Is all belief irrational?
I've been working on this a long time. I'm satisfied it's incontrovertible, but I'm testing it -- thus the reason for this post.
Based on actual usage of the word and the function of the concept in real-world situations -- from individual thought to personal relationships all the way up to the largest, most powerful institutions in the world -- this syllogism seems to hold true. I'd love you to attack it.
Premises:
- [1] Epistemically, belief and thought are identical.[2] Preexisting attachment to an idea motivates a rhetorical shift from I think to I believe, implying a degree of veracity the idea lacks.[3] This implication produces unwarranted confidence.[4] Insisting on an ideas truth beyond the limits of its epistemic warrant is irrational.
Conclusion ? All belief is irrational.
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?
Because the gap between I think and I believe seems to be hallucinatory.
You cannot create captive groups, cliques, cults, companies, societies, governments, nations, philosophies, or religions with just I think.
If so, all those bastions of "civilized" authority and coercion turn out to be figments of psychotic (disconnected from reality), hallucinatory minds which invented psychotic, hallucinatory narratives.
Im not kidding or exaggerating even a little bit.
This would be great news for those of us who want a truly human world. Big pill to swallow, though.
Comments (100)
By whatever definition of belief, truth, or knowledge you apply, it is generally recognized that a belief has to be justified in order to be valid or usable. Adequate justification, along with a recognition of uncertainty, addresses any questions about rationality.
They are?
A believe is, one way or another, held to be true. But not all thoughts are held to be true. We can certainly entertain thoughts that are not true - that's were things like modality and error come from.
if your point is that we ought perhaps treat our beliefs with scepticism, that's not a bad view. But care needs to be taken - can you, for example, maintain scepticism as to the meaning of the words your post is written with, while you write it? Doin so would seem to undermine the very grounding of your scepticism.
Is your belief that you are now reading this sentence irrational?
All this by way of pointing to something a bit broader than just that your belief that "All belief is irrational" would thereby be irrational.
But further, we do construct social institutions, not by "I think..." so much as by "We will act in this way...". No individual can construct such a social institution by thinking it; but that is why they are social.
SO not seeing it.
I pretty much never go for argumentum ad populum. I generally assume that whatever is generally recognized in a world such as ours is must be incorrect.
I'm assuming you're thinking along lines of justified true belief. That pertains to knowledge. I'm not talking about knowledge, but the difference between thought and belief.
Per Copilot at https://copilot.microsoft.com/shares/1YnFudJCauyNC69pJSbJi#:~:text=At%20this%20point,the%20JTB%20framework.
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Me:
At this point, is JTB still considered a robust definition of knowledge?
Copilot:
NoJTB (Justified True Belief) is no longer considered a robust or sufficient definition of knowledge. Philosophers widely agree that Gettier-style counterexamples expose fatal flaws in the JTB framework.
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You're welcome to specify the epistemic differences between, "I believe it's raining," and, "I think it's raining."
If it's raining, you can justify both statements. The justification for one is exactly the same as for the other. Both statements have equal warrant. Epistemically identical.
Which just begs the question: then why "believe" rather than "think"?
In other words, what justifies/gives warrant to characterize "It's raining" as a belief as distinct from a thought?
You're welcome to explain that. I'll be all ears. I can't.
The conclusion doesn't follow: hasty generalization fallacy (at least).
Bet it doesn't help.
Epistemically identical and identical mean different things.
I didnt say that belief and thought are identical, period.
I distinguish epistemics from epistemology. Epistemics is the practical analysis of how knowledge is produced, justified, and deployed. So, when considering thought vs. belief, there is no epistemic difference inherent between the two. Neither grants an idea more or less epistemic warrant. Epistemically, "I think it's raining" and "I believe its raining" are identical with respect to the accuracy, soundness, value, etc., of the idea that it's raining. The differences are rhetorical and epistemically unwarranted..
If it's raining, you can justify both believe and think versions. The justification for one is exactly the same as for the other. Both versions have equal and identical warrant. Epistemically identical.
Which just begs the question: then why "believe" rather than "think"?
In other words, what justifies/gives warrant to characterize "It's raining" as a belief as distinct from a thought?
