Moore's Puzzle About Belief
I did a Google search about philosophical puzzles and came across this website. I was skimming through the puzzles and I found this one the most interesting. Here is how it is laid out by the online encyclopedia Britannica:
[i]Suppose you are sitting in a windowless room. It begins to rain outside. You have not heard a weather report, so you don’t know that it’s raining. So you don’t believe that it’s raining. Thus your friend McGillicuddy, who knows your situation, can say truly of you, “It’s raining, but MacIntosh doesn’t believe it is.” But if you, MacIntosh, were to say exactly the same thing to McGillicuddy—“It’s raining, but I don’t believe it is”—your friend would rightly think you’d lost your mind. Why, then, is the second sentence absurd? As G.E. Moore put it, “Why is it absurd for me to say something true about myself?”
The problem Moore identified turned out to be profound. It helped to stimulate Wittgenstein’s later work on the nature of knowledge and certainty, and it even helped to give birth (in the 1950s) to a new field of philosophically inspired language study, pragmatics.
I’ll leave you to ponder a solution.[/i]
[i]Suppose you are sitting in a windowless room. It begins to rain outside. You have not heard a weather report, so you don’t know that it’s raining. So you don’t believe that it’s raining. Thus your friend McGillicuddy, who knows your situation, can say truly of you, “It’s raining, but MacIntosh doesn’t believe it is.” But if you, MacIntosh, were to say exactly the same thing to McGillicuddy—“It’s raining, but I don’t believe it is”—your friend would rightly think you’d lost your mind. Why, then, is the second sentence absurd? As G.E. Moore put it, “Why is it absurd for me to say something true about myself?”
The problem Moore identified turned out to be profound. It helped to stimulate Wittgenstein’s later work on the nature of knowledge and certainty, and it even helped to give birth (in the 1950s) to a new field of philosophically inspired language study, pragmatics.
I’ll leave you to ponder a solution.[/i]
Comments (371)
Are you sure McGillicuddy doesn't know it is raining? I don't think that is clear.
I thought McGiilicuddy does know it's raining. But McGilicuddy is referring to MacIntosh's not knowing and thus not believing. MacIntosh can't refer to themselves that way, because they're not in the know!
I don't believe there is life on Mars. But let's say there is. I can truthfully say that I don't believe there is life on the Red Planet. But I'm wrong in this scenario. If I knew I was wrong, I would not say I believed otherwise. But I don't actually know that.
So I can say something true about my belief when wrong, as long as I don't know better.
Or I don't. But I believe I do. So therefore I think I can say something true about myself.
I rather somebody else discuss this with you, it's not personal.
Quoting Wheatley
I think there's a slight of hand here: First it asks you why the sentence is absurd, then it asks you why something that you do is absurd.
Those are all very tricky concepts. :rofl:
Now tell me I'm wrong!
Samuel Johnson's kicking a rock while hollering, "I refute it thus!", and Diogenes walking away from an argument claiming that motion was impossible.
I like Diogenes the best of the three.
Sure, but let's say Johnson kicked that rock to prove it was solid against atomists claiming it was a bunch of atoms and the void. Then low and behold physicists discover that solid objects are mostly empty space. So Johnson's common sense reaction doesn't amount to much other than rocks appear solid and also hurt when you kick them.
Now let's say somehow science determines that our universe is a simulation. That means Moore waving his hands around amounted to proving nothing about an external world. And Diogenes walking away isn't the same as moving through physical space.
Point being that common sense objections to philosophical arguments don't amount to much.
Common sense is only good for common things. Skepticism about the external world ain't common. There you go, now you can publish this argument in your favorite philosophical journal.
The sense of the sentence is determined by whom is saying it and the context. If I were to imply that MacIntosh was mocking Macgillycuddy by using quotation marks, punctuation and tone in the sentence then it is resolved.
"' 'its raining', but I dont think it is." Here Macintosh is quoting Macgillcuddy mockingly and then affirming his counter belief.
Nothing has fundamentally changed about the content of the sentence simply how it is applied to the situation.
Or ... if you consider Macintosh saying his absurd phrase but you ask for further qualification of the sentence (context), it can be firmly placed within a logical sentiment. For example;
"Its raining, but I dont believe it is." "What do you mean?" 1). "Well despite the fact that i am aware there is an outer world where such things surely happen, i am in a windowless room, and i choose only to believe what i can sense in front of me.
Though philosophically extreme, this would be a rational context to place such a sentence.
Or "it's raining but I dont believe it is" "How so?" "Rain often begins as snow at higher altitude only melting in the last moments. So if it spends most of its fall as snow and a little as rain which one is it truly? Both are falling right now at this moment. So it depends on your perspective. "It is raining, but I dont believe it is as I believe it is snowing."
Although pretty pointless and annoying ... these eccentric rationalisation no less remove the absurdity of such a sentence or at least some of it.
If nothing is done and the sentence is allowed to remain standalone with no contact then it is absurd.
There might not be a reason for him to say it but he might nonetheless say it. As you say, it's a silly statement, but also a true statement. That's the puzzle.
While I could say, "It's raining outside, I don't believe it", I couldn't actually be saying that truthfully.
Being poor in English, you might want to read this with a pinch of salt.
The sentence "it's raining", in my humble opinion, is actually this: "I believe it's raining" and this is directly contradicted by "but, I don't believe it's raining". Ergo, to say, "it's raining, but I don't believe it is" amounts to contradicting yourself.
That said, it's probably useful to look at the problem against the backdrop of "belief" and "fact". A fact is, in the simplest of terms, the way the world is. A belief is what one holds to be true.
As you can see, a belief is an option. This may not seem obvious to you but consider matters on which the jury is still out. In the absence of compelling evidence and /or sound arguments, certain propositions are in truth-value limbo. Yet we see many adopt positions on such undecided matters - instances of making a choice as to what one wishes to believe.
So, even if "it's raining" is true, it's entirely within the realm of possibility that " but I don't believe it is"
:chin: :brow:
My resolution to this apparent paradox is to distinguish between the speech-acts of "expressing", which is a demonstration of one's own mental state, one's thoughts or feelings, and "impressing", which is attempting to affect a mental state in another person; and to highlight how, if we assume a speaker is being honest and not manipulative, we assume an impression from them upon our minds to imply also an expression of their own mind. That is to say, when they impress upon us that X is true, if we assume that they are honest, we take that to also express their own belief that X is true. If they then impress upon us that they don't believe X is true, that impression contradicts the preceding implied expression of their belief. It is akin to shouting in a rage "I'M NOT ANGRY!". There is nothing self-contradictory in the content impressed, in either case — it's possible for someone to be non-angry, and it's possible for someone to disbelieve a truth — but just as the raged shouting expresses anger in contradiction to the impressed claim of non-anger, the utterance "X is true" implicitly expresses belief in X, and so contradicts the attendant impression of disbelief.
(The more common term "assertion" can, I think, be taken to be equivalent to my term "impression" here, but I like how the linguistic symmetry of "im-" and "ex-" illustrates the distinction: to "express" is literally to "push out", and one may imagine an illustration of expression as little arrows pointing out of the speaker's mind; while to "impress" is literally to "push in", and one may imagine an illustration of impression as an arrow pointing into the listener. Though I've spoken of impressions and expressions thus far only as they apply to statements, pushing thoughts from speaker to listener, the distinction can also be applied equally to questions, where an impressed question is a direct question figuratively pulling something straight from a listener, while an expressed question is a more open-ended wondering, a demonstration of the speaker's own uncertainty and openness to input should anyone have any to offer. Sentences of the forms "I wonder if X." and "Is it true that X?" clearly illustrate the difference. Since questions "pull" rather than "push", we might continue the clear Latinate verbal illustration by terming the "is it true" type of question an "extraction", meaning literally "pulling-out" of the listener, and the "I wonder" type of question an "intraction" — not "inter-action", but "in-traction" — meaning literally "pulling-in" to the speaker. The difference intended here is like the difference between billing someone for a service, versus putting out a hat so passers-by can donate what they like. The difference between impression and expression is likewise comparable to the difference between sending a product to someone directly, versus setting it out with a "free" or "take one" sign.)
The difference between impression and expression is somewhat analogous to, but not literally the same as, the difference between the imperative and indicative linguistic moods, inasmuch as an impressive speech-act is effectively telling someone what to think (or in an impressive question, telling them to tell you something), while an expressive speech-act is effectively showing others what you think (or in an expressive question, showing your uncertainty). However it is important to stress that I am not saying impressions are literally imperative and expressions are literally indicative, because I hold that the ordinary indicative type of statement that's generally held to be the plainest, most default kind of statement is itself a kind of impressive speech-act: saying "Bob throws the ball" impresses a belief in Bob throwing the ball, implicitly tells the listener to believe that Bob throws the ball, and so is kind of imperative-like in that way, but is still distinct from the literal imperative "Bob, throw the ball!". Similarly, expressive speech-acts, while they are indicative-like in the manner that they communicate, can be more imperative-like in their contents, such as "I think Bob ought to throw the ball", without impressing that opinion on anyone, much less Bob himself. But, of course, we can also merely express indicative-like, descriptive opinions, ala "I think Bob throws the ball", and importantly, I hold that we can also impress imperative-like, prescriptive opinions, ala "Bob ought to throw the ball". Expression and impression are about how an opinion is delivered; it's a separate matter as to what the contents of that opinion are.
Nowhere in the anecdote does it say MacIntosh knows that it's raining. So, true or not, it would be absurd for MacIntosh to say he knows what he doesn't know.
Simple tendentiousness on Moore's part, I don't doubt.
If you don't believe that it's raining outside but it is in fact raining outside then you would be saying it truthfully.
Read carefully.
Where does it say MacIntosh knows?
Right, but I wouldn't be saying that i know it's raining outside, but believe otherwise!
Good.
Then it's silly (and likely simply tendentious) of Moore to put the words "it's raining" in his mouth.
It's important to note that MacIntosh is both "you" and "MacIntosh" in the anecdote. The heart of Moore's tendentious sleight of hand.
It was absurd of whoever did to put those words in MacIntosh's mouth.
You can say anything. For example:
Donald Trump is not a criminal but I believe that Donald Trump is a criminal.
The above is true if, despite what I believe, Donald Trump is not a criminal.
Moore's question is tendentious and possibly intentionally misleading. It's not absurd to say something true about oneself. It's just unusual to speak the truth without any basis in knowledge or experience. It has to have happened by pure chance.
It's not absurd. For example:
You had pancakes for breakfast today.
There's nothing absurd about the above statement, even though the fact of the matter is unknown to me. It's sensible and either true or false.
It would be absurd for you to make that assertion if you didn't believe I had pancakes for breakfast. There would be absolutely no reason to say it. Hence, absurd.
In short, you left out the second half:
You had pancakes for breakfast today, but I don't believe you had pancakes for breakfast today.
Absurd.
A unconscionably misleading question. Moore must have known better.
It's not that it's absurd to say something true about oneself. It's silly to suggest that's absurd.
It's absurd to assert something true without evidence while holding a belief to the contrary.
At some point people have to wake up to the reality that "I do not 'believe' X" IS NOT THE SAME AS "I 'believe' NOT-X."
Here are two things about me that are totally true:
I do not "believe" any gods exist...and I do not "believe" there are no gods.
For me, the puzzle is why this is a puzzle, but then I haven't read Moore and know little about him and the context of this puzzle.
Here's the thing: "It's raining, but I don't believe it's raining," isn't necessarily a silly statement. What if we're talking narrative present (present tense for past events) with an intrusive narrate. "It's raining (as I, the narratar), but I (my past self) don't believe it's raining." When speaking, you need to take perspective into account in a way you don't have to if you consider well-defined philosophical propositions. If you ignore perspective, you can create plenty of absurd situations:
Bill: I'm Bill.
Joe: No, I'm not.
Both are correct, and yet B seems to contradict A. What a puzzle! This constructed situation is nonsensical, because it entails that Joe can use "I" correctly but can't parse it when someone else uses it. (Not sure if cognitive impairments exist that make such a situation plausible.)
Similarly, Moore's puzzle is the result of assuming things about Macintosh's knowledge and then decontextualising him so that his knowledge is only partially relevant.
It's just not a puzzle that you can't truthfully speak the truth about whether or not it's raining if you don't know whether or not it's raining. Macintosh could gamble on it, though, if his intention is to speak a true sentence, rather than to speak the truth about rain. Basically, Macintosh would be betting on himself being wrong about rain. That this leads to real-life absurdity doesn't automatically cause a philosophical problem. It depends on what problems you want to explore (and this is where my ignorance of Moore limits me).
I'm not surprised they say this puzzle helped develop pragmatics. It's definitely relevant.
Why do I need a reason to say something? The meaning and truth of a sentence does not depend on my motivation for saying it. "You had pancakes for breakfast" has a sense, whatever I believe, and is either true or false, whatever I believe.
Moving into armchair fog-to-pettifoggery here.
You don't "need" a reason to say a thing. You "have" a reason to say a thing.
You said "you had pancakes for breakfast today" because you thought it would support your argument.
Name one thing you've said without a reason for saying it.
You're the one who said "It would be absurd for you to make that assertion if you didn't believe I had pancakes for breakfast. There would be absolutely no reason to say it."
Do I or do I not have a reason for saying "You had pancakes for breakfast today"?
The fact is that I did say it, and I also don't know what you had for breakfast today. And it's either true or false.
So where's the absurdity?
I'm the context of the present philosophical argument, yes, you had a reason to say it: to win the argument.
Remove that context and you would not have said it.
Many, many (and I dare say), many absurd things have been said in an attempt to win a philosophical argument.
What I meant was: you would not have said it.
Do you agree with the below?
It's absurd to assert something true without evidence while holding a belief to the contrary.
No.
Perhaps I'm ashamed of my virginity and tell my friends that I've had sex before. People lie all the time.
This seems muddled.
Reread my statement.
"without evidence"
There is no evidence for my claim that I've had sex if I am in fact a virgin.
The sentence itself is not contradictory, and it can be true, but the speaker incurs contradictory commitments in uttering it. Therefore, the meaning of a sentence considered in isolation is not the same as the commitments one takes up in uttering that sentence, which are richer. The two can come into conflict where one alone doesn't.
You're not asserting something true without evidence. You're asserting something false.
So when I lie I commit to believing my lie?
Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm
So it's not absurd to assert something false without evidence but it is absurd to assert something true without evidence? Why?
Is it absurd for me to assert that intelligent life exists on other planets despite having no evidence for it? Is it absurd for me to assert that there's a beer in the fridge despite having no evidence for it? I don't think either are absurd, whether they are true or false. They're just either true or false.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I was just pointing out that your example doesn't jive with my statement.
Not sure about the rest of your questions.
And I questioned your statement by asking why it's absurd to assert something true without evidence but not absurd to assert something false without evidence.
But what if I believe that there's a beer in the fridge but assert that there isn't a beer in a fridge. However, unbeknownst to me, someone else has taken the last beer from the fridge (a classic Gettier example). When I assert that there isn't a beer in a fridge (which I intend to be a lie) I'm actually asserting something true (without evidence). Is my attempt at a lie an absurdity?
Yes. In fact, otherwise lying wouldn't work! The whole point of lying is publicly committing to believing something you know to be false (well, in the most canonical case of lying).
One can disagree with one's PAST self of course. Macintosh can say: I USED TO think it wasn't raining but I was wrong.
"Beliefs" are just assertions dressed in unhelpful mental woo. Better and sufficient to deal with,
"I believe" adds nothing to "it is raining outside" during sincere speech acts.
Macintosh watches a video his third friend made of the evening showing himself and the window behind him, he exclaims - perfectly coherently - "Look at me getting up to leave without even reaching for my coat. It’s raining outside, but I don’t believe it is”
The statement can be made perfectly coherently narrating in present tense the recollection of a past discrepancy, which is all his friend was doing in the first place.
If one misuses verb tense.
It was raining, but I did not believe that it was.
Narrating a film or book in the present tense is not a misuse of tense it's an accepted narrative device, even though it's understood the portrayed events took place in the past.
One can say whatever one wants to say about their own past mental ongoings.
To your point...
One can offer a report of past events captured on video. One can sincerely say "Look, it's raining(in the video), but I do not believe that it is(at that time, again, in the video)" without contradiction.
I would concur.
What does sincerity have to do with it? I can say "My name is Andrew" which has a meaning and a truth-value that has nothing to do with whether or not I believe it.
I can believe one thing but say the opposite. It's called lying.
Indeed. Moore's question was “Why is it absurd for me to say something true about myself?”. My answer is that it isn't absurd at all, as can be seen from the example of narrating a video of oneself. All that's odd here is that "It's raining" does not convey the degree of belief because it doesn't need to, it's just a couple of words which do something within the context of the conversation. they're not somehow bound by some law of nature to represent an accurate report of someone's mental state, they're just words.
Funny you should ask. Remember the struggles I went through coming to acceptable terms with Gettier's paper? The solution is drawing and maintaining the difference between a statement and statement of individual belief. In short, Gettier forgets all about the fact that the statements he's accounting for are Smith's beliefs. Had he kept that in mind, the referent of "the guy with ten coins in his pocket" is Smith himself. The truth conditions remain the same.
Gettier moves from "the guy" referring to Smith, to "the guy" referring to any guy with ten coins in his pocket. The problem, simply put, is that Smith did not believe that anyone else would get the job but himself, yet Gettier needs us to forget that part along with the truth conditions thereof.
Gettier changes the referent, the meaning, and the truth conditions of Smith's belief statement. That's an accounting malpractice.
The problem in a nutshell for Case I.
Yes. That claim needs amended somewhat.
If I say one thing but believe another then either I'm lying or I misspoke. It is not a contradiction for "it is raining" to be true and for "I believe that it is not raining" to be true and so it is not a contradiction for "it is raining and I believe that it is not raining" to be true. I may have misspoken, or I may be partially lying, but that's not the same thing as a contradiction.
I think I agree with the latter part. There are two statements at hand. Each with it's own focus, meaning, and/or truth conditions.
The former statement "it is raining" is about whether or not it is raining. The latter statement "I believe that it is not raining" is about the speaker's own belief. That's how both can be true at the same time.
To combine them into a single sentence however, is to treat two separate claims about completely different things as if it is a single claim with one set of truth conditions.
