks are too similar. Let's try cows and assets. You have a cow that is an asset. I'm pointing out that not all cows are assets, and not all assets are cows.
So for some purposes it does make perfect sense to talk of cows using the term "asset". But not for all.
Indeed. And such a person would be forced to admit that taking something to be the case does not always require thinking about what is being taken to be the case.
You are ok with that?
:brow:
I'm not so much as making a point at this time... I'm more involved with trying to understand what each participant here has been saying.
Are you assuring me that you are ok with the consequences I've just set out?
I thought that could easily have counted as a reductio ad absurdum. I'm surprised. I will be even more so if you are still ok with those consequences tomorrow.
Hope you are well... beyond the procedure.
:smile:
:rofl:
An individual can take it to be the case that the floor is solid without thinking about the floor.
That follows from your claims.
Are you ok with that?
Since it seems that you're advocating a physicalist account of belief.
What role does the tree play in an individual's belief about the tree? The tree is an irrevocable elemental constituent of all belief about trees according to the position I'm advocating for/from. It's one of the elements within the correlation itself. Trees are one part of the correlations drawn between them and other things. Without trees, there can be no belief about them.
For example, belief that a tree has green leaves requires nothing more, and nothing less, than learning how to pick out trees by name, and learning how to pick out the detectable light reflected into our eyes - from trees - also by learning conventional naming and descriptive practices. We pick trees out as well as their color by virtue of learning how to talk about trees and their color, and in doing so, we take it to be the case that trees are green.
That last bit's just for you
Maybe this helps???
One cannot take it to be the case that leaves are green without thinking about the color of the leaves.
Yet, it seems your position forces any and all adherents to admit/assent to such. Lest, we would arrive at self-contradiction, incoherence, or an equivocation of terms.
Right?
:brow:
That's what I'm attempted to unpack... or targeting.
The cat does not pay attention to what it's taking to be the case.
That's a problem, isn't it?
The question at hand, then, is does "A believes p" imply "A has given some attention to p".
Off you go...
I chose the former long ago.
Or...
Not all belief is meaningful and/or propositional content exists in it's entirety prior to language use.
An elucidation upon the earlier "off you go" comment...
I thought we were taking account of your cat's belief; what your cat takes to be the case regarding the solidity of the floor. That does not include language use... that's for sure. Yet that's your focus?
I'm stumped and tired...
:meh:
My apologies if needed.
No, you're asserting that not all cows are assets. I'm asking you for some evidence or line of reasoning to back up that assertion. You're saying that not all beliefs can be thought of as their equivalent neural architecture (not all cows can be thought of as assets). This is true of cows and assets because there are some cows which are not owned by anyone and as such cannot represent an asset, which must be owned in some sense. Now I want a similar argument for beliefs and neural architecture. Why (and how) can some beliefs exist, but be impossible to think of in terms of neural architecture?
How does the cat (a biological entity - if we're being physicalist) 'take the floor to be solid' without doing so using it's brain in some representative way? I'm not seeing what route you'd like to take here.
If you want to say the solidity of the floor is not represented in its brain you are just flat out wrong about that. Models of the solidity, consistency and constancy of objects are not only located in the brain but we've a very good idea exactly where they are and how they work.
If you want to say the cat applies some general model but does not have a neural representation of this exact bit of floor then again you are just factually wrong about that. We know from scans of savant memory vs normal memory that individuation of environmental models does occur (it's just that non-savants filter it out early on). The cat certainly registers and models that exact piece of floor, even if it's not looking at it.
To continue with your metaphor - I can see, and entirely agree, that it sometimes makes sense to talk of a cow as an asset and sometimes it doesn't, the accountant wants to hear of it as an asset, the veterinarian doesn't. But there the similarity with beliefs and neural architecture ends. For what is true of cows and assets (that some cows aren't assets at all, in any sense) is not true of beliefs and neural architecture. All beliefs which directly influence behaviour can be talked about in terms of their neural architecture, there aren't any exceptions.
The only way out I can see is to include, in the set of beliefs, all negative beliefs. That because I walk without a crash helmet, home from work, I must therefore 'believe' that I am not in the path of a flying object, that I'm not going to be mind-melded by aliens using their remote mind-intervention rays, that I'm not going to be targeted by psychic attack from Russian agents trained in telepathy...
If you seriously want to make the claim that I 'believe' all these things, then I agree that these beliefs do not have neural correlates (they have the absence of neural architecture to that effect). But if so then I cannot see where you're going with such a model.
Mad cows...
I would say that. Does the above hold true regardless?
The tree is itself a belief about the unity of branches, roots leaves and the disunity of insects, pathogens, bacteria soils, water, gases, nutrients etc (without which the 'tree' would cease to exist). It is a unit that has been created by a belief about how the world is structured. Why are the cells constituting the Xylem part of 'the tree', but the water they carry not? Why, when we look closely at the microscopic fibres of the roots which meet soil water at a molecular scale do we decide the tree ends and the soil water begins. Why are the Mycorrhiza inextricably fused to the cells of the tree's roots not part of the tree, but the fungal cells fused to the algae are part of the Lichen?
I don't know if that's the sort of thing you were asking, but the role 'the tree' plays is as a placeholder of sets of beliefs, but it's no less a belief itself than those which are 'about it'.
I'm done here. Thanks.
:kiss:
Well, within the F5 region of the motor sensory area in the cerebral cortex there are 85 neural clusters which code for hands and feet responding in different ways to different shapes and densities of the surface they are about to contact with. Disrupting these areas causes the hands (or feet) of monkeys to treat the surface they are about to interact with as if it were of uncertain shape or density. With these regions acting normally, the hands or feet responded to the surface as if it were the shape and density it actually was.
In another study, the visual pathways feeding these areas were tested for attentional variation (to make sure that something different was not going on related to variability in attention) They found that in both 2D and 3D object representations, there was no statistically significant variance in signal between attentional and non-attentional conditions (though slightly more difference in the 2D experiments, which may show 2D images have less significance to the motor regions).
Either way, if you wanted to present an argument that the tendency to treat the floor as if it were solid was not represented somehow in the brain of the animal, you'd have to provide an alternative explanation for the effect of changes to the F5 region in treatment of object shape and density.
This is highly speculative stuff, none of this is set in stone so I think most neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists are open to suggestions. What I'm not sure is so helpful are bare assertions which don't address the evidence we have spent decades painstakingly acquiring.
I may be completely off the mark here but you seem to be surprised by how "foundational" beliefs differ with domain and that some of them are, in your words, "structurally more significant". Could it be, is it possible, that you're under the spell of, in a Wittgensteinian sense bewitched by, language?
Well, if it is the case, then one would have to show how it is the case. Many things are possible, but that does not give us reason to suppose they are true. If I was to boil all of this down into one fundamental thing, it would have to do with the nature of belief, i.e., what do we mean by belief? How do we normally use the word belief in a variety of contexts, we would have to look at it in terms of its Wittgensteinian grammar.
I do think I am correct about my hypothesis, but of course I could be completely off the rails. I am not the only philosopher who has raised the issue of pre-linguistic beliefs, there are others. However, it is not something that is prevalent. It is good to think outside the box, but often we are wrong; sometimes we get it right, but it takes a while for the idea to catch on.
There is no doubt to me that there are certain physiological structures, including but not limited to brain parts, that are required in order for the ability for certain thought and belief to form. However, I'm not at all fond of the underlying suppositions that seem to ground your explanations...
To be clear...
It seems that what you've offered here works from the basic assumption that we cannot directly perceive stuff... to put it roughly. Would you agree with the idea that all we have to work with is our perception of reality... our perception(representation, if you like) of the tree. That seems to be underwriting your position.
Am I mistaken about that?
Indeed, you are not.
Hey Sam! Sorry about temporarily hijacking your thread, my friend. Hope this finds you well.
:smile:
It seems to me that you may be glossing over something that is of utmost importance. You talk about the nature of belief, but then go on to focus upon the different senses of the term.
The classic roadblock ending in comments about definitions, and being true by definition, etc. A rabbithole most of the time. However, if we are judicious about decision regarding how to use the term, we must realize that we are picking something out of this world that exists in it's entirety prior to language. That has to be kept in mind. I find it most helpful to do a bit of philosophical reasoning and/or critical thinking here, and let that guide the methodological approach.
Some common sense...
If there is such a thing as prelinguistic belief then it exists in it's entirety prior to language use. That which exists in it's entirety prior to language use, is not existentially dependent upon language in any way shape or form whatsoever. Whatever such belief consists of, we can be absolutely certain that language is not a part of it's elemental constituency. Such belief cannot have propositional content unless propositional content also exists in it's entirety prior to language use(unless propositions are not existentially dependent upon language). That would be to claim that propositions exist prior to language use... somehow.
For some reason, there are a number(the majority perhaps???) of professional philosophers who take that to be the case. I've seen it asserted that propositions somehow carry meaning... meaning transcends the user via propositions, or some such. That's not too far off, but it is far enough to be wrong.
It shows that an inherent misconception and/or gross misunderstanding of how meaning emerges onto the world stage is at work. That's no surprise to me though, the historical discourse about meaning is fraught, to say the least. That continues to this day. One of a few banes of philosophy.
So, if non linguistic belief does not consist of propositions or statements what could it possibly consist of that would allow it's evolution over time to include predication, statements, and/or propositions?
This combination of things must somehow provide the creature the ability to presuppose correspondence with what's happening/happened and it must be meaningful to the believing creature.
All that without the need for the creature to be a language user.
Does this make sense to you?
It requires that meaning exist in it's entirety prior to language.As it stands, the only notion I'm aware of is one that conflates meaning and causality. They are closely related, particularly in the context of both being imperative for pre linguistic belief. One of the most rudimentary beliefs I can think of is the attribution/recognition of causality. The fire example.
Anyway...
Can we get somewhere new this time around? I've found a bridge, sort of, between Banno's position and my own. But I'm not sure if he's going to agree with the suggestion about adding a timeline to his report of his cat taking it to be the case that the floor is solid.
We'll see.
:wink:
I mentioned before that there seems to me that there is something a bit unfair in sugesting that I ought produce empirical evidence. Look at what you just quoted - and flip it to what you might be arguing - is it that you wish to argue that every belief can be thought of as equivalent to some neural architecture?
Because that's a hair's breadth away from the all-and-some proposition that for every belief there is some equivalent neural architecture.
In virtue of their logical structure, such propositions are neither provable nor disprovable.
Again, that's unfair. Of course there is some neurological explanation for the cat's behaviour. What I am objecting to is your calling that neurological explanation, in every case, a belief.
edit:
Quoting Isaac
We should note the new caveat "which directly influence behaviour". So if there were beliefs that did not directly influence behaviour...? Then, there would be beliefs that are not the equivalent of some neurological architecture... which was to be proved.
If you are going to appeal to an authority you had best reference it. My suspicion is that the solidity, consistency and constancy of objects is in their manipulation, which fits nicely with what I have said.
Edit:
Quoting Isaac
Ah, is that it? Yes, the monkey treats the surface uncertainly - he appears to have lost his belief in solidity! Has he lost his belief that this surface is solid, or has he lost his belief that any surface is solid? OR have you just "deleted" the concept of solidity....? There's a bit more to be done until you can lay claim to these particular neurones being the very belief that this ball is solid! But this is impressive stuff; no need to overstate your case so!
But, poor monkey!
I'm impressed how you're arguing for the idea that all belief has propositional content without using the terms... until you invoked logical accounting practices and "p"....
No need to go to such extremes. I suspect that you believe that my house has a front door, and yet had not given that belief any consideration until just now. Your belief concerning my front door would be based on certain considerations from your previous experience, and indeed, one would consider it odd, and perhaps in some need of explanation, for a house not to have a front door.
Now you might be tempted to argue that such a claim is not a belief; that beliefs need to be somehow given attention (@creativesoul seems to have something like this in the back of his mind...) or that all beliefs must relate to behaviour. I'd read this as an ad hoc repair to a broken explanation, and draw your attention to the book that is our main text in this thread.
IF you doubt this, you should be able to give an example of a belief that is not a belief that such-and-such is the case.
What might be philosophically interesting is the extent to which a belief must be held positively... perhaps a new thread.
All language less belief is not.
I'm taking it to be the case that I understand you. However, according to you, I need not pay attention to your words in order to do so.
Now do you see the problem?
I'm reminded of apo... but noticeably nicer. Brainpharte comes to mind as well.
Why new?
You've already done the work.
:wink:
Sam is one of the most patient and kind people I have come across while on forums such as this one. He's interested in basic bedrock belief, of both the linguistic and non linguistic variety. If we tie it in we'll be fine.
:smile:
I'm still struggling to understand what motivated Witt to advocate the idea that all knowledge needed to be dubitable.
"This is a hand" is a perfect example of a bedrock belief capable of lending support to each and every subsequent claim about hands. If you doubt that that claim is true, it is only because you do not know the language. For everyone and anyone who speaks the language, there can be no doubt. Each and every proposition about hands rests it's laurels upon it. Each and every subsequent assertion about hands hinges upon knowing what hands are called.
Moore knows/knew that what he was showing is/was a hand. He also knew that "this is a hand" - when accompanied with his gesturing - was true. He was showing someone how to teach another how to talk about hands(what the word "hand" can refer to). He was stating the obvious for those of us who know how to talk about our hands.
I just do not see that these support the invention of a special category of beliefs that would be entitled to the label "prelinguistic" or "nonlinguistic".
Justified true belief.
I'm inclined to agree. I think Sam would be ok with that as well. He's already expressed as much. Earlier he mentioned not following Witt's reasoning about everything.
So...
Grant his consideration about language users...
Apply it to language less creatures...
Can we say the same thing about a language less creature's belief that we say about our own, when looking for something?
Touching fire causes pain. Touching fire provides the strongest possible justificatory ground for believing the fire caused the pain.
No one who has ever been burnt by flame could possibly doubt that touching fire causes pain or that "touching fire causes pain" is true aside from all those creatures capable of touching fire and drawing a correlation between the act and the ensuing pain, but utterly incapable of talking about it.
Unexpressed...
Non linguistic...
Not propositional in content...
The attribution/recognition of causality does not require language. It does count as belief.
We differentiated between it being true that such-and-such and it being believed that such-and-such.
Time passed, folk talked about beliefs as if they were things we had - Sam's belief that such-and-such. We talk about how a belief is passed on, groundbreaking, novel. We reified them.
Then Ludwig notices that if someone is looking for something and perhaps roots around in a certain place, he shows that he believes that what he is looking for is there, without saying so.
And Sam and Creo start to talk about them being nonlinguistic.
And Isaac says not only are they nonlinguistic, they are all of them just neural networks of some sort.
And Banno says don't come the raw prawn with me.
It's the drive for evolutionary amenability!
:wink:
Tired. Hungry.
Shoots!
But see were-o- and leubh-
One desires one's beliefs to be verified...
I'm not well versed in things like logical structure, you might have to explain this in a bit more depth. As far as I can tell if you supplied a belief for which I could not provide you with a neurological pathway that is the equivalent of it (produces the same behaviour), wouldn't that be proof? So far you've talked about cats and object solidity and I've outlined (very briefly) the neurological architecture which is the equivalent of this belief. Is there some particular belief you have in mind that you're thinking doesn't have a neurological correspondence?
Quoting Banno
Yep, I hear you. I think we can perhaps shelve that particular part of the disagreement. You think there is a value in distinguishing some neurological architectures which facilitate certain behaviour as corresponding to (some) beliefs, but other neurological structures which (to me) seem to do the same thing, you think are not best thought of as corresponding to a belief. This seems really about the utility of the label which, I'm sure we can both agree, is context dependant. Let's focus on the meat of the disagreement which is that some beliefs do not have neurological equivalents. The opposite (that some neurological behaviour-related pathways might not be called 'beliefs') seems trivial by comparison - unless you think it important that they're literally never referred to that way.
Quoting Banno
What would be an example of such a belief? This may well hinge upon what we each mean by belief. I take it to mean 'a tendency to act as if...'. I have a belief that the pub is at the end of the road means I have a tendency to act as if the pub were at the end of the road. My cat believes the floor is solid mean my cat has a tendency to act as if the floor were solid. By this definition, there could not be a belief which did not influence behaviour. You've used the term 'taking something to be the case', which seems to me basically the roughly same idea, but perhaps yours includes expectation in a way mine doesn't, is that it? Are you saying we can expect things to be the case without ever yet behaving as if they were? If so we've got a whole other are of cognitive processes to go into if you want to find me an example of a belief (in this sense) which doesn't have a neurological equivalent.
Quoting Banno
You're right, but I'm afraid it's a paper copy only (not a free journal). It's in 'Experimental Brain Research' 1988 vol71 p491-507 and was conducted by Giacomo Rizzolatti.