The rest of your comment from if your point is that we ought perhaps treat our beliefs with scepticism and down is actually off-topic. Relevant, yes -- but I made no pretensions of getting into implications of what I said in the post. Happy to talk about them, though, once we get on the same page about what I in fact did say. My sole aim here is to stress test the argument as it stands before getting into its ramifications.
I admit that the title of the post was a bit of provocateuring as I worded it. Whats irrational is the shift from think to believe. No rational warrant to make the shift, which means no warrant, period. No value add unless you think that creating an illusion adds value. Believe smuggles in illicit credibility. Granular gaslighting.
So, the rational content, meaning, and the epistemic warrant for, I believe its raining, and, I think its raining, are exactly the same. Believe, however, sneaks in credibility that isnt rationally defensible, and so, its irrational. To the degree that a belief is semantically and epistemically as rational as a thought, there is no rational justification for holding it as a belief. If were thoroughly convinced of the idea, rather than say, I think we say, I know When we say, I believe were admitting we dont know it, but we want to impress more than, I think will buy us. That more is the irrational bit. Add it to a thought, resulting in a belief, and that belief is definitionally characterized by the irrational bit.
So, I guess, strictly speaking, the title is right on as it is.
Maybe, but not just cuz you say so. Specify. Point out and explain the gaps and/or leaps.
I don't believe we have a clear enough understanding of the limits of "epistemic warrant" to use the idea as a given. Saying that is not a rejection of reason but a particular use of it.
The proposition that saying as much is itself a belief only leads to comparing beliefs.
And then you are back where you started.
And?
I don't "distinguish epistemics from epistemology", so you are wrong?
You want your cake and to eat it, by supposing that belief and thought are both the same and yet different.
A belief is usually considered to be an attitude towards a sentence such that the sentence is held to be true.
A thought is something else entirely.
The objection I presented is that we can think something without believing it. It follows that belief and thought are not identical.
I don't see that you addressed this objection.
And again, more broadly, your conclusion is itself a belief: that belief is irrational. It follows that your argument is irrelevant to your conclusion, since your conclusion is irrational.
Believing all belief is irrational, is irrational.
So there seems to be something irrational about your conclusion.
Quoting T Clark
You responded:
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Are you saying that a belief doesnt have to be justified in order to be valid or useable? Or are you saying that a justified belief is not valid or usable?
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
I didnt say anything about justified true belief.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
What difference does it make? The issue on the table, as I understand it, is whether or not all belief is irrational. As I indicated, adequately justified belief is not irrational.
By "epistemic warrant", I simply mean that what is asserted as true doesn't cantilever past a solid, rational (adequately thought through and connected to reality) basis for thinking it's true. When, "I think it's raining," isn't enough to do what you want to get done, given no additional reason or fact or evidence to justify making the statement seem stronger (more credible) than "I think" affords -- i.e., given that nothing warrants the additional credibility you want to convey -- the additional credibility is unwarranted, and so, irrational.
Does that help?
As to:
"The proposition that saying as much is itself a belief only leads to comparing beliefs."
I have no idea what you're saying there nor how it relates to what I said in the post. Please clarify.
I don't really understand what work "epistemically" is doing here. However it is true that "I think that p" and "I believe that p" both indicate that you assign the value "true" to p. Moore's paradox is a powerful argument in favour of that intuition. I'm not sure why you don't add that the same is true of "I know that p". However, these terms are not synonymous. This becomes clear when one considers "S thinks/believes/knows that p". If p is false, A does not know that p, but can be said (by someone else) to believe or think that p.
The significant difference between "I know.." and "I believe..." and "I think ..." is that although they are, if you like, cognitively identical, they indicate more and less confidence in the truth of p, with "think" at the low end of the scale suggesting considerable uncertainty whether p.
IQuoting Millard J Melnyk
If there is a pre-existing irrational attachment to an idea, the shift may well take place, and the resulting belief will be irrational. But if there is not a pre-existing irrational attachment to an idea, the consequence will not follow. So 3) does not follow.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Seems like a belief in the good of humanity ;-)
How do you distinguish between generally received opinions from what has been justified by reason?