I'm not conflating the meaning of a sentence with the beliefs of the speaker. I did overlook the fact that one can deliberately misrepresent their own beliefs. One can say whatever one wishes about their own belief.
No it isn't.
My name is Michael and water is H[sub]2[/sub]O.
Red herring.
Wikipedia provides the following explanation:
Quoting Wikipedia
How so?
"It is raining outside" is true if and only if it is raining outside. "I believe it is not raining outside" is true if and only if I believe it is not raining outside. One cannot believe both that it is raining and that it is not at the same time. Thus, stating "It is raining outside, but I do not believe it" is incoherent in every situation I can think of aside from the example Isaac provided earlier.
As I've already explained, the meaning of a sentence is not the same thing as the belief of the speaker. So why does it matter if "one cannot believe both that it is raining and that it is not at the same time"? We've already established that the meaning and truth-value of "it is raining outside" has nothing to do with what the speaker believes.
It matters when one asserts (e.g.): "It is raining outside, but I believe that it's not raining outside".
Why?
Because that is what makes it incoherent and/or self contradictory when one claims both at the same time.
It might sound absurd, but that doesn't mean that it is. The onus here is to explain what about it is absurd. The claim I have made is that the meaning and truth of the sentence "it is raining outside" has nothing to do with the speaker's belief, and that it is possible to believe that it is not raining outside even if it in fact is. Therefore there is no logical contradiction in the sentence "it is raining outside and I believe that it is not raining outside" even if it sounds absurd.
But I'm not claiming both at the same time. There is a difference between the sentence "It is raining and I believe that it is not raining" and the sentence "I believe that it is raining and I believe that it is not raining". The latter is a contradiction, the former isn't.
That's all true, but the absurdity is when one asserts both together. Even if I were to lie about it raining outside, it still is (and/or sounds) absurd to make that dual assertion.
So why does it sound absurd? Can you show that it actually is absurd? Perhaps the problem here is with your interpretation of the sentence rather than the sentence itself?
"It is raining outside" - when and if spoken sincerely - is spoken by a language user who believes that it is raining outside. When spoken insincerely, it is uttered by one who believes it not.
It can be true at a particular time both that P, and that I do not believe that P.
I can assert or believe one of the two at a particular time.
It is absurd to assert or believe both of them at the same time.
Edit: As I also posted above, as given in SEP:
The common explanation of Moore’s absurdity is that the speaker has managed to contradict himself without uttering a contradiction. So the sentence is odd because it is a counterexample to the generalization that anyone who contradicts himself utters a contradiction.
Again, what does sincerity have to do with it? What it means and whether or not it's true has nothing to do with what the speaker believes.
It's absurd to believe both at the same time as then one would be holding contradictory beliefs.
But why is it absurd to assert both at the same time? We've already established that "it is raining" and "I believe that it is not raining" are not contradictory statements.
Right. So now you have to ask yourself why this is the case. Why is it that "It is raining outside" - when and if if spoken sincerely - is spoken by a language user who believes that it is raining outside?
What is the necessary link which makes it impossible for someone to sincerely say "It's raining outside" (a statement about the state of affairs of the world), when they believe it is not (a state of their internal mind)
Seeing how we're talking about the absurdity of particular belief statements, and the two are contradictory, and it is impossible to believe both at the same time, it matters.
The common explanation of Moore’s absurdity is that the speaker has managed to contradict himself without uttering a contradiction. So the sentence is odd because it is a counterexample to the generalization that anyone who contradicts himself utters a contradiction.
Again, I'm not saying "I believe that it is raining and I believe that it is not raining". I'm saying "It is raining and I believe that it is not raining".
There is only one belief; the belief that it is not raining. So where is this contradiction?
So could you explain the manner in which he is contradicting himself? If the sentence isn't the contradiction then what is?
My name is Andrew. The Moon is made of cheese. Liquorice is delicious.
There are many reasons that one might assert something that they don't believe to be true. But what does the motivation of the speaker have to do with it?
Why do we need a link that makes it impossible to sincerely say "It's raining outside" if we do not believe that that's true? Belief presupposes truth. One cannot believe both simultaneously; that it is raining outside, and that it is not raining outside.
There's no link needed here that I can tell...
That's just how meaningful belief and statements thereof work(s).
If you're sincerely saying that it is raining, then you believe it is raining. If you believe that it is raining, then you cannot believe that it is not.
As I said, the absurdity is in the dual assertion. You need to deal with both parts of the assertion, not just one. Otherwise, you're not really talking about Moore's paradox.
Maybe I'm not saying it sincerely. As I've said, people can lie. I'm lying when I utter "it is raining and I believe that it is not raining" but a lie is not the same thing as a contradiction or an aburdity.
But what is absurd about asserting "it is raining" and "I believe that it is not raining"? You keep saying that it sounds absurd without explaining what about it is absurd. We've already established that the two sentences mean different things, have different truth-conditions, and can both be true. So where exactly does the problem arise?
That one is.
Why would you assert it to be true if you don't believe it? And why would you not believe it if you are asserting it to be true?
Right. But we're not necessarily talking about simultaneously believing both, not yet.
All with have are two propositions with two different truth-makers. If the truth of "It is raining" is determined by whether it's raining, not by whether I believe it's raining, then I can say it is truthfully raining, but I don't believe it is.
The problem here is caused by the contradiction between a philosophical commitment to correspondence theory, and the actual psychological reality that the truth of a statement is always a judgment and always based on the belief of the person doing the judging.
I did respond. There are lots of reasons that someone might lie. But what does their reason for lying have to do with the supposed absurdity of the assertion?
Quoting creativesoul
How so? It's just a lie. We've already established that the two parts of the sentence are not contradictions.
I don't see what difference lying makes. Even if I were to lie in asserting that it's raining, what sense does it make to also assert that I don't believe that it's raining?
You're asking about the speaker's motivation, but what's the relevance of that? We're discussing the sentence, not the speaker. Or are you saying that the absurdity is that you can't make sense of why the speaker is uttering the sentence?
Allegedly, but you still haven't explained why it's absurd. Why is it absurd to truthfully assert that you don't believe P and at the same time to (insincerely) assert P? We've already established the the statement contains no logical contradiction, so the absurdity, if there is one, doesn't seem to be with the sentence itself. Is it, as I suggested, that you just can't understand why anyone would say such a thing?
Only on the assumption that "P is true" means "I believe that P is true, or I wish to give the impression I believe P is true". That's the origin of the apparent paradox. Correspondence theory would have that "P is true" simply means P, not "I believe that P". If we're to accept this, then there should be no absurdity. There is absurdity, so we must reject this. Wittgenstein, Moore and Ramsey all reject it in different ways, but the point of the paradox is to get us to reject it somehow.
It's logical in the sense that the sentence contains no contradiction. And given the facts, it's false. But were it raining (unbeknownst to you) then it would be true.
Yes, I edited that comment to "The absurdity is in someone asserting ‘P is true but I don’t believe P’", but too late it seems. [Edit: Oops looks like the edit didn't take. I had edited it to be 'P but I don't believe P' (or 'P but I believe not-P). Oh well.]
Quoting Isaac
Right, well, at least you accept that there is a paradox, unlike several others here.
Well, you've only lied about it raining, not about your belief, so is it true or false?
It's false, as I said above. And were it raining it would be true. Either way, there's no logical contradiction. Just an ordinary truth or falsehood.
Sort of. I actually hold to Ramsey's solution that truth dissolves to the success of beliefs, so I think the paradox has been solved, but I agree there was one.
Edit - I don't want to give the impression here that Ramsey's work was a response in some way to Moore's puzzle. Only that it is a solution to it. I'm unclear on the historical facts, but I'm pretty sure that's not how it actually played out. There's no direct mention of it in Ramsey's writing, to my knowledge.
It's true regarding your belief. It's false regarding the weather. As a conjunction it's false.
Whereas if it were raining then it would be true regarding your belief, true regarding the weather, and so as a conjunction it would be true.
This is the issue. How can something be false regarding the weather absent of anyone's beliefs about it. The state of the weather can only be understood in terms of someone's belief about the state of the weather.
Doesn't that make your belief false, then?
Whether or not it's raining has nothing to do with whether or not I believe that it is raining. I can wrongly believe that it's raining or wrongly believe that it's not raining.
No. My belief is that it is not raining. It isn't raining. Therefore my belief is true.
I didn't claim the state of the weather was dependent on anyone's beliefs about it. I said that the state of the weather can only be understood in terms of someone's beliefs about it. The public object "the state of the weather" to which "it's raining" refers is someone's belief about the state of the weather. The actual state of the weather is a hidden variable outside of our Markov blanket.
I don't know what you're trying to say here.
Are you say it's impossible for it to be raining but for me to believe that it's not raining?
I'm saying that for it to 'be raining' is someone's belief that it is raining. That's what it means for it to be raining, there is no more to it raining than that some people believe it is raining. So saying It's raining cannot meaningfully refer to anything other than a belief that it's raining. It might refer to it as a theoretical object (say if I was lying, I'd be referring to an imaginary belief that it's raining, one which I'd like you to imagine I actually held), but there's no proper referent for the mere fact that it's raining, that is a hidden variable, we cannot meaningfully refer to it outside of talk like this (about models we use).
Fair enough, perhaps you have found a way out of the paradox by lying about P. What if you don't lie about it?
It's raining if water falls from the clouds. If I'm in some windowless room and so can't see or hear what's happening outside then I might not believe that it's raining even if in fact water is falling from the clouds and my lawn is getting wet.
If I only say what I believe and if I believe that it is not raining then I won't say "it is raining".
We're talking about the absurdity, incoherence or nonsensical nature of the sentence "It's raining but I don't believe it's raining". So the question is whether we can make any sense of it (and then, if we can't, why not).
To make analytical sense of it we need first to understand what the terms refer to. "It's raining" appears to refer to the state of the weather, "I believe it's raining" appears to refer to the state of my mind. The two could be in different states with regards to rain and so the sentence seems coherent (if a little odd).
But how can one refer to the state of the actual weather? On does not, nor ever can, know the actual state of the weather, so to refer to it would be absurd (outside of pointing out that it cannot be known). So parsing the sentence as referring to the actual state of the weather makes the sentence absurd.
Quoting Michael
To what are you referring with "in fact"?
We can look outside.
Quoting Isaac
That doesn't follow. We can talk about things even if we can't know if they're true or not.
The physical state of affairs outside my head. The actual state of the weather. Whether or not water is falling from the clouds, notwithstanding whether or not it's possible for me to know that it is or isn't.
Which would update your beliefs about the weather, you could still be mistaken.
Quoting Michael
I didn't say we couldn't. I said no sense could be made of it.
Quoting Michael
Right. Which would be a nonsensical referrent.
Yes, I could still be mistaken. It might be raining but I might believe that it's not raining.
It might. But you couldn't talk about it and make any sense. To say "it's raining" requires a referrent for 'raining' to be a property of. To make a claim about the state of a referrent about which you cannot form any form any judgment without it being a belief, and then claim that it differs from a statement about your beliefs, doesn't make any sense.
It makes perfect sense. "It is raining" and "I believe that it is raining" mean different things. The former refers to the weather -- a physical fact about what the world is doing outside my head -- and the latter refers to my belief.
Just because I might need to believe something about the weather to talk about the weather it doesn't then follow that when I talk about the weather I'm talking about my beliefs.
It seems to. If you "need to believe something about the weather to talk about the weather", then it certainly seems to follow that you must be talking about those beliefs when talking about the weather. You have no other content in your mind to which to make any reference. Your language has to refer initially to something in your mind otherwise how would your linguistic cortices select the right word?
Requiring a background understanding of the world to engage in successful communication does not entail that words refer to one's beliefs.
I need to understand the English language to make meaningful use of the phrase "water is H[sub]2[/sub]O" but such a phrase doesn't refer to the English language; it refers to the chemical composition of a certain kind of liquid.
Maybe, but that's because you have the referrents relating to words in English and also beliefs about water in your mind, you could refer to either. You do not have the actual weather in you mind, only your beliefs about it, so you cannot refer to properties of the weather, only your beliefs about them. When you select the term 'rain' it applies to your concept of rain, not actual rain. If you construct the sentence "it's raining" I can only refer to a belief about a state of affairs because your brain has no other referent from which to select the appropriate terms.
Then the sentence "it is raining" would mean the same thing as the sentence "I believe that it is raining" and both would be true iff I believe that it is raining, and so mistakes are impossible. Are you willing to commit to this conclusion?
Why must something be in my mind for me to refer to it?
I'm not following you so far as mistakes being impossible. If "it's raining" means the same as "I believe it's raining", a 'mistake' is only possible if other people believe let's not raining or I later come to believe it's not (or wasn't) raining. The actual state of the world is something we can only infer (form beliefs about), so 'mistake' doesn't make any sense there either. We can only dispute or update beliefs.
Quoting Michael
You referring to it is a neurological process, some requirements or desire prompts you to form words, the brain searches for the terms to match the referent (in cases like this). It only has concepts in your mind from which to select. It can't select the actual weather, that has no direct neural connection to you language cortices, it can only select from concepts about the weather.
The actual weather causes/updates beliefs which then cause language to be spoken appropriate to them. I can't see any way the actual weather can get through to your language without forming a belief first.
In the account of those two belief statements. The problem is the conflation of belief statements and propositions(statements examined in isolation from the speaker).
One cannot believe both that it is raining and that it is not raining. Asserting "it is raining" assuming a sincere speaker, tells the audience that the speaker believes it is raining. Asserting "I believe that it is not raining" directly contradicts that.
A speaker cannot believe them both at the same time. A speaker can assert them both at the same time. Hence, the absurdity and/or self-contradiction.
Sincere speakers believe the statements they make. A sincere speaker believes it is raining regardless of whether or not they prefix the statement with "I believe". Given that it is not raining inside your belief, the latter is not just about your belief. "I believe" adds nothing meaningful here.
There are two belief statements. The contradiction is there.
There's one statement about my belief and one statement about the weather. There aren't two belief statements.
Why do you keep talking about sincere speakers? The person who says "it is raining and I don't believe that it is raining" isn't being sincere.
The sincerity of the speaker is irrelevant. We're discussing the sentence, not the speaker.
It's not absurd to assert something that you don't believe. People do it all the time. They lie, or they misspeak, or they don't understand what they're saying.
Well, it's absurd for you to think it's not raining when it's raining. It's merely stupid for you to say you think it's not raining when it is. In the first case, you're an idiot. In the second case, you're telling people you're an idiot.
Moore was envisioning a situation where the speaker (MacInstosh) doesn't know nor does he have any reason to believe that it's raining outside. The speaker is sitting in a windowless room and hasn't heard any meteorological report. What the speaker is saying about himself is the exact same true thing that his friend is saying (knowingly and without any paradox) about him: "It’s raining, but MacIntosh doesn’t believe it is."
@Pfhorrest provided what seems to me the best discussion of Moore's paradox in the first page of this thread.
We are talking about a single speaker's assertions/statements. All statements, when sincerely spoken, are belief statements. The two beliefs in question directly contradict one another.
I'm discussing the belief statements, because that's how the self-contradiction and/or incoherency is found and understood.
Even in that case, the speaker cannot believe both at the same time.
No. It is a long standing historical mistake to treat belief statements as though they are equivalent to statements and/or propositions.
Hence...
Talk of P, when discussing belief begins on the wrong footing.
Quoting Isaac
Equivocating the term "truth" doesn't help.
What you cannot do is believe it is raining, and not believe that it is raining at the same time.
Nah.
The problem, as I've expressed clearly enough, is that some people are treating the two belief statements as though they are not belief statements at all, but rather just - at face value - some statement/proposition or another... in general. The problem is of historical origins, and it amounts to a conflation of belief and statements, and/or belief and propositions. There's a remarkable actual difference between the two...
Hence...
Both statements can be true at the same time, without contradiction, but both cannot be believed at the same time without self-contradiction.
As common language users, we automatically presume sincerity and/or honesty in another's speech. This happens autonomously, early on, and it is necessary for language acquisition. It's a default not of our own choosing. But later on, when we come to realize that some folk are insincere, we temper our certainty/trust in another's sincerity accordingly. The tendency, the need, to assume sincerity most of the time remains.
The second sentence in question above is 'absurd'(I much prefer self-contradictory/incoherent) as a result of violating what's possible for us to believe, and as a result of our recognizing that the speaker themselves cannot believe both statements at the same time despite being quite able to assert both simulataneously.
Furthermore, the speaker is not saying something true about themselves, as Moore suggests, they are clearly contradicting themselves from one belief statement to the next.
The instant I say of myself, "it's raining but I don't believe it is" it becomes self-contradictory i.e. it doesn't make sense.
A resolution of the paradox requires that either in both cases, the sentence is nonsense or in both cases it makes complete sense.
Clearly, in my humble opinion, "it's raining but TheMadFool doesn't believe it is" can't be nonsense for the simple reason that there are many things happening out there in the world that I, TheMadFool, am not aware of so can't form a belief on them. Take the recent explosion at a port in Beirut. When it happened (on Tuesday), I wasn't aware of it and so I didn't believe it - the sentence "It's exploding (in Beirut) but TheMadFool doesn't believe it is" is perfectly sensible.
So, the only option available for us is to try and demonstrate that when I utter the words "its raining but I don't believe it is" makes sense. One possible way seems to be to make believing/belief an option i.e. there maybe truths/facts but we can choose whether to believe them or not - a fact/truth is different to any beliefs about it.
This strategy meshes well with the Justified True Belief (JTB) theory of knowledge as it, like I'm doing here, considers truths/facts as distinct from beliefs about them - the basic idea being that there could be truths/facts but we may or may not believe them.
Too, the phenomenon of denialism - someone refusing to believe a fact/truth as happens when having a traumatic experience - supports the idea that belief/believing could be an option independent of facts.
:chin:
Quoting creativesoul
Quoting creativesoul
I'm not saying that he believes both, only that he says both. People can assert things that they don't believe. That's why there's nothing wrong with the sentence "it is raining and I don't believe that it is raining". The only problem is when you infer from this that the speaker believes the sentence to be true, but then the problem is with your inference, not with the sentence itself.