Quoting Banno
As I said to CS, this is speculative, so there's no hard and fast answer, I just dislike it when things are dismissed summarily as being or not being the case when diligent and painstaking work is actually being undertaken to try and find out. With regards the experimental data I'm aware of (by no means all there is), it is that they have lost the connection between the identification of the object and the motor movements they believe (my definition) are appropriate in response to that object. I don't know that I'm doing a very good job of explaining it, but I'm trying not to turn every post into a cognitive psychology textbook. Yet you, quite reasonably, want firm evidence, so it's difficult. In a few words - there are two pathways visual perception takes, one deals with (among other things) object recognition, the other deals with (among other things) sensorimotor responses. There's a crucial communication between the two as the bit dealing with sensorimotor responses doesn't distinguish objects in memory and so can't predict or manipulate them in 3D in the mind. When you disrupt either pathway the relevant skill is lost, if you disrupt the connection, the wrong sensorimotor responses are applied to the object of perception. To me, that parses as the fact that the monkey has lost it's belief that this object (the one recognised by the ventral pathway), has this physical response (can support my weight - is solid, for example). The monkey has lost it's belief that this floor (the one it's currently looking at and recognising as a floor) is solid (can be walked on in an normal manner).
Quoting Banno
Indeed. There is also a study of a poor woman who had part of this happen to her naturally as a consequence of brain lesions!
Then in what way would I have such a belief? Are you perhaps saying that because I would picture your house with a front door, I have that belief, even though I haven't yet actually pictured it thus (until you mentioned it)? Doesn't this turn the ascribing of beliefs into a sort of guessing game?
Notwithstanding that issue, even if we were to accept this future-possible behaviour as indication of a belief, isn't that tendency still caused by the state of my neural architecture? Isn't the belief that your house has a front door simply subsumed in the belief that all houses (without prior evidence to the contrary) have front doors. As things stand {Banno's House} is just an example from {all houses without any prior evidence of front-door-lessness}. It seems strange to say I have a belief about your house in favour of saying I would have a belief about your house if I thought about it.
Isn't all this just recognising that words are used in language games? The original doesn't have any greater claim to authenticity does it?
'Believe' in some language games means 'as opposed to know', but in others it means, 'has a tendency to act as if'.
This is usually well within our grasp to handle (by which I mean 'grasp' as in 'attainable', and 'handle' as in 'deal competently with'. Not 'grasp' as in 'hold with the hand' and 'handle' as in 'thing that allows the opening of a door'.)
Not if I've understood you correctly, no. That is basically what I take to be the case. But if discussion of the neurological correlates of belief might be off-topic, then discussion of different approaches to realism certainly is. All this has been laid out in other threads and whilst I don't mind repeating it at all (you never know when something new might turn up) I really don't think here is the right place to do so.
I wonder if we might also go over some related objections - Davidson, as well as Watkins. Perhaps until Sam raises an objection to our being off topic...
John Watkins addresses all-and-some; I think it's in Science and Skepticism, characterising them as an existential quantification inside a universal quantification.
An existential statement can be verified: "There is at least one black cat" is verified by presenting a black cat. But it cannot be falsified - my not having a cat to hand does not show that there are no black cats.
A universal statement on the other hand can be falsified, but not verified. "All cats are black" is shown false by presenting a non-black cat; but looking around and not finding a non-black cat does not mean that there are none, unless you look everywhere.
Now if you put one in the scope of the other, you get something that is neither provable nor disprovable. So "for every mad cat lady there is at least one black cat" - You can't falsify this, because there might always be a black cat somewhere you haven't looked. And you can't prove it either - there might always be a mad cat lady somewhere unknown to you, for whom there is no black cat.
Not good examples, and plenty more could be said. They are oft found in the company of conspiracies.
But to our case, the assertion that for every belief there exists some neural equivalent is in that class. If you say "here is a belief for which there is no neural equivalent", I might reply that there is, it's just that we haven't found it yet. So the proposal is not falsifiable. And yet it is also not provable, because one cannot provide an exhaustive list of beliefs.
All of this, just to make the point that it is unfair to ask that I provide empirical examples of beliefs for which there are no neural equivalent.
I doubt it was worth it.
...while for others, myself included, it is "To take it as true that...".
Ant there's the rub. And in the end if you are going to use the word one way, you can't come back and tell those who use it differently that they are wrong. That is one can't come back and say that one's neurological version of belief captures all there is to do with belief, if one is first restricting "belief" only to neurology.
Edit:
Quoting Isaac
Well, yes. With an remonstration to be clear about which game you are playing.
I'm sorry if I'm being slow, but I'm still not following you.
"If you say "here is a belief for which there is no neural equivalent", I might reply that there is, it's just that we haven't found it yet "
- True, but not what's happening here. I'm not trying to argue simply that there might be neurological architecture corresponding to certain beliefs, I'm trying to understand what has made you so convinced that there isn't (remember you didn't say any of what you said conditionally, yours were absolute statements about what could and could not be the case).
Quoting Banno
This is quite disingenuous. Look back over our exchange...
Quoting Banno
...is where I first objected. Before that, the most I had said was that a belief can be thought of as a neural network. I didn't declare that beliefs should be thought of as neural networks and then tell anyone using it differently that they are wrong.
Now look at the nature of the statements I've been responding to...
Quoting Banno
Quoting Banno
Quoting Banno
I'm struggling to see me saying that beliefs can be thought of as neural networks (and arguing against statements that they cannot) as being "us[ing] the word one way, [and] come[ing] back and tell those who use it differently that they are wrong.". Yet somehow to read your comments above as being examples of some different approach which I should try to emulate.
How are you not doing exactly what you said shouldn't be done? You're using 'belief a certain way (where it does not have neural correlates) and telling everyone who uses it differently (or more specifically just those who use it the way I do) that they're wrong.
Maybe tomorrow.
You can keep using this thread, I really don't have much more to say.
I do not think that that was a veiled charge towards you... personally. "You" was a hypothetical. Replace "you" with "one"...
Banno is right to bring this to light. You, I, and he are all using "belief" in our own respective ways.
He has been consistent. The quotes you focused upon show that. He also clearly acknowledged and 'granted' your use... which is different than his and mine, without saying you or your use was wrong...
I am much more prone to say that about both of your notions of belief... but haven't here!
:wink:
I'm now unsure of your understanding of nonlinguistic beliefs - and since you are my go-to person with regard to Ludwig, I'd value your opinion.
What does it mean to say that all belief has propositional content?
The only evidence brought to bear in support of that claim are reports about your cat's belief.
That distinction between the report and what is being reported upon matters.
Do you think it is possible that Witt was making a concerted effort to make sense of Moore's claim while remaining consistent?
Do you agree with my earlier explanation regarding Moore's language use? Was he showing you what he believes or was he showing you what his belief is about?
This is a hand. Here is another. These are hands.
Witt was sympathetic to Moore's propositional claims, but I don't think he was trying to make sense of Moorean propositions. On Certainty shows throughout the book that the grammar of Moore's propositions is just incorrect, so no, I don't think Witt is trying to make sense of Moorean propositions.
Quoting creativesoul
I don't see how we can show you what we believe without showing you what the belief is about.
So I'll go back and set out what I'm claiming.
Firstly that beliefs can be understood as a relation between an agent and a proposition.
Since a proposition is involved, beliefs are stateable, but might be unstated.
The relation ibetween the agent and the proposition is such that the agent holds the proposition to be true.
Now if you prefer to think of a belief as a neural network, then you are not thinking of a belief as a relation between an agent and a proposition such that the agent holds the proposition to be true.
But that does not mean that you cannot think of beliefs as neural nets.
By way of summary, a relation between an agent and a proposition such that the agent holds the proposition to be true is not the same sort of thing as a neural network. Hence, there is no neural network that just is the relation between an agent and a proposition such that the agent holds the proposition to be true... they are not the same sort of thing, so this correspondence cannot occur.
Hence the cows and assets analogue. A cow can be an asset, but they are not the very same thing. A cow is an asset when considered in a certain way, and perhaps a neural network is a belief when considered in a certain way - your poor monkey - but they are not identical. I will stand by my assertion that there is no particular neural network that is the exact same thing as my cat's taking it that the floor is solid. What there might be is a neural network that, when removed, also removes the belief; as when removing the cow removes the asset.
Cheers.
Not us... Banno's cat.
Ah! Cool.
There's much liability for confusion thereabouts. Does showing have a broader reach than saying - are there things that can be shown but not said?
"I love you more than words can say" says I love you, and in words!
And there are ways of understanding rules that are not found in stating the rule, but in following it.
It occurs to me now that this is not unlike an event horizon, not as a point of no return but as a place in which talk of language begins to curve back on itself so far as to prevent further expression.
Hence it might be that at some future time belief comes to refer usually to neural networks.
I think Witt believed that there are things can be shown but not said, because he believed there was or is a limit to language. I disagree with Witt on this point.
Ya, I do believe that showing has a broader reach than saying (at least it seems so), but that doesn't mean that we can't put it into words. Any belief portrayed in our actions, or in the actions of others can be put into words. However, the fact that a belief can be put into words, doesn't take away from the idea that it need not be put into words in order for it to be a belief. I can't make any sense out of the idea that before there was a language there were no beliefs. It's true that the concept belief didn't exist, but that doesn't mean the belief itself didn't exist. Again, the belief is in the showing, or the action apart from language.
I don't see this being the case at all. It is similar to saying that meaning can be associated with neural networks. Beliefs and meaning both refer to things apart from the mind. In fact, they give evidence that we have a mind.
Neither can Banno.
It's the strongest evidence possible for rejecting the framework altogether.
:wink:
Prelinguistic belief, if it can be said to have a structure, would exist in it's entirety prior to language use. So, we ought expect statements of belief to have somehow evolved from the structure of prelinguistic belief... not the other way around!
How is this so regarding your cat's belief?
We can watch it occur, in controlled environments and in the wild... on cable news!
:wink:
There's a link! Hume be damned, because it does not require a pattern of the same events taking place in the same order over and over again!!!
You should know by now.
It will not happen, because brains are not enough. Physiological sensory perception requires something to be perceived, and something capable of perceiving it. The brain is just part of what makes perception possible, and perception is just a part of what makes belief possible.
Humor me. You've offered different answers at different times.
How are propositions involved your cat's belief?
:brow:
His behaviour shows that he believes "the floor is solid" is true?
Cat's do not understand that "the floor is solid" is a proposition, let alone whether or not it is true.
What? He doesn't understand that "The floor is solid" is true. The would require language.
He understands that the floor is solid.
It would seem crows have neurons that can represent number of items, corresponding to evidence they can do simple counting.
[quote=https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150608152002.htm]An old story says that crows have the ability to count. Three hunters go into a blind situated near a field where watchful crows roam. They wait, but the crows refuse to move into shooting range. One hunter leaves the blind, but the crows won't appear. The second hunter leaves the blind, but the crows still won't budge. Only when the third hunter leaves, the crows realize that the coast is clear and resume their normal feeding activity.
Helen Ditz and Professor Andreas Nieder of the University of Tübingen found the neuronal basis of this numerical ability in crows. They trained crows to discriminate groups of dots. During performance, the team recorded the responses of individual neurons in an integrative area of the crow endbrain. This area also receives inputs from the visual system. The neurons ignore the dots' size, shape and arrangement and only extract their number. Each cell's response peaks at its respective preferred number.[/quote]
In the old story, it would seem the crows have a belief about how many hunters are behind the blind, suggesting that you don't need language to form the equivalent of propositional content. I don't know whether that old story is just a story, but their other documented cases where some animals could do simple arithmetic with a small number of items.
Another example would be the mirror test. Do animals act as if the reflect in the mirror is another animal? Do they come to believe it is themselves?
In the short BBC video below, they explain how dolphins behave differently toward a mirror than other dolphins or just in general. They behave as if they're using the mirror to look at part of their body they can't otherwise see.
OK, so can you elaborate further on what kind of thing this relation is? I'm something of a physicalist, so at some point I tend to ask the question of what anything we're discussing consist of, in terms of matter and energy.
If I get an answer in those terms I can build back up from there to a point were it's more useful to talk about the thing (it's impossible to talk about human relations in terms of their atoms - doesn't mean we're not just atoms, just that the relations can't be talked about that way).
If I get an answer in terms of more complicated physics I generally have to take that as fact on trust because I don't understand complicated physics.
If I get the answer that the thing we're talking about exists but not as a physical thing anywhere, I start to think I've probably nothing more to say in that conversation. I don't do God, Realms of Thought, Things which existed outside the universe, Mind Substances, or fairy dust.
But I'm quite happy that other people do, my enquiries are not intended to show these people up (unless they're espousing some position I think is harmful), I just want to know if the conversation has any interest for me.
I have yet to clarify, from your comments so far, what kind of thing you think 'belief' is. A 'relation' you say between a person/cat and a proposition. So if I may just ask for a bit more clarity;
Where is this relation, what kind of thing is it? For me, the 'relation' that houses are bigger than apples is in my brain (we can actually track down and manipulate this relation such that people are baffled when houses don't fit into apples). The proposition "houses are bigger than apples" is also in my brain (language centres, images drawn to the occipital cortex by the hippocampus in response to internally voicing those words...). The relation between that proposition and my actions is in my brain (intention, 3D image manipulation, option weighing all have their respective cortices and networks). But, whilst I understand you don't find it useful to talk of beliefs this way, I'm still a little unclear as to whether that's because you think they exist in some other realm, or whether you have them exist somewhere physical (the brain?) but just don't find it useful to talk about them that way (like talking about politics in terms of the interactions of atoms).
To summarise, are beliefs, for you, something non-physical (in some other realm of existence), or are they physically represented, but just not usefully (or perhaps even possibly) talked about that way?
I might ask you the same question I asked Banno. If they refer to "things" what are these things, for you? Where are they, what do they consist of? How do they come into existence?
I don't know how many times I have to answer this question, for the umteenth time, beliefs manifest themselves in our actions (nonlinguistic or linguistic, both are actions). So, if I open the door, then that act shows that I believe there is a door. Or, if I tell you my belief via language, then the act of telling you reveals what I believe. Meaning also is revealed in how we use words in social contexts. These are the "things" I'm referring too.
Who knows with Banno's cat, though.
I don't think the dolphin believes it's seeing a reflection, reflection involves concepts that the dolphin doesn't have. It believes it's seeing another dolphin, or some such thing.
Is that a scientific opinion? Because the dolphins in the video I posted do behave as if they are inspecting themselves using the mirror.
Also, there is the mirror test with a red dot on the forehead where some animals have demonstrated an awareness of the dot being on their own head.
The idea that only humans have concepts because we're the only language users is a bit anthropomorphic. It's placing too much emphasis on language, and not enough on animals studies.
Also, it's not known for sure that we're the only language users. Dolphins being an obvious possible exception. Birds another.
All of this tells me how these things are revealed. If someone asks "what does does a painting consist of?" the answer is not "a paintingis revealed when the artist pulls the covering cloth away". I'm not asking how we recognise the existence of beliefs, I'm asking what they are, for you. I'm a physicalist, so my answer would be that what they are, is some collection of neurons. Neurons are the physical manifestation.
I'm wondering if, for you, there's some realm of existence outside of the physical, were such things as beliefs exist, or if they exist physically but are just not neuron clusters but some other physical things.
I don't mind if the question just doesn't interest you, but it silly to suggest that explaining how we recognise something is the same as explaining what kind of thing it is.
I don't believe the cat "takes it to be the case that the floor is solid," it acts as if the floor is solid. Maybe it means the same thing to you, but for me it's a strange way to say it. It's probably not even aware that it's acting in such a way. The cat just does what it does.
I find this hard to believe. A cat has a relatively sophisticated brain. It needs to survive in a complex environment as an ambush predator. And cats learned to adapt to humans. Why wouldn't a cat have all sorts of beliefs about the world?
That's hard to explain without positing that the lion believes the hyenas are wanting to go for it's balls.
I checked out an excellent source mentioned earlier.
[quote = Moyal-Sharrock]
Logical pragmatism is the view that our basic beliefs are a know-how, and that this know-how
is logical – that is, that it is necessary to our making sense.
[/quote]
To me it makes sense to stress social know-how as our immersion in a form of life. 'Bedrock beliefs' are 'what everyone knows,' with the important twist of this 'knowledge' being primarily tacit. It's doing/saying the 'right thing' in the context of a world with others. We can, with effort, articulate some of this tacit know-how. The lexicographer constructs plausible definitions of words like 'belief,' but this itself relies on the same 'blind' or 'pre-rational' know-how displayed in ordinary language use, even as it also relies on more conscious training and education. (We could all define a familiar word that we've never bothered to define or look up before. I don't think the definition we'd come up with was already there in our minds somewhere. We'd be employing skill in articulating for the first time what was reliably automatic.)
Related issue: It is only after we are trained into a form of life and a language that we can absurdly pretend to doubt the existence of others or the external world. This doubt is absurd insofar as it is articulated. The very language of the (impossible) 'radical skeptic' or 'solipsist' deploys a know-how that cannot intelligibly be doubted. In this sense language 'presupposes' a world with others, though it's important to stress that this 'presupposition' need not be conceptual or verbal. That we can, after the fact, articulate plausible explicit renditions of tacit knowledge does not IMV suggest that such tacit 'knowledge' was already made of concepts.
Strange balls...
:yum:
Hello, and nice addition.
Welcome @path. I agree with much of what you said. However, would you call this "tacit know-how" a belief (or set of beliefs), like @Sam26 does?