Efforts to make that distinction are a big part of why we talk about reason.
I think I agree with some other objections in the thread. I noticed aspects of my own objections in these.
Even granting that some beliefs and thoughts are epistemically identical, there still seems to be a crucial kind that hinders your argument from going through: "justified beliefs." I don't think these are identical to mere thinking. It seems like going from "I think" to "I believe" when that belief is justified would warrant some confidence. Given justification, the generalization is too quick.
Still, beliefs and thoughts don't seem identical to me epistemically. I may have beliefs even when they are not thoughts. I have many beliefs about the living status of all kinds of people, but this does not mean that I'm thinking that they are either dead or alive. "Having a belief" and "having a thought" are thus separate concepts.
We can also separate beliefs and thoughts in how they are justified. A belief may be supported by reasons (weighing evidence, coherence with other beliefs, etc.) that are not present in the same way when we merely think about the claim. For example, the belief Niccolò Machiavellis The Prince was not written as satire might be justified by testimony and by an independent weighing of the textual evidence. But merely thinking that same statement does not mean that this thought itself is drawing on that testimony or that weighing of the evidence. Often I think is just a way to say that one has a belief. The belief can be epistemically justified, but it does not necessarily follow that the thought is justified in the same way. They seem different.
Quoting Banno
:snicker: Ninja'd.
I think it is fair to say that there are given contexts where they are used synonymously, yet even then we could perhaps extend this and say they are identical in the sense that light blue and dark blue are identical as being shades of blue. Meaning, both are ponderings.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
In given contexts they are most certainly synonymous. "I believe I am breathing" is hardly the same as me saying "I think I am breathing". The first is an ironic statement and the second is a flight of fancy.
Beliving something and Thinking it are quite different in some contexts and practically identical in others. It is irrational to say Blue can mean Sad and that Red can mean Passion that all colours are synonymous with this or that emotion. This is kinda what you are doing with Think and Believe.
Agreed, in principle, but from that, how does it not follow that all thought is irrational? It is unintelligible that all thought is irrational, for the thought that all thought is irrational is itself irrational, ad infinitum, therefore it must be the case, given the criterion of epistemic congruency, that not all belief is irrational. The caveat being .epistemic congruency just means neither thought nor belief is knowledge.
The key is the judgement which follows from the act of cognition, insofar as it is possible to think without judging the validity of the object thought about, while on the other hand, the object thought about must have been judged in order to then affirm or deny the validity of it.
To think, e.g., its raining, merely indicates a priori, that some of the manifold of conditions experience informs as necessary, must be observed, such that rain is possible. To believe its raining is to judge whether enough of those conditions are actually met in order to validate that an observation accords with experience. To know it is raining, then, indicates that all the conditions experience informs as necessary are met, from which it is invalid, re: self-contradictory, for the judgement to be that it is not raining.
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Quoting Paine
..just as you say, with anthropology, psychology and that ridiculous OLP conspicuous in their absence when we do.
This hinges on the fact that we both believe what and that we are thinking, and think only what we believe. Even if I think "the moon is made of green cheese" either I do so from a context of genuine empirical ignorance, or in the mode of intentional counter-factuality. In which case the second premise, that there is tendency to epistemic over-valuation - due to the epistemic coincidence of belief and thought itself - is unwarranted. Belief is not irrational so much as it is pre-rational. Or foundationally rational would be my construction.
The fact that you believe something fundamentally involves asserting an epistemic authority. However it is not unwarranted so much as it is committed to establishing warrant. Hence the basis of rationality.
Quoting Banno
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Geez Louise, guys. This is making a mountain out of mole hill. Can, "I believe" and "I think" be synonymous. Sure it can. We often precede statements with "I believe" and "I think" to express a sense of skepticism about the truth value of what we are stating.
The other issue is that Millard seems to be conflating two senses of "think".
-Propositional think that p (e.g., I think its raining) ? epistemically similar to believe that p.
-Generic or hypothetical thinking (e.g., Im thinking about unicorns or Imagine its raining) ? not epistemically committed.
You both are now talking past each other as one is talking about the first and the other is talking about the second.