If he's making the statement of truth when he has no direct knowledge of it then you have to consider that the statement was made by his friend and likely a trusted source. A trusted source magnifies the evidence to a sufficient level that acceptance established the Truth. The value of a statement of belief is greater when the establishment of truth has been achieved. Since the greater value was stated then the extra statement of affirmation would have been redundant and unnecessary. It would have been irrational because the extra statement of belief would have added no value in terms of a contribution to the conversation. However, the effect of the statement lacking belief caused a good deal of contribution to our conversation.
I can go along with your distinction between 'truths' and 'beliefs' as being the degree of justification, but it's a little too far to say that someone not accepting this proposed definition is somehow in denial, don't you think?
Indeed. Distinction is one thing. Labeling one half 'belief' and the other 'truth' is an act of definition. We do not get to just define terms to our liking, they already have public meanings (often many). For example, both types of thought might be called 'beliefs'. One simply stronger than the other and additionally earning the label 'truth'.
Any two things are identical in some sense and different in another, so without context it's wrong to say anyone is ignoring the difference, they may merely think it irrelevant to the context.
I tend to draw a less sharp distinction than you do between those beliefs about which I'm prepared to say they're true and the others. For me, my judgement about whether the criteria have been met to call something 'true' is not simple, nor always readily available to my concious awareness.
So I agree with you that "It's raining" and "I believe it's raining" express the same type of thing (a belief about the weather) to different degrees of certainty, but I don't think we can universalise the distinction. That too is something within the mind of the person making the statements.
Only in philosophy would someone think that there is anything to be gained from imagining that someone would say something that nobody would say in a situation which would not take place.
The domain of logical possibility...
It's a thought experiment. Physicists also make use of those aplenty, not just philosophy. Their purpose is to tease out hitherto unnoticed consequences of our assumptions. This peculiar thought experiment was especially fruitful since it heralded in some measure the movement away from metaphysical or purely descriptive accounts of knowledge and belief and towards more contextual and pragmatist accounts of belief and knowledge avowals and ascriptions.
If you say so. But it seems to me not a particularly "tough" experiment; instead a silly one. For me, addressing the question "Why is it absurd for me to say something I would never say?" doesn't strike me as useful.
Yes. Yet fifty-eight years later the effects are here somewhat blunt.
It's useful in making trouble for theories of language that fail to account for the absurdity of the utterance. It's not devised to instruct ordinary people what it is that they can or can't sensibly say. (Also, I meant 'thought' not 'tough', sorry).
I should mention, also, that in addition to the early post from @Pfhorrest that I already mentioned, the Wikipedia entry on Moore's paradox is concise and espacially well crafted. The approach promoted by Richard Moran at the end of the article is especially congenial to me since I like to approach problems in the philosophy of thought and of language from the standpoint of the necessary interplay of practical and theoretical reason. And the requisite interplay also presupposes a capacity for self-knowledge.
I think this is an example of treating something which isn't a problem as if it is a problem.
The sentence "I know it's raining (i.e., it's raining) but I don't think it's raining (i.e., but I think it's not raining)" isn't "true" as the thought experiment proposes. There can be no situation in which it's true. When we know something to be the case--that it's raining--we don't think that it isn't raining. As a result, there's no paradox.
(Edited response)
You are making the assumption that the "sentences" (assertions?) "I know it's raining" and "It's raining" are equivalent. One can suppose that the second one (i.e. the sincere assertion, obviously not the sentence or sentence content) implies the first, but what is the nature of this implication? It's not implied as a matter of semantics, grammar or logic. That's in part what's at issue in the discussion of Moore's paradox. It raises issues regarding the pragmatics of language that go beyond mere semantic or logical analysis.
Actually, if I'm assuming anything, I'm assuming that nobody would say "It's raining" if they thought it wasn't raining, unless they wanted to lie for one reason or another. In any case, there is no true statement being made. It's necessary that we pretend the statement is true for the paradox to exist. I suppose we pretend when we engage in thought experiments generally, but I doubt this is one of those experiments where we pretend something is the case.
Of course nobody would say it. The question is, why not?
The Moore sentence is clearly pathological. But how do you know that? What rule, principle or maxim does it violate? Or is it defective in some other way?
I can't explain it, and that bothers me.
(I think @Snakes Alive had a promising approach.)
I appreciate @Snakes Alive's approach too. It evokes a pragmatics of entitlements and commitments à la Brandom. It's a pragmatist approach that's interestingly different from @Pfhorrest. Pfhorrest's purported solution relies on a distinction between two distinct components of the act of language of assertion, which he calls expressing and impressing. Snakes Alive's Brandomian suggestion makes the economy of any assumption regarding the speaker's intention to induce ("impress") a belief in the recipient of her language act. It replaces this intention with incurred commitments within the language game. While asserting Moore's proposition, those incurred commitments are inconsistent regardless of the speaker's hopefulness in inducing a belief in her interlocutor.
I think the questions to be addressed are--Why does Moore say/think it would be said? Why does he maintain a true statement has been made? He doesn't bother to explain. If there's no reason to accept his assumption, then there's a problem with the "thought experiment", I think.
If it's raining then the assertion "it's raining" is true even if the person saying it is lying.
If it's raining and he/she says it's raining, there is no lie. No false statement is made.
I would say that I lie if I assert something I believe to be false.
Regardless, this is the situation:
1. It is raining
2. Tom believes that it is not raining
3. Tom asserts "it is raining"
For whatever reason, Tom is asserting something he believes to be false, but his assertion is true. This is the situation that Moore is imagining.
Regardless of the statement being true or false, Moore acknowledges that it is defective in some respect. But he points out that it's not defective or false by dint of its being logically inconsistent (since the expressed propositional content isn't self-contradictory and it is identical to the content unproblematically asserted by the speaker's friend). The defect must be found elsewhere.
Tom's assertion "It is raining but I don't believe it is raining" is Moore-paradoxical regardless of the truth of the component proposition "It is raining". Moore only envisioned the component proposition being true in order to highlight the fact that the same propositional content being asserted by Tom can be truly and unproblematically asserted by Tom's friend (about Tom). It is therefore tempting to conclude that there isn't anything wrong with the propositional content of Tom's assertion. There must be something more to the evaluation of a speech act of assertion beyond the evaluation of the truth of its content. By now, that may seem to be obvious that it must be so, but there is considerable disagreement regarding the characterization of the missing ingredient.
Sure. I was just addressing Ciceronianus' comment:
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
I thought showing him that it can be true would dismiss him of this criticism.
This is my initial take:
Quoting Michael
I don't think there's anything wrong with the propositional content of Tom's assertion. Rather I think it's the speech act itself that's the problem. Saying something like "it is raining and I don't believe that it is raining" is playing the game of language wrong. We're supposed to (in ordinary situations) infer that the speaker believes his assertions, and so an assertion from which we infer contradictory beliefs doesn't make sense (in the casual sense of the phrase).
Here's an analysis that might remove any apparent contradictions.
Being true is a predicate of statements. "It is raining" is true iff it is raining.
Belief is a relation between an individual and a statement.
Making an assertion is an act that one can perform by speaking; it is one of a range of acts, including questioning, commanding, demanding and so on. Speech acts of this sort can be analysed in terms of the requirements that make them felicitous. See Austin and Searle.
An assertion has as its content a statement - that is, an assertion is performed using a statement.
Making an assertion that p counts as an undertaking that p is true.
An assertion will be sincere iff the person asserting p believes p.
So if Mac asserts that it is raining, we can conclude either that Mac believes that it is raining, or that Mac is being insincere.
Hence, if Mac asserts both that it is raining and also that he does not believe that it is raining, we can conclude that he is being insincere.
What is a "commitment within the language game" other than the same thing as what I've termed "impression"? When you take a stance, commit yourself to that stance, on affirming or denying some statement, what exactly are you doing, other than endorsing that affirmation or denial of that statement as the thing to be done?
It's like a political bumper sticker: when you put "TRUMP 2020" on your truck, the point of that is to take a stance of support in for Trump, and in doing so, hopefully induce others to do likewise. Moore's Paradox, in that analogy, is like having both "TRUMP 2020" and "I GO FOR JOE" bumper stickers: "so... you want me to vote for Trump, even though you're voting for Biden? Huh? Why would you encourage me to vote opposite of you? Who do you actually want to win?"
But so is assertion. Neither relation is clear enough to merit distinguishing it axiomatically from the other.
Quoting Banno
There. That at least rests the distinction on the background mentalism.
Dude, an assertion is spoken. Beliefs, not always. That'll do to distinguish them.
Quoting bongo fury What?
What else?
What could "asserts p mentally" possibly mean? Why twist "assert" into use in a private language? What rubbish is this?
Well, it being spoken does seem to be a pretty important part of it being a speech act.
How many other uspoken speech acts are you aware of? Or is it that you just have no fucking idea?
I'm not in favour of multiplying them. I'm recommending translating the mental talk into speech talk.
Quoting bongo fury
Then I'lll not pay much further attention to your recommendations. "Mental talk" - what sort of thing could that be?
I wasn't presuming otherwise.
Quoting Banno
Talk about human reference which uses theoretical terms implying mental entities such as beliefs.
What? Talk about human reference? As in, "Peter", "Jane"?
Do you suppose that beliefs sit in your mind like you sit in your comfy chair?
'cause talk like that will go a long way to explaining why Moor looked paradoxical.
Brandom's pragmatist account of language (together with his inferentialist semantics), which I am not fully endorsing, only expounding a little, here) is developed in the footsteps of Wilfrid Sellars who viewed language primarily as a game of giving and asking for reasons. A reason offered for believing (or expressing a commitment to) some proposition P may be another proposition Q that your interlocutor is committed to and that P logically is entailed by. You are generally entitled to propositions that aren't logically incompatible with any other propositions that you already had expressed a commitment to (by, for instance, asserting it). Likewise, by asserting P, and thereby incurring a commitment to P, you are losing entitlement to claims incompatible with P.
What you had termed "expression" is similar to the act of incurring a commitment by making an assertion. But your idea of an "impression" is not entailed by the idea of a commitments as just characterized. You interlocutor only must commit herself to propositions that you offer her reasons to endorse on the basis of premises that she already is committed to. Even if she remains unconvinced by your assertion (justifiably, by her own lights) you still incur the exact same commitments to the content of your assertion and to its logical consequences (as well as losing entitlement to incompatible claims) and she can hold you on account for failure to acknowledge some of them.
I agree.
No, I just meant study of meaningful discourse and communication. "Mental talk" meant mentalist talk: study which is of that subject matter and is of a mentalistic bent, tending to imply mental entities.
Quoting Banno
I'm not a believer: in minds, or beliefs, as such. So I was recommending translating that kind of picture into one making do with representing speech acts, and so on. Glossing beliefs as mental assertions seemed a plausible enough first step, although I'm not especially surprised if that gloss would outrage some people's, er, beliefs.
I meant (and thought I said) for impression to be the speech-act equivalent to ordinary full assertions, and expression to be something less than that. On this account you’re describing, what is the practical difference between saying “X” and saying “I think that X”?
On my account, the former is an ordinary assertion that X, which impresses an opinion, pushes it at others in a way that isn’t welcoming of disagreement; while the latter is merely expressing the speaker’s opinion, showing us what they think without any pressure to agree.
If we assume a speaker is honest, we assume the ordinary assertion with its impressive force to also imply an expression of the speaker’s own mind. But just that expressing function doesn’t seem to capture the usual function of assertions, which seem to do more than just show us what their speakers think, they seem to tell us what to think. Which is what makes “I think that X” a more timid, less forceful thing to say than just plain “X”: you’re withdrawing the impressive force that would come with an ordinary full assertion.
Done.
Some people.
That's the whole thing that makes this a paradox. There's nothing inconsistent about you disbelieving something true. But it sure somehow sounds inconsistent for you to say that that is the case.
Yes. That's been established and is not at issue as far as I'm concerned. Those do not directly contradict one another. That basically is Moore's first example. He compared that to another though, and that is where the problems show themselves. A report of another's thought and belief, and a report of one's own thought and belief are drastically different.
You cannot believe both, that "X" is true, and that you don't believe it.
That's the difference.
You can totally believe X is true and that another doesn't. You do. They do not. The same cannot be said about ourselves, unless we're talking about past events. Then, if one follows the rules of grammar, the verb tense changes to past tense. Moore's example used present tense. That's suspect language use(misuse) and that also adds to the oddity.
What else could 'infer' possibly mean other than 'form a belief that...'?
So why are we 'inferring' from listening to speech acts, but not 'inferring' from other perceptions? You seem to want my perception of water hitting the roof to be some kind of direct transfer of world-fact into my brain, yet speech acts are inferred. I can't see why you'd make such a distinction.
I don't know how you read that into anything I've said.
That's fine. I shouldn't have got back involved. There are some issues it's interesting to play around with, see what people think, there's others where it's just the same rehearsed script over again. I've had this conversation here a dozen times and it always ends the same way, it's like a zombie, you think you've killed it then up it comes a week later completely unaffected by the previous encounter. I'll leave you to it.
I fail to see the depth of this puzzle.
“Why is it absurd for me to say something true about myself?”
From MacIntosh view it's not true. It's as if Richard Dawkins would say "God exists, but I don't believe in God".
The only absurdity here is the construction of the sentence “It’s raining, but I don’t believe it is”.
And we all know you can conjure up many word-based paradoxes.
There are games in language in which "X but I don't believe X" make sense.
Ah, but if we pretend that he wasn't, then we can keep having fun.
Fair enough.
The thing is, Moore sentences screw with what, to a budding philosopher, might seem like natural answers to the general question, "Why do people say the stuff they do?"
There is, sad to say, a gulf between the fact that p and someone believing that p. Thus, even if people always and only said what they sincerely believe, we could not deduce p from someone asserting it, or from p that people would assert p and not assert ~p. So much we all know well enough.
We also all know that from someone asserting p we cannot conclude that they believe p. They may be insincere; they may have misspoken; they may not have meant p by saying what they said, even though we might take them to have meant p, and there are subcases of this last that are particularly noteworthy, such as irony.
But having gotten to irony, it looks like we've made a mistake.
A: "How was work?"
B: "Just peachy."
B is most likely not asserting that work was just peachy; she is asserting that work was not peachy at all by saying that it was. She is still asserting what she sincerely believes though, right?
A: "That bad, huh?"
B: "No, it was okay. Long stupid meeting this afternoon, that's all."
So B was also exaggerating, and didn't actually believe that the work day had been the opposite of peachy, although that is what she meant by what she said.
We can mostly infer what someone believes from what they say, and we probably have to, because reasons. We can even do this taking some extra steps between what they said and and what they meant by what they said. (Or "what they meant by saying what they said," if that's better.)
The connection between what someone means and what they believe is clearly not just (logical) implication, as we all know. It looks a lot of the time like what Grice called 'implicature': this is a slightly weaker connection than implication in that the audience is encouraged or expected to make an inference, but not only does the speaker not require their audience to infer their belief, the speaker might actually block that inference. Implicature is cancelable.
In the example above, we get one of each: in the first exchange, B encourages A to take her to mean work was the opposite of peachy; in the second exchange, B then cancels A's inference that B believes work was the opposite of peachy. And this is all perfectly ordinary. I've put some of Grice's terminology on it, but we all do this stuff everyday, and it seems barely even deserving the word 'theory'.
And it's also wrong. Moore sentences show that clearly, and Grice himself makes this very point. The inference of belief is not cancelable and is not implicature. I attempted a little sleight-of-hand here, which I'm guessing most readers caught: exaggeration is, like irony, a sort of insincerity, whether or not it is intended to deceive. Grice was aware of Moore's paradox. He treats irony as a violation of the maxim of quality*, and the assumption that the speaker believes what they (in the indicative mood) say as just assuming they are following the maxim. (And further, if you make an indicative mood utterance you intend that the audience think you believe what you are saying.)
According to this story, I'm not inferring that you believe p when you assert p, but assuming you do. (Leaving aside whatever interpretive hoops we jump through, for the moment.) When I assert p, I don't intend you to infer that I believe p, I intend you to believe that I believe it. Just the conclusion without the inference to get you there.
But are we really done with inference? Doesn't it seem like I'm actually reasoning something like this:
IF you assert that p AND IF you are observing the maxim of quality, THEN you believe that p.
Or we might put it this way:
IF you assert that p, THEN EITHER you believe that p OR you are not observing the maxim of quality.
Sure. But we could rephrase: when you say something either you believe it or you're lying, or exaggerating, or speaking ironically, or any of the other ways of violating the maxim. It's the violations that give rise to implicature, and the default is just non-inferential belief ascription.
I think this should strike most philosophers (of an analytic bent, anyway) as a somewhat bitter pill to swallow, rather like Hume showing you can't justify your reliance on induction. I think we want to say that ascribing beliefs to others based on their indicative mood utterances is rational -- and I believe it is -- but if it is, it is not because we infer what they believe from what they say. I mean to say: it is a question of rationality, within the sphere of reasoning, evidence and so on, not that "the rational thing to do" is believe people are always honest or something. Not the conclusion, but the process.
So if we are to find a place for rationality it's going to be somewhere else, which is a little surprising because the natural hook to hang rationality on would surely have been right around here somewhere, right? Language use, propositional attitudes, belief formation -- this looks like the place.
But we need something more. Since I've more than nodded at Grice, I'd like to be able to give his answer, but I'm not sure we get one. (And I'm no Grice scholar.) The next thing he reaches for should look familiar by now:
But this ends up not being much of an account, because all Grice is going to claim is that when you make an indicative mood utterance you intend the audience to think you believe it. That might get us to treating the commitments of indicative mood utterances as the same as belief reports, but nothing more. It's not an account of what those commitments are or of the sense in which the management of such commitments is a rational matter.
(No one take this as any kind of final word on Grice, please, because I think it likely he addresses these issues in stuff I haven't read. If anyone knows, speak up.)
* Try to make your contribution one that is true; do not say what you believe to be false; do not say what you do not have adequate evidence for.
Ah! Sorry. I may not have read you carefully enough.
On Brandom's account, the difference is pragmatic and perspectival. When one ascribes a belief to someone else (either second- or third-personally) one thereby takes them to be committed to the truth of the propositional content. (I am assuming that "X thinks that..." or "X believes that..." are equivalent). When one rather ascribes knowledge to someone else, one is likewise taking them to be committed to the truth of the propositional content but one is also thereby endorsing that content. That difference regarding first-personal endorsement vanishes in the case of first-personal ascription (or avowal) of belief or knowledge since one can't avow a personal commitment to the truth of a proposition while at the same time failing to endorse it. So, on that account, saying either one of "P", "I think/believe that P" or "I know that P" are pragmatically equivalent.