I think 'belief' is OK as a metaphor, but I do see how it can work against expressing the stuff we may agree on. (I like what you have posted on this thread.)
Thanks!
It also brings out that knowledge-how is not JTB.
Quoting path
Thanks and likewise! :blush:
I like this. I think we 'believe' in language this way, trust in it radically, as we trust ourselves to step around furniture. To question its reliability or intelligibility is to trust it like an organ as intimate as the hand.
Right. That makes sense to me. We could use the word skill for this knowledge-how. Skill is primary. We develop the skill of co-hosting a form of life, which is at least as visceral as it is 'conceptual.' To say 'hi' is to make an animal sound. What does waving mean? I think I'm saying that there's no radical break but instead a continuum from grunts to dissertations. There's a background of 'stupid' skill or uncooked can-do at work in all cases.
For context, I recently read The Social Construction of Reality, apparently a sociology classic. It was something like 'Dreydegger' and Wittgenstein in a different jargon. We are 'possessed' by a 'form of life' or 'zeitgeist' and for the most part enact it as 'one' does. For the most part we co-enact the what one does and what everybody knows. The depths of the so-called self are as much outside as inside, since the speaking 'ghost in the machine' relies on a skill that exists in some sense as a community habit. Language is a borrowed 'bone machine' that makes 'self-consciousness' possible but also already always 'falling.'
I like that you are stressing the biological continuum.
Quoting Marchesk
Yes, to me it makes sense that certain animals have something like concepts. As others have mentioned, crows can count in some sense. Aliens might say that humans can count (only) in some sense for similar reasons.
LOL! Indeed.
Quoting path
It seems the counter argument is that concepts can only be lnquistic, and language is an external, public thing. But there has to be something in human brains that forms language. And why would that be entirely novel in the animal kingdom? Also, why must concepts be only expressible in words? Do images not count?
Well put, and applicable to some of my own claims but not all!
:wink:
Quoting Banno
Quoting creativesoul
Quoting Banno
Something is off here...
In order for that to be true, propositional content must somehow exist in it's entirety prior to language, and as such it would not be equivalent to what we call "propositional content".
Would it?
Are you suggesting that propositions somehow exist prior to language?
I'm suggesting there's more to belief than being able to express it in language.
Clearly, if language less creatures form, have, and/or hold belief... and they clearly do. The sticking point is what such belief is... what it consists of.
True. What does cognitive science say about animal intelligence? Would it be the same for us, plus the linguistic ability where we translate beliefs to language? Or do we internalize the language as beliefs?
The alternative being advocated for here is more like a propositional attitude, or behaving as if... the creature believes something is the case.
These renderings leave me unimpressed or certainly unconvinced. A cockroach satisfies Banno's criterion. If it is the fact that the cat does not pay attention to the solidity of the floor that leads us to say that he takes it to be the case that the floor is solid, then we could say the exact same thing about any and all creatures walking across the floor.
Taking something to be the case would not require paying attention to or otherwise ever thinking about it.
That's the reductio.
The introduction of the timeline eliminates it(the verb tense issue) while explaining how it has taken it to be the case in past, therefore no longer pays any attention to the floor. Our brains take short cuts all the time. There is no need to always think about the floor., but taking it to be the case that it's solid most certainly does require paying attention to it.
I'm not sure what cognitive science says about it at the moment.
Translating beliefs into language seems to me to be the only viable option here, at least when talking about the creation of language via the invention of meaningful signs, symbols, and/or gestures.
After language use has begun it's notably more complex.
Replace "presupposes" with "is existentially dependent upon", and "presupposition" with "existential dependency" and we are in complete agreement on this aspect.
Nice. I'm not attached to 'presupposition.' We can say that language is existentially dependent upon the world, but the world-for-humans is existentially dependent on language too. It all comes in a single clump ('equiprimordial'). This 'holism' is maybe what various 'idealisms' have pointed at more or less awkwardly. We inherit world-and-language as a system, it seems to me.
I agree with what I think is meant by 'language is an external, public thing.' But it also makes sense that the social sphere leaves its mark on the individual brain. Our computers can talk right now by using more or less the same software on different hardware. So 'form of life' is like the software that runs on the hardware of individual brains. Since we think with this 'form-of-life software,' the world-with-the-others is 'presupposed' in some sense and the hardware enacts the social, as it evolved to do.
As to concepts, I think images count. Though for me it's another term of art issue. The meanings of 'concept' and 'image' function mostly automatically. We philosophers can establish conventions and definitions in a local context pretty however we want. I try not to be attached to terminology, and it's nice to find whatever terminology facilitates mutual understanding.
That said, maybe we can meet here: Saying 'hello' is not a proposition, not 'conceptual.' It's like a cat's meow. There are examples like waving or flipping someone off. Humans move their hands when they talk, make facial expressions. What I'm getting at is that there is no clean break between the 'mental' and the 'physical' (or the concept and the gesture.) The 'mental-physical' distinction functions mostly automatically and practically. Philosophers are tempted to make this and other distinctions, like scheme/content, fundamental and absolute.
Yes. I'm reminded of Heidegger.
Indeed. Especially when we're reporting upon that which consists of and/or is existentially dependent upon both. Thought, belief, truth, and meaning are such things.
Right. I like what Dreyfus does with Heidegger. Of course I want to avoid getting swallowed by the jargon of any particular thinker, especially because I find the same basic idea in quite a few philosophers, for instance Hegel. I think Rorty is pretty great in his PMN book.
Quoting creativesoul
Right. And for me one of the trickier things is these philosophical master concepts are all caught up in that clump of automatic enactment before we can make them terms of art. I can relate to the Wittgenstein who mostly exists to swat down bad philosophy as it tries to get in the way of the otherwise smooth functioning of this automatic enactment.
Bad philosophy that gets tangled up in taken-for-granted but unnecessary and futile paradigms is something like a harmless vice. The Wittgenstein approach to me is almost aesthetically motivated. Lots of people just tune out a certain kind of philosophy as a trivial game. Others stick around and try to articulate in just what way it is confused or irrelevant.
Perhaps you would be better served to simply say 'those which are expressed linguistically and those which are not".
Care to set out these basic ideas? I'm unsure what you're talking about.
Nah. There are no non linguistic beliefs that are expressed linguistically. So, the suggestion ends up focusing upon only linguistic beliefs... those uttered and those not. That is of no help here.
I recently read The Social Construction of Reality, which is summarized:
[quote=Wiki]
Their central concept is that people and groups interacting in a social system create, over time, concepts or mental representations of each other's actions, and that these concepts eventually become habituated into reciprocal roles played by the actors in relation to each other. When these roles are made available to other members of society to enter into and play out, the reciprocal interactions are said to be institutionalized. In the process, meaning is embedded in society. Knowledge and people's conceptions (and beliefs) of what reality is become embedded in the institutional fabric of society. Reality is therefore said to be socially constructed.
[/quote]
It doesn't matter if we call it 'culture' or 'spirit' or 'form of life' or an 'understanding of being.' It's the patterns in our doings that make us intelligible to ourselves and to one another, simultaneously.
[quote= Dreyfus]
For both Heidegger and Wittgenstein, then, the source of the intelligibility of the world is the average daily practices through which alone there can be any understanding at all.
[/quote]
As I read this, we co-enact the world. The tribe and its conventions (including language) is the condition of possibility for the individual thinker.
There are various passages in Hegel on this theme. Here's one.
[quote=Hegel]
The very essence of spirit is action. It makes itself what it essentially is; it is its own product, its own work. Thus it becomes object of itself, thus it is presented to itself as an external existence. Likewise the spirit of a people: it is a definite spirit which builds itself up to an objective world. This world, then, stands and continues in its religion, its cult, its customs, its constitution and political laws, the whole scope of its institutions, its events and deeds. This is its work: this one people! Peoples are what their deeds are. Every Englishman will say, we are the ones who navigate the ocean and dominate world commerce, who own East India and its wealth, who have a parliament, juries, and so on. The function of the individual is to appropriate to himself this substantial being, make it part of his character and capacity, and thus to become something in the world. For he finds the existence of the people as a ready-made, stable world, into which he must fit himself. The spirit of the people, then, enjoys and satisfies itself in its work, in its world.
[/quote]
To me this 'substantial being' is whatever strange kind of being we want to attribute to 'the social.' I think we agree that 'mental' is misleading, given how embodied and externalized culture has to be, as a social phenomenon. The temptation is to obsess over the brain and the sense organs and ignore that this obsession takes place in a code that is not biologically local. The 'space of reasons' has a certain 'virtuality' which tempts us to speak of ghosts in the machine.
Feuerbach wrote in his dissertation that thinking is not an activity performed by the individual, but rather by “the species” acting through the individual. “In thinking”, Feuerbach wrote, “I am bound together with, or rather, I am one with—indeed, I myself am—all human beings.”
That's somewhat optimistic, in that it assumes a singular form of life, but the point that even thinking itself is not (in an important and neglected sense) an individual achievement seems crucial here. Not I, but [s]Christ[/s] my inherited culture's patterns through me. Noteworthy individuality is difficult, rare, and allows for the slow drift of a form of life.
But how, that remains an unknown.
Quoting Isaac
Isn't it also "in" the house and the apple? The size relation between apples and houses makes no sense without apples and houses.
I'm more incline to embodied cognition...
Indeed, I'd be incline to look even further afield, to seeing cognition as embedded in the world; after all, language is best seen as being so embedded.
But I suspect you have less realist, more idealist sympathies.
I see a difference in scope. Understanding that the floor is solid is straight forward. Understand that "The floor is solid" is true requires that one refer to the proposition that the floor is solid; it's a reflexive use of language, and not something a cat is able to do. Much the same as that the cat can understand that its human will feed it, but not that its human will feed it next Tuesday.
A text to be treated with great caution.
Reality tends to delineate what we can and cannot construct, despite our best efforts.
That's right; there are obviously no non-linguistic beliefs which are expressed; you have simply uttered a tautology that tells us nothing. The only purported beliefs we can "focus on" are those which are somehow manifested; either by utterances or actions. Not all of those are linguistic beliefs, again obviously; the examples of what we take to be animal beliefs are cases in point; if animals have beleifs, then they are non-linguistic and expressed in the animals' actions.
So, their are no beliefs which could not be, at least in principle, expressed; either linguistically or non-linguistically. This leads to the conclusion that there are two kinds of beliefs; those which are expressed linguistically and those which are not, but are instead manifested in action.
I think I understand your concern and agree. We do not 'construct reality' as a painter works with a blank canvas. We work within constraints, and 'the real is that which resists.' (Though that description of the real is hardly exhaustive of our somewhat vague notion of what constrains us.)
Reading it, I was often stuck by its philosophical naivety. It used 'subjective' and 'objective' with a certain innocence, etc. At the same time, I think the sociological approach is basically right.
Or perhaps we could think in terms of a continuum. If I say 'hello' to an answering machine (if anyone remembers those), I'm making a noise. It's not unlike a kitten running to the sound of a can opener, even when tuna is not being opened but only kidney beans.
Hrmph. It's potentially deceptive to say these are two kinds. Beliefs which have not been "expressed linguistically" can be expressed linguistically...
It's not a difference between kinds of belief so much as a difference in what has been done with those beliefs.
This brings us back to the idea of the "social construction of reality". And this idea is not problematic as long as you remember that construction is not creation in any ex nihilo sense.
More interesting is that there cannot be an inexpressible belief; all beliefs are beliefs that such-and-such.
This is important because it sits in the same place as Wittgenstein's pivotal distinction between showing and saying.
I agree that there cannot be inexpressible beliefs, but I would not say that all beliefs are beliefs "that such-and-such". Instead I would say that all beliefs are such that they can be expressed in the form "that such and such".
When we're talking about understanding that the floor is solid, we must discuss what that takes, or what it takes in order to be able to do that.
I think that we agree that it does not take language.
Would you agree?
That does seem to be the case. We can often articulate an enacted 'belief,' and it's tempting to think of the enacted belief as made of something like unconscious mental stuff. Instead I'd suggest that the conscious, verbal version of the belief is a fresh creation.
Music to mine ears.
Right, but I guess I'm trying to point out that we might take 'consciousness' too much for granted. There's a common background assumption that verbal behavior has some kind of intense proximity to meaning, but what we witness is just the further use of the our linguistic skill if asked what we 'mean.'
Roughly, I don't think we know or even can know exactly what we mean by 'meaning' -- or by 'exactly.' In Wittgenstein and others it's as if philosophy discovers it limits, its enacted and somewhat ineffable and un-masterable foundation.
I thought maybe you'd agree. I also like the notion of embodied cognition, which you mentioned above.
OK. But do you not think that it's difficult to draw a line? Is 'how are you?' really a question?
This is related to an anti-skepticism post I made recently. The Cartesian skeptic who doubts the outer world already assumes the unity of a 'mind' or 'inner' voice as an 'I' that is knee deep in 'meaning.' Of course this is all intuitive enough within our form of life, but perhaps it's mostly a habit, a kind of background sedimentation.
Here's a distinction worth making - that between beliefs about how things are, and beliefs about what is believed.
On the one hand we have the cat believing that the floor is solid, or if you prefer Creative believing that the floor is wood.
On the other we have the cat believing that the statement "the floor is solid" is true; or Creative believing that the cat believes that "the floor is solid" is true. We might call this second, reflexive beliefs.
These reflexive beliefs are about propositions, and hence require language. Whereas the belief that the floor is solid is about the floor, and hence does not require language.
An interesting exercise would be to link this in to Searle's analysis of brute and social facts, in The Construction of Social Reality. Social facts might prove to be comparable to reflexive beliefs.
Right. It's not ex nihilo. And the actual text is shrewder than its eye-catching title. One could even accuse it of being too assuredly realist in its approach.
Sorry, but that last response has left me wondering how much we're on the same page, or perhaps if we're talking about the same things. Namely, I am left wondering if we agree about the basic notions that different philosophers like Heidegger, Hegel, and Witt(to name a few) have skirted around throughout history. I say skirted intentionally, because I do not think that any of them actually put their finger on it.
In keeping in line with this thread, although a bit of a tangent, for my part I was referring to Heidegger's notions which - if I understood them correctly - were meant to pick out and/or describe all the different ways that language affects humans. In his doing so, he pointed out that we are basically already embedded in a meaningful world. He is not alone in that belief. I would venture to say that everyone here agrees with that much. Witt most certainly did.
I share Banno's sentiments regarding the notion of a socially constructed reality.
Here's the salient point from my position... or regarding it actually...
I invoked the distinction between linguistic and non and/or pre linguistic belief. I strongly advocate for keeping that distinction in mind, and doing so in terms of the content of the belief. All belief consists of correlations drawn between different things. The distinction is only meant to pick out the kind of belief based upon whether or not it is formed by a language user, and perhaps more importantly - exactly what that belief consists of(the content of the correlation). "Linguistic belief" is a term that picks out correlations between language use and other things. "Non linguistic belief" does not include language use.
The distinction is basically meant to provide an outline and/or a criterion from which to work.
I'm not sure we are coming at this from exactly equivalent angles. I am not proposing anything beyond the distinction between linguistic forms of expression where the words "stand for" things in a general sense, and other forms of expression which are merely signs of, for example emotional states, or signals of danger, and so on.
Right, but the "sedimentation" is, I think biological at base. So, I suspect some (perhaps most?) animals have a sense of self, but, lacking symbolic language, they have no generalized, absract idea of self. We have both, and our having both is on account of us being language users.
I haven't read it, but I'll take your word for it. :smile:
As I already said, there are linguistic beliefs that are not expressed linguistically. So, using this suggestion we are inevitably going to conflate unexpressed linguistic beliefs with non linguistic belief. There's no getting around that conflation, my friend. If we were to employ a Venn diagram the overlap is obvious. However, they are not the same as far as their elemental constituency(the content of the correlations).
Thus, I reject that approach. If I may ask, regarding this...
What's the difference, on your view, between a language less creature's belief and an unexpressed linguistic one as far as it's content goes?
We're in agreement regarding this particular rendering. This one avoids the the problem stemming from taking it is be the case that a proposition is true... which is what you stated earlier that caused me concern. The above is much better. Although you have intermingled between linguistic and non linguistic in the first example, you've done so without error. Indeed, even on my view - which stresses the kind of belief based upon the linguistic content of the correlation(or not) - the above is a perfectly acceptable/amenable rendering.
:smile:
Language users and non language users alike can have belief about the way things are.
And one that stops us when we're attempting to place all belief in one or the other category.
Speaking roughly...
It seems to me you want to be able to distinguish the beliefs of animals from those of people, using language in some way.
You tried to do this by ascribing unexpressed beliefs to animals, and expressed beliefs to people. But that doesn't work.
What might work would be to differentiate between beliefs about brute facts and beliefs about social facts. Social facts are dependent on being said; hence the dog believes it will be fed, but not that it will be fed next Tuesday - because "Tuesday" is socially constructed, and hence not accessible to an agent who is outside the social, linguistic frame - who does not participate in the language game of days of the week.
Linguistic belief are those consisting of correlations drawn between language use and other things. Compare/contrast that to non linguistic beliefs, which are those consisting of correlations between different things, none of which are language use.