When it comes to justifying our beliefs, we can do it one of two ways - empirically or logically. When we are able to justify some belief using both, instead of just one or the other, it becomes knowledge.
Quoting Banno
Quote the statement where I said belief and thought are the same thing. You're hallucinating.
Simple. You ask the person with the opinion what they did to justify it to themself. Most people did nothing.
If you're interested in epistemology, you should read my paper above. Let me summarize to your basic point.
First, we assume you know something. But knowing something now doesn't necessarily mean it will be known again in the future. Lets use a deck of cards as an example.
We know that there are 4 jacks in a deck of 52 cards. From here we can conclude one type of inductive conclusion, probability. There's a 1/13 chance that when I draw a card, it will be a jack. If I decide to believe that any other card besides a jack will be drawn, I've done that through reason that its a 12/13 chance that it will be any card besides a jack.
Lets go one step down. I draw lots of cards and realize I can pull a jack from this deck of 52 cards. This is my knowledge. Since I know its been done one time, I believe it is possible to pull a jack again. So I pull from a deck of cards, and believe I'm going to pull a jack. Not because of probability, but because of possibility. What is known once could possibly happen again.
Next I have a randomizer on this deck of cards. I pull one card, put it back, then it randomizes again. Because I can envision the scenario in my mind with what I know, its plausible that the deck randomizer could randomize it so that a jack will never be the first card again. Its not irrational yet, but getting there.
Finally, we have an irrational belief. I pull a jack from a deck of cards, then put it back in the deck. I now believe that the jack I just put in the deck, is no longer in the deck. There's no reason behind such a belief, and this belief contradicts all reason that would point to the jack being in the deck. This is an irrational belief.
Glad to see someone understands "epistemically identical". :grin:
Quoting GazingGecko
"Justified belief" is an oxymoron. Take any idea. If the idea is justified to the point that a person would be in idiot to reject it, what part of the idea needs to be believed?
When you look out the window and it's raining, do you say, "I believe it's raining." ?? Where does belief enter into it? If you're lying in bed in a dark room and hear rain on the roof, do you say, "I believe it's raining." ?? Or would you more likely say, "I think it's raining." ?? Where does belief enter into that?
To the point that an idea has been rationally justified, there's nothing for belief to do. When we're attached to an idea whose justification leaves something to be desired, we use belief to cover the unjustified aspects so that we can have illicit confidence that they merit credence as much as the justified aspects do. That's not always a bad thing. We show each other this grace all the time when we say, "I believe you," or, "I believe in you" -- and that's a good thing. But it's no more rational than believing the tooth fairy left a quarter under my pillow.
I like topics like this because they tease out people's unexamined biases. Most people here reacted to "irrational" as a negative. It's different when it comes to ideas, though. Psychologically, "I believe in you," is worlds apart from, "I belief in democracy."
:rofl:
Believing that believing all belief is irrational, is irrational, is irrational.
And that's to ignore the irrationality of confusing what I've said as a "belief". Where did I state or imply that I have a "belief" that belief is irrational?
Some people are so addicted to belief, they see them everywhere lol.
Hallucinatory.
Neither you or Banno can tell the difference between "identical" and "epistemically identical", apparently.
It does not follow just from that either that they're rational or irrational.
Sorry, having a hard time following you and relating it to what I've said. It's just not that complicated. The semantic content and the epistemic warrant for both versions, believe and think, are the same with respect to the the actual assertion. One is no more or less true than the other. Agreed?
So, there is a reason and a function for choosing "believe", and that reason is precisely to extend the "this is true" subtext always implied in an assertion beyond existing epistemic warrant (having done the work to establish that "this is true" isn't false.) Conjuring this illicit credibility is the function of "believe".
That's all I'm saying here.
No, not even a little bit. Personally, I don't deal in belief at all. "I think" and -- rarely -- "I know" are all I need, precisely because overextending epistemic warrant disgusts me. Have you read Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit? Bullshit differs from lies by virtue of the fact that the bullshitter does absolutely nothing to establish warrant, because they couldn't care less about it. Warrant (connecting what we say to what's real) is irrelevant to them. All that matters is the effect they generate by what they assert. So, where I've mentioned overextending credibility beyond epistemic warrant, you can just substitute "bullshit" without any loss of meaning, lol.