Such an account, I think, would threaten to make assertions of the form: "I very strongly believe that P; I'm pretty sure you are wrong to deny it" or "I don't merely believe it strongly, I know it for sure" pragmatically defective, if not outright inconsistent. On Brandom's account, they're not problematic at all.
I don’t see any pragmatic defect on the part of those by my account. The extra bits besides just “I believe P” are adding back in (some of) the impressive force that the “I believe” took away from just “P”.
That's an interesting take. But if the function of "I believe..." in "I believe P" primarily is to take away some of the pragmatic force from just "P", shouldn't "I strongly believe..." take away even more?
It seems to me that there may be a better account of the pragmatic force of "I believe ...", which I already sketched (following Brandom) but maybe should flesh out a little more in a direction Brandom himself might or might not endorse.
One way to make more obvious both the meaning and the pragmatic-perspectival character of "...believe(s) that ..." might be to make explicit its epistemic-perspectival character. Bare unqualified assertions that are simply meant to inform an interlocutor don't need modifiers like "I believe that..." or "I know that..." because they are typically offered in contexts where there is an assumed shared epistemic background between the speaker and listener. The speaker may be offering simple testimony to P, which she may know on some ordinary and unproblematic empirical or testimonial basis that the listener has no special ground or reason for challenging. The claim is expected to be believed by the listener (and impart knowledge upon her) by default.
If the claim that is being made rather has the form: "I know that P", this may make explicit that I take myself to be in a unique epistemic position to know it and therefore that I am in a position to justify my grounds for believing it to a listener that isn't herself yet in a position to take my word for it by default. Something more than mere assertion is required for her to be brought to share my epistemic perspective. When I want to acknowledge that the listener takes herself to be knowing that P while I myself am withholding any such claim to knowledge, because I believe her epistemic grounds to be faulty, then I can claim that she (merely) believes that P. So, in short, "X believe(s) that P" is closely equivalent to "P appears to be known to be true from the epistemic perspective of X". Although our capacity for knowledge is fallible we sometimes are in a position to know things to be true while at the same time recognizing that other wrongly take themselves to know them to be false.
So, on that view, "I strongly believe that P" means roughly: "I take myself to know that P and I have very little doubt that I am mistaken about knowing it" whereas "You strongly believe that P" means roughly "You take yourself to know that P and you have very little doubts that you are mistaken about knowing it". That difference in perspective explains, I think, why qualifying an assertion with the modifier "...believe(s) that..." can both be used to stress what one takes to be the good standing of one's epistemic credentials (when used first-personally) or be used to bring into question (and thereby attempt to weaken) someone else's credentials (when used third personally).
Curious that , , and seem to be vehemently agreeing with each other...
I think we're agreeing that Moore's paradox is instructive and suggestive rather than it being merely trivial or no puzzle at all. We aren't quite all on the same page regarding what it is exactly that it is suggestive of.
@Isaac thinks it overthrows the correspondence theory of truth with a single blow. That's a bit more vehement than anything I've posted.
Isaac throws out reality every second day. Perhaps some form of idealism goes with his predilection for psychology. But plainly there is a simpler solution. Hence he writes things such as:
Quoting Isaac
...confusing truth and belief.
It's not the truth of a statement that is a judgement; the judgement is whether one accepts the statement. Issac doesn't accept this, and hence finds himself in all sorts of bother.
Sure. Not sure that the differences are substantive. There seems to be agreement that, roughly, if one does not believe what one asserts, then one is being infelicitous.
I've looked for the original article from Moore. It seems to be "Reply to my critics", but I've not been able to acquire a PDF. Going back to the source of a philosophical meme such as this can be informative - often they have moved on over time, ending up a long way from their original purpose. See what it's like to be a bat and the tram problem for other instances.
(( I couldn't find it online either. Curious bit of history in the SEP article that Church seemed to have recently seen Moore's thing when he anonymously gave Fitch the horrifying paradox that bears his name. ))
So...
The problem, according to you, is trusting a speaker. And someone mentioned irony earlier...
A friend provided a copy of Replies to my critics, which I am investigating.
from A Defence of Common Sense
Now I had previously taken this to be an early reference to self-deception (@Isaac?); but it seems I may be mistaken.
It's no mere predilection, the pay's better.
Quoting Banno
The sum total of which thus far seems to consist only of the scorn of internet philosophers. If there's some other bother you suspect I might actually be forewarned of...
Quoting Banno
I thought it was Wittgenstein's letters. His letter to Moore gives a better account I think.
His criticism is equally pertinent here.
The absurdity of suggesting that "there's a fire in the next room" is about one thing and "I believe there's a fire in the next room" is about another.
(The reference in PI seems to just assume we know the paradox already.)
Maths Tutor: "Williams! What is three times seven?"
Williams: "Sir! I believe three times seven is twenty-one, sir."
Tutor: "Don't be irrelevant, Williams. I asked you about the product of three and seven, not your state of mind, which I assure you is of no interest to me or to anyone else."
Williams: "Sir?"
Tutor: "I have no interest in what you believe, Williams, which is I why did not ask you, 'What do you believe the product of three and seven is?'"
Williams: "Yes, sir. It's twenty-one, sir."
Tutor: "Andrews! Is Williams correct?"
Andrews: "I thin-- yes, sir. It's twenty-one."
Tutor: "Good! Now, we'll have no more of this 'believe' business in my classroom, is that clear?"
All: "Yes, sir!"
Oh, but young Williams's maths tutor is concerned precisely with Williams's state of mind, you might complain; his one job is to make sure Williams holds the right beliefs. Is that the only interpretation? Couldn't we also say the tutor's job is to ensure that Williams gives the correct answer when asked a direct question? I can just hear Wittgenstein describing this scenario as "training".
Wittgenstein's remark, by refusing to acknowledge the de dicto/de re distinction, has another little oddity:
Wittgenstein: "Is there a fire in the next room, Williams?"
Williams: "No, sir."
Wittgenstein: "Show it to me."
Williams: "Sir?"
Wittgenstein: "The fire I asked you about, Williams. Where is it?"
Williams: "There is no fire, sir."
Wittgenstein: "Don't be absurd, Williams. Would I have asked you about something that doesn't exist?"
Russell [ entering ]: "I believe, dear Wittgenstein, that young Williams here [ pats Williams on the head and winks at him ] is trying to say that the next room is such that if something is in it, it is not a fire."
Wittgenstein: "Oh shut up, Russell."
The "aboutness" of a sentence is not always a simple matter. What one can and can't say is almost never a simple matter. Why then should we expect to reach simple conclusions about what one can and can't say about what?
Indeed. I could get a dog to bark 'sausages' everytime he's asked 'what's for dinner' but that wouldn't make the dog's utterances any more about my dinner. We'd like to be able to deny that the dog's talking about my dinner, but on what grounds? I'd say on the grounds that he's not thinking of my dinner when answering, but if we're to somehow bypass mental states as gateways to the objects of sentences, then I'm not sure what defence is left us. Apparently, my dog must indeed be talking about my dinner!
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
At the risk of inducing apoplexy in banno et al, one element I do consider fairly simple about sentences is that their cause is either autonomic, or arising from models in our brain constituting our beliefs. The rain cannot cause me directly to form the words "it's raining". Barring some form of conditioning, whatever the weather is doing, it's effects must first travel through those parts of my brain responsible for forming beliefs prior to prompting me to utter the words. Given that, it's difficult, despite the complexity, to see how any proposition could be about anything other than some belief of mine. That is unless, as I suspect banno might like us to believe, those cortices have no effect whatsoever and simply pass the unadulterated effects from the world to our speech. Given the enormous effort we go to to make and maintain them, this seems unlikely.
If you want to tell a causal story about why we say what we do, you should probably also have a story that gets you from facts to meanings, or you never get "aboutness" at all. (Quine and Grice, to name two, both have such stories.)
Supposing that you can get aboutness here, how do you pick which cause in your chain is the one the utterance was about?
Suppose you've conditioned your dog to say "sausages" given a certain stimulus. The pathways are there, just waiting for it. (Making a hash of the neuroscience.) When that stimulus shows up and your dog says "sausages", isn't it more natural to single out that stimulus, or the event of its occurring, as of special importance, rather than whatever happened in your dog's brain? (Still not clear that cause would be what an utterance is about.)
As for whether your dog is talking about your dinner, even Ryle would have little trouble with that. A single conditioned response it's just not how we judge competence at understanding or producing meaningful speech.
I would like to hear if anyone else here thinks that “I believe...” strengthens rather than weakens an assertion, because that sounds very unusual to me. Even “I strongly believe that P” sounds weaker than just “P” to my ear. I asked my English major girlfriend her opinion, within letting her know mine first, and she said the same thing.
In any case, whatever specific wording conveys whatever specific force, the point of my impression/expression distinction is just that there is a difference in force there, where one can express a belief without fully asserting its truth, or impress it upon others. The later normally implies the former, but in the case of dishonesty doesn’t necessarily have to.
Well, on pain of being unable ourselves to say what our own utterances are about, it had better be something we have access to during the construction of those utterances, and that isn't the state of the world, only our inferences of it.
Either way, it would seem odd if we ourselves were not responsible for picking out what our own utterances were 'about'. And again, if we're to do that, from what selection do we have to choose? Not states of the world. Those are not in our minds, and we wish to be able to say for ourselves what our sentences are about. All we have then to select from are the inferences about those states, our beliefs.
I wouldn't say either that "I believe(s) that..." has the primary function to strengthen the force of an assertion either, only that it can do so and its ability to do so can easily be accounted for (when it does) on the basis of what it is that I take to be the primary function of that predicate (as used either first- ,second-, or third-personally). And that's to stress that what is thereby being pragmatically modified (the bare assertion made by X, or that X stands ready to rationally defend such a belief when prompted to do so) is supported by X's specific epistemic perspective. In different contexts, such an act of alluding to the specificity of someones epistemic perspective can both function to raise doubt about it or to point out its privileged or authoritative status.
When used first personally, the predicate "I believe that..." may function a little bit like the expression "Bring it on!" when challenged to a fight. It could betray that one is confident in one's defensive skills or it could constitute an acknowledgement of the other person's entitlement to her belief that she might win the fight. "Yes, I really believe it to be true" might be though of, similarly, as the acceptance of a challenge to an epistemic fight.
(Edited above to replace "standing" with "perspective")
I am holding on on commenting on this part of your post until I'm finished with a paper I'm currently working on. Some friends are waiting...
I'm just not following this. Do we make inferences and form beliefs about the world and its state, even though we don't have access to it?
Listen...
Moore's second example is someone recognizing their own mistake, while it's happening, and that - my friends - is humanly impossible.
While we can see someone else's mistake while it's being made, as in the first example, we cannot 'see' that we are making a mistake while in the process of doing so. That is the crucial consideration that needs to be immediately moved and kept in the forefront of this discussion.
It is humanly impossible to knowingly make a mistake; to make a mistake on purpose. It is likewise humanly impossible to knowingly believe a falsehood. We do not realize that we're making a mistake while we're in the process of making them. Moore's present tense verb usage in his second example renders exactly such an impossibility.
We cannot believe both statements at the same time because we cannot recognize that we're mistaken while we are. The only way we can believe both statements at the same time is if we misuse verb tense while accounting and/or describing our own past mistakes.
Isaac's earlier example illustrated this. One could say "Look it's raining, but I do not believe it's raining" while viewing a video of themselves being mistaken. However, and this is key too...
Such talk is the recognition of one's own mistakes, while being made, and even in the cases of viewing a past recording of our own mistakes while they were happening(watching a video of ourselves being surprised by rainfall)... the time sensitive grammatically correct rendering - a true account/self-report - would be "Look, it was raining, but I did not believe it."
Inferences are formed from our perceptions (formed from our senses). Utterances are not the direct result of our senses (except in very rare cases). So they must arise from our inferences. During the construction of sentences (that being the key caveat) we are not accessing the world. We are accessing our inferences about it.
There is a distinction between the statement "there is a fire in the next room" and the assertion "there is a fire in the next room.
Quoting Isaac
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Indeed; @Isaac seems to go astray here.
Quoting Isaac
This is very strange. It's oddly parallel to Stove's Gem: we only have access to our inferences about the world, and hence we do not have access to the world...
Incipient idealism...
I'll comment Austin to all hereabouts. There you will find both an account of the distinction between a mere statement and an assertion, and learn to re-connect with the real world.
x->y->z
Causal separation can smell a lot like causal isolation.
If I told you that x approximates y with error, and that y approximates z with error, one way of reading the processes is that z only approximates x given y. Another way of reading it is that z approximates x using its dependence upon y.
In these terms, it's a question of whether access behaves like a walk or a neighbour in a causal chain. Isolation given a given can be the same thing as access without one.
oyster->oyster perception connection in eating->human eating oyster
We cannot eat the oyster in itself as eating is a perceptual interaction = We eat the oyster in itself using a perceptual interaction.
Do you emphasize causal separation given (the middle node in the graph) or that the oyster is eaten (that the middle node on the graph acts on the first node to produce the third)?
One of those philosophical distinctions pretending it is not, @Isaac throws environmental interventions like eating into the process of perception.
I'm not here to argue that we don't eat oysters, I'm here to point out that a naive realist (among which I count myself) and representational realist (in the sense that we interact with the world only using representational processes) agree on the causal chain of eating oysters.
Yes, well, I drive a car by sitting like so, and moving my arms and legs thus. But moving my arms and legs thus is not driving a car.
Maybe, but only in terms of what I intend each to do in the world, not in terms of the objects of reference in each case, the means by which I select the words 'fire' and 'room' out all the words I know.
Quoting Banno
a) at no point did I say we don't have access to the world, merely that we don't access it when making propositions. I was quite clear about that. We access the world through our senses. We do not form propositions using the the signals coming from our senses.
b) that some philosopher opposed it is not itself an argument, even if he's Australian.
Quoting Banno
It's not philosophical contemplation. The idea comes from computational neuroscience. Not that I want to get into some 'he said, she said' mundanity, but it is philosophical contemplations that would simplify things for human convenience. It is actual investigations of how the brain works which raise the need for a more complex theory.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes, but if I hit a wall and then remove the wall, I'm still hitting. What you've shown is that some activities are described including multiple components, whilst others are not. What matters here is which our speech acts are, and fortunately we now have things like magnetic imaging to help us work this out. As fdrake said...
Quoting fdrake
We're not here arguing about the nature of a causal chain from actual world to speech acts,. Despite banno's protestations, none of us are idealists, we all agree that the external world exists and affects us via our senses. At issue is only where along that chain it is sensible to say the object of the utterance at the end of it is.
The process goes
state of reality>sensory responses>belief that it's raining>belief that I'd be best off telling someone>speech act "it's raining"
That much is pretty much indisputable.
Correspondence theory would have the truth of the final stage measured by the first, but since no one can contemplate, feel or talk about the first without it having passed through at least stages 2 and 3 it seems an unnecessary conceit to pretend it's stage 1 we're talking about. Especially as we cannot, no matter how hard we try, disentangle those stages from our embeddedness in the world (both social and physical).
We could, as I think some do, have 'truth' as being the better approximation to stage 1, which seems viable, but my concern with that is that it is reliant on yet other beliefs about the errors some faulty belief has generated. Simpler to just be honest about the actual real-world use if term 'true', which, to paraphrase Ramsey, it just that belief which would, if acted upon, bring about the expected result.
It's best, I think, to see speech as an act, that it does something. In this sense, the truth of a statement is not so relevant as it's felicity? - (@fdrake, is that the term I'm looking for?).
This resolves the paradox because in the majority of circumstances "it's raining, but I don't believe it is" is simply infelicitous.
So, in this,
Quoting bongo fury
... we are confronted with, either:
"Belief" is (arguably) just a customary way of separating out a system of assertions peculiar to one or more persons (or momentary time-slices of a person), separate from some more general system. In which case, the same choice of analyses applies for "but I don't believe it" as for "but I don't assert it".
So, because we use sensory responses to detect rainfall, we cannot talk about that which we're detecting?
Ah, so yo do see the distinction! Hope remains.
Quoting Isaac
So if I propose "I had oysters for lunch", am I talking about oysters, or something else - perceptions, brain states, beliefs or whatever?
I say oysters.
And if that's the case, how is it that my proposition does not "access the world"?
On reviewing the SEP article I discovered that the distinction is from Peirce. I'm not surprised.
The analysis I have in mind is from Austin, with its roots and branches in the work of other Analytic philosophers. The statement "there is a fire in the next room" has sense and reference, but no illocutionary force - nothing has been done with it. The assertion "there is a fire in the next room" has an illocutionary force - it is being used to make an assertion. Having an illocutionary force places the statement in a relation to the speaker.
Arguably, no statement is ever entirely bereft of any illocutionary force, and might be considered a "dud ticket". But we use them quite routinely when doing logic, so I'm not too concerned about that.
And we can do all the logic we want on just those gerund ideas of states of affairs. “All men being mortal” and “Socrates being a man” entail “Socrates being mortal”, but in making that inference we haven’t yet committed to any claims that any of those states of affairs are the case, or ought to be the case.
Quoting Banno
These seem like the same issue. One thing that frustrates me about philosophy is that it seems, to my untrained impression, to be sometimes trying to bridge a divide which there is no need to bridge, where each side merely butts up to the other seamlessly. Of course, in normal language we can talk of oysters and we all know what we're talking about. No one has the slightest problem with that. But as a result of no-one having the slightest problem with that, there's nothing further to say about it. There's no issue to solve, no problem of interest.
We might then want to look a little deeper for some specific reason - maybe a problem of language intrigues us, or some pathology we want to cure - we want to know what's going on in more detail and in order to do that we have to break up a normal process we're all quite happy with into stages and processes which seem strange to us (of course they do, we don't normally think of them this way). All this is fine too - we know we're doing this just to resolve the issue, not to dictate some new way of being in the world.
