Isaac

So it was on-topic to assert it, but off-topic to defend it. What a neat trick.

Psychology is neither psychiatry nor psychotherapy, they are themselves only branches within clinical psychology which itself is a branch of psycholog...

WTF? I'm guessing you meant to say psychotherapy or psychiatry right? (You'd be wrong even if you did, but would have at least a leg to stand on). I'v...

Well then what's the point in me discussing the contents of any experiments with you? They're clearly unnecessary. Whatever magical power you've used ...

Yep. Demonstrable understanding of probabilities without being able to use the terms correctly or mathematically in indigenous tribes, in children les...

But 'that it has four feet' is not a proposition. That's what I was getting confused about. You were wanting to define belief as a "a relation between...

Absolutely. I think there's a link there to why we love stories so much - they infuse our culture completely and seem to be almost entirely universal ...

I didn't say anything about the terms being interchangeable within your post. You've made a claim about empathy which does not apply to it, it applies...

You're just confusing empathy with sympathy. Empathy is (broadly) feeling what another person is feeling, sympathy is caring about what another person...

Yeah, I agree, and insult can come in the form of more than just foul language. I tend to draw a distinction though, between philosophy and rhetoric. ...

I'm sure @"StreetlightX" can speak for himself, but just to point out how clear it is to an outsider, Chester was banned for ...not just for using ins...

Yeah, this definitely happens, they are fairly well studied areas in social psychology. It's known as perceived entitivity. People act in such a way a...

Well, in terms of using the term, I think we just want other people to feel compelled to agree with us, but I'm a psychologist, I think practically ev...

Hardly. I don't know how much experience you have with your native flora, but pick some medium-large sized woody plant and ask people if it's a tree o...

If this is the case (and I'm very much inclined to agree with you), then would it not be more likely that there is no such thing as what a word means....

Indeed. I hope I have been clear enough about the speculative nature of pretty much all neuroscience and cognitive psychology. That's not to say one c...

[ Can you think of an example of this, where an absurd result from a thought experiment has been a red flag in this sense. I'm not entirely sure what ...

All of this tells me how these things are revealed. If someone asks "what does does a painting consist of?" the answer is not "a paintingis revealed w...

... Still an appropriate response, no? Yes, but what is it like to be a bat dreaming of being John Wick in the Matrix?

Yes, but what if the p-zombie was just a brain in a vat? What if he was colourblind tortured p-zombie brain in a vat? Would he learn anything new when...

Ethical thought experiments show us what we think we ought to think when unencumbered by all the shed load of physiological inputs, prejudices, memori...

I might ask you the same question I asked Banno. If they refer to "things" what are these things, for you? Where are they, what do they consist of? Ho...

OK, so can you elaborate further on what kind of thing this relation is? I'm something of a physicalist, so at some point I tend to ask the question o...

I'm sorry if I'm being slow, but I'm still not following you. "If you say "here is a belief for which there is no neural equivalent", I might reply th...

Not if I've understood you correctly, no. That is basically what I take to be the case. But if discussion of the neurological correlates of belief mig...

Isn't all this just recognising that words are used in language games? The original doesn't have any greater claim to authenticity does it? 'Believe' ...

Then in what way would I have such a belief? Are you perhaps saying that because I would picture your house with a front door, I have that belief, eve...

I'm not well versed in things like logical structure, you might have to explain this in a bit more depth. As far as I can tell if you supplied a belie...

Well, within the F5 region of the motor sensory area in the cerebral cortex there are 85 neural clusters which code for hands and feet responding in d...

The tree is itself a belief about the unity of branches, roots leaves and the disunity of insects, pathogens, bacteria soils, water, gases, nutrients ...

No, you're asserting that not all cows are assets. I'm asking you for some evidence or line of reasoning to back up that assertion. You're saying that...

Somewhere below Primates, Cetaceans and possibly Elephants. At the moment we know that people do not report self-awareness, nor do they have any memor...

Excellent. This really cannot be emphasised enough. OK, so where in this system do priors from past models come in. Some of our perceptual features ar...

OK, but aren't we (the rest if us here) discussing exactly what is meant by 'belief'? Doesn't that very discussion undermine the idea of some clear fo...

No, just that it's more likely than not. A person born wealthy is more likely to remain wealthy. A person born poor is more likely to remain poor, so ...

I think so, but it's difficult to prove. Experiments with conflicting sensory inputs seem to show that subconscious adjustments are still made on the ...

Indeed. I think to capture the use of the term you have to limit it to features of (or linguistic representations of features of) a mind. Ramsey expre...

Yes. I think somewhere in all this most of the disparate opinions seem to still have a locus around the idea that a belief is related to a tendency to...

No, but the statement of a belief is not what causes the tendency to act either, is it? Its the arrangement of neural connections in a certain form. W...

So how do you see this differently from, say, laws of physics? They seem to me to have the same property, yet we talk about the relations as consistin...

It wasn't so much that we talk about beliefs in terms other than linguistic renderings, just that we don't, in other areas, infer this to mean that th...

I certainly think it's a mental state. I think whether it's a linguistic rendering is up to us, I mean it's just a word we can define it how we like, ...

Yeah, I meant arbitrary relative to the world. @"fdrake" has made the same point to me before and he's right, I tend to ignore (in my simplification) ...

Does my reply to Marchesk help any?

It's to do with what 'an object' is defined as. Imagine the world consists of just an heterogeneous soup. That's all there is, one object. Any object ...

Then we're possibly on the same page. I asked the same question about the assertion that a belief is not a mental state. If it's not a statement, not ...

Really? That didn't come across at all from what I read (not your fault, I'm not well versed in all of the philosophical background). If that's the ca...

How so? The assertion is only tangential, I was trying to show how it's important in some fields to get a grasp of the effect different stages in the ...

I see. Possibly the solution is to focus on some practical consequence of either view, some behavioural reflection of the different beliefs.

The data from the sensory organs relating to the object as it is in the world. I think, for the sake of clarity, it's best if we all stick to 'percept...