So, then, "belief" fits only with ideas that are at least in part bullshit. No bullshit, no need for "believe" -- and in fact, people rarely use "belief" or "believe" when there's no bullshit involved. They say "think" or "know" or, far more often, just state the assertion. That's something I haven't even mentioned yet: it's a curious tick, epistemically, to interject ego into the mix. "It's raining," is about the rain. "I think it's raining," is about the speaker's relationship to the rain. "I believe," is even more egocentric.
Quoting Pantagruel
I agree and I think that's an astute observation. Yet one more reason that belief is irrational, because the interest in imposing epistemic authority (if it's merely asserted, it carries no authority) and the act of imposing it are thoroughly irrational. Warrant established on authority is patently irrational. "Smoke this brand, it's better for you," says the guy in the white lab coat and a stethoscope draped around his neck, LMAO!
You're, of course, welcome to theorize to your heart's content, just like I do. :blush:
That was an enjoyable little read, but it's not responsive to the post. Sure, there are different ways of looking at the same thing. I presented mine here for the purpose of evoking feedback on it, not on yours. Thanks though.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
1) This depends on how you are using the terms 'belief' and 'thought'. A belief can be a thought (I guess where it is not it woudl be referred to as somethign liek an 'Alief'), but a thought cannot be a belief.
2) Nothing is certain unless framed in an abstract framework. Having a degree of belief is perfectly rational (ie. believing a dice roll of 6 is more probable than not if I roll it 100 times).
3) No. It is called doubt and/or scepticism. These are kind of important. It is not unwarranted to state that a 100 dice rolls will almost certainly result in rolling a 6 (Entropy is evidence of highly improbable thigns being reclassified as 'impossible' for common purposes).
4) Insisting that belief and thought do not differ is to take an irrational stance. You have stepped beyond the limits of what such language is capable of by tagging colloquial language as if it is a mathematical truth.
It's doing there in an attempt to distinguish the assertion from the statement of relationship to the assertion (which failed miserably as can be seen in the comments.) "I think it's raining," and, "I believe it's raining," are semantically identical with respect to the rain, i.e., the assertion each makes is identical. All that differs, as you point out, is the speaker's level of credence in the assertion.
Quoting Ludwig V
LMAO! You can see from the discussion how problematic it is to get minds to open to the possibility that "I believe" is not all it's cracked up to be. Do you think taking on "I know" would be easier? You're right, it's exactly the same situation for both, although when someone says, "I believe" and "I think" we take them at their word. When they say "I know" a boatload of new soldiers of skepticism suddenly get activated. :lol:
Once it's clear that belief properly applies only to assertions that are part bullshit (see https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/1022560), then knowledge becomes easy-peasy: assertions which we believe (because you never know -- how much epistemic work is "enough"?) have been completely justified. To my mind, "knowledge" is a useless category, because either it remains open to revision -- in which case, what are the merits and advantages of calling it knowledge as opposed to theory or provisional conclusion or guess? -- or dubbing it "knowledge" prematurely closes the question, which accounts for the obscene levels of resistance to new ideas and angles always mounted by the "knowers" in every age and every situation.
Quoting Ludwig V
If in fact we use "believe" for assertions that involve bullshit, then "believe" is at the low end of the scale. "I think P" is honest and invites discussion. "I believe P" has a markedly different effect, immediately raising the question what the person did or did not do, (likely the latter, because jumping that gap is what "believe" does,) to determine the extra that "believe" implies over "think".
But the most persuasive form is to drop all reference to self completely.
You can see this in practice: "P." is actually more credible, all things being equal, than "I believe P."
"Fire! Get the hell out!" compared to "I believe there's a fire! I believe you should get the hell out!"
Which is more likely to prompt action?
Naked assertion without reference to self is actually more convincing than "I know". Psychologically, the reference to self itself raises questions that naked assertion doesn't. What's more, it shifts the cognitive focus away from the whole (supposedly) point: "It's raining" motivates hearers to check out the actuality to see if the assertion is true empirically. "I think" and "I believe" and "I know" shifts attention to the speaker's relationship with the empirical reality. The effect is to dissuade (to some degree) empirical investigation by deflecting attention onto the speaker.