But here, in the middle of this (fairly scientific) process, philosophy will step back in and say "but that's not how things seems to us!". Well, we knew that. If we wanted to leave things how they seemed to us we wouldn't have started in the first place. No one says "It's raining, but I don't believe it is". So nothing about this is going to relate to how things 'seem to us'. If you want the resolution to come out as something which sits with what already seems to you to be the case, then there's no point even looking.
If, on the other hand, we want to see if the nature of this artificial problem gives us a frame we didn't already have, a map we weren't already making use of, then we'd be foolish to judge the results by whether things look the same as they do through the frame we're already using.
That being said, the actual answer to your questions is that in normal day-to-day life we're talking about aspects of the real world. Oysters. But if we want to know why "It's raining, but I don't believe it is" sounds weird, we're going to need a different frame, because no one says that in day-to-day life.
I suggested we look at the motivating forces producing utterances to see why they'd never produce such a one. Looking at these we see that utterances cannot be produced directly by objects in the world, objects must first have some effect on our senses, then on our beliefs, then finally on our speech centres.
Once we have this model we can see that the only way the rain (as a state of the external world) could prompt us to any utterance at all is via the exact state of mind we're describing in the second half of the sentence. We cannot, therefore, assess the former without it being an assessment of the latter. We might. It's not logically impossible, but we just don't appear to when we look at what the brain actually does.
What you see as seamless has perhaps been a great division amongst philosophers.
I've been clearer.
Quoting Banno
That would indeed be ironic and a shame, since a focus on tokens is usually (e.g. in Carnap and Goodman and Quine, I don't know about Peirce) motivated by a nominalist aspiration to remove unnecessary metaphysical entities.
Doubly ironic that you contrast it with speech act theory, which seems to have continued an anti-abstract trend away from positing of (as entities) propositions to only sentences to only statements on particular occasions. (Yay, tokens! ... utterances, inscriptions.) Trouble is, Austin then starts multiplying unnecessary psychological abstractions (the forces, yuk). And the abstract metaphysical entities (states of affairs, yikes) have sneaked back in, as "content".
I read Goodman as saying, observe the discourse instead as a proliferation of sentence tokens which are acts of predication i.e. pointing of symbols at things.
Quoting Banno
Great, and when you do logic, aren't you writing (or uttering) tokens, and excluding or contextualising (e.g. attaching "not" tokens to) contradictory ones, from within a system of proliferation of assertive tokens?
In the interests of comity, I'm going to speak here with a looseness I'm immediately disavowing.
I believe the sticking point is this: meaning, referring and believing are part of our frame not yours, part of folk psychology, not neuroscience. That's why you'll find no takers for your claim that when someone says it's raining they're talking about something that's going on in their head. No one anywhere will assent to that. Ask a non-philosopher and they'll tell you that people who believe things like that get locked up and put on heavy meds.
If you restrict yourself to telling the neurophysiological story of how rain is detected by our senses, how the brain generates predictions about the near future based on this new data, how we reflexively respond to seeing someone heading for the door without an umbrella and certain parts of the brain spring into action to prepare and then cause yet another complex subsystem to emit the sound "It's pouring outside!" -- tell that story and mostly people will be fascinated, marvel at what science has learned, and have no problem.
It's not entirely your fault, of course, because the early modern philosophy canon we're still obsessed with is full of groping attempts at psychology (as we can find groping attempts at linguistics, or physics or other sciences throughout our strange history), and since these philosophers weren't clear on the two frames they're mashing together, by and large neither are we.
Well, no, it's actually not. You see where you've placed a division between reality, sensory responses, and belief that it's raining, I reject those divisions based upon the fact that all belief consists - in large part - of the first two. There can be no removal of reality(rainfall) or physiological sensory perception. What's left would not have what it takes for belief that it's raining.
The problem I see with the model you're proposing is that it leads us to say that we're not talking about rainfall, or that we do not have direct access to the world. But we are, and we do. Therefore, the model is wrong somewhere along the line. It's also untenable. If held to strictly, you would be forced to admit, on pains of coherency, that 'state of reality' is just another thing you've arrived at via the second and third steps of the process... or end in self contradiction.
Banno "et al," forsooth.
Speaking on behalf of "et al", I wish to note something once wisely said about philosophy. No, not the comment made by my daemon Cicero that "there is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it," which is something of a truism. Rather, the statement of C. S. "Charlie Logic" Peirce: "Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts." Why? Because there be dragons which make Puff himself look like something we meet on the street each day.
I think Peirce would say, similarly, that we shouldn't pretend in philosophy that a paradox is presented by describing as true a statement which nobody would make about himself/herself, let alone make at all, in any circumstances which resemble what takes place in the life of humans. What we learn from such a fabrication, beyond the fact that it is clearly a fabrication (which can be determined with very little effort) can only be a fabrication itself.
My girlfriend similarly asked why anyone would say anything like the statement in question, and I said in response that they wouldn’t, because it would be such an odd thing to say, but the interesting question, what makes for the paradox, is WHY is it such a weird thing to say about oneself that nobody would ever say it, but it’s not at all weird to say about others? That difference is the origin of the paradox, and the thing that may be illuminating upon our understanding of language.
But it would be a weird thing to say about another. Because in order to say that another is saying the same thing, it would be necessary to say that they said or say it's raining, but don't believe it is, or said or say it's raining, but said or also says they don't believe it's raining. Only then would MacIntosh be saying, as does McGillicudy, that it's raining but he doesn't believe it's raining.
My answer is because when you say "it's raining", you're not only telling someone ("impressing") about the rain, you're also showing something about your beliefs ("expressing") about the rain. If you say it's raining but someone else doesn't believe it, you're showing something about your beliefs, while telling about someone else's, so there's no room for contradiction. If you say it's raining but you don't believe it, you're showing something about your beliefs, while telling something to the contrary about them.
To get the same weird effect in talking about someone, you have to use a different sentence. You have to say something about what they say is a fact and about what they believe. You can't just say something is a fact and then say whether someone believes it, because that only has weird possibilities when the someone is yourself.
It doesn't say "I say it's raining" because "I" clearly is speaking, saying, that it's raining. It isn't necessary to say you're speaking when you're speaking. That in itself would be peculiar.
When someone says it's raining, they merely say that. They say nothing about themselves. The say something about the weather.
Then you agree the Moore sentence is not a contradiction. So what's wrong with it? Why is it something no one would ever say?
Hoping this hasn't been previously addressed in this long thread:
We would say “It’s raining” when we do not believe it is raining whenever we would intend to lie to another about what the given state of affairs is. But since acknowledging one is lying while actively lying defeats the very intention of lying which one is engaged in, and since we in practice cannot experience intending to lie while simultaneously intending not to lie (this being a contradiction), saying “It’s raining, but I don’t believe it’s raining” is something no one would ever say in earnest.
But, then, in so arguing I find that the statement, “It’s raining, but I don’t believe it is,” is contradictory in terms of the intentions it implies on the part of the speaker who so affirms.
A statement is made regarding the weather by X. Then, X says he doesn't believe the statement he just made regarding the weather. When people say they don't believe what they just said is the case, that strikes me as indicative of a problem with the sentence, and possibly a much greater problem with the speaker.
Absolutely everyone agrees to all of this.
Moore's hypothetical speaker makes two separate claims in the same sentence at the same time. That much is clear and uncontentious. They cannot both be believed at the same time. That much is also clear and uncontentious. That's it. That's exactly why it "sounds absurd".
What else is needed here?
Moore described a situation of an individual speaker making two statements - at the same time - that cannot both be believed the same time.
What remains puzzling?
A different but equally effective de-mystification would be to just realize that Moore's 'puzzle' describes what would be taking place IF one were able to see themselves as they see another while in the midst of being mistaken about the weather. That's precisely what's going on in the first example. One person is watching another be mistaken about the weather as it's happening. That example is not a problem at all. However, one who is in that situation cannot recognize that they are mistaken. In such a situation, one IS NOT capable of watching themselves but that's what's being described - as is clearly shown by talking in the third person about oneself using present verb tense.
Yet again... that's it. What on earth remains so puzzling? Moore's 'puzzle' describes what would be taking place IF one were able to see themselves being mistaken about the weather as the mistake is happening. We cannot do that.
Moore set out a hypothetical scenario that does not - cannot - happen. We all know this, even if we cannot quite explain it to our own satisfaction. That's exactly why it "sounds absurd". If anyone has trouble de-mystifying Moore's 'puzzle', I would suggest taking a long hard look at your notion of human thought and belief, because that's precisely what is being misunderstood within the 'puzzle' itself.
What makes it puzzling is when and if it cannot be effectively de-mystified(solved) by using one's framework...
If one's framework takes adequate account of the sentence and why/how it seems puzzling, if one can explain away the puzzle, untie the linguistic knots, dissolve the issue, then there is no need for a new framework.
If I were to make some claim or another that human thought and belief could exist in their entirety without a complex brain with certain structures, you would immediately dismiss such claims... and rightfully so, because you(and I) both already know better...
Yup...
Regardless of sincerity... one cannot believe both statements at the same time.
Right, so the original sentence isn't of the form "X says P but X doesn't believe P".
It's just of the form "P but X doesn't believe P".
The former form of sentence would not sound contradictory for any value of X, even oneself; it just describes someone who is lying, saying something they don't believe. I can easily say "I say P but I don't believe P"; I'm just telling you I'm lying when I say P.
The latter form of sentence doesn't sound contradictory for any value of X besides oneself, but then it does sound contradictory when said about oneself. I can't say "P but I don't believe P" without seeming to contradict myself, even though it's totally logically possible and non-contradictory that P might be the case and yet I might not believe it. If I say it about anybody else, the lack of problem there is clear: "P but Bob doesn't believe P" just means Bob is wrong about P. It's logically possible that I might be wrong about P too, so why does it seem so weird to say "P but I don't believe P" that nobody would ever utter a sentence of that form?
(Because saying P shows that I believe P, so if I'm simultaneously telling you I don't believe P, what I show and what I tell are in contradiction. While if I say the same thing about someone else, I show you what I believe but tell you what they believe, so there's no possibility of self-contradiction there, because the beliefs I'm showing off and the beliefs I'm telling about are different people's beliefs).
I don’t think this is right (even though I conceded to @Michael earlier that it was). I find the sentence to be absurd whether the speaker is lying or not. Also, it’s not much of a lie.
It is absurd to assert ‘P but I don’t believe P’ whether honestly or not. You, @Pfhorrest, previously made the distinction roughly that ‘P’ is a strong form of assertion and ‘I believe P’ (or ‘I don’t believe P’) is a weak(er) form of assertion. The absurdity of honestly expressing ‘P but I don’t believe P’ is clear enough. But even if a speaker were lying about one or the other, there seems to be no reasonable circumstance in which someone would express both simultaneously. And it’s a terrible lie! Why would someone lie using that absurd form of expression? Why would one lie about P and also claim not to believe their own lie? Why would one honestly assert P and also lie about disbelieving it?
Additionally, I think someone previously raised the example where it would make sense to assert the paradoxical statement, such as ‘I’ve won lotto; I can’t believe it’. This is not true disbelief; only an expression of great surprise.
S1: "P but X doesn't believe P."
S2: "X says P but X doesn't believe P."
You're talking about the first, S1, which is the form of the original sentence Moore was concerned with, and you're right in everything you say about that. That sentence is absurd in some way or another when X = the person saying it.
Ciceronianus was saying that the sentence is equally absurd whether or not X = the person saying it, but then he gave S2 as the form of the sentence. I agree that S2 is equally absurd no matter the value of X, but that's because it's a different sentence, and it's not really absurd at all. It's saying that someone says other than they believe; in other words, they lie.
If I were to tell you that "I say my dick is enormous but I don't actually believe it is", say in the context of me talking to women, I'd just be telling you that I lie about my dick size. I'd be telling you that I lie to them, not trying to lie to you in the moment right there.
That's a different sentence though than "My dick is enormous but I don't believe it is". That's absurd, just like the original Moore sentence, which is of the same form.
But "Bob's dick is enormous but he doesn't believe it is", of the same form as that, makes perfect sense. Bob is underconfident about his dick size. It's not absurd to say that about someone else, only about oneself.
But that's a different sentence than "Bob says his dick is enormous but he doesn't believe it is". That just means that Bob lies about his dick size, exactly like the sentence where I did, which is of a different form than Moore's sentence.
So... "thanks, but no thanks"?
I think there's a lot of confusion in this thread about what Moore's paradox is a paradox of. Here's Wittgenstein
And Moore himself is reported to have said the sentence is "an absurdity for psychological reasons" - According to Wittgenstein's report of the lecture.
Despite the herculean efforts of most posters here to avoid any psychological talk and focus on the 'say-ability' of the sentence, this was never the object of the paradox. The object of the paradox was entirely psychological - according to Moore. It was entirely about the proper truth judgement of each part, why we are (seemingly) incapable of judging it 'true' that it's raining, but also true that 'I believe it's not raining' when those two things appear to have different subjects.
As I said earlier, Moore, Wittgenstein and (inadvertently) Ramsey had different solutions, but what they were solving was not "can we say 'It's raining, but I don't believe it's raining'?". All agree that the answer to that question is "yes we can, under some odd circumstances". Nor are they answering the question "does saying 'It's raining, but I don't believe it's raining', sound like a contradiction because it would be odd to believe both at the same time?". All agree that the answer to that question is "yes".
The question they're answering is "why can't I believe both at the same time?" Why can't I hold one belief about my state of mind and another about the state of the world?
So all this talk about say-ability misses the point which is about why we cannot hold those two beliefs, the words we say (as I've tried to explain) merely reflect some belief, literally cannot but do otherwise.
You appear to suggest that Moore, Wittgenstein and Ramsey were in agreement on this. However, according to Marie McGinn, Wittgenstein did not agree with Moore about this:
Yes. I didn't mean to imply they were all in agreement about the cause of the dissonance, that's why I tacked on "according to Moore" at the end of that bit. What I think they're in agreement about is that it is the beliefs themselves which are at odds.
Yes. Unfortunately we can only gather very little of Moore's meaning from that one letter which is why I quoted from PI. It seems clear, at least to me, that Wittgenstein's objection to merely psychological was not about moving the issue from belief to grammar, but about not limiting the issue to one of mere cognitive dissonance, which I'm guessing from the context is what Moore might have implied in his lecture. If we don't adopt that understanding of the passage in PI it make Wittgenstein's later comments in 'On Certainty' difficult to understand, no?
I would concur, and add the following...
To lie is to deliberately misrepresent one's own thought and belief. All lies share this common feature/trait/denominator. When one lies about whether or not it is raining, they do not say both, that it is raining, and that they do not believe it is raining.
"It's raining, but I do not believe it" is not a lie. It's just plain old textbook self-contradiction.
Yes, but under traditional correspondence theory, that has no relevance. The first part has its truthmaker in the state of the world, the second in the state of my mind.
Put it like this. Is there any problem with me saying
According to correspondence theory there should be nothing wrong with me saying that. The judgement of the truth value of "it's raining" depends on the state of the world, the judgement of the truth value of "I believe it's raining" depends on the state of my mind. If the state of the world can be judged independently to the state of my mind, then there should be no problem with me making the statement quoted above.
But there is a problem, or at least it seems there is. Hence correspondence theory has to go.
I've no idea what relevance that has to what I've offered here. From what I remember, I'm no traditional correspondence theorist. There's much to argue with concerning the rest of that post, but it is all equally beside the point. I'm just showing that Moore's 'puzzle' is a result of not having a clue of what belief is and how it works.
This is a better rendering... the nail in the coffin, as it were...
One cannot believe that "It's raining" is true when they do not believe it is raining.
We all know that much.
Of course we all know that. The problem is when we try to explain why. Ramsey's solution is simple, it's because 'I believe that P', 'P is true' and 'P' all amount to the same thing in ordinary use, just asserting P.
Holding that 'P is true' means something of another class to 'I believe P' is where the problem starts.
Marie Mcginn's article (PDF) is worth a read. She offers this account of Moore's paradox and his solution:
This is pretty much what many people here, including myself, have suggested: that it is simply absurd for a speaker both to assert P and to assert he does not believe it.
Quoting Isaac
I am not familiar with Ramsey's solution, but - assuming your account is correct - this is what sparks Wittgenstein's interest: 'P' (or 'P is true') and 'I believe that P' are not equivalent in all contexts. Moore's paradox reveals something interesting about the grammar of the word 'believe'. If these were equivalent, then you would expect that tense would not alter their equivalence. However, as you have already quoted (from Wittgenstein):
If 'P' and 'I believe that P' "amount to" the same assertion, then their meanings should not change with tense.
I find McGinn's presentation of Wittgenstein's solution to be somewhat nuanced, but at its base is the familiar motif of his later philosophy:
What I consider to be the important points of (McGinn's interpretation of) Wittgenstein's solution:
If that's the case, then it seems to me that debating, or perhaps more properly discussing, this "paradox" at length is nothing more than an effort to explain what nobody would ask to be explained in the first place.
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
Like all paradoxes the solution was found in a re-wording of the issue. Resolving this paradox resulted fairly directly in the logic of speech acts, which was not a bad thing.
You see, I'd have hoped that would result without the need for this contrivance. Ah well. But what on earth is Marie McGinn speaking about? Surely (I know I shouldn't call you that) she means "there are truths about me which I cannot assert without appearing absurd"?
Each and every time we hold some false belief or another; each and every time we are in the process of being mistaken about the way things are, someone else could state something true about our being mistaken, about our holding false belief, and there would be no issue whatsoever.
However...
Because we cannot recognize our own mistakes; because we cannot make a mistake on purpose; because we cannot knowingly believe a falsehood; we cannot say some things that are true about ourselves despite the fact that others have no problem at all stating such things.
No need for some elaborate explanations. Isn't that exactly what peer review is all about? The fact that we cannot recognize our own mistakes?
Moore's example describes a person who knowingly holds false belief.
:brow:
"I do not believe it's raining outside, but I'm wrong" describes the exact same situation as "It's raining outside, but I do not believe it".
Bewitchment... indeed.
If she means that, then she's absolutely correct. They are virtually innumerable such true statements(if that's what you mean by "truths") about one that they cannot assert about themselves without sounding 'absurd'.
Interesting article, thanks.