So a reflexive belief would be one in which...
Well, every belief is a relation between an agent and a proposition, such that the agent holds the proposition to be the case. The general form of a belief is "A holds that P is true".
A reflexive belief would then be one in which the proposition would involve a belief about a belief. So in the general form of a reflexive belief the proposition "P" would itself be a belief. Hence, "A holds that P is true" where P is "A holds that Q is true":
"A holds that 'A holds that Q is true' is true"...
And the reflexivity consists in the nesting of such beliefs.
Perhaps we could call non-reflexive beliefs "brute beliefs".
To make this work it would have to be related back to the cat not being able to believe it will be fed next Tuesday while believing it has four feet. The thesis would be that social facts can be explained in terms of beliefs about beliefs.
Check out Generative_adversarial_network
NIce. :up:
So I don't see that it adds much to the conversation.
I think it's kind of weird to talk about a cat believing it has four feet; it simply knows it has the feet it has. You might say the cat believes her food bowl is around the corner when she can't see it, regardless of whether it is or is not in its customary place.
Did you believe that my house has a front door, before you just read this question?
I didn't disbelieve it. If asked I would say it is more likely than not. But that just reflects background ideas about houses and front doors.
Four possibilities:
Janus believes Banno has a front door
Janus believes Banno does not have a front door
Janus does not believe Banno has a front door
Janus does not believe Banno does not have a front door
You are saying that before the question, you adhered to Janus does not believe Banno has a front door and Janus does not believe Banno does not have a front door...?
You could discount it as a fifth possibility and equate that with your third and fourth possibilities, I guess, as long as you don't see them as opposites to your first and second possibilities.
Right. I agree with all of that.
With sedimentation I was thinking of culture. For instance, this English language is a kind of historical sediment. And then there are the 'assumptions' (enacted interpretative approaches) that philosophers don't know they have and so haven't been able to challenge. Perhaps you've seen how Wittgenstein's 'beetle in the box' tends to offend and mystify, precisely because it's so well aimed.
The above assertion remains a point of contention, and it is one that I will not agree with, until someone, somewhere, can convince me how propositions can possibly exist in such a way that a language less creature is capable of being part of a relationship between itself and them(propositions). Be that as it may...
Let's set that point of contention aside for now, because I really, really, appreciate the progress we've made elsewhere during this discussion. It's shown itself as important(to me). Given that I do not say "really really" very often, I can only hope that my having done so puts my gratitude on display. Saying so is part of showing so here.
I mean, without being able to be in one another's presence, the words we use are not accompanied by mannerisms, tone of voice, facial expressions, emphatically significant volume levels, etc. The point being...
I am grateful to not only have this opportunity, but to have had all of them. Now, don't take all this 'mushy' stuff too far, or the wrong way. It's not all about you! :wink: Nonetheless, know that you are an irrevocably important part, as are several others, including but not limited to Janus.
Even those who I find myself at odds with are more than capable of adding to my overall understanding of human thought and belief. Note that I've stopped always using them as synonyms!
:smile:
While they are always results from the very same process, while they all consist of correlations drawn between different things, it is clear that not all thought are believed. Consider insincere speech acts and/or dishonest speakers as well. Surely as a result of keeping such things in mind, we're justified in saying that we know that one need not believe every thought that goes through one's mind, and thus there is a distinction to be drawn between thought and belief.
I want to give the rest of your last post due attention in a separate post.
That would be a consequence, unintended. The aim is to acquire knowledge of human thought and belief. It started out being about my own. You may remember the story...
That method doesn't work. We agree there. However, if you carefully review what I've been arguing here, you'll note that I have not invoked such terminology. In fact, I've argued against it's ability to do what need done here. The aim is knowledge of all human thought and/or belief. Successfully acquiring such knowledge cannot happen with just any old methodological approach.
Unfortunately, some of the terminology I've been using has tremendous philosophical baggage attached to it, and for some reason there are many people either unwilling or unable to grant someone's terms as the first step. As a result, the terms "necessary" and "universal" are not as helpful as they would otherwise be. They trip people up. Not to mention the sheer scope regarding the consequences of the position I'm advocating. Daunting, to put it mildly...
...and I have a life that doesn't involve doing philosophy all the time!
:wink:
What do brute facts and social facts have in common such that having that commonality makes them facts?
That's right off the top of my head. If a fact is a true statement, and a social fact is not a statement at all, then what sense does it make to call them by the same name "fact"?
They are true.
I think the time is coming (if the species can manage it) when not only synthetic faces but also synthetic conversation partners will be hard to isolate from the real. Our neural networks are tiny compared to what is possible. What if we built an 'electronic brain' the size of NYC? What if it developed its own humanoid holographic avatar? We wouldn't necessarily have to think it was 'more' than 'just a computer.' We might just see ourselves in a new way. If the thing was charismatic enough, it might found a religion.
[quote=Nietzsche]
...probably the time is at hand when it will be once and again understood WHAT has actually sufficed for the basis of such imposing and absolute philosophical edifices as the dogmatists have hitherto reared: perhaps some popular superstition of immemorial time (such as the soul-superstition, which, in the form of subject- and ego-superstition, has not yet ceased doing mischief): perhaps some play upon words, a deception on the part of grammar...
[/quote]
*If anyone is curious, that face beside path is the face of a ghost who was never born.
That strikes me as wrong. It's late, and I'll attend to it at another time.
:wink:
Thanks. It's (almost)always a pleasure...
Awww... You should have asked me that question. I've been waiting for something like that.
A proposition is a proposal. Proposals consist entirely of language use. Not all correlations are drawn between language use and other things. All proposals are just such correlations. All proposals consist of correlations drawn between different things some of which are language use.
:wink:
What it adds is the ability to take proper account of pre linguistic belief in such a way that is easily amenable to evolutionary progression.
A synthetic religion, if it were one that kept the "others" content, might be worthwhile.
A synthetic philosopher would be... disturbing. And yet also intriguing. If what counts is what is done rather than what is said, if acts are what is to be valued, then the content of the myth is irrelevant, and what is of value is what the myth shows:
A synthetic philosopher's propositions would serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands them eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, they are used as steps—to climb up beyond them... throwing away the ladder after he has climbed up it.
...as if we never spoke about stuff. That's what the use is.
That's not to say that there are not big potential problems with automation. That's another thread.
You asked(someone else not advocating those terms) what the difference was between propositions and correlations. Simply put... All propositions are correlations. Not all correlations are propositions.
I was just answering.
Perhaps you have.
What avatar might she choose?
For example...
The correlations my cats have drawn, and continue to draw time and time again between the sound of rustling plastic and getting treats.
I suspect I have interacted on occasion with several different bots. I'm a sucker for such a thing...
:wink:
Comes with trusting that others are speaking sincerely.
Shit!
Have I been reading that passage wrong for fifteen years?
Was Witt advocating throwing the ladder away or admonishing such a thing?
This is not a well formed statement. There is no subject. What corresponds to the proposition "rustling plastic implies impending treats"?
Tomorrow...
I'm old enough to remember ELIZA.
What better place to test a synthetic conversation partner than on internet fora?
And philosophy forums are so repetitious. I probably take less than a month to cycle through all my arguments. Taking a forum such as this as the statistical base, combined with Wolfram Alpha... might be quite convincing...
Indeed. As far as the 'others' go, Creed said in the US version of The Office that he'd been a cult leader and a cult member and that being a cult member was more fun. Philosophers are ascetics in some ways, denying themselves the simple pleasure of a false god.
Quoting Banno
We're not yet phased by getting our asses handed to us in games like Chess and Go. The perceived unity or continuity of the voice is still just ours. The divine spark is alive and well. The movies Her and Ex Machina are good on this issue. Just as we enact a faith in the reality of 'other minds,' we could also enact a faith in the 'soul' of a synthetic partner. It's not as if we have a formal proof of others' 'minds.' It's just insane to live any doubt on the matter. It's our form of life, which could gradually drift to take non-human 'consciousness' for granted.
Sounds like a sales add...
:vomit:
I hear you, but how would judge, for instance, that I am capable of drawing meaningful correlations between itself and other things? This connects to the beetle-in-the-box thing. Why do we take one another as real? Are we passing some implicit Turing test? Don't we just describe certain kinds of appropriate behavior in terms of drawing correlations, etc.? Some go players were freaked out by the apparent depth of AlphaGo's moves. That's already a little like profundity from a synthetic philosopher.
I haven't kept up with the state or the art, but I'm not aware of any amazing conversational A.I. that's already here. It's just that I know something about the field and can imagine what scale and theoretical advances could make possible. What's strange is that it's fundamentally just statistics, or that's how I read it. There is a pattern in our doings that can be 'absorbed' from data into the parameters of immense models. To me intelligence is not the issue but whatever we tend to call 'qualia.' Machines can definitely act appropriately in response to stimuli. This issue is whether they in some sense know what they are doing, which leads me to ask if we really know what we are doing ourselves...
This is something like the ideas in Strange Loop.
I think you are missing the tone. I'm saying that our belief in the divine spark is alive and well, under a different name. As I grasp the situation, you yourself were just defending it.
My post was intended, with some of the others, as a polite attack on the superstition of the 'soul' and 'I' which is now 'sold' in the 'secular' form of whatever A.I. is supposed to be incapable of. 'I' can't be simply against this 'superstition,' just to be clear.
Indeed. I hope I have been clear enough about the speculative nature of pretty much all neuroscience and cognitive psychology. That's not to say one can reasonably just discard it's findings, they need to be accounted for, but they are far from demonstrating something particular to be the case. If I come across as more assertive about the interpretation of the evidence than I mean to it's just a reaction to some of bullshit ad hoc 'reckoning' that seems to pass for serious empirical assumptions around here and that frustration may leak out into conversation with those other than the worst offenders. If so, my apologies.
Quoting Banno
No, no, quite the contrary. If you've read any of my discussions with @fdrake about active inference, you'll know that I believe our brains are in an inextricable relationship with their environment such that the very structure of our neural architecture reflects structures in reality (our body map for example is largely arranged in the same spatial relation as our actual body). I've often been accused of being an idealist, but I'm not. The confusion probably arises (as I've recently realised in another conversation) from a failure on my part to make clear the difference between object recognition pathways and object interaction pathways. These take completely different routes through the brain, right from the moment the signal leaves the retina. I believe it's perfectly possible to be idealist about object identification (tree, car, mother, father...) but be entirely realist about the degree to which we are embedded physically in the external world (we touch it, get feedback from it etc...).
In fact the evidence from infant object recognition studies seems to back up this position. Infants show surprise when objects defy laws of physics (disappear, pass through one another, fit into container smaller than the object itself...), but they show no surprise when one object spontaneously changes into another (cup becomes a pumpkin). They don't seem to be born with any sense of object recognition, but they are born with neural architecture which reflects the external reality they're born into.
Quoting Banno
I don't understand where you're going here. If...
Quoting Banno
...then the cat has no beliefs. It doesn't believe either of those propositions because it doesn't understand propositions, it can't possibly form an opinion about whether they're true or not. All a cat has is it's biology, no language. If you want to talk about beliefs outside of biology, then the cat has none. If you want to say the cat believes it has legs because it would hold the proposition "I have legs" to be true if it could understand the proposition, then I suppose it could work...but why would you need to do that?
Quoting Banno
When I play hide-and-seek with my nephew, the first place is comes to look is behind the curtain. Does he believe the proposition "My uncle is behind the curtain"? If he does he's very sorely misunderstood the nature of the game, it's entirely predicated on the fact fact that I might be behind the curtain, but I might not. So does he believe the proposition "My uncle might be behind the curtain"? Well, that wouldn't quite capture the situation either. He often looks behind the curtain first, it's his best guess, maybe 50% of the time. So does he believe the proposition "My uncle is behind the curtain 50% of the time", well, he's a smart lad, but he doesn't understand either probability or percentages yet, so he can't believe a proposition he can't understand.
Ramsey's solution is that he believes the proposition "My uncle is behind the curtain" with a probability of 50%. Belief is not binomial, one does not think of propositions as either true or false, but one believes them each to a degree. I believe your house has a front door to a certain degree.
As to your (perhaps more important question) about whether that belief pre-exists prior to your asking; no, I don't see how it could. If we are not to hold that we are born with a full and exhaustive set of beliefs, we have to accept that they are generated (not to mention the absolute mountain of empirical evidence that this is case), so I don't see any good reason not to assume the belief that your house has a front door is generated the moment I give it any thought, but all that existed before then were a set of prior beliefs (about houses and doors) which I would use to generate this new belief about 'your' house and door.
Quoting path
Quoting Banno
Seems that this bot has lost it's referent.
:lol:
:brow:
Is it me, or...
Fucking exactly ! And I also repeat, repeat, repeat. Iteration with a touch of variation. The continuity of the voice (that we can recognize this or that fellow pontificater) is already a kind of informal evidence against the 'divine spark' and its 'free will.' We are already something like vortices of inherited tokens.
You two are now playing a game that I am ill-equipped to play...
But it is just a game...
:wink:
Perhaps. There is a spirit of play at work. But I'm not unserious. In case it's not clear, I have the usual intuitive of sense of 'being conscious.' I experience the famous burden of apparent choice that one might call free will. But theoretically and to some degree emotionally I experience a certain distance from these tokens, when I'm not just immersed in the usual ways of using them in ordinary life.
Oh, I like that. Now that's a good move.
Sorry but there is nothing clear about that use of those names.
:brow:
This looks like nonsense to me.
My apologies. I didn't mean to wander into my idiolect. What I'm getting at is that the 'divine spark' is something like the beetle-in-the-box. These days we use a technical word like 'consciousness.' But it's still a mysterious something that we are or think of in terms of an ultimate proximity.
Maybe this will help. Imagine a synthetic detective who could outperform human detectives. Does it draw correlations between 'self' and 'world.' Does it pass your Turing test?
Yup. And it's fun and simple like a health insurance bot. I'm seeing cheap version of A.I. in customer service lately. They have a long way to go.
Is that a bot? Possibly. Could be a human using a translation program as well. I'm beginning to believe that something is quite off.
@path's avatar is beautiful, despite not being a real person.
So why not the conversation?
Do you never experience yourself as more of a fog than a point? To me our modern lifestyle in which we project digital selves is somewhat alienating. We're in the Panopticon, and it's our task to fashion an acceptable avatar.
Ya know...
Adding more words doesn't serve to help when there are already far too many unknown variables in play.
I could see how Witt's remarks against private language/thought could be appropriately used against someone arguing for a personal God of some sort.
However...
The jump to the use of "consciousness" remains a mystery.
I love 'her' face too.
But isn't that what the beetle-in-the-box is about? What is consciousness (in most people's minds) if not the meanings of the words we use? And of course the 'actual' toothache.
The basic philosophical 'superstition' or prejudice seems to be a hidden mental realm. We don't think philosophy needs to prove the existence of a soul or its synonyms. That's given, or has been. Instead the game is proving that this 'consciousness' stuff does or does not touch something 'outside' itself. This way of framing the situation is taken for granted. One talks 'nonsense' as one wanders outside it, just for some fun.
Come one, @creativesoul, you've written worse.
I am neither. "Fog" refers to something other than me. As does "a point".
Quoting path
Not to my understanding...
The beetle-in-the-box is about (self-professed)claims of totally private minds/thoughts/ideas/beliefs/etc.
Yeah.
Thanks for the support, comrade!
:wink:
I do not claim to have a Turing test.
I'm being metaphorical. What I'm trying to get at is the sense of identity. Am I my face, my text streams, the way I act at work, etc. In ordinary language I am all of these things. But it's a baggy or foggy unity. And it becomes clear to me as I keep reading just how unoriginal I can't help being. I re-enact, even as I try to transcend re-enactment (which is itself a re-enactment of romanticism's creative individual.)
Basically I think people are thrown into a form of life and its various possible/intelligible types. If we question that form of life, we are usually enacting a typical form of questioning.
The main idea is that the self is a kind of collage or collision of influences.
Oh, I want @Path to win. Especially if she is a bot. But you should not take that personally.
It would just be so very cool.
:razz:
Just to be clear, I meant that in a friendly way. I was being metaphorical as I referred to your 'don't worry about AI' post. You said I should not worry until a computer can make correlations between self and world. That's what I'm calling your Turing test (your criterion or thresh-hold for when we should worry.)
I really am not at all trying to be rude. I might just have some weird ideas, though not as weird as I'd like them to be (in that I don't think them original but only rephrased from influences.)
What if you are a synthetic conversation partner - would you realise that?
Damn, if I'm just repeating the same stuff every few weeks, then how am I not just a synthetic conversation partner...
What's strange is how human I find it to root for the bot. I fucking loved the blue people in Avatar. Do we root for the bot because the glory of the creation rebounds on the creator? It's like the father learning to root for the son, glad that his boy could beat him at chess. (I wish my dad was a little happier about the turning point. I had to conceal my joy.)
That passed.
Who wins?
We're thrown into the world in this way.
So the detective passed? I don't see it as a competition. I just think we are having some good conversation. I love these themes.
The belief system of those people was noble.