Just because it is "not yet rational" doesn't mean that it is the opposite of rational. This is a classic fallacy of the excluded middle. Rationality and irrationality can be on a spectrum, not sides of a coin.
Perfectly fair! Let me address your post then.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
This conflicts with most understandings of thoughts. A thought is an inner conscious experience. So for example if I'm thinking of a tomato, then I'm thinking of a tomato. Is that a belief? No. A belief is a claim that what we are thinking about is real beyond the thought itself. So if I thought about a tomato and said, "I believe this tomato I'm thinking about exists somewhere in the world," I'm nothing that what I'm thinking about is real beyond my thoughts. Prior to proving that it is true, it is a belief.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
I do want to clarify what an "I think" context is from an "I believe" context. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems you're assuming that "I think there might be a tomato that exists in the world that I'm visualizing in my head," is different from, "I believe there is a tomato that exists in the world what I'm visualizing in my head."
If this is case, "I think" in your case isn't a statement of certainty, but a statement of consideration or exploration. You don't believe its the case, you think it could be. This is called "plausibility". There's nothing innate in your thoughts that confirms or denies that the thing you are thinking about can be found in the real world.
You are implying that if someone thinks on a plausibility for long enough, it becomes a belief statement of possibility or certainty. I would say that's not necessarily the case. Plenty of "I think"s simply stay that way. But correct me if I have the wrong base understanding of what you're trying to say here.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
If one changes from "I think" to "I believe" through the repetition of one's thoughts, then that is most certainly unwarranted confidence. But you have to demonstrate that this always happens, and I'm not sure you have here.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Correct, and I think few would disagree with you.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Unfortunately I'm not seeing how this conclusion follows the premises. All you've noted is one type of belief, or a belief that insists on an idea's truth beyond the limits of its epistemic warrant. The point in my initial reply was to show you there are different types of beliefs. Probability, possibility, plausibility, and irrational. The first three if believed based on one's epistemic circumstances, can be rational. Only if one disregards the epistemic circumstances that allow the other three beliefs to be cogent, can one come to an irrational belief.
If "justified belief" is an oxymoron then I suppose that we are relying on different concepts that we both call "belief".
With belief I roughly mean an attitude with a direction-of-fit towards the world with the content that something is the case or not. On this view, "It is raining" can be a belief without one claiming "I believe it is raining" explicitly. This usage seems closer to (or at least a kind of) what you call an "idea." Thus, to me, there is nothing contradictory in saying a belief is justified, akin to how you say an idea is justified.
I think I have a better picture of what youre arguing now. I think you take "belief" to be an add-on to expressions of ideas to signal credence to oneself or others without any added epistemic warrant being involved. You seemingly derive this concept of "belief" from how the phrase "I believe" is used to convince oneself and others that there is more warrant than there really is and that this thus is irrational.
Your addition of "I believe in you" is interesting. It tells me that you take the relevant concept to be what I would consider "non-doxastic," being similar to having "faith."
Is this in the right direction of what you had in mind with your argument?
Well, bad call. No "middle" excluded by me, although I won't argue it's not true of your interpretation of what I've said. I can't account for or answer to your interpretation. Speaking in binaries for simplicity's sake does not imply thinking in binaries. It's seems you want to find fault if at all possible? Have you considered your own motivations for that?
Take "belief is irrational" like saying, "Todd's gone nuts!" It doesn't mean there's absolutely no sanity left in Todd, does it? But nuts enough that it's significant and has to be dealt with. Like that.
I think your confusion lies in failing to keep the two parts of such statements distinct.
"I ____ that P" is a two-part assertion. (think/believe/know in the blank, makes no real difference.)
Part 1: P is the assertion proper, and it is identical in "think P", "believe P", and "know P". Epistemically identical in all cases.
Part 2: The "I ____" part, referring to the speaker's relationship/attitude to the assertion, which as far as the truth value of the assertion is neither here or there.