Is it anywhere explained why? I've read the article, but not with any great depth. I can't find an explanation for this assertion. It seems on the face of it rather an odd thing to say. If the thing that someone asserts (the matter the sentence is about) can be about something which is outside of their mind, then why does saying it imply they believe it? I agree that saying it implies they believe it, but I get there via the fact that the assertion can be about nothing else but the belief (not the fact of their belief, the content of it). I'm not clear if McGinn is disagreeing with this, but the context you raised it in seems to suggest so, yet I can't see how to get to such an implicature without this content substitution.
Quoting Luke
I don't think this is the case because beliefs change, so "I believed then that it was raining" is about a past belief (where the state of one's mind becomes the object), and "It did then rain" is a current belief (about the historical fact). One doesn't, admittedly, escape from the the issue of needing to see it as impossible for one to have a belief about one's current beliefs (where one can have a belief about one's past beliefs). But this 'psychological' issue is present as an assumption in all solutions so I don't see it as a blocking point to Ramsey's. This is pretty much what Wittgenstein says later, as you quote.
Quoting Luke
...ie, we can't have a belief about our mental states. Consider, in this light though "I believed..." which is used exactly that way - a description of one's mental state. So either way we have the meaning changing with the tense. We don't seem to be able to escape that.
Other than that, I'm inclined to agree with much of the remaining assessment of the variations in the use of "I believe..." as it progresses over tenses.
My take...
Why is it the case that someone who asserts "It is raining" does not thereby assert that they believe it is raining? Well, because "I believe it is raining" contains different words than "It is raining".
Why does asserting "X" imply that one believes "X'? Well, because that's what happens when a listener does not doubt the sincerity of the speaker.
I would guess that 'It is raining' is about the weather, whereas 'I believe it is raining' is about one's belief. The belief may be implied by the former statement, but it is not asserted. Perhaps your views are different to Moore's.
Quoting Isaac
This misses the point. In the present tense, 'P' and 'I believe that P' have the same meaning, as Ramsey contends. However, Wittgenstein's example demonstrates that these two statements each have a different meaning in the past tense. Since 'P' and 'I believe that P' do not have the same meaning in the past tense, then Ramsey is incorrect to make the unqualified assertion that they both have the same meaning/use.
Quoting Isaac
I consider this a unique view of the matter. This would imply that all assertions are about beliefs rather than, e.g., about the world.
Surely there are at least some cases in which we know for certain whether it did in fact rain, like the time I got drenched walking home without an umbrella.
Quoting Isaac
I don't follow your logic here. If Wittgenstein's aim is to show that 'I believe...' is not a description of my own mental state, or that this is not how the expression 'I believe...' is used, then how is Wittgenstein making it a psychological issue? He is trying to avoid viewing it as a psychological issue. This is what Wittgenstein finds problematic about Moore's solution, according to McGinn.
Quoting Isaac
As the article states: "The paradox concerns the first-person present indicative use of the verb ‘to believe’". It is not paradoxical in the third-person use, or in the first-person use in past or future tenses. It is distinctively paradoxical only in the first-person present indicative use of the verb.
Wittgenstein's solution is to break the assumption (shared by Moore) that 'I believe...' is a description of one's own mental state. To quote from the article again:
Yes, we can have belief about our own belief, and they not only can be, but must be true belief. The alternative is confusion, lunacy, and/or insanity(not knowing what to believe or why). What we cannot have is false belief about what we believe.
Why is one of these a description of one's mental state but the other is not?
Do you see it differently?
Could you say more about how either statement is a description of one's mental state?
Well, here and now... not strictly speaking. It's better to note that I'm reporting upon some common language uses, as are we all...
However, I could be and have been the speaker saying such a thing, when I'm uncertain and/or doubt that(whatever that may be). I'm sure the same could be said of most anyone who regularly uses "I believe" as a means to express uncertainty about that(whatever that may be). Such use is amenable to interchangeability of "believe" and "think". Not all are.
Quoting Luke
"I believe" can be used to indicate both uncertainty and certainty. Strictly speaking, I wouldn't call either a "description". I've borrowed that word from others here. "I believe, but I'm not certain" is about one's own mental state nevertheless, in these situations, to be clear.
I don't follow how the above statement is about one's own mental state but "I believe that some philosophical positions are better than others" is not.
One is about philosophical positions and there is no uncertainty and/or hesitation involved regarding the truth of the statement(that), while the other is about both that(whatever that may be) and one's own low confidence level(doubt, uncertainty) that that is so, is true, is the case. etc.
"I believe that some philosophical positions are better than others, but I'm not certain as to why or how" is about grading philosophical positions, and one's own uncertainty and/or doubt about what makes some better than others.
Quoting Luke
I'm not following. Which description?
But it's not the belief itself which is "a description of one's mental state" in that case; it's the doubt about the belief.
I've never claimed otherwise. Sometimes "I believe" indicates doubt, particularly when someone says "I believe, but I'm not certain". Those uses are about one's own uncertainty/confidence level concerning the belief statement(s) in question(X or that).
You did make this claim, in your now deleted post:
Quoting creativesoul
You state above: ""I believe" can be [...] a description of one's mental state". This is what I have been questioning.
I stand by everything I've written. I'm actually glad you resurrected that bit. The deletion was accidental.
"I believe" can be a description(part of one anyway) of one's confidence level. I never said "I believe" is always used that way. Hence, sometimes it is not. The example(sentence) we were discussing at the time you said this...
Quoting creativesoul
...did not qualify as one of the uses of "I believe" that can, and does, refer to one's own certainty and/or confidence level(state of mind). So, when you said what you said, about that particular example, I answered accordingly...
I never said otherwise... about that particular example/candidate under our consideration.
Hopefully that helps to clear up any misunderstanding about that particular part of our conversation.
I've offered numerous examples of such usage.
That's what I've never claimed. So when you said it "was not the belief itself which is a description of one's mental state", I would agree.
I said "I believe" can be a description of one's mental state, or part of one anyway. I adopted that terminological choice from others here. I wouldn't necessarily choose it. There are much better ways to untangle the knots here.
No. I'm saying exactly what you claimed I'm not. I'm not saying exactly what you said I was.
:brow:
The certainty/doubt is the mental state.
"I believe, but I'm not sure..." refers to(is all about) one's own mental state. "I believe, but I'm not sure that X" is about one's own doubt concerning the truth of X.
Come to think of it.
:wink:
Speak for yourself. Though I can, of course, make statements about myself (whether false or true) in an tone or voice which will make those statements sound absurd, or in a manner which will appear absurd, or in circumstances in which the statements are absurd. But I'd guess that's not what you mean.
The photograph thing is clever. I had matter-of-factly observed that we can't deduce p from someone's asserting p -- never occurred to me to imagine deducing p from my believing that p.
But this is another point of divergence between the first- and not-first-person cases: we regularly infer p from the fact, which we (let's say) infer from what they say, that someone trustworthy, either in general or just in the matter at hand, believes that p. It is plausibly our principal way of gathering knowledge. This sort of inference is clearly reasonable even if we grant the point at the top, that there's no logical but only probable implication to be had here.
[s]But in the first-person case? 'It must be true because I believe that it is' is a non-starter. Not only not deductive but not even probable, and in fact just not conformant with our standards of rationality.[/s] This looks wrong, on second thought. Of course someone could say, 'I'm probably right about this, because I'm usually right about this sort of thing.' No, the issue is whether they could take their own belief that p as evidence that p, and if it's evidence then it could count as a reason for believing that p!
That's pretty interesting.
Surprising answer, given that I thought that you and I shared quite a bit of overlap(agreement) in our respective views in this thread.
Do you not agree that there are a large group of true statements about an individual that the individual cannot assert about themselves without sounding absurd?
Do you object to the following paragraph?
Assuming linguistic competency, each and every time an individual observes another being surprised by rainfall, the observer has the ability to talk about the observations in terms of another individual's lack of true belief. We can watch another from the beginning to the end, so to speak, have no clue that it is raining outside before being suddenly surprised. We can do a live report.
In times like these, we can most certainly say something true about another in terms of their lack of true belief about the weather.
We cannot say the same of ourselves, while it's happening to us, because it's happening to us; which means that we are the one lacking true belief about the weather. Moore wonders why we cannot same the same about ourselves. Had he kept in mind that we are not aware of our mistakes while we're making them, he would better understand why it sounds so absurd to say the same of ourselves.
That just seems to beg the question. If we're going to assume the object of propositions from the outset, then we're only going to get limited range of possible solutions to the paradox.
Quoting Luke
What I'm saying is that it has a different meaning in the past tense in any case - Wittgenstein's, Ramsey's, Moore's... "I believe that..." is not, according to Wittgenstein, intended as a third party description of one's mental state, yet "I believed that..." is so intended. See the quote...
Quoting Isaac
Believe has a different past tense use to it's present tense use. I don't understand what might be so problematic about this, lots of words have different uses in different contexts. "I believe that P" could well be spoken referring to one's mental state in odd circumstances. say a neuroscientist interpreting his own fMRI scans (in a future where we're better at it) - "Oh look! I believe that P". So I see it as completely unproblematic to see "I believe that P" as meaning different things in different contexts, and equally so that some of those contexts only normally arise in the past or present tenses.
Quoting Luke
In philosophy maybe. It is the standard model in psychology and neuroscience and has been for at least thirty years. Philosophy has an unhealthy obsession with absolute truth. I've asked this in this thread before, but not to you directly, so..
If assertions are 'about' the world, then how does the world become the subject? When I form the words constituting the assertion, how does the world tell me which words to choose without first being inferred by my beliefs about it?
As far as all of neuroscience is concerned, my beliefs about the world trigger word selection from my linguistic cortices which then form sentences. The words are selected from several areas of the brain holding information on associations between words and my beliefs, which are then strung together. If you have some plausible mechanism whereby the world directly determines my word selection then I'd be interested to hear it. If not, then it seems strikingly odd to me that we should say something outside of our direct awareness is the object of a sentence we constructed. It would imply that we're not in control of the object of our sentences, that we have no choice what they're about.
When we ask "what are you talking about", people do not reply "I don't know yet, I'll just go and check"
Quoting Luke
Certainty has nothing to do with it. even something we have 100% confidence in is still a belief.
Quoting Luke
I think this is just a lack of clarity about what 'psychological' refers to here. See...
‘[o]ne can mistrust one’s own senses, but not one’s own belief ’ (PI, p. 190).
How is that not a proposition of psychology? It is a clear assertion about what the mind can and cannot do. To mistrust one's own belief, one would have to have a belief about one's own belief (a low confidence belief). Wittgenstein is saying here (and quite rightly), that one cannot generally do this, and is supported by the evidence - we have higher level hierarchical structures which unify the dissonant output from lower level structures, it is generally impossible for us to have a belief about a belief, it simply get unified into a single belief.
If that were the case, then there could be no such thing as what many classify as reflective thought, a change in one's own sense of self worth, belonging, identity, self-examination, superego, self policing, or any other sort of metacognition aimed at deliberate improvement by virtue of aiming to avoid forming, having, and/or otherwise holding false belief. There could be no understanding of our own pre-existing belief, if we cannot form, have, and/or hold subsequent belief about them. There could be no such thing as identifying, isolating, and subsequently removing false belief from our worldview.
Yet, all these things exist and/or happen regularly.
A current lack of confidence, reliability, trustworthiness in some statement or other that we once believed with nearly unshakable conviction comes from exactly such a metacognitive endeavor.
We're equivocating on the meaning of 'belief'. A belief in the sense I'm talking about, is an inference about the state of the world. It already (in it's output) contains a level of confidence. There's no secondary 'belief' about the the original 'belief' by which our confidence in it is measured. we might have beliefs about our general metal state, but they would not speak differently of the confidence the belief about the state of the world shows in it's output.
I would concur... completely... if... we added beliefs about ourselves too... we are both objects in the world, and subjects taking account of it, and/or ourselves.
Witt said something much stronger(too strong by my lights)... the limits of my language are the limits of my world... or something similar.
Yes, absolutely. I think a lot of confusion about much of what I write here results from the fact that we can at times treat ourselves as objects about which we form inferences. The whole of psychology is the forming if inferences about the human mind as an object, despite using the human mind, as ourselves, to make those inferences.
Some see that as problematic, I don't, but it's worth remembering which we're talking about and not mixing the two.
Psychology is belief about that which existed long before the discipline(much simpler thought and belief). This holds good even when using the sense you've described above.
I see no issue at all with using our mind to acquire knowledge of that which existed in it's entirety prior to it...
Human thought and belief are such things. All minds consist - in large part at least - of thought and belief about the world and/or oneself.
Quoting Isaac
Just to connect some dots here -- what you called the belief's 'content' above, that's the inference about the state of the world. (And 'inference' you're using here not in the sense of 'an act of inferring' but in the sense of 'a conclusion reached by an act of inferring,' a proposition, yes? Not trying to be pedantic here, but that word's ambiguous and we're already having enough trouble.)
So beliefs are about the world and assertions are about the content of beliefs, namely, inferences that have been made about the world.
Alright, suppose I have inferred that Dewey defeated Truman, and I hold a belief the content of which is 'Dewey defeated Truman.' If I were to assert that Dewey defeated Truman, for instance by saying, 'Dewey defeated Truman,' I would be, as I understand it, saying something about the proposition (expressed here as) 'Dewey defeated Truman,' the content of a belief I hold. What would I be saying about it? That it is true?
Yes.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
No. I don't see the results as propositions, just 'tendencies to act as if...'. A proposition is a speech act. It could be done for all sorts of reasons. I know philosophically, a proposition need not be spoken, but I think this is where a lot of the confusion comes in. We do not necessarily think in words, so converting all beliefs to propositions muddies the content of those beliefs by injecting rhetorical syntax into psychological processes - we might well 'talk as if' such-and-such were the case, but if we do not 'act as if' such-and-such were the case then we have cause to doubt that our grammar actually reflects our psychology.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes, mostly. As I said, speech acts are performed for all sorts of reasons, so an assertion might be about the content of some belief, but not necessarily the one people listening to it would take from the words used.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Yes, in that instance, bearing in mind the caveat about using propositions as proxies for mental processes. This is how I agree somewhat with Ramsey's conclusion that truth is more rightly thought of as a property of beliefs, not of propositions (Ramsey got there another way). Not all beliefs can be properly expressed as propositions.
Also, according to later Ramsey, for a belief to be true is merely for you to have the expected results from acting as if it were the case. So your believing 'Dewey defeated Truman' to be the case results in a likelihood to say such things as "Dewey defeated Truman", it's a true belief to the extent that when acting upon it, the result you get is what you'd expect it to be if it were the case that Dewey defeated Truman.
I'm generally more emotivist about truth. 'Truth' is just a label applied to things we really, really want other people to act as if were the case. I think our actual beliefs are more subtly graded in terms of Bayesian probabilities, but we could hold that 'true' ones are just some subset (I just don't think that's mostly how people use the word).
What I mean to say is that I think the word 'true', or 'truth' means what it is used to mean - and what it's used to mean is "I really, really want you to act as if this were the case", so that's what it means as far as I'm concerned. This becomes a classic deflationist position (as per Early Ramsey) because we simply don't say "'It's raining' is true" we just say "It's raining". We only add "...is true" to anything for rhetorical effect, or shorthand "everything he said was true" (saves us from just repeating everything he said).
The extent to which I agree with later Ramsey is that I think it a useful distinction to have a technical category of beliefs which, when acted upon as if the were the case produce the expected results. Using 'true' this way as a technical term seems advantageous. we just need to bear in mind that it's not how the majority of the population use it.
It's an interesting observation. As I understand it, Wittgenstein's aim is to undermine the assumption that 'I believe...' is a description of a mental state, in order to demonstrate that 'I believe that p' has a meaning/use which is equivalent to 'p'. That is, he sees this as typically how 'I believe...' is used, without reference to anything psychological. Wittgenstein's resolution to the paradox - why it seems paradoxical - is because it practically and actually is a contradiction. 'I believe that p' effectively means (has the same use as) 'p' (in the first person present indicative use only). The 'photograph thing' is one of the arguments he uses to break the psychological assumption.
Beg which question? I'm just trying to make sense of Moore's paradox by way of McGinn's article. I tried to answer the question you raised about her article. I'm not interested in a debate over realism/idealism. Anyway, I suppose the same could be said about assuming the "subject" of propositions from the outset.
Quoting Isaac
Wittgenstein's point is that the meanings of the present-tense statements "I believe it's going to rain" and "It's going to rain" are equivalent, but the meanings of the past-tense statements "I believed then that it was going to rain" and "It did rain then" are not equivalent. It's not simply that the meaning of each statement changes due to tense, but that the meaning of the two statements is not equivalent in the past-tense, as it is in the present-tense.
Ealier you stated: "Ramsey's solution is simple, it's because 'I believe that P', 'P is true' and 'P' all amount to the same thing in ordinary use, just asserting P." Wittgenstein's example intends to demonstrate that these different statements do not "all amount to the same thing" or have the same meaning in the past tense. This is "problematic" only insofar as Ramsey's solution fails to account for it.
Quoting Isaac
How do you get from 'making assertions about the world' to 'the world tells me which words to choose'? I can't make any sense of this.
Quoting Isaac
I meant it in the philosophical sense of psychologism. In this case, it is the view Wittgenstein is attempting to counter: the assumption that 'I believe...' refers to a description or reading of one's own inner/mental state.
What is the "true statement about ourselves" here?
This is clearly what LW was up to -- without even going back to the Investigations, you could guess that what's going to interest him here is the grammar of "I believe ..."
What is lovely is the observation that a belief is not like a sense impression. Sense impressions have this sort of authority, like scouts or emissaries who actually come from the lands beyond to report how things stand. Beliefs aren't like that at all.
When I tried to think of counterexamples, I kept finding things much more like sense impressions. Say you're looking for your car keys, and suddenly remember seeing them on the kitchen table; you can indeed take your own mental state as evidence that your keys are on the kitchen table, but you wouldn't describe this as suddenly remembering that you believe they're on the kitchen table and had merely forgotten that you believe this. That's cool.
This is all very helpful. (At the moment, I'm really just trying to figure out how we can stop talking past each other.) We're still having serious terminological problems -- in my world, the above is either a contradiction or just nonsense! -- but that can be remedied. And I know perfectly well that Ramsey had truth-deflationist leanings, which is why it seemed odd to me that what we land on as "assertion" is claiming, of some proposition, that it is true.