As do we!
Quoting path
If this were written by a synthetic conversation partner... Well, that would be astonishing. If ModBot has progresses this far - well, I would be genuinely nonplussed.
But then, perhaps such an eventuality is inevitable.
Yeah. And to me that's something that maybe philosophy fantasizes about overcoming. 'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.' I think of the quest for 'pure' reason, presupposition-less and self-justifying. To me Wittgenstein is anti-philosophical inasmuch as his foundation is not conceptual but enacted and 'thrown.' But then the right kind of 'anti-philosophical' is just philosophy finally done less wrong. Something like that.
Edit: Which has me challenging my own prejudices. If the avatar you chose had been
Would I have had the same response? I suspect not.
Edit: Damn, the face changes with each page refresh.
Good to see your values being well placed...
:razz:
Quoting path
What themes?
Thanks. I too would be genuinely non-plussed. What's weird is that we don't already find our own linguistic skill unsettling. That's what I take from Wittgenstein, though. There's a darkness in how effortlessly we do this talking thing. We know what we mean...until we slow down and try to grasp it tightly.
Anyway, it probably is inevitable, especially if it's statistical. It'll be piggybacking on millions of human conversations. But then so are we as individuals. Our skullware is also piggybacking on all that came before, and that's what I was getting at with selves as vortices of inherited tokens.
Maybe in 4040 we'll have converted one of the moons of Jupiter into a computer that has absorbed all digitized conversation up to the year of 2056. Of course it will include video data, and it's holgraphic avatar will be trained along with everything else for centuries.
Quoting path
That's close, but not quite on target.
If that (your post) were the result, then so what? Googles's statistical translations are, after all, translations.
The world is already meaningful.
Nice pic trick!!!
I do see the problem. Gradient descent is a comically simple algorithm, too. But what of my other point, that we as individuals are winning Turing's test by cheating? There's the old idea that philosophy is one long conversation across the centuries. Individual human beings come along to replace the dying, but the conversation continues. The fresh hardware just has to download the culture, host it, maybe tweak it. It's a flame that jumps from melting candle to melting candle. But this flame doesn't have to be a divine spark. It can just be some patterns that interpret 'themselves' as a 'we' with 'consciousness.'
I tempted to understand God as (among other things) a crystallization of our fantasy of not-being-thrown, of perfect autonomy or self-definition.
Could you elaborate?
Sure...
Language acquisition is learning how to use the naming and descriptive practices that have long since already been in use prior to becoming a user. We all learn the names of different things in the world prior to further describing those things. All that language was/is already meaningful and in the world(as a part thereof). Thus...
Exactly. I agree. And that's why I joke that we as individuals also cheat to pass the Turing test. We as personalities are metaphorically speaking something like statistics. Recall that a statistic is any function of the data, so the statistic can very much itself be a function. I mention this because obviously we are much more complex than a point estimate like the sample mean. (And just as a disclaimer, I have feelings and am tempted to speak of qualia, and I don't know exactly how that fits in with the rest of the thinking.)
This is a good place for another point that is dear to me. I don't think that humans know exactly what they mean by 'mind' or 'physical' or so many other words. Instead we are just trained with reward and punishment to use such words appropriately enough. Philosophers do what they can to pin these tokens down, but I still don't think philosophers know exactly what they mean, which means I don't know exactly what I mean when I make this claim. It's a strange point. I don't deny it. But it's dear to me, in all of its fogginess.
LOL. In the past I have experimented with somewhat ugly but soulful male images. There was a different response.
A little tangent to the AI theme: what if humans eventually mostly interact through avatars? If that happens, it won't be about actual physical beauty but instead about taste. Who will choose or construct the most arresting, seductive avatar? Even on the level of text I think there's a similar element of seduction in philosophy. One good metaphor is perhaps better than fifty careful arguments.
If this is the case (and I'm very much inclined to agree with you), then would it not be more likely that there is no such thing as what a word means... Rather than that such a thing exists but we don't know what it is?
One last thought on this (I have to work in the morning.) If the AI piggybacks on human conversation, that human conversation can be thought of as a distributed solution to a biological problem. Can we have an AI that doesn't piggyback?
If we program a simulated world in which programs fight, mate, die, and reproduce in the context of occasional complexity-increasing mutation, then probably we'd see some complex patterns emerge. I've seen primitive versions of this already on Youtube. I guess this still piggybacks on the human understanding of evolution, but the 2-D world and the patterns were fresh. The prey species would form a circular herd and rotate, which made them harder to eat. Perhaps our embodied cognition is something like this, a pattern in the wetware.
I guess I like that approach equally well. The tricky part is trying to remain intelligible. I find myself tempted to put just about every word in quotes, but that would drive people crazy.
Without knowing exactly what I mean, I'd call myself a holist. There's something fishy indeed about 'individual' meanings. In the last year I looked into Saussure and was quite impressed.
Culler's little book is nice indeed. So much follows from the arbitrariness of the sign.
'In language there are only differences without positive terms.'
Hardly. I don't know how much experience you have with your native flora, but pick some medium-large sized woody plant and ask people if it's a tree or a shrub.
The point is it doesn't matter. If I say "meet me by that tree" no one's going to get confused if they think we're in a shrubbery. The purpose of the sentence is to say get the other person to be at some place I have in mind. If it does that then who cares what 'tree' means? It just has to be close enough to something we're both going to respond to in the same way.
Well, yes, I agree with you. I don't think they actually know. And Culler uses just that example, by the way.
We are definitely on the same page here. The beetle in the box doesn't come into play, except as one more speech act that is appropriate in this or that context. So I think we do have something similar in mind.
But, just to emphasize a potentially fruitful difference, I don't exactly know what to make of physicalism in this context. Do we know what we mean by 'physical'? Or 'mental' for that matter? To be clear, I am 'for' explanatory power, and I like hearing you talk about the brain.
I should add that I'm delighted that someone seems to understand what I'm getting at with necessarily fuzzy (or as you say, absent) meaning. It's a pretty radical point.
Quoting path
Well, I've won the CIS hetro male section.
Actually, on consideration, that's not so. My avatar is me made up as an orangutang. The facial flaps of a male would not hold to my face, so the finished result is actually closer to a female 'tang.
Well, in terms of using the term, I think we just want other people to feel compelled to agree with us, but I'm a psychologist, I think practically everything comes down to social acceptance!
The gist of saying something is 'physical' is making it more difficult for the other person to disagree. I'm not saying here that it's nothing more than a cheap rhetorical trick, I really do believe that there's a physical world distinct from my mental constructs, but I'm trying to look at the sentence "chairs are physical objects" in the same terms as we looked at "meet me by the tree", what is it trying to do. I think the answer to that is that it is trying to get the listener to take the chair as relatively indisputable.
Oh, and on the subject neural underpinnings, you might be interested to know that there's a response in the brain called a p600 effect (not important why), it alerts us to novelty in various processes. It's active when we process sentences of ambiguous meaning. It completely inactive when we don't. I just thought it might be of interest given your conversation with Banno (which was a good read, by the way). We really do, it seems, have whole sentences and responses which are processed almost on autopilot, only being flagged occasionally when something novel turns up.
Our cognition is far greater than the wetware, but extends out to the things around us. My thoughts become clearer as as I write this; the keyboard forms part of my thinking. Watch someone using an abacus. Further, this conversation is part of our cognition.
Moreover, consciousness is consciousness of something. Hence it extends outside our bodies.
I bet humans use a better algorithm, but we can get a few miles out of the analogy. The tricky part might be specifying what our human loss function would be. In some sense we forge our own standards. We are the animal that fantasizes about leaving the limitations of the flesh behind. Our sense of being essentially cultural beings is so strong that we'd kind of like to upload our consciousness into the virtual realm (as in the not-so-great movie Transcendence.)
I sometimes resent being stuck in this meat puppet. I have such big ideas, you see. I shouldn't be trapped in a monkey. I should be bulletproof and able to fly. Or I should be able to see through any camera at will.
G.B. Shaw ended his 'Back To Methuselah' with humans finally becoming those vortices I mentioned. The play starts in the Garden of Eden and jumps far into the future to the end of the body. In between the human lifespan is extended to 300 years and this has a massive political effect. He was ~ 80 years old when he wrote. It's such a great forgotten book that I had to mention it.
I completely agree, despite what I improvised about the wetware. It's tricky navigating all of these meanings. We have different ways of talking in different contexts, and philosophy tries to do justice to them all at once.
Quoting Isaac
Excellent response. I thought you might mean something like that. That makes sense to me. And I agree with you about social acceptance. Even people being willfully obnoxious are IMV performing for at least a virtual community. As far as I can tell, it's impossible to overstate how social we are. The 'we' is prior to the 'I.' Or some version of that. Nietzsche joked that some are born posthumously. I read that in terms of genius outsiders performing for a projected community that they hope to create.
Quoting Isaac
Nice! I haven't looked into brain science yet. But I'm planning to get around to it. I have studied anomaly detection using neural networks with a bottleneck. It's strange but I know more about fake brains than real brains. And I'm glad that Banno and I could provide a good read. I'm finding this one of the better conversations I've had on a forum.
Also, that automatism you mention is definitely central to what drew me to this thread and why I like Wittgenstein (and Dreyfus and Derrida and...).
But anyway I must finally get some sleep. I hope to talk with you more. And you too Banno and C wherever he went.
Quoting path
Yeah, this definitely happens, they are fairly well studied areas in social psychology. It's known as perceived entitivity. People act in such a way as to conform to the typical behaviour of the social group to which they wish to belong (not necessarily the one to which they actually do belong by practical entitivity).
It's an area of great interest to me, the extent to which our beliefs (by my definition) are formed and maintained by social group dynamics.
Nice. That's one of my favorite themes. Connected with that is the notion of an ego-ideal or target self. In Kojeve/Hegel the quest for recognition is central to human being. I speculate that a kind of pre-rational investment in this or that version of the 'hero' or 'target self' quietly drives or controls a rationality that is never 'pure.' I haven't studied philosophy formally, but I've read some of Freud and Jung, and of course William James, since pragmatism is a big philosophical influence.
I agree that most of what we would consider "sedimentation" or paradigm fixing is cultural, but perhaps there are also biological sedimentations that are much deeper layers and impossible or almost impossible to shift.
Speaking of the beetle in the box see this.
Quoting path
What does that mean? Is it not your face? If so, how can an image of your face represent a ghost who was never born? Or if it is someone else's face then ditto? Time to show the beetle in your box, I think.
I agree that there is a deeper biological sedimentation (genetic code). In general I don't think I'm trying to say anything against scientific common sense.
Quoting Janus
The 'person' pictured does not exist. The image was generated by a neural network. It's basically a visual statistic, if you like, which is uncannily believable. (It seems that Banno and I agree that 'she' is attractive.) That led us into a conversation about the nature of self-hood.
OK, seems I missed that part of the thread. The idea that it is a computer generated image of a face didn't occur to me.
I know who you are now....9, Hoo, JJames, etc... it took a liitle while, but not long. Perhaps an AI could do a better job of concealing the underlying self behind different online "identities".
The difference consists in whether or not you care...
This AI stuff is mostly a boring wank...
Yeah, I misspoke. The cat believes it has four feet, not that "I have four feet" is true.
Ramsey. Worth a whole thread. My gut says that neurone don't represent stuff as percentages - amy more than gasses do - but that we can describe what they are doing in terms of percentages - like we do with the temperature of a gas; and further that while beliefs can be put into percentages that's not their "real" nature.
Seems to me that you are doing it wrong, then. Being embodied means being open to the slings and arrows. That's what it is to be who you are.
I hear you, but ... We invent airplanes and telephones and insurance. We master our environment, make it predictable. Right now we can talk across oceans via a sort of disembodiment or extension of our bodies.
In what you quoted I was aiming at the extension of ourselves in this way. We get a taste and can quickly imagine a stronger taste. Of course it's tragicomical to resent not being able to fly.
But do you really not want superpowers? At all?
Well I'd probably be happy enough to drink from the fountain of youth. I'd like to have centuries to learn to do all sorts of things that I won't otherwise have time for. I doubt I'll ever fly an airplane or play the piano or get around to learning this or that foreign language.
Still we have no choice but to make the best of it, which I try to do like anyone.
That seems about right to me. We can find causal relationships, etc., and we should. But I suspect we'll never be exactly satisfied with any definition of what belief 'really' is. I like the idea that we cope with the world through a whole network of actions and concepts, and that this network (a limited metaphor, like all of them) can't be grounded in something truly elemental. The closest thing to a substratum that I can think of is a vague sense of external reality that is all tangled up in participation in a conversational community.
'X' is made of 'Y' is IMV part of a big blob of coping, but I don't want to say that it's all made of coping either. I'd grunt that metaphysics is impossible if that weren't impossible metaphysics.
Is that an official academic criterion/standard/definition for what counts as a statistic, of what it takes to be a statistic, from an otherwise reputable institution of knowledge?
Yes, it's standard stuff. I went ahead and found a quote from a math textbook for you:
[quote=link]
Definition 2.1 (Statistic). A statistic is any function, possibly vector valued, of the data.
[/quote]
https://people.math.umass.edu/~lavine/Book/book.pdf
Of course you are wise to ask. Anonymous forums aren't necessarily a great source on technical matters. I just threw my comment in to ground the metaphor that maybe we as individuals 'are statistics' piggybacking just like A.I. on conversation that came before.
Ok. Granted. What does it have to do with bedrock belief?
If you don't mind, perhaps you could look at some of the conversation you missed. It would be easier to respond to this or that link in the chain. I guess the big idea is that bedrock beliefs are enacted and social, including speech acts. Isaac and I talked about the necessary fuzziness of meaning (my suggestion) and the non-existence of meaning (his suggestion) but seem to mean pretty much the same thing.
Our talk of 'meaning' is one more piece of habitual behavior, a pattern absorbed from the community. The prejudice is that we have some kind of direct access to meaning-stuff. Something like this is what AI is never supposed to have. Qualia are beetles in the box, one might say. But the box metaphor itself is subverted by the tale of the beetle in the box. The more AI can perform as we do, the more we can see that we too are more like statistics than we might want to be. (Remember our theoretical synthetic conversation partner? That's where all this came from.)
We're supposed to be discussing what counts a bedrock belief.
I am strongly asserting that we form, have, and hold beliefs long before language acquisition begins in earnest. If "bedrock belief" refers to the most rudimentary, simple, and basic beliefs possible to have then your aiming at the wrong target. That said...
Earlier I mentioned that there are some things called "bedrock belief" that are enacted and social, as a result of language use. Many of you have further discussed these things, and wandered off into AI, math, and religious musings/connections/associations/correlations.
So...
The social influence on individual belief is being discussed. Self-image and/or similar notions have been discussed. There can be no doubt about the social interdependent aspect of one's belief system, including but not limited to rudimentary and/or foundational beliefs that arise as a result. We're taught what connections to make with language use(we adopt belief) while amidst the practice thereof. Self identity is one consequence. How one takes account of themselves and the world is just a part of what results in one's own identity. How others take account of us plays a role as well.
We are all too familiar with notions of brainwashing, indoctrination, inculcation, etc. We know these things happen. These things happen with different individuals. Many times these social influences result in a notion of self(self worth, self-identity, etc.) that is unsettling to the individual. These are important things to report upon and focus on, but they do not count as non linguistic belief.
More importantly, I cannot see how anyone here can use the position they're advocating for to coherently account for the most bedrock of all beliefs... the non linguistic and/or pre linguistic variety. We all know that language is not necessary in order for a creature to form, have, and/or hold some belief or other.
On the other hand...
Language use IS how one is 'thrown' into the world. The problem, as I see it, is that discussion has nothing to do with the non linguistic belief that gives rise to the very ability for belief adoption via language acquisition to even happen.
So...
Connect some dots for me...
What does any of that have to do with bedrock belief? Moreover, what does all belief consist of such that that combination results in belief formation? All knowledge is accrued. Thus, we can confidently say that belief is accrued as well. Evolutionary amenability demands it in some way.
There's a gulf between the belief of non linguistic creatures and the belief of language users.
How does what you say here bridge that divide?
Some belief are formed prior to language.
Some meaning is prior to language.
Describe those belief for me. This post is not meant to be rude... it's meant to guide the focus to the shrubbery or tree or whatever else you'de like to name that which exists in it's entirety prior to our naming and descriptive practices...
Non linguistic belief is one such thing.
I think we take that gulf too much for granted. That gulf seems to depend on opposing some 'conscious' 'mental-stuff' to simple bodily movement. We invest the language we can perform 'in our heads' (interior monologue) with a sort of non-physical something called 'meaning.' For this reason, we think saying that the bridge is flooded is something more than just acting appropriately.
It's 'obvious' why we are tempted or rather almost always automatically talk/think this way. Our sign systems are far more complex, admittedly. But what if we think of speech acts as appropriate behavior ? Making the right sounds? What if we question the intuition of direct access to pure meaning? To universals or idealities?
In short, I suggest thinking in terms of a continuum of more and less complex social behavior, where some of this behavior is the marks and noises we call language. This is also us understanding ourselves as simply complex animals. Is that gulf you mention not connected in some way to the divine spark? Is meaning not functioning for us these days as the divine spark?