Since there is no difference in P in any case, there is no reason justified by assessing P epistemically to choose "think" or "believe" or "know". The choice has nothing to do with P or its validity or truth value. P (epistemically) and the speaker's relationship/attitude to P both lie on spectra. The choice made to adopt one or another relationship/attitude does not. It's a discrete, mutually exclusive choice.
In predominate usage, "I believe" is chosen for assertions for which the epistemic analysis of the assertion does not give it sufficient warrant. It's a frank admission that epistemic warrant is weak. "Believe" bridges the gap. When warrant is strong, "The sun is really bright and hot today," we simply don't prefix an assertion with "I believe..."
I don't argue that there isn't plenty of sloppy use of language and that lots of times "think" and "believe" get used interchangeably. "Know" is quite different, though. However, I try not to make sense out of things based on sloppy examples.
Does that help?
What you have in mind does, but it's not what I said.
"I ____ that P" is a two-part assertion. (think/believe/know in the blank, makes no real difference.) E.g., "I believe it's raining." P = "it's raining".
Part 1: P is the assertion proper, and it is identical in "think P", "believe P", and "know P". Epistemically identical in all cases.
Part 2: The "I ____" part, referring to the speaker's relationship/attitude to the assertion, which as far as the truth value of the assertion is neither here or there.
Since there is no difference in P in any case, there is no reason (justified by assessing P epistemically) to choose "think" or "believe" or "know". The choice has nothing to do with P or its validity or truth value.
Quoting Philosophim
Actually, no -- which would be clear with a simpler example. Yours with "might be" and "visualizing in my head" and "plausibility" is unnecessarily complicated. Let's stick to "I _____ that P", it's all we need.
I said/implied nothing about thinking "on a plausibility for long enough, it becomes a belief statement". Our use of think, believe, and know are terminology choices we make. I'm ignoring sloppy usage and deceptive usage and assuming the the choice reflects the speaker's own honest assessment of their relationship/attitude to the assertion.
Let me know how these clarifications alter your feedback.
Therein lay some difference in our philosophies: an assertion is a statement predicated on language, but the OP is concerned with the relative quality of thought and belief, its irrationality, which are determined by the logical validity of the cognitions of which they are the content, and with which language has nothing to do.
While I agree assertions of thought or belief, in and of themselves, hold the same epistemic value, demonstrated by their interchangeable language use .however indiscriminate that may be ..without serious loss of mutual understanding, it remains they are very far from being interchangeable in the system in which they are the constructs necessarily presupposed in any language use.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Agreed, assertions expressing them aside, thought has no more truth value than belief, but only because there is no truth value in either one. Truth resides exclusively in the conformity of the thought or belief with experience on the one hand, or another antecedent thought or belief that has itself already conformed to experience, on the other. Conformity with respect to experience is empirical proof, legislated by the principle of induction, re: contingently true only insofar as we know; conformity with respect to antecedent thought/belief is logical proof, legislated by the LNC, re: necessarily true insofar as its negation is impossible. Empirical proof is called knowledge, logical proof is called apodeitic certainty.
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Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Or its overly simplified?
Either way, its your thread; Im just a visitor.
Ok, I'm in agreement with you that in certain contexts, "I think" can mean the same thing as "I believe". But does it always? No. Many time "I think" can also mean "I'm considering". And considering is not a synonym of 'belief'.
If you're going to use a word that can have more than one meaning depending on context, but you're only interested in the context in which that meaning is a synonym of another word, just use that other word. Otherwise people are going to bring up the different contexts of the word you're using, and the argument will likely get into an argument over definitions instead of where you want to explore.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Again, I think in a particular context these words could be synonyms, or have certain parts that they share. But 'know' is never the same as 'believe' unless you're using slang. Knowledge as a definition is a descriptor of whether a belief has a backing behind it that fits some reasonable standard beyond the base assertion. Another way to view it is, "If a belief can be irrational, than there is the possible contrast of a belief being rational."
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Unfortunately this just picks a very limited context and makes them all synonyms. So all you've really done is use one concept, not three. But it is the case that these words can represent different concepts in different contexts. Therefore you can's use the word as if it is a synonym in all contexts.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
There's a difference between 'unnecessary complication" and "identifying real differences". I mean, we can call everything that's has green on it a tree right? "Fir tree", "bush" and "grass" are not unnecessary complications, they are observations of important differences in most contexts.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
So then, and please correct me again if I'm wrong, you're using belief and think as synonyms.