I think what you want to say is something like this: I have enough confidence in some of my beliefs that among the actions I am willing to take on the basis of those beliefs is, in the appropriate circumstances, to say out loud that this is how things stand, to agree with someone else who says it, to answer in the affirmative when asked if this is how things stand. Speaking is a way of acting upon a belief.
But something is getting garbled when you also tell the causal story of how we produce an utterance, and then call what caused the utterance what the utterance is 'about'. I'm just not getting the connection you see between the causal chain or process that results in an utterance and 'aboutness.' If I assert, by making an utterance, that this is how things stand, what I'm talking about is how things stand. Your occasional use of 'about' to mean something else has me befuddled.
Quoting Isaac
Example?
I'm not even sure what you're asking me.
Mac does not believe that it's raining outside, but he's wrong. <------------that is what we can say about another that we cannot say about ourselves without sounding absurd. Others can say it about us, when we're mistaken about the weather, but we cannot say it about ourselves in the same scenario, when we're mistaken about the weather, without sounding absurd.
"I do not believe that it's raining outside, but I'm wrong" describes the very same scenario as "It's raining but I do not believe it".
Yes. But you said there are virtually an innumerable number of true statements we cannot make about ourselves without sounding absurd. In what sense are the statements "I do not believe that it's raining outside, but I'm wrong?" or "It's raining but I do not believe it" true? I assume they'd have to be made by someone who doesn't believe something is taking place though aware it's taking place, or someone who knows something is taking place but does not believe it's taking place. Otherwise, it strikes me they wouldn't be true statements.
Who would make such "true statements" in virtually innumerable instances?
Ok.
So it seems you agree with the above bit. Good. I thought we were in agreement about that much at least.
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
Indeed I did, and there most certainly are. In light of being mistaken...
Moore provided only one example of innumerable actual situations when one holds false belief, when one does not hold the right sorts of true belief, or when one is otherwise mistaken. That is the key here; an irrevocably crucial consideration that seems to have been left sorely neglected.
Each and every time one is mistaken - and those situations are innumerable - there are most certainly at least a few true statements about the scenario, that that particular individual cannot say about themselves without sounding absurd, despite the fact that others can. That is the scenario put forth by Moore.
His subsequent 'puzzling' question, however, is far too vague, for we can make all sorts of true statements about ourselves without issue. So, asking why I cannot say something true about myself without sounding absurd doesn't put a sharp enough point on the question, especially given the rest of the hypothetical scenario he provided. A far better question would have been to ask "When I am mistaken, why can't I say the same things about myself that others do without sounding absurd?"
The absurdity is the result of 1 not being able to believe both statements within the Moorean sentence at the same time, 2 not being able to knowingly hold false belief, 3 not being able to recognize our own such mistakes while making them, and 4 being perfectly capable of stating the sentence anyway.
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
In the exact same sense that they are true when spoken by another.
The statements are true in the sense that they are meaningful and they correspond to the way things are; the case at hand; reality; the world; the universe; what's happened; states of affairs; etc., and that meaningful correspondence obtains regardless of whether or not the speaker actually believes the statements.
"I do not believe it's raining outside, but I'm wrong" is true if, and only if, I do not believe it is raining outside but I'm wrong. "It's raining outside, but Mac does not believe it" is true in exactly the same way.
What makes statements true(what makes a statement obtain correspondence) are actual events; what's happened, what is happening, and/or what will happen(in the case of prediction/expectation which aren't even capable if being true when spoken). If it is raining, and one does not believe it is raining, and one says(quite absurdly) "It's raining, but I do not believe it", then the sentence(both statements) would be true on both counts.
When taken separately, the one about the weather would be true if it was raining when spoken, regardless of the speaker's belief. However, "I do not believe it is raining" is true if and only if the speaker does not believe it is raining, and as such it's truth is not determined by the weather, but rather, by the speaker's belief about the weather.
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
All individuals that attempt to say the same things about themselves that another says so easily when the individual is mistaken about something or other. Anyone using accounting practices typically used by others as a means to talk about their own mistake, while they are in the middle of making it.
Anyone, perhaps, looking to show the inherent inadequacies of conventional understanding(logical notation/propositional logic)?
Someone, perhaps, who took note that while others can recognize and point out that we are mistaken, while we're mistaken, it doesn't make much sense at all if we say the same things about ourselves, but they could not effectively explain how and/or why that's the case.
Someone, perhaps, looking to further discriminate between all the different meanings/uses of "I believe..."
Someone looking to further the idea that philosophy is doing something important?
No one at all practicing common parlance.
It's not about idealism. recognising that the access we have to the real world is indirect does not entail idealism. All I'm saying here is that if you're trying to make sense of Moore's paradox, it limits your options to simply assume that the proper object of an utterance is the real world and the truth judgement of that utterance is the state of the world. You may well have ideological commitments by which you'd like to assume that from the outset, and that's fine. I'm only saying that my understanding of the paradox doesn't assume those things and so we're not going to get any further if yours does.
Quoting Luke
That seems the same to me. "I believe it's raining" can be a description of one's state of mind (as I gave the example of someone reading off a super-advanced fMRI scan of their own brain), it just rarely is, but nothing is preventing it from being so. As such, it is this meaning which is implied when the sentence is in the past tense. The other meaning ("It's raining") is expressed in the past tense as "I believe it was raining". I don't really see what insight Wittgenstein is pointing at here. We have two different meanings (description of state of mind and description of states of affairs) and a way of expressing both in either present or past tense. I'm not seeing the significance of the actual structures we use to form those expressions, we still have all four combinations available to us in our language.
Quoting Luke
I think they do, it's just the grammatical rules for expressing them that Wittgenstein is getting wrong "I believe that P", "P is true", and "P" are all present tense. The past tenses (in terms of assertions of belief about states of affairs) are "I believe P was the case", It's true that P was the case", and "P was the case". Saying "I believed that P" is the past tense of the sense of an assertion about my state of mind. A legitimate use (uncommon in the present tense, but common in the past tense).
Quoting Luke
?I'm simply trying to make the pragmatic point that we run into problems of intent if we assert that the object of our utterances is something further back in the chain of causation than we can identify. Here is a chain of causation...
The actions of sub-atomic particles cause edges to form in matter where properties change
The reflection of photons off that part of the world into my retina cause an electrical signal to be sent to my occipital cortex.
The activity of that cortex causes several feedback loops (including the selection of more samples from the world) eventually releasing signals to higher level cortices.
---
After several iterations of this process, that particular pattern of particles and edges is associated with my concept of 'table'
(skipping quite a few stages)
I want to make someone aware of what I see, Various linguistic cortices send and receive signals from those areas which send out object recognition signals and produce the vocal twitches which sound like "There's a table", or "I believe there's a table", or "Watch out for that table!" to get that job done.
You want to say that the 'object' of the utterance is located at the 'outside world' point in that sequence (above the dotted line (sub-conscious activities in our brain are also outside of our conscious Markov blanket). But note, it's not a 'table' at all at those points, it's not a 'table' until well within the inference levels of conscious awareness, quite deeply within our own belief models.
I think the proper 'object' of a sentence is something we assign (it's not a state of the world we can be right or wrong about. So we could have it at the actual state of affairs the sentence was ultimately prompted by if we want. I'm just saying that this would be confusing, as we don't even know what that is, we just infer it.
Much as I said to Luke above. If we want to talk about the object of our sentences, to answer questions such as "What are you talking about", we only have access to the selection of object identification models that we have in our brain. Imagine it like a bag full of marbles, we pick out a marble and show it to someone (form a sentence about it), then someone says "which was the marble you showed us?" - you can only delve back into that bag to produce the answer to that question.
Objects are stored as such in our brains, belief models which store recognisable breaks in the symmetry of reality to more rapidly infer predictions about them the next time they're seen (this is a 'table', tables hold cups). Outside of our brains, they are not objects, they're just matter, or processes or whatever, we'll never quite know, but they don't have objectively defined edges and properties, we do that bit inside our minds. So if we want to talk about the object of our sentence, to answer questions such as "what are you talking about?", then we'd be better off, I think, using these models as an answer (most people have very similar ones so it makes communication easier). But if we use these models as an answer, then the object of a sentence is in our minds, not in the outside world. The model (the thing that gets the label 'table') is in our minds. That which it is a model of is what's in the outside world.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I couldn't very well do that without thereby disproving my theory could I? There are activities in the brain which we do not properly understand yet, yet they produce action and as such count, for me, as a belief (disposition to act as if...). As such, I think there are probably beliefs which cannot be properly expressed as propositions. It seems unlikely on the face of it that we have words for processes and concepts we've been thus far unaware of.
A non linguistic(language less) creature's...
:wink:
No problem for your theory or mine!
Okay then, I'm not interested in a debate over direct/indirect realism.
Quoting Isaac
Couldn't exactly the same thing be said regarding your assumption of indirect realism? I just don't see the need for direct/indirect realism to be introduced into this discussion. Why are you trying to force it?
Quoting Isaac
It seems you're still not getting it.
The following two (present tense) statements have the same meaning/use:
(1) "I believe it's going to rain"; and
(2) "It's going to rain"
Both (1) and (2) have the same meaning/use.
The following two (past tense) statements have a different meaning/use:
(3) "I believed then that it was going to rain"; and
(4) "It did rain then"
Both (3) and (4) do not have the same meaning/use.
That's not always the case.
Sometimes...
No, they don't and I've already given the sense in which they don't (someone reading their own super-advanced fMRI scan). Another might be a schizophrenic talking about his condition, or someone with lesions in the ventral perception pathway, or any of several psychological conditions that can lead to split perceptions. There are two sense of "I believe" and two tenses (past and present), all four combinations are available to us in our language and the context determines which we might mean.
There's no mistake, not really. Someone might say "It's raining but I don't believe it" in frustration or amazement (for example, if it hasn't rained for a long time but rains heavily the day of an outdoor wedding). In that case there's no mistake, of course. The speaker isn't actually standing in the rain without believing it's not raining. Someone may express the fact that they were mistaken by saying "It's raining, but I didn't believe it was."
In Moore's example, when it's said of MacIntosh that he doesn't believe or doesn't think it's raining, is that statement being made of MacIntosh while MacIntosh is standing in the rain, or watching it rain? In that case, he's not mistaken; he's not making an error, and we wouldn't say that of him. Something's seriously wrong with him.
If it's raining and MacIntosh tell us he doesn't think it is while MacIntosh is sitting with us in a windowless room, then he'd be mistaken.
There's no circumstance, however, where we would say "It's raining but I don't believe it is" unless there was something seriously wrong with us, or unless we're playing games. There is no truth to the statement. It sounds absurd because it would never be said by a normal person in a normal situation, but nor would it ever be thought true. It might be thought to be a statement made by someone seriously ill, but that obviously isn't what Moore intends. I think there is no paradox because there is nothing "true" about Moore's contrivance.
That's the issue in a nutshell.
Your first and last paragraph are in direct conflict with one another.
Well, if you think statements (1) obviously not intended to be taken as literally true, and (2) which refer to what was believed in the past, are the same as statements (3) to be treated, according to Moore, as literally true and (4) which refer to what is believed now, I suppose that would be correct.
There most certainly is in Moore's scenario. One is mistaken about the weather. Another points it out. Moore wonders why one cannot say the same things about themselves. That's what I've been talking about... with the last few posts in particular.
A bit of philosophy that has passed into general usage is, given a fictional world such as a novel or a movie or a video game, to distinguish between the perspective of fictional characters who (in their fictional way) dwell in that world and our own perspective as outsiders. This isn't hard but I'm going to give an example anyway. Here are two answers to the question, 'Does Santa fly around the world in a helicopter delivering toys on Christmas Eve?':
(1) No, it's a sleigh pulled by eight (sometimes nine) magic reindeer who can fly;
(2) No, because Santa Claus doesn't exist, so he doesn't fly around in anything.
Both are defensible answers, and which is preferred depends on circumstances.
*
Now, you have a story about how the world doesn't really include objects we refer to and talk about using words; these so-called 'objects' are all artifacts of our mental models of reality, created and continually updated by our brains automatically, without our awareness much less our intervention.
Let's say you're right -- it's the standard view in the cognitive sciences these days, I hear, and I have no cause to challenge it. We all inhabit a virtual reality.
But this is not what you and I, or you and @Luke, have been disagreeing about, I believe. It's that when (in-world) I (in-world) asks (in-world) you to (in-world) put the (in-world) book (in-world) on the (in-world) table, you're inclined to tell me that there isn't really a 'table', that the 'table' is in-world and that what I'm talking about is part of a model of reality instantiated in my brain somehow.
Well that's true, right? And didn't I just admit as much?
No. Because in-world I lives in a world that has actual tables and actual books to put on them. In-world, these things are all quite real. It's the whole point of having the model. It's the whole reason our brains generate the virtual reality to start with. The tables in in-world-I's world aren't artifacts of the in-world-model of the in-world-world in in-world-I's in-world brain; they're just tables.
And you accept this too, not just in unguarded or non-philosophical moments, but even here in this discussion every time you say 'brain' instead of saying 'more or less invariant features of reality that we keep track of using the label "brain".' But even that wouldn't do -- look how many words there were used with their in-world meanings! It's all of them.
This is worthy of it's own thread.
I completely agree with you, but this is exactly what I've been trying to argue all this time, sentences which cross worlds [hierarchies of models] can only really be made sense of in very careful contexts.
Have you ever read a fantasy story to a child? There's been some experimental work on this, as well as just anecdotal evidence. Children have a limit of acceptability in fantasy stories. You'll be telling a story about a flying carpet (fine, no problem) then say, "and then I ate carpet and flew home", they'll invariably say something along the lines of "That wouldn't work, you need to sit on the carpet for it to fly you home, it won't work if you eat it!" - The story is treated as a purported model with it's own rules (most of which are simply our rules). There's just a higher level model above it within which it's just a story. Sentences which cross models or break out of models aren't easy to make sense of.
If I say "pass the salt" I don't need to explain the whole inference-model, my dining-companion's model is sufficiently similar that my words have the expected result. Which I think is what you're saying. But then you seem to think this an answer or counter to my position here, and I'm not sure how that works. Answers in either world make sense, answers which cross worlds are more difficult to understand "It's a sleigh pulled by eight reindeer but reindeer can't fly so they'll have to run really fast", wouldn't make sense.
That's the trouble with Moore's paradox (or the solutions to it) that I'm trying to explain. "It's raining" is 'in-world' as you put it, your 'rain' is similar enough to my 'rain' that we can just talk about rain and its properties without getting into how they're modelled in the brain. Fine.
"I believe it's raining" (taken as a psychological statement) is not in the same model as "It's raining", it's talking about how the model of 'raining' is being formed - by my believing it to be the case. Truth values, when treated as simple correspondence, then go further the other way, treating the in-world as if it were the only one and there is no story "Santa is real and that's all there is to it". This constant crossing of worlds without any note given to the fact that we're doing so is what causes the confusion.
If we're in the shared model where "It's raining" just means that in-world clouds are dropping in-world water, then "I believe it's raining" is not truth-evaluable by me. My beliefs about this model are assumed to be the case, that's the game we're playing when we talk about stuff in-world. We can't talk about Santa in-story and simultaneously talk about the properties of the writer of the story.
If we're in the next model up, where the real world is not directly accessible to us and we can talk about "my beliefs about it", then "It's raining" is not truth-evaluable. We've no idea if it's actually raining or not, and even the very concept of rain is just a shared model which may be slightly different in each mind sharing it.
What those analysing Moore's paradox as having two conflicting truth values are doing is trying to have both, exactly what you've just shown does not make sense (except in very careful circumstances).
If one wants to claim that "It's raining" has a truth value within that world-model. It's true iff it's raining. Then there's no problem with doing that, but we can't then simultaneously talk about our beliefs about whether it's raining and evaluate such propositions by the same standard. Our beliefs about whether it's raining are the authors of the story in which it's raining.
Wittgenstein's stab at it can't possibly be right, since 'I believe it's raining' and 'It's raining' don't mean the same. Of course, one can utter the first to convey the second, and this might even be the point of saying it. But to deny the first, we say 'no you don't,' and to deny the second, we say 'no it's not.' And in doing so, we deny very different things. Likewise, the report of what's said is different: 'John said he thinks it's raining' versus 'John said it's raining.' Even in isolation the utterances have quite different pragmatics – 'I believe it's raining' is weaker, in that it implies a hedge, and puts less pressure on the audience on the uptake. Cf. 'I believe it's raining, but I'm not sure if it is,' versus 'It's raining, but I'm not sure if it is.'
I don't think you're getting the point of the example. Everyone, including Moore, agrees it's absurd, that one wouldn't normally say it, etc. That's the whole point – the fact that it's absurd shows something interesting about the relation of belief to assertion, viz. that we commit to believing what we assert, without outright saying that we believe it.
Obviously I agree with everything in your post, and have said as much, but I've avoided leaning on this particular point because, while it's true that in everyday usage people reach for 'believe' precisely when they want to deny claiming knowledge or certainty, around here 'believe' is usually shoptalk that's just neutral on the confidence with which you believe. The latter is not so much a 'weaker' cognitive verb, as just a limited one. In everyday usage, your first example there ('I believe it's raining, but I'm not sure') is almost redundant. In everyday usage, certainty is sometimes an implicature that can be canceled. ('How many are left?' 'Seventeen -- but don't quote me on that.')
This is all very long-winded, but there is a methodological worry at the end: earlier-days ordinary language philosophy often marshalled evidence for a claim by saying things like 'If that were true, you'd be able to say this, but you can't.' As OLP birthed or transformed into pragmatics, it became clear that reading those cases as questions of 'what makes sense' is not so simple: what makes sense is sometimes what fits the pragmatics rather than what is truth-apt or something.
Such a profound insight. And all that was needed to arrive at it was to pretend that a statement which would not be made was made, and was "true."
Oh no. I've made an assertion I don't believe without saying I don't believe it. That's absurd, isn't it? Why is that?
We do get to choose though, and some choices may be better grounded than others in particular circumstances. Where you say '(taken as a psychological statement)', you're simply announcing your choice. I announced mine a few pages ago when I said 'meaning, referring and believing are part of our frame not yours, part of folk psychology, not neuroscience.'