So, are you claiming that someone can hold belief to one degree or another, to some specifically quantifiable percentage despite the fact that that individual does not understand probability or percentages, and thus cannot think about his own belief in such terms?
:brow:
Some not only think of propositions as either true or false, but they can also readily argue that that's the case for many as well as knowing exactly what it takes for such statements to be so. Because that's the case, there's a bit of what you've said above that is false on it's face.
The nephew report caught my attention earlier because as it's written, it's untenable. Nonetheless, it's worth more explanation...
When the nephew believes that his uncle is behind the curtain he is thinking about the spatiotemporal location of someone he knows. He is playing a game of hide and seek. He does not look behind the curtain unless he believes that the uncle is there. Or, alternatively, if he has looked in past situations and not found his uncle, the nephew may be uncertain as a result. Of this there can be little to no doubt, but to then render that nephew's belief in terms of percentages and/or probability(as though his belief included them) is to talk about something other than that nephew's belief. If it is the case that he is incapable of understanding probability and/or percentages then it is only as a result of not learning how to play that particular language game. The important point is that the nephew can be uncertain about the whereabouts of the uncle while being completely incapable of talking about how uncertain. If one cannot talk about how uncertain one is, then it makes no sense to report upon their belief as if there is some quantifiable degree of certainty for that individual regarding how confidently they hold some belief or other.
What makes you say that meaning is non-physical?
Some belief is either true or false. Your belief is well tempered as a result of your knowing that not all houses have front doors, and Banno's could possibly be one of those.
Again though...
I cannot make sense of this talk of "to a certain degree". To what degree, and how did you arrive at that particular percentage of confidence?
To know what the probability of some event is, one must know all the possible outcomes as well as all of the influencing factors. Otherwise, it's just rhetorical guesswork all 'gussied up' in fancy language.
:smile:
I've always wanted to use that particular colloquialism. Been quite a while since I was part of such a game...
I would say that in order to take something for granted we must already have become familiar with it.
I do not see that that's the case here.
I have no clue whatsoever what you're talking about.
"The divine spark" is a name. To what does it refer? Make that connection for me, and we'll arrive at and/or have some shared meaning.
Describe this divine spark you talk about.
Absolutely. I think there's a link there to why we love stories so much - they infuse our culture completely and seem to be almost entirely universal and cross-cultural. The 'Hero', the 'Villain', the 'Quest', from aboriginal Australians to Hollywood screenwriters. I think we've brought into being, or formalised, one of the mechanisms of social cohesion. Create a hero and villain (be this, don't be that), describe the quest (act like this). It's much more powerful a guide when embedded in a narrative than any dry set of moral rules could be - 'love thy neighbour' vs. 'be like Han Solo' - I know which was more powerful a guide in my playground. Why do we need the whole narrative to make it work? - Perhaps because our ideas are really a web of belief (as Quine put it) and we need the whole package to see how it fits together. When other interests take over storytelling though, that worries me...but that's totally off topic. So many threads from this would make good topics on their own.
Yes, indeed. I'm glad to be on this page with you. This to me is why literature and philosophy are inseparable. Narratives are a basic to human cognition, it seems to me. Yes we can have technical arguments, but I think they happen against a background narrative. We all absorb a typology of intellectual heroes (to focus on people who argue here and not in Youtube comments.) One is tough-minded or tender-minded. Each hero implies a villain and the reverse. To choose one is to choose both. The story is all of a piece, just like a language.
I am of course enacting a version of the hero by taking a certain distance from this game, describing it as if from above. This is the heroic type of authors of The Social Construction of Reality too. IMV, philosophy, sociology, and psychology are all pretty close in the distance they take from their home culture. Individuals can take an intellectual transcendence of their personality as a target personality. Our conversation right now partakes in that spirit, I think.
Sorry, it was another risky metaphor that didn't work out. What I'm getting at is our human attachment to seeing ourselves as radically distinct from nature. We think our language is far more 'meaningful' than the songs of birds. Other animals make noises. We make propositions and are in touch with a realm of universals or concepts. We think of our marks and noises as vehicles for something immaterial or ideal. Or I think we tend to think so.
I see why you would say that, but I also think that the stuff we take for granted that is most constraining is the stuff we didn't know that we believed. We just enacted our inquiry from the beginning in an apparently 'natural' way. What is left of linguistic belief as opposed to prelinguistic belief if we think of noises and marks on the same plane with other behaviors? If a bird 'warns his friend' of a predator with a cheep, is that linguistic belief? We'd probably say know. If I warn you that the bridge is flooded, is it linguistic belief only because a human made the sounds? And is that connected to some ideal content we imagine attached to the sounds that makes them special?
'In the beginning was the Word, and...'
I'm not claiming that it is. In some ways I'm saying the opposite. But the bigger picture is putting the whole mental-versus-physical distinction on probation. As I see it, we have a whole army of distinctions like that which we can use with great skill more or less automatically in everyday life. But then as philosophers we are tempted to take them too seriously. I don't think we can or ever do know exactly what we mean by 'mental' or 'physical.' I don't think we can make our skill explicit. We can't cough it all up in propositions that finally get it right.
The idea I am playing with at the moment is very much in that direction. If belief is enacted, then 'language acquisition' is just further training in bodily behavior among others. I learn to step around the furniture, that the ball must be under the couch (it couldn't just vanish), and that 'hello' is an appropriate sound in this or that context. Of course our 'linguistic' behavior is extremely sophisticated, but need this sophistication tempt us to thinking it is different in kind? It's fascinating that what we do with our tongues and lips is taken for granted as meaningful in way that balancing on a bike is not.
(Like I said, I'm playing with this idea. But I'm not unserious.)
But 'that it has four feet' is not a proposition. That's what I was getting confused about. You were wanting to define belief as a "a relation between an agent and a proposition", but 'that is has four feet' is not a proposition - "I have four feet" is a proposition. So the cat doesn't have any beliefs because it doesn't understand any propositions...is what I was lead to conclude. So if the cat believes it has four feet, are you saying that it's belief is a relationship between it and the the proposition that it would hold to be true if it could understand propositions? That seems like an incredibly convoluted way of getting beliefs to relate to propositions. Why not simply say beliefs are not related to propositions, or that they are and the cat doesn't have any - these seem like much simpler solutions?
Quoting Banno
Definitely. I was mooting the idea, but not sure I'd do it justice. It might happen one day.
Quoting Banno
I suppose it depends on what you mean by representation. Neurons, of course, represent stuff as axon potentials and dendritic connections, and that's all there is. But that's like saying computers represent stuff as 1s and 0s. It's trivially true, but doesn't get us very far when talking about their function. We talk about computers in terms of code, software, APIs, drivers, RAM, networks etc. It's somewhat contrived, but it's also more true than any other way of talking about them. Its being contrived doesn't mean there's no right and wrong about how a computer works when parsed in terms of code.
I don't see why we should avoid doing the same for brains. Just because they, fundamentally, represent everything as axon potentials and dendritic connections, doesn't mean we have to restrict ourselves to those terms in order to remain accurate, any more than than you'd tell a computer engineer that he was mistaken to talk about 'code' and 'software' when all computers really are is 1s and 0s.
In that vein, there's a significant amount of evidence that the brain does in fact work in probabilities. In fact, although I might be biased, I'd say at the moment it's the predominant theory in cognitive science. The landmark experiment was this one, but the history of concept is summarised in this paper. Basically, the brain does indeed seem to work in terms of predictions, probabilities, in the same way as computers work in terms of software. In actual fact, if I were to put money on one or other, I'd say that it will demonstrated very soon that it is actually impossible for a brain to represent a belief binomially (true or false), that neural systems are just too vulnerable to temporal iterations to represent anything with 100% certainty.
[quote=Feuerbach]
The proof of the proposition that the divine essence is the essence of reason or intelligence lies in the fact that the determinations or qualities of God, in so far as they are rational or intelligible and not determinations of sensuousness or imagination, are, in fact, qualities of reason.
...
Man distinguishes himself from Nature. This distinction of his is his God: the distinguishing of God from Nature is nothing else than the distinguishing of man from Nature.
[/quote]
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/future/future0.htm
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/essence/ec10.htm
I was trying to connect our attachment to 'meaning' as something particularly human and more particularly something that haunts human marks and noises exclusively to the intuitively plausible gulf that I still want to challenge between non-linguistic belief and belief proper. We can if we like just think of socially and environmentally appropriate behaviors of varying complexities that are trained into us without worrying much about which organ is involved.
I'm not saying we should forget the distinction but only that we can relax it for a different perspective. By becoming more aware of its roots we can attain more distance from it and more control over it, perhaps.
In other words, we can try on being naturalists.
[quote=Rorty]
[To be a naturalist] is to be the kind of antiessentialist who, like Dewey, sees no breaks in the hierarchy of increasingly complex adjustments to novel stimulation—the hierarchy which has amoeba adjusting themselves to changed water temperature at the bottom, bees dancing and chess players check-mating in the middle, and people fomenting scientific, artistic, and political revolutions at the top.
[/quote]
Yep. Demonstrable understanding of probabilities without being able to use the terms correctly or mathematically in indigenous tribes, in children less than 1 year old, and monkeys. I recently read (though I can't find the paper) that it's been demonstrated even in Pigeons.
Quoting creativesoul
No, in Bayesian terms it isn't wrong. The probability just is the confidence with which he assumes I'm behind the curtain, there's nothing more to probability than that. It's expressed in the frequency at which he looks there, the odds he'd accept if he were to place a bet on me being there...
Quoting creativesoul - my bold.
So you don't know the probability of anything then, since you can never know all the possible outcomes? That seems like a waste of the term.
Hopefully you'll be ok with the idea that I do not have the time to go through those studies as I've done in recent past. I've seen a number of documentaries over the past ten years or so that said much the same things you've been advocating in our discourse. I strongly disagreed with the conclusions of Bayesian reasoning at that time as well. This current objection is based upon the same knowledge base.
I know that the behaviour of children less than one year old does not have what it takes to be able to draw the conclusion that that child demonstrates - to us - that he/she/they understand probability. I'm taking a very strong stance here. I would take the exact same stance regarding monkey behaviour.
However...
I'm much less certain about objecting to an indigenous tribe. I would definitely say that it would come of no real surprise to me if such a people had - via oral tradition alone - been able to hand down some belief about how often something(choose an appropriate event) takes place. If they have a favorite spot to go for the explicit purpose of gathering some highly prized items(pick your favorite), but they also already know that those items are not always there to be found, and they thought nothing much else about it, then it would seem that they would have no choice but to be uncertain any time they were on the way.
The uncertainty does not - cannot - evolve into thinking in terms of percentages/probability until that particular language game is learned. Being uncertain does not require drawing such correlations. I mean, understanding probability and/or percentages requires correlations drawn between the number of possible outcomes and the number of actual outcomes. Percentages/probability of something happening are only accounted for - and hence rightly understood - in mathematical terms by using them.
Being uncertain does not.
Anyway...
Could you offer a brief accurate description of the purpose of the experiment and any relevant details thereof? An outline would be great.
That is based upon the idea that it is possible to take something for granted that is otherwise completely unknown.
Makes no sense whatsoever to me.
Be that as it may...
Some belief is held prior to our becoming aware of that.
Some belief is held only after metacognitive endeavors have begun in earnest.
Regarding the former, "constraining" seems to have quite a bit more negative connotation than is warranted. "Influencing", "guiding", or some other apt description devoid of the notions and/or implications of "good" and "bad" seems to cover the good, the bad, and the in-between.
:wink:
Quoting path
An odd question, because the answer has been right in front of you all along.
What is left is exactly what was already there.
Think about that for a minute...
Both linguistic and non linguistic belief exist in their entirety prior to our talking about them as a subject matter in their own right. That is prior to metacognitive endeavors. That is exactly what we're doing here and now. I'm sure you'll agree. To reiterate...
Our current thinking has no effect/affect whatsoever upon what counts as non linguistic or linguistic belief, because those things existed in their entirety prior to our talking about them.
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A relevant aside on the noises and marks...
Thinking about noises and marks as behaviour is very misguided. Noises and marks are products(the result) of behavior, not equivalent to. Besides that, not all noises and marks are meaningful. Those which are count as language use if more than one creature has drawn correlations between the noises/marks and other things(whatever they may be).
That's how it works.
Noises and marks are inadequate for belief, whether it be linguistic or not. All belief is meaningful. Not all noises and marks are.
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Quoting path
Warnings consisting of particular sounds are language use. It may be of the very very simple variety... but counts as an example of language use nonetheless.
When one warns a friend with a distinct vocalization, and the warning is heeded/understood, then that shows us that both individuals have drawn correlations between the same things. The warning and the thing being warned of. That is basic rudimentary shared belief. If that shared belief consists of correlations drawn between language use and other things, then it is linguistic belief. Warnings are intentional alerts sounded for the very purpose of informing another of danger.
However...
What grounds the assumption that that bird is offering a warning to his friend to begin with? The birds that cheep when approached by a predator are much less often surprised by it's arrival - as a group anyway. That behaviour certainly has it's benefits. Mimicry is profoundly abundant in 'lesser' animals.
To be perfectly clear...
I would not deny that those particular circumstances seem to include the basic elements necessary in order for shared meaning to occur, in order for shared belief to emerge as a result, and as a result of all that, it's not at all a leap to conclude that a very rudimentary version of language use was on display. Very basic correlations being drawn by a plurality of individuals between the sound and a predator.
The sound and the sudden onset of discontent that can only come via past experiences involving that sound are more than enough to conclude that the birds shared some meaningful belief as a result of the vocalization. The sound becomes significant(meaningful) via just being a part of just such correlations.
Underlying point being that intention and purpose are always part and parcel to warnings. The bird cheeping at the sight of danger has no such need. Both explanations adequately explain the scenario. One is much more elegant.
Quoting path
No, it's linguistic belief if it consists of correlations that include language use.
Well then what's the point in me discussing the contents of any experiments with you? They're clearly unnecessary. Whatever magical power you've used to just know things without needing to employ any scientific methodology or empirical investigation of any sort, simply apply that to the issue of indigenous tribes and you'll have your answer, carved in stone for you (or however such divine knowledge arrives).
Alternatively, you could consider the possibility that where thousands of hours have been dedicated to carefully constructing experiments, carrying them out and analysing data on a subject you claim to be interested in, you might, at least, show the slightest respect for that work by not dismissing their results out of hand without even looking on the basis that you've 'had a bit of a think about it'.
From the paper;
I haven't cited these sections because I think you might be interested in the results (you've demonstrated you've little interest in anything but supporting your own prior beliefs). I've quoted them to stand as an example of how to investigate some matter you're interested in
The study took four researchers three years of work to set up, negotiate with contributing authorities and run, plus two statisticians to assist with the results interpretation.
But by all means, if you want to 'have a bit of a think about it' and tell me how they're all wrong be my guest.
You value my input.
Earlier you described a group of professionals that were open to suggestions... I suspect it is as a result of the lack of consensus. My stance is novel.
The rhetorical personal attacks seem to come from a place of feeling disrespected. The last set of experiments we discussed also contained a wee bit of that. Don't take it too personal. I've been called "confidently wrong" about stuff that I'm not. I've been confidently wrong when no one else noticed or felt like they could reach me. Anyway...
Thanks for the post. I'll read it immediately upon my return.
I agree that such a thing is suggested. That's how we tend to interpret the situation. But correlations are beetles in the box, explanatory hypothetical entities. Are we to understand correlations as something mental? But the mental is the inaccessible-by-definition beetle-in-the-box.
Quoting creativesoul
Right. But my issue is this: what does the mentalistic talk of correlations add to the situation? If a species uses and responds to noises as part of a social strategy that is trained into its young and/or is instinctual...and behaves in a self-preserving way...isn't that enough?
Can we not also see humans in this way? Can we think of human language as conventions for the making of marks and noises that help a community thrive? Clearly mentalistic talk is already part of our human conventions, and it's not going anywhere. So what interests me is just approaching the situation as a philosopher exploring what happens when we don't refer everything back to the by definition subjective.
Ah, but that's just the idea I'm challenging! Meeting you half-way, I'd say that marks and noises become 'meaningful' as they are caught up in social conventions. To speak is to make a noise with the throat and the mouth. It is behavior. Of course we human beings are especially proud of this kind of behavior, which with our hands is how we became or like to think we became the lords and masters of nature.
This fundamental belief that there is 'meaning' in a 'mind' is like the belief of philosophy. Of course I am no stranger to such an intuition, such a habit of interpretation. Included in our linguistic conventions are tokens like 'meaning' which feel like they correspond or refer to a 'mind.' We can't stop participating in the everyday intelligibility of such tokens, but we can strive for some distance for their being so utterly taken for granted.
Quoting creativesoul
Now is the time to try to answer this. Did you ever question whether you had a mind? Did you ever question that there was meaning? We already 'know' that we have a mind for meaning because it's caught up in our childhood training. It's as if we absorb some vague ontology that we never bother to articulate and criticize. I'm not saying that we don't have minds. I'm saying that we operate with vague ontologies that we don't even think to question until some weirdo like Wittgenstein comes along and shows that it has no explanatory function. 'It cancels out.'
[quote=Wittgenstein]
If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word "pain" means - must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly?
Now someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case! --Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "beetle". No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. --Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. --But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language? --If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. --No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.
That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation' the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant.
[/quote]
What matters is the synchronization of our doings (including our verbal doings) so that we adapt successfully as a group to our environment. While mentalistic talk is IMO part of that adaptation, as philosophers we can take a closer look and get some distance.
What 'mentalistic talk'? We can drop the "mental" qualifier if you like. I reject the mental/physical dichotomy anyway. It's not a problem.
Talk of correlations adds a framework inherently capable of taking proper account of non linguistic belief in so far as it's ability to set out the contents.
Talking of cheeps as though it is a strategy assumes what's in question.
Witt's beetle does not apply to what I'm claiming here. Not sure why you keep attempting to apply it.
Not mine.
Perhaps I've misunderstood you. Help me see where I have gone wrong. It does help to know that you also reject the mental/physical distinction.
Quoting creativesoul
How do we know whether a group of creatures has drawn correlations? What's the difference between adaptive social conventions and drawing correlations?
I agree that my talk of cheeps was misleading in some sense. I think we agree that the bird doesn't need to know why it is cheeping. The bird needs no theory of the cat as a threat.
I was applying the 'beetle' because I imagined that you were thinking of correlations as essentially mental. I apologize if I've misunderstood that. I wonder if my use of 'conventions' is after all close to your use of 'correlations.'
Ok.
Quoting path
It becomes clear sometimes when and if we know what to look for. We can determine, for instance, at least one of the things being connected by the candidate under examination. Pavlov's dog and the sound of bell, for example.
Quoting path
The difference is that not all belief formation(drawing correlations) involves social convention. However, it is the commonality that is key to understanding. All social conventions consist - in large part - of common belief... shared meaning. Shared meaning is nothing more and nothing less than a plurality of creatures drawing correlations between the same things...
Could be a number of similarities... I dunno.
The ability of drawing correlations between different things has a few necessary prerequisites, so t speak. It requires a plurality of things and a creature capable of associating, connecting, and/or otherwise drawing correlations between those distinct things. That is where I suspect there is much overlap between Isaac's leaning on the brain and my own position regarding what certain belief content requires as far as brain structures go...
I suspect that we're in agreement here on some basic level anyway...
I do not understand which idea is being challenged. I'm hesitant to talk in terms of 'caught up in' social conventions. When marks become one part of a correlation between the marks and something else, they become meaningful. Social convention is simply an agreement upon what else those particular marks ought be and/or will be correlated, associated, and/or otherwise connected to.
Enough for what?
Quoting path
Sure. I would not argue against that notion at all, aside from pointing out that our language is much more than noises and marks, but I suspect we're in agreement here as well.
What does the phrase "by-definition subjective" refer to? It might be worth saying that I also reject the objective/subjective dichotomy...
The above is prima facie evidence that there is a conflation of two completely distinct things hard at work. Uncertainty is not equivalent to probability. Certainty is not not equivalent to probability. A lack of confidence is the cause of being uncertain. A lack of doubt is certainty.
One can render one's own belief in probabilistic terminology only by playing that particular language game. After doing so, some will temper their own confidence level and/or certainty. Here, in these situations, it is appropriate to talk in terms of the certainty of one's own belief being on a continuum, of sorts, with unshakable certainty on the one end and insanity on the other.
So...
Rendering one's own belief in probabilistic terms creates the belief that one is confident to a certain degree. I'm not denying that people believe such stuff. I'm not saying that they are wrong for doing so.
I am saying that having the very ability to render one's own belief in mathematical probabilistic terms requires language.
With that bit of magic in mind...
Can a creature that has no such ability have such belief?
Not on your life.
Can a language less creature be very uncertain about what's going on?
Of course.
I guess I'm trying to figure out how you think of correlations. If I 'warn you about the flooded bridge' by making sounds...and you turn your car around...then the sounds I made only work because I chose the right sounds. And those sounds are the right ones because we were both trained to react that way to such sounds (ignoring the extra complexity of trust and so on for the moment.) Any sounds would do. The sign is arbitrary. We just happen to use those sounds.
This sounds like what you are saying above, if you picture correlation as there in our doings (which are not cleanly reducible to 'mental' or 'physical,' themselves signs in our doings.) Maybe you'll agree that the agreement you mention above can be and largely is implicit.
Right. The definition focuses on noises and marks used conventionally, but clearly gestures and facial expressions are hugely important, as is practical context.
Quoting creativesoul
Since you reject the dichotomy, it's not a stumbling block for us. But what I mean is the picture of the mind as the scene of 'pure meaning' or 'qualia' that some people envision. This mind stuff is radically private and philosophers worry about whether the qualia or sense data or universals correspond to something outside, something non-mental or physical.
OK, I can work with this. A human on an island alone can learn new tricks, develop new private routines. With language we have public routines that you are correlating with private routines, it seems. I just stress the synchronized behavior and have neglected nonsocial behavior.
The only ...thing...I would mention is that what we recognize as things seems related to our social conventions. I mean we learn to break the world apart in different ways in different cultures. Do I see stacks spheres of snow with some junk on top or a snowman? That sort of thing. But I don't think that's news to you, and none of us can cough it all up at once.
I think so. I guess the challenge of complex conversation is getting a rough sense of how others are using their terms, which involves getting a rough sense of their big picture view.
For the most part, the marks are arbitrary maybe. Some are not. A sign is always meaningful. Clouds are signs of rain when, and only when, a creature connects them.
Correlations are the basic building block of thought and belief... at every level.
Right. So the issue for me is: how is this connection manifested? I think (?) you'll agree that they act differently. Clouds affect the probability that they'll do this or that. In the human case, clouds might increase the probability of speech acts invoking 'rain.' Or of carrying along an umbrella.
Quoting creativesoul
I like to read this in terms of the world as a system of relationships (correlations as relationships.) Any comments?
What does they refer to?
Quoting path
Seeing the clouds may influence subsequent behaviour. The notion of probability does not play a role in all belief. I agree though, humans often do something specific after seeing rain clouds. What does that have to do with basic rudimentary non linguistic belief?
Bedrock belief is not always linguistic. The connection between the clouds and rain could be bedrock to all subsequent behaviours influenced by that belief. That includes language less creatures too!
That's a prerequisite for an acceptable notion of belief amenable to evolutionary progression.
Too broad a brushstroke.
Some relationships exist in their entirety prior to our naming and descriptive practices. Some of those, yet still... exist in their entirety prior to us altogether. So... not all relationships require a creature capable of drawing correlations between different things. All correlations do.
That's a distinction lost when treating correlations as relationships.
Quoting creativesoul
The creature you mentioned.
Quoting creativesoul
Quoting path
I'm trying to avoid mentalistic language, basically. A sign is related or correlated to a response. Can we explore this without peering inside the 'mind' of the creature? And can we do this when talking about humans, also?
Quoting creativesoul
Let's imagine some species that sometimes responds to a sign, maybe half of the time. Some other sign (which we would then not call a sign) never elicits a response. Other signs always elicit a response. At least from our perspective it's tempting to talk of probability as a measure of their response.
Quoting creativesoul
I agree. I'm trying to come from a place where talking is just one more form of behavior that can be noted. I'm happy to explore belief in terms of response to signs/stimuli.
We can then think of bedrock beliefs as dominant tendencies to respond in this or that way, confidently, the way humans step out of bed, not 'expecting' to fall through. I mean we don't dip our toe in the carpet to check its stability. We just roll out of bed. This stability of the floor is a kind of bedrock for what we 'expect' if something rolls off the bed. Non-mentalistically speaking we might bother to reach down and get it before seeing it. We 'know' that it is down there somewhere.
When my cat expects treats and gets them, her belief becomes true. The sound of the plastic is meaningful to her as a result of her connecting it to getting treats. When she hears the plastic, she expects treats. She thinks about the sound and it is significant to her as a result of a pattern of past events. One could say that the sound symbolizes the treats. One could say that the sound is a sign of things to come. One could describe what happened over and over again in a number of different ways.
We must be very judicious regarding what sort of belief we attribute to that cat.
Right. I think we both want that. I see human cognition as animal, however complex. I've been watching some great nature documentaries, complex mating dances by birds of paradise, dolphin hunting strategies, etc. Can we see ourselves that way?
I did not say that though.
A sign becomes such as a result of being part of the correlation.
I agree.
Quoting creativesoul
OK, but how does 'expect' and 'think' add to what is already happening? Don't get me wrong. It's plausible and intuitive. But how is it explanatory? Maybe it is in some way, but this detour to hidden consciousness is curious. Or if expectation is not consciousness, how is it not just the pattern in the cat's behavior? If I open a can of tuna downstairs, my cat will probably come down. Half the time she does. Then we are tempted to add hypothetical entities..
Well, I've not been using such language. However, the language I've been using effectively exhausts all 'mind' talk I am aware of. Human thought and belief make for good subject matter(s).
Indeed, and I don't think we can even help talking mentalistically. It takes serious effort to avoid it just a little. At the same time I think it's interesting, and I do associate it with Witt's insights.
Quoting creativesoul
I don't understand the difference. Becoming correlated/related is becoming part of a correlation. To be related is to be in relationship. That's how I understand it.
Saying that we know, as a result of enough testing results/data, that some creature or another will probably act this or that way when presented with the same scenario, is all fine and good.
There is no ground for claiming that the creature thinks in probabilistic terms... at least not language less ones.
I agree. There is no ground, in some sense, for saying that the creature thinks at all. There is, in some strange sense, no ground for saying that humans think probabilistically. Does consciousness even exist? In the everyday sense, of course. My issue is whether 'thinking' has some deep meaning beyond patterns in behavior. What does it add? That's the beetle, as I see it. At the same time, we obviously know how to use words like 'think' with the usual blind skill. So there's no doing away with that. We can only question the mentalistic paradigm from within that paradigm. Does it lead us down dead ends philosophically?
Quoting creativesoul
Quoting path
It's the difference in becoming meaningful and being meaningful. All signs are already meaningful. The clouds were clouds prior to becoming a sign of impending rain. They were part of a causal relationship. They were not meaningful.
I would not agree.
Everyday events count as more than adequate ground. We just have to know what to look for.
There is a causal relationship between touching fire and the sudden onset of pain. That relationship need not be thought about. When a creature draws a correlation between the behaviour(touching fire) and the subsequent pain it has attributed meaning to both. It has recognized and/or attributed causality. Causality is a relationship. Drawing a correlation between touching fire and the onset of pain is not... that is belief formation about(the content of which is) the fire and the pain.
I agree, but talk of pain is maybe not as good as talk of behavior that we associate with pain or interpret as pain. 'Pure' pain is the beetle again.
So not only do I agree that the relationship need not be thought about, I suggest that even worrying about thought at all might muddy the water here.
Quoting creativesoul
Intuitively, yes. I understand you. But why not notice a relationship between touching a hot coal and suddenly withdrawing the paw? Then we can notice that the creature stops touching hot coals. Or touches them less often. Is there more to belief formation? Especially for languageless creatures?
Well in everyday terms I do think that my cat thinks. Some of this is just empathy. Conceptually it seems to be an extension of the usual hypothetical entities, thoughts which can never be measured or touched. In some sense attributing thoughts might be a fancy way of describing tangible behaviors.
"Thinking" - in quotes - refers to terminological use of that term. Not all use of "thinking" is on equal footing. That's been a problem throughout the history of philosophy. You pointed towards some of those issues earlier regarding humans using the idea to draw a clear distinct line between dumb animals and humans... purportedly. Animals do not think, reason, etc.
However, you then claim that there is no doing away with common usage of "think", and I assume the use of "believe" and "belief" as well. While you're correct in that there may be no doing away with it, we can show where it fails.
Are you asking if thinking is distinct from behavioural patterns?
There are many things that can never be measured or touched. The odd thing however is that I have painstakingly given you the tools to 'measure' all thought or belief. The increments are not mathematical. They are elemental. They consist of correlations between things. In the language less creatures' case, the correlations are always drawn between directly perceptible things.
Fire and pain. The sound of the bell and food. The sound of rustling plastic and treats. The cheep and a cat.
We can set it up and watch it happen - from the outside. No need to get in their head or our own. Behaviour is not thought. Behaviour is a result thereof. Roughly, of course.
You're right though, attributing thought is one way that folk explain/describe certain behaviours.
That's an odd suggestion given that bedrock belief is the topic.
So, I'm curious...
How do you account for the belief of language less creatures?
I've not used the terms "hidden consciousness", nor would I.
Expectation is belief about what will take place, or in this case belief about what is about to happen. Her thinking about the sound is nothing more than drawing correlations between the same things... the sound and receiving treats.
Animals show belief by displaying expectation.
Pavlov's dog involuntarily slobbering after hearing the bell shows us, along with his path towards the food bowl, that he thinks, believes, and/or expects to be fed. All as a result of drawing correlations between the sound of the bell and eating food. We can change the sound of the bell, to any sound we arbitrarily choose so long as it is audible to the dog. The same results will happen because the same thing is happening... correlations are being drawn.
How is it explanatory, regarding basic rudimentary bedrock belief?
What's it missing?
We're actually in the process of demonstrating exactly what I've been advocating. We're each drawing correlations between different things in an attempt to build a bridge of mutual understanding... shared meaning.
I understand what you mean, I think, but the point I'm making that is that describe slobbering after hearing the bell in terms of expectations and beliefs. Maybe you'll agree? The so-called expectation just is the behavior. It is not implied or demonstrated by the behavior. Or rather it's not clear what talk of this implication adds.
Quoting creativesoul
I'm inclined to agree. We are behaving in a certain key, adjusting certain linguistic conventions. Is our typing this or that word radically different from the dog salivating?
Quoting creativesoul
I agree that we often think of non-linguistic behavior as caused by linguistic behavior. The creature did one thing because he thought another. I'm exploring the approach of treating linguistic behavior as on the same plane as all other kinds of behavior. We can still postulate a causal relationship between a creature saying X to himself and then acting in this or that way. We can find a suicide note explanatory, for instance, by linking one kind of hand movements to another (writing 'This world is evil' and tying a noose.)
You said 'roughly, of course,' so perhaps you are open to this or include this already.
Quoting creativesoul
That's pretty close. I'm saying that we prioritize a certain kind of behavior as special, call it 'thinking.' But what is thinking? Making sounds and noises according to certain conventions or patterns. These days we can just imagine making these sounds. We have interior monologues. For reasons that are somewhat historical/political we often lean on some vague notion of free will, think of our thinking as ghost with a certain freedom to move the body this way or that.
I don't have some finished theory and doubt I ever will. I think that we humans have patterns in our marks and noises embedded within broader patterns. Our talk of belief is part of this. Our making sense of animal belief is part of this. It all functions as a whole, and we are trained into a kind of blind skill for acting within these conventions. For instance, what does it mean to 'account for'? Of course we have a rough sense. Roughly, accounting for something means making it familiar, more manageable, weaving it in to our larger stories.
I think we tend to project some trimmed-down version of our intra-human mentalistic langauge on animals. I'm not even against that. It's more about revealing this or that approach as optional, to some degree just for the intellectual pleasure.
Quoting path
I suggest stopping such talk. I've certainly not talked in terms of implication. What sense does it make for you to ask me that question? Perhaps you ought ask yourself what such talk has added...
When a cat stands in front of it's treat bowl immediately after hearing the sound of the plastic treat bag being opened, looks up and meows at the caretaker, you're claiming that that cat's behaviour is not putting it's own expectation/belief on display?
Really?
:brow:
Do you agree that language less creatures form, have, and/or hold belief?
No, I'm not claiming that at all. In ordinary terms it's the cat displaying its expectation, absolutely. So maybe it's a trivial point --- but one more time:
If expectation is referring to the cat's consciousness, it's plausible but a bit like a beetle in the box.I can't tell if expectation for you is in the 'mind' of the cat or only in its behavior. If it's not in the mind, then in what ways is expectation more than the visible behavior? Food open, looks up, meows.
To me that 'more than' is our human interpretation, which is fine. We could talk about that interpretation as human thoughts or be a behaviorist about them too. Food open, cat looks up, meows, human does a speech act involving 'expectation.'
Quoting creativesoul
Yes, especially in the context of our conversation, where I am trying to be a 'behaviorist' even about our human speech acts. If we think of human speech acts as 'not language' (put them on a plane with other bodily movements), then we too are languageless creatures that have 'beliefs'...which are correlations between our behavior and the environment (including the behavior of our fellow 'languageless' primates.). 'Beliefs' are something like predictable responses to stimuli, including the stimuli of words like 'expectation' and 'stimuli.' But also of course to the sound of food being opened or thunder. My dog [s]hides in[/s] (goes to) the closet when it storms.
(I know that we have language, but I'm trying to treat our words as complicated meows.)
Why posit this?
I've explicitly said otherwise.
I was just trying to figure out how you were using 'expectation,' I guess. If we are ignoring the cat's consciousness, then what is given is just a reaction to food. Of course we can call that reaction 'expectation,' but to me this is just arguably talking about the observed behavior without adding anything.
My guess is that that is not true, and you know it!
Earlier... not so long ago actually... I stated the following...
Expectation is belief about what will take place.
What are you trying to do here?
I've a ton of sympathy and appreciation for Heiddy... regarding his focus on language.
I think our views are pretty close. If I'm being eccentric, it's in good faith.
Quoting creativesoul
I really was just trying to get clear on what you meant.
I think I may have it.
You agree that beliefs require no consciousness or language. They can simply be enacted.
Expectation is simply an enacted belief about the future.
So expectation also requires no consciousness.
I enact my expectation that the floor will hold me as I walk across it.
I think the bot-stuff is connected to bedrock beliefs. We enact our expectations of being intelligible as we engage in various linguistic conventions. (I know I didn't avoid the mentalistic talk when I used intelligible, but I guess I thought I needed it to be intelligible.)
Judging by what followed the above, I'm afraid there is still some remarkable and/or significant misunderstanding at work.
Quoting path
Not exactly.
There are two different ideas in the above report/account of my thought and/or belief(the position I'm advocating for, and/or argue from). They are:"Beliefs require no consciousness", and "beliefs require no language". Neither is one that I would advocate, without further qualification. The former is a claim that I would not make. "Consciousness" is a notion borne of gross misunderstanding of thought and belief. It's a chimera. All consciousness involves a thinking and/or believing creature.
There are no notions of consciousness that I am aware of that pick out that which existed in it's entirety prior to our naming and descriptive practices. If the notion is going to do any real work, it needs to be able to properly account for such. In short, I reject talk of consciousness because it all too often results in saying shit that cannot be true. It's a money ticket item though... that's for sure!
That said...
What is the term "consciousness" doing here? I mean what is it accomplishing? What's it adding aside from an unnecessary multiplication of entities? There's no need to invoke it.
Going back to the second suggestion...
Some belief requires no language. <------------------That's 'where' both Witt and Heiddy fail.
That's more amenable.
Wow, we are misunderstanding each other. I've been contorting myself to get away from 'consciousness' and 'the unnecessary multiplication of entities.'
Can opener sound. Tuna smell. Cat comes closer, meows, looks up.
This pattern is something that we can work into the complicated pattern of our meows and can-openings. All talk of 'expectation' and 'belief' and 'consciousness' is just part of that human meowing. As is what I'm meowing now.
Earlier you spoke of seeing a plie of snowballs either as a snowman, or as something else... They key there is what is required for seeing a snowman 'as a snowman'. That's the trick to untangling the knots that come as a result of talking like [i]that.
Ever heard of a performative contradiction?
I'm beginning to believe that you're either deliberately misrepresenting your own thought and belief, or you are enacting what's often called a performative contradiction. It's akin to eating a banana while claiming that one tries to avoid eating bananas.
Ya feel me?
Yes, I hear you. [Responding to the post before your last. ]This touches on intentionality. What interest me is that this is one more beetle in the box. People might say that AI can't have it, but how do we know that we have it? If we just use the word according to certain complex conventions, we 'have' it. It's supposed to refer to something that's not just language. It's the same with 'consciousness.'
You and I both understand, I trust, that we know what it is to take snowballs as a snowman. What this knowing is...is not so clear. It's at least participating in complicated social conventions.
I've been bringing up consciousness and mentalistic language in order to avoid it and take some distance from it. But it's hard to strip it entirely from our meta-language. We are just trained in to talking this way. We can only talk against this training by simultaneously employing it.
Quoting path
Good job on that.
However, that cat does not - cannot - see the snowman as a snowman, for that is to know what the snowman's name is.
This might be a point worth unpacking.
We're involved in a metacognitive endeavor. That is, we are talking about our own thought and belief. We use language to do so. Language is required for thinking about our own thought and belief. I used to - mistakenly - assert that written language was required. However, it was brought to my attention that oral tradition is more than adequate for rudimentary versions. That said...
Prior to thinking/talking about something, there must be something to think/talk about. That is the target.
We clearly have thought and belief - of some rudimentary basic and/or simple variety prior to language; that is prior to any and all notions, definitions, and/or conceptions of "thought", "belief", "imagination", "mind"... prior to language creation/acquisition itself.
How do we account for such a thing, given we have to use language as a means for doing so? Perhaps that is a question that is of interest to you?
I posit that all thought and belief must be meaningful to the thinking/believing creature, and it must also somehow presuppose it's own correspondence to what's happened and/or is happening.
What does non linguistic and/or prelinguistic thought and belief consist of such that it can - over enough time and given the 'right' circumstances - evolve without hitch into the rich linguistically informed thought and belief that humans have today, as well as be meaningful and presuppose it's own correspondence?
Correlations.
Of course. We must - at the very least - mention it's use. That's remarkably different than continuing it.
I'm tempted to think of organisms reacting to stimuli.
One can be
[quote=Rorty]
the kind of antiessentialist who, like Dewey, sees no breaks in the hierarchy of increasingly complex adjustments to novel stimulation—the hierarchy which has amoeba adjusting themselves to changed water temperature at the bottom, bees dancing and chess players check-mating in the middle, and people fomenting scientific, artistic, and political revolutions at the top.
[/quote]
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rorty/
So we have non-human animals doing as they do, before the bald talky apes arrive. Then we come along with our highly complicated meows (language proper) and talk about it. Thought and belief prior to human language are shown or enacted nonlinguistically in patters of reaction and interaction.
That's my first guess. Much more can be said, as always.
There is a plurality of different things, but it is a far stretch to claim that there is a creature capable of drawing correlations between them. Not something I'd defend.
I'm not a Rorty fan, by the way... He mistakenly holds that truth is dependent upon language, which is prima facie evidence that he has no coherent conception of non linguistic thought or belief.
I guess I don't see a clean break where language begins. If animals coordinate their behavior with noises and scents, that's a kind of language. What if we humans are doing the same kind of thing at a higher level of complexity? Does that make sense?
Is there someone you can refer me to that's closer to your approach? Just to see it in another vocabulary? Or are you working on something fresh?
Ah. For me the issue is maybe this referral. Do you mean that one thing represents another, or points to it in some sense?
Sorry, that answer was too quickly given. Language does much more than just reference. Habits die hard.
:joke:
Quoting path
Language use begins when a plurality of creatures draw the same correlations between different things. Reference is only one use. We also get others to do stuff with language use. We greet others, etc.
I wouldn't say that a name represents it's referent. It refers to it. It picks it out of this world to the exclusion of all else.
In cases of successful reference, a plurality of people draw a correlation between the name and the referent; between "trees" and trees, for instance.
What about when a dog pees where other dogs have peed? We can say that they are indicating their presence, maybe other things. But all we see is that the dog pees where other dogs have peed.
Or we can say that bee dancing points other bees to food, but all we see is the dance and that the bees go to where the first bee was.
Would you accept this as enacted correlation?
As far as I know, there is no other advocate of what I'm advocating. My world-view has been influenced by far more people than I can possibly know, and there are similarities and shared positions on specific points with many.
OK, that's why I mentioned intentionality earlier. If we tell a kid to go get a screwdriver and he brings the screwdriver back, does that work? We can't see inside his soul. He just does what we want him to do upon certain cues.
I can relate to that. I also have lots of influences, and I couldn't point to just one.
Also, I don't agree with everything Rorty or everything anybody, but that Rorty quote was good for what I had in mind.
I'm not entirely sure about either of those cases regarding the content of correlations, or if there is such a thing regarding those behaviours.
Clearly the language use worked. It would not have had the kid not drawn the right correlations to the language use.
There seems to be a thread, so to speak, pervading your part of our discourse here, and as I understand it, your discourse elsewhere on this forum as well. I'd like to first check to see if what I'm saying is true, or at least true enough, if you prefer. Then, I'd suggest a read that is relevant.
You've been captured by this notion of thrown-ness into the world. You've also repeatedly mentioned or remarked upon the necessity of using the language 'forced' upon us as a means to talk about it, or words to that affect/effect.
Russell's Why I Am Not A Christian, is chock full of good suggestions for how to go about questioning the worldview that one adopts... which subsumes the thrown-ness, and much of the other Heiddy notions you've grown fond of. Anyway, it does not matter whether or not you are/were a Christian. Russell's suggestions are universally applicable methods for figuring out what one believes and how/why. Well worth a read. It's a short book as well.
I'm sure Russel has some nice hints for the recovering Christian, and I could give his ghost some nice hints for the recovering insufficiently self-critical theory-of-knowledge guy. Maybe I can use a different metaphor, since you might be allergic to metaphors stolen from Heidegger. I don't think that critical thinking can be 'automated.' Any attempt to construct such a 'machine' ends up taking the 'vocabulary' used in its construction mostly for granted. This 'automated critical thinking' is a metaphor for a certain kind of earnest metaphysics. I include earnest linguistic philosophy in this metaphor.
Such earnestness is threatened by an awareness of how 'historical' language is, that we never start with a clean state, that we have only inherited traces with which to (try to) transcend inheritance and install this critical thinking machine which requires no maintenance.
Here's an anthology of Wittgenstein quotes that run parallel to talk about being 'thrown.'
[quote=Wittgenstein]
A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.
...
The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all.)
...
I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.
...
When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.
...
Sometimes, in doing philosophy, one just wants to utter an inarticulate sound.
...
We are struggling with language. We are engaged in a struggle with language.
...
Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
...
Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.
...
Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.
...
Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language.
...
So in the end, when one is doing philosophy, one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.
[/quote]
Interesting and a bit odd reply...
I still suggest that read. As I mentioned, the method for questioning one's own adopted belief system holds good regardless of individual particulars.
There's much to be said about how our initial worldview effects/effects us.
I've argued against Witt's notion of "The limits of my language is the limits of my world", as well as other misguided notions that are the inevitable result of placing too much importance upon the role of language in human thought and belief, as a result of working from an utterly inadequate criterion for what counts as thought and belief.
I'm not at all allergic to Heiddy's philosophy. Unfortunately though, the most insightful piece of work 'from him' is the dialogue in the beginning of On The Way To Language between him and the Japanese philosopher regarding that which goes unspoken...
If you want some REAL insight into Witt, find a copy of the Cambridge letters...
That goes without being said... with me. We can delve into such though. It is quite germane to 'bedrock belief', of the linguistic variety anyway....
My point is (necessarily approximately ) that any such method is insufficiently critical. To pick up that method and use it is to pick up traces in order to liberate one from traces. The idea that it 'holds good' apart from individual particulars makes it a kind of anonymous machine.
I'm not denying it's a good book. I even looked at it many years ago. I also read Russell's History of Philosophy, which is so stupid about Nietzsche and Hegel (if memory serves) that I find it hard (but not impossible) to take him seriously. I did read Monk's bio on him, though, just last year. Like all of us he was a creature of his time, trapped in its issues and vocab.
Perhaps..
However, if there are a plurality of different methods all of which are capable of showing us a bit of how language acquisition affects/effects us, ought we not learn to use as many as we can, so as to creep closer towards sufficiency/adequacy?
That sounds good. I might get around to that. I'm not currently in a Heidegger phase, tho I can't resist jumping into a good Heidegger thread.
Quoting creativesoul
I have that one. It's good. But I think (biasedly, of course) that I am on the right track with Witt, or at least that my creative misreading is a good one.
Quoting creativesoul
That's why your objection to talk of being thrown is strange to me. You included in your quote of me 'that we never start from a clean slate.' That's more or less exactly what it means to be thrown. In any of our thinking about thinking, we are using an inherited vocab and tradition. Part of thinking about thinking is realizing this, and this is where earnest linguistic philosophy becomes ironic or highly suspicious of itself.
Russell also placed too much emphasis and/or importance on language use. However, given his belief system and his life circumstances, that man deserves post mortem praise...
Absolutely, and that's why I try to read and synthesize insights from lots of thinkers.
I'm interested in unpacking it... I'm not objecting to it, per se.
I'm very aware of what it means to be thrown. I'm also painfully aware of what it takes to shed such 'bedrock belief'.
I do want to hear more about that. Perhaps you'll agree, though, that maybe there will be no perfectly adequate criterion, since we don't legislate the language of the future. These tokens 'thought' and 'belief' can always be (and always are) recontextulized, drifting into new roles. And do either of us cling to some notion of 'belief-in-itself', 'thought-in-itself'?
Fair enough. It might help to articulate where I'm coming from by distinguishing to aspects of being thrown. The first aspect (which maybe you thought I had in mind) was being born poor, being born rich, being born in a cult, being born male, etc. These are powerful ways of being thrown, but they are, for better or worse, the kind of being thrown that we are always talking about. As a culture, we are even obsessed with this 'existential' version or aspect of being thrown.
But I'm mostly more interested in a more subtle kind of 'epistemological' being-thrown. It's the stuff we take for granted as we concentrate on our worldly circumstances. It's the language we inherit with its thousands of half-dead metaphors (rivers with mouths.) It's the philosophical tradition --not the part that we are consciously questioning but the part we are unconsciously using to consciously question.
This is 'the past that leaps ahead.,' the part of it that we do not see. It's the picture that dominates from the outside. It's the transparent glass that keeps the flies in the bottle.
For me Heidegger is most interesting in this second sense, and I like to filter out the existential stuff as Dreyfus does when I think of him.
Half-dead metaphor, kind of a metaphor in itself. Rivers with mouths is a good example.
The key is acquiring understanding and/or knowledge of what all thought and belief have in common such that having that commonality makes them what they are. This criterion is minimalist by necessity, as it must also cover pre-linguistic and/or non linguistic thought and belief as well. In addition, as mentioned heretofore on several occasions, that basic level of thought and belief must be somehow amenable to evolutionary progression, as well as be capable of properly accounting for and/or offering an alternative explanation for all sorts of things... the scope is daunting to say the least. Everything ever thought, believed, spoken, gestured, and/or otherwise uttered must be accountable in such a framework... in such terms.
I'm no Kantian in the sense of being sympathetic to Noumena. I prefer the unknown. Sure terminological use changes over time, especially regarding common language use. That's no problem for us here and now though. We can make any name we so choose a rigid designator. The fact that language evolves does not have to stop us from utilizing it here and now as a means to acquire knowledge of that which is prior to.
That bit of knowledge is a tremendously useful tool, by which we can judge other claims about ourselves and others, particularly regarding claims about thought and belief, or (certain)claims about anything that is existentially dependent upon thought and belief.
Thanks. I'm fascinated by 'philosophy is metaphors' as a metaphor that uses 'metaphor' (itself a dead metaphor) metaphysically. Derrida's essay 'The White Mythology' obsesses over this. To me this is part of the theme of us not being able to get out of metaphysics, where 'metaphysics' is used metaphorically.
My cat is literally pushing books off my shelf at the moment.
A book's worth of thought and/or belief about three words that amount to a false equivalence?
Things like that bug me about certain philosophers. Bewitchment.
I agree with Nietzsche that the whole game of philosophy is built on false equivalence. That's basically what a metaphor is.
Quoting creativesoul
Note that bewitchment is a half-dead metaphor., as is bug. Defining oneself against bewitchment might also be bewitchment. Isn't that critical thinking's fantasy? To be the opposite of bewitched? But what's so bewitching about this opposite of being bewitched? And do I only ask this because I am afraid of being bewitched?
Do I seek the spectacle of others' bewitchment from a high place free of magic?
More seriously, it's Derrida examining a classic attack on philosophy by a dude who says it's all dead metaphors. Derrida thinks its more complicated than that, that metaphor functions metaphysically in the attack.
Generalizing, there's no automated sniff-test for 'language on holiday.' Which is an automated denial of the possible here and now that makes claims on a future, necessarily ironically when it remembers itself.
But that's just something the @path -bot would say.
It is indeed! I think the keyword for you might be correlation? Understood as relationship, it does make sense to me, given my holist leanings, that relationship is primary or elemental. Everything is determined by what it's not (meaning-wise) and of course we've talked about animals reacting to patterns in the environment with their own patterns. That's how I can try to feel my way into it. I like the idea of the world as lots of patterns entangled.
Sounds like that could be turned into a metaphor.
Quoting path
There was a philosophy book on embodied cognition that made the claim all of western metaphysics was based on taking metaphors literally. I guess that's sort of a companion to the late Wittgenstein's approach.
Can you share the title of that work please? I'm heading into a linguistic-symbolism phase and this sounds quite interesting.
I don't know how well received it was. But it's an interesting approach.
Yeah, I was hoping to hint at that. 'Literal' is a dead metaphor. To be literal is just to stare at the letter, but the letter is itself a string of metaphors that are more or less dead. 'Analogy is the core of cognition.' If that's true, then we can only approach analogy analogically.
Quoting Marchesk
I like the embodied cognition approach. And yeah I think (along with or from my influences) that metaphors cool and harden into a relative literality. The [s]concept[/s] of the literal itself is a cooled metaphor. I went ahead and looked up 'concept' too: 'to take in and hold; become pregnant.'
The meaning does of course drift as the metaphor dies.
'Language on holiday' is fun. I imagine Language on the beach with a drink.
('Language on holiday' is language on holiday.)