Exactly. It is a matter of degree. Hence by definition no longer binary. We have moved now onto a scale which lies between two extremes.
What this shows is that the thread, and your attempted explanation, is hopelessly muddled.
Cheers.
Probably.
Again, what you mean by belief isn't relevant to the post. The syllogism can't be evaluated on the basis of your definition, because it doesn't use that definition.
Quoting GazingGecko
Getting there! :D
As I've mentioned now in several places:
"I ____ that P" is a two-part assertion. (think/believe/know in the blank, makes no real difference.) E.g., "I believe it's raining." P = "it's raining".
Part 1: P is the assertion proper, and it is identical in "think P", "believe P", and "know P". Epistemically identical in all cases. Maybe the problem is how I tried to
Part 2: The "I ____" part, referring to the speaker's relationship/attitude to the assertion, which as far as the truth value of the assertion is neither here or there.
Since there is no difference in P in any case, there is no reason (justified by assessing P epistemically) to choose "think" or "believe" or "know". The choice has nothing to do with P or its validity or truth value.
So, not sure what you mean by "add-on", but I think the above makes clear the structure of what I'm talking about. "I think/believe/know that P" involves a discrete choice about how to characterize the speaker's relationship/attitude to the assertion P, not a difference in P itself. When a person chooses "believe", it's because neither "think" nor "know" fit the bill, and they're not satisfied with simply stating "P".
Given the above, I'm pretty sure that "doxastic" and similar considerations apply only to Part 2, the asserter's "doxastic stance" toward the assertion.
Well, no, we're not in agreement, because I haven't said and don't agree that think can mean the same thing as believe.
Quoting Philosophim
Nope. I'm not sure I can make it clearer. Last try: I'll restate it with a bunch more possibilities:
"I ____ that P" is a two-part assertion. (think/believe/know/consider/speculate/conjecture/theorize/hypothesize in the blank, makes no real difference.) E.g., "I believe it's raining." P = "it's raining".
Part 1: P is the assertion proper, and it is identical in "think P", "believe P", "know P", or "WHATEVER P". Epistemically identical in all cases. Maybe the problem is how I tried to
Part 2: The "I ____" part, referring to the speaker's relationship/attitude to the assertion, which as far as the truth value of the assertion is neither here or there.
Since there is no difference in P in any case, there is no reason (justified by assessing P epistemically) to choose "think" or "believe" or "know" or "WHATEVER" -- which are not synonyms. The choice has nothing to do with P or its validity or truth value, which is identical in every case.
I apologize then, I'm clearly not getting it.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Can you explain how these are epistemically identical in all cases? The point I was getting at earlier is that you seem to want to use one concept with words that often have different meanings in different contexts. It would be much clearer if you voiced what that specific concept was without the introduction of different words.
You also use P as a noun earlier with "Its raining". So is "Its raining" epistemically equivalent whether I believe, think, or know about it? Or is it the believe, think, or know which is epistemically equivalent?
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Ok, this is contextual to oneself. But couldn't a person have a different intention? So I'm sure one person when they say 'believe' could mean 'assert'. In another context they could mean, "Consider". And in another context they could personally believe their belief is 'knowledge'. But these are all different concepts, whether their opinion of the concept in application to P is true or not.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Are you just trying to say that "What is true is true regardless of what we believe/think/know about it?"
To find out what somebody believes, don't ask them for a self report of the form "I believe that X is true with n% confidence", but rather, ask them what they know about the world, because what a person is prepared to assert about the world is a more accurate measure of what their actual "beliefs" are, and can be expected to be at odds with what they say about themselves when introspecting unreliably.
The next question should concern the extent to which beliefs exist internally within a person in the sense of a mental state, versus externally of the person as behavioural hypotheses that society projects onto the person. (Since we have no reason to assume that people understand themselves).
That's right, if you are only thinking about the first person use - "I know that...", "I believe that...", "I think that...". Things are different