Compare these answers to 'Why do you think it's going to rain?':
(1) Because Channel 5 said ...
(2) Because my neurons ...
In everyday life, and in philosophy, we talk about beliefs having or lacking reasons; in psychology, you're headed for causes or explanations.
Quoting Isaac
The presuppositions of our shared model are assumed -- that there's objects, that time passes, that people have beliefs and intentions, and so on -- but obviously people worry all the time about whether their beliefs are true, and they do so within the shared model, accepting those presuppositions.
Quoting Isaac
Our shared beliefs are the author of the story in which it is possible for it to be raining, but an individual can clearly believe it's raining when it isn't. The world in this game is persistent: we change what stories we tell as individuals within it without rebooting the whole shared world every few milliseconds.
So in what sense is my at this moment belief not truth-evaluable by me, just assumed to be the case? Are we all prisoners of our own beliefs? If you believe something, you can do other than assume you're right, deluded though you may be?
This is just to say that you actually believe what you believe. I also actually bend at the waist and allow the chair to support me when I sit. That's neither a consequence nor an explanation; it's just what sitting is. Your at this moment belief is not truth-evaluable by you not because you are prisoner of your at this moment mental model, but because you have already evaluated its truth. You've already put a check in the T box, so your pencil is no longer hovering between the T and the F. And you might change that, but at this moment the T box does have a check. That's just what believing is.
Because when we're not mistaken, we're not mistaken. When someone else is not mistaken, they're not mistaken. According to Moore, in the first case there's a mistake. In the second case, there is no mistake.
'Say, Lefty -- why does Tex hate Canadians so much?'
'Canadian killed his pa.'
'Mmm. I still say, that's no justification for judging a whole country.'
The problem is we're talking, presumably, about normal English, not the specialty language of philosophers. I wouldn't really trust the specialty language, either – we can't just destroy the use of a verb by professional fiat, and we're always in danger of returning with our insights to use the word normally again, therefore drawing inferences we were never licensed to.
Another difference – 'I believe it's raining' typically implies that the speaker does not see that it is raining. 'It's raining' implies no such thing – we might see it, we might not. These nuances are crucial in evaluating these things. We can't just throw these words around.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I think that in this case, the semantics is indeed different, which is why the pragmatics is different. It's true that at this time people weren't so good at distinguishing different levels of implication, but the discovery of Moore's Paradox was part of the process of sorting that out a little better. You can see Wittgenstein here as making the mistake you outline – he saw that 'I believe it's raining' and 'it's raining' are often used for similar illocutionary purposes (true) and therefore concluded that in some sense they must 'mean the same' or 'be used the same way' (false, once we look more carefully, and at a wider array of examples).
Note a methodological weakness in the Wittgensteinian claim is that we're unable to explain why 'I believe it's raining' has a similar effect sometimes to 'it's raining,' but we can't explain why this tendency goes away when the tense or person shift. Wittgenstein notes this, but so far as his comments go, it's a complete accident that these functions differ in such systematic ways. But it's not an accident – there is a reason why the first person present tense for these verbs is what triggers the oddity, precisely because 'believe' means the same in all these contexts, but only when one commits to not believing what one is saying at that time does it become odd, due to the constraints on normal assertion.
Well, it would be true. Think of it this way. If I say 'John thinks it's raining, but it's not,' there's really no issue. And suppose I'm right: it isn't raining, but John thinks it is. Then I've said something straightforwardly true. But if John were to report this same thing, how would he say it? Well, he'd say 'I think it's raining, but it's not.' He said the same thing as I did, but there is something wrong with the way he said that thing. The reason is that if he says it, he must commit to his own belief in what he denies believing. There's no such restriction on me if I say it.
And so, it's not just about what we say and whether it's true – there are additionally norms governing who says that very same thing, and in what circumstances. In this case it's because we typically commit to believing what we assert, though we don't say that we believe it in making this commitment.
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
I'm not really understanding what this has to do with the scenario. You may not be following.
The hypothetical John's statement would be "true" only to the same extent it would be "true" that he thought it was raining while aware it wasn't. But that wouldn't happen. So it would be as "true" as something that wouldn't happen would be "true."
Agreed across the board.
Do you have a way of fleshing out 'commitment'?
I don't see how they do. Within the model (where we talk about certain well-accepted shared beliefs as real objects fo the world), when I'm getting wet from standing outside and I can see droplets of water falling from the sky, so I really 'worry about' whether my belief that it's raining is true? I can see people worrying about certain edge cases, but not in the main. Notwithstanding that, my locus of attack here is the notion that Moore's paradox is solvable without questioning correspondence theory. If people are concerned whether their beliefs correspond to states of the (in-story) world, then there's no paradox. If "It's raining" means 'the socially agreed in-world state is that of raining', then Macintosh might very well disagree with that, he could quite logically say "It's raining, but I don't believe it is" by substitution, it just means the same as "The socially agreed in-world state is that of raining, but I don't agree" - a perfectly common situation.
The point is that the paradox only works as odd in this sense if one takes the view that "It's raining" is truth-evaluable, not only in a way separate to "I believe it's raining", but in a way where one could not reasonably believe otherwise (hence the oddity of saying so). This is not the state of shared assumptions you're now describing, one could reasonably believe otherwise in that case.
If "It's raining" is about the state of some external world, then we have the question of how that state caused us to form the sentence without passing through models of belief (which them become the object of the sentence, lest the object be something we're not even in control of).
If "It's raining" is about those of my beliefs which are shared and unquestioned in society (the 'stroy' we all inhabit), then we have the problem that it's perfectly reasonable to question that story, something akin to "I've been brought up to believe in God, but I don't think I do believe"
If, however, we simply accept that for certain classes of belief, in certain contexts of use, "I believe it's raining" is simply the same as "It's raining" and the same as "It's true that it's raining", then the paradox is solved Macintosh is saying "I believe it's raining, I believe it isn't raining" which is a contradiction, McGillicuddy is saying "Macintosh believes it's raining, I don't believe it's raining" which is not a contradiction". Wittgenstein's objection to this solution I've covered above with Luke, is only a problem if one mixes one of the many other senses in which "I believe" could be used, many of which would also make sense in the present tense, as has been shown here (A description of a psychological state, an expression of uncertainty, an expression of surprise...)
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
All seem to be about the same issue, and I'm not sure what it is you have in mind. By what process do you imagine I go about evaluating the truth of my beliefs that would not simply constitute the updating of my mental model?
Wittgenstein agrees that this contradiction is the source of the paradox; he just finds this explanation to be not comprehensive enough. The point I've been trying to get across to you - Wittgenstein's point - is that, in the context of use you describe above, the pair of statements "I believe it's raining" and "It's raining" both have the same meaning. But why doesn't the same paradox arise for the same pair of statements in the same context in the past tense? In the past tense, the same pair of statements do not have the same meaning (as each other).
The pair of statements "I believe it's raining" and "It's raining" have different meanings in different contexts, we agree on that much I think.
Each meaning in each context has a past, present and future tense. So if there were two meanings, A and B, Wittgenstein is comparing present tense A with past tense B. Understandable because we hardly ever use meaning B in the present tense, and we hardly ever use meaning A in the past tense, but we could do, neither are logically impossible.
As I said:
The hypothetical John's statement would be "true" only to the same extent it would be "true" that he thought it was raining while aware it wasn't. But that wouldn't happen. So it would be as "true" as something that wouldn't happen would be "true."
For me, there are problems with describing what wouldn't happen as "true."
We know this because he said the same thing that I did, namely that it's raining, but John thinks it's not.
You can also show this another way. If I say, 'It's raining, but John thinks it's not,' and John says, 'agreed,' or 'that's right,' he has equally said something very bizarre. Yet he has done so just by agreeing with exactly what I already said. Yet I said something obviously true – so what's strange is not what I said, but that fact that John is the one saying it or agreeing to it.
Sorry, but I don't think the statement "X is the case, but I don't think X is the case" is a true statement.
If I say "It's raining, but John thinks it's not," I can't just say that's true or not – it depends on whether it's raining, and whether John thinks it's not. Surely you agree that can be true, in such a situation, right? Now suppose we're in such a situation: it really is raining, and John really thinks it's not.
Now suppose John hears me say this and says, 'that's right!' He is agreeing with what I just said, no? And so affirming that it was true? But it's weird for him to do that, even though it wasn't weird for me to say it.
Note that this example illustrates the same point without John himself having to make any such statement of the form you cite.
I don't know what more to say. If the statement "It's raining but John thinks it isn't" is true, then it's raining but John thinks it isn't. If John's statement "It's raining but I don't think it is" is true, the John must think it's raining and think that it's not raining; or perhaps know it's raining and think it isn't raining. In what circumstances would that be true?
The point is that the sentence is still odd because he commits to believing that it's raining in virtue of asserting that's it's raining. But that isn't part of what he said.
So if John said, for whatever weird reason, 'It's raining but I don't think it is,' then if it really is raining and he really doesn't think it is, then I'll say, yeah, he's right, despite the fact that what he said was really bizarre. To say that what he said was true is the same thing as to say that 'It's raining but John thinks it isn't' is true, because that was what he said.
Yes, it would be bizarre for him to say that. That is the point. But what he said was just that it's raining but he doesn't think it is. I can say that just fine, and it can be true, no problem. Yet when he says the same thing, even in the same circumstances, it's bizarre. That is the point.
I've been keeping in my back pocket an example of this that comes straight out of speech act theory.
Suppose the US has information that some very high level Canadian official, who's traveling through a US airport, is connected to a terrorist group, and for whatever reason Canada can't change his status in time for the US to apprehend him. You could imagine the President declaring Canada a terrorist state to provide a legal basis for the action, and announcing it by saying, "I do not in fact believe Canada to be a terrorist state and will revoke this declaration in about three hours, but for legal reasons I am officially declaring Canada to be a terrorist state."
Well, Moore is dead wrong. He offers an example of one being mistaken and another pointing that out, while it's happening, and then goes on to ask why one cannot say the same things about themselves, which is to ask why someone cannot point out their own mistake while it's happening.
That is exactly what "It's raining, but I do not believe it's raining" is doing(would be doing anyway) when one is pointing out their own mistakes from afar, like another.
Aside from this, I think that you and I are largely on the same page. The statements about the weather and my belief are true(if it's raining but I do not believe it) when spoken by another, but they are self-contradictory whenever they are spoken by me(the mistaken one).
Self contradictory statements are not true, cannot be true. They are meaningful. They must be. Contradictory statements cannot both be believed at the same time. They can be reported upon, shown as such, but they cannot both be believed at the same time. In order to report upon our own lack of true belief about the weather like another does, we must point out the mismatch between what's going on, and the fact that we are oblivious to what's going on; those facts/events/happenings/ongoings/etc.
If we are oblivious, and we certainly are during such times, then we cannot report upon that because there's no difference, in our own minds, between what's going on and what we believe about that. That's why they cannot both be believed.
When viewing a visual recording of ourselves being unexpectedly surprised by rainfall, we'll watch what others did at the time it actually happened. We'll watch ourselves walk right past the coat closet. Yep. We did not believe that it was raining outside. That's where we keep our umbrella.
Hanging on a hook securely attached to the outside of the sidewall. We walked right past. From our vantage point, we can know with utmost certainty that we did not believe it was raining outside.
The difference between the two accounts of our own mistakes, one being reported by another, and the self-reporting, is that another could inform us of the weather outside ensuring that we grabbed our umbrella thereby successfully avoiding unexpected rainfall.
But we cannot convince ourselves to grab the umbrella out of the coat closet on the way out the front door. That is true regarding both timeframes, now and then! It's also true at each and every individual point in time in between...
If you have the patience for it, I'd like to set aside my position and just examine yours for now. My goal at the moment is just to understand your position better than I do now. I'm not even looking for arguments against it, though I will have questions.
Here's how I understand your position:
(1) The sentences 'Dewey has defeated Truman' and 'I believe Dewey has defeated Truman' mean the same, have the same use.
(Thus Moore's paradox is only an apparent paradox; the speaker who utters 'Dewey has defeated Truman, and I do not believe Dewey has defeated Truman' is uttering a contradiction.)
The idea behind (1) is that 'Dewey has defeated Truman' is really 'I believe that Dewey has defeated Truman' but elides or suppresses the 'I believe ...' It is nevertheless an expression of belief, or of purported belief, if we have to account for insincerity at some point.
This is so because we can only talk about the world as we understand it, and we understand it entirely in terms provided us by the mental model of the world our brain constructs and continually updates.
Our words refer to artifacts of this model, not to objects in the world.
Everything we say is, in a sense, a 'report' on the latest iteration of the model we are aware of.
If I have this right so far, this is where I'm a little unsure. Certainly, as you've said, there are those occasions where we might speak about our beliefs as an outsider would, observing ourselves as an object, but this is not the usual case, so 'report' there sounds a little wrong. We want a clear way of saying that the sentences we utter are informed by the mental model, entirely dependent on it, but for speech acts to be something other than comments about it.
Certainly we'll continue from here with a pragmatist account of speech acts, but we have to backtrack a little because 'belief' is being used in two ways here. On the one hand, it's kind of kind of pragmatist shorthand -- 'Jim believes there's beer in the fridge' just unifies descriptions of actions Jim is taking or might take, things he says or won't say, and so on. A belief is nearly a theoretical posit -- what we're really interested in is behavior. But above we claim that 'Dewey has defeated Truman' is something a lot like a description of my mental state, that it's about my beliefs in a sense not too different from the way people generally understand beliefs, just somewhat broader. That claim doesn't seem to rely directly on some idea of utility as a pragmatist account might; it's an argument about what the semantic content of our speech acts must be.
So my question is roughly this: do we argue here that the pragmatist account actually kicks in a little earlier, in the model taken as a sort of Bayesian inference engine, that this is where we find the idea of utility? But then are we also looking for pragmatist account of semantics? Do we even need one, or do we sort of get it for free by focusing on how the model (whence all our speech acts originate) works?
Not too clear, but I hope you get the gist of what I'm asking. If not I'll take another run at it.
There's two elements to your summary which I feel I need to clarify.
1)
Moore's paradox rests on the understanding of two processes - the selection of a referent for an utterance, and the truth-valuation of that utterance. Each of these may change depending on the context, the words alone do not give us the processes being used in any given case. We do, however, require a judgement of both to obtain the paradox, reference alone won't do it, it's also that the utterance appears to be true (or capable of being true) when uttered by another, so we have assumed both reference and truth evaluation.
I don't see a problem, as we discussed with regards to stories, with the referent of an utterance being treated as an imaginary object (Santa Claus could be the referent of "Santa Claus wears a red outfit"), so if we wanted to talk about our shared world (socially constructed), then we can have it that in that language game the referent is the convenient fiction of weather and rain - our (hopefully) shared model.
The problem in Moore's paradox is that someone's belief about the weather is being treated as evaluable by an outsider with an accuracy that the first person somehow is assumed to lack. IF A and B are the only people in the context, whether it's raining (as a socially constructed fiction) is a fact by virtue of A and B agreeing on the matter. A cannot be mistaken simply because B thinks it isn't any more than B can be mistaken simply because A thinks it isn't. So B's saying "A doesn't believe it's raining but it is" can amount to no more than "A doesn't believe it's raining but I do" which then means that when A utters the sentence "It's raining but I don't believe it is", he's similarly saying "A doesn't believe it's raining but I do" - only here 'I' refers to A whereas for B's sentence 'I' refers to B so they're not the same sentence.
So it's not quite a matter, for me, of saying that the referent can only be our model. I have no problem with a language game in which the referent is a fiction, a shared model, a social construction...whatever. It's just that the truth evaluation has to match the nature of the referent, otherwise we end up with saying something like "Santa Claus wears a red outfit, but he doesn't wear a black belt because he doesn't exist and so he can't" - either we're talking about Santa Claus the fiction, or Santa Claus the (lack of) reality, we can't just mix both and expect to make any sense.
Which leads to the second part...
2)
We could interpret (though abnormally) "I believe..." as having the shared model of states of mind as a referent. We can model our own thinking, even though we use some of our thinking to construct such a model - I don't see any intrinsic problem with that. We can share that model with others and come to some mutual agreement about it such as to make a socially constructed reality out of it. But then A is simply saying something different to B. A is saying "I believe (as a description of my state of mind) it's raining, but (I believe - meaning my model of the weather is such that) it isn't", which is a clear contradiction. B is saying "A believes (as a description of A's state of mind) it's raining but (I believe - meaning my model of the weather is such that) it isn't"
Either way, B is not saying the same thing (in terms of truth evaluation) as A.
I hope this hasn't been too long-winded. Basically I'm saying that all we can ever judge about the external world is our beliefs about it, and we can judge them by evaluating the response of the world to our actions upon it (in fact I go as far as to say that it the reason we act upon it, but that's another story), we update our beliefs such that acting upon them minimises the likelihood of surprise. So truth only really makes sense to me as an assessment of belief. That belief can be about a shared idea (belief about what is in other people's minds) like Santa Claus, or even a belief about my own beliefs like neuroscience or psychology - either way the truth evaluation comes from treating it as if it were the case and measuring the degree of error from doing so.
So a simple answer to your question would be that we can have whatever we want as the referent within a language game, but when it comes to truth evaluation (in a pragmatic sense), I see no way to meaningfully achieve this without having our belief as a referent.
Yes. Nor would they be made in "ordinary life." I think the further we depart from the real, the less sense we make.
What Canada is, and how it can be treated under a particular law, need not be the same. So there is no contradiction. In Moore's example, "raining" isn't one thing when we speak of another, but another thing when speaking ourselves.
Reporter: 'So Canada is a terrorist state?'
President: 'Yes.'
R: 'But you don't believe Canada is a terrorist state.'
P: 'Of course not.'
It's just a counterexample to the claim that no one would ever say 'P but I don't believe P.' It's not a restatement of Moore's paradox.
We've established that all sorts of different utterances 'following' that form can be stated.
None of them can be believed by the speaker at the time - aside from misuse of verb tense when reporting upon what's already happened, such as Isaac's example. Even then, it's a misuse. That's not how we're supposed to use those words.
The form is utterly inadequate for taking proper account of all of the particular meaningful language uses that count as being of that form.
Isn't that a huge problem for the accounting practice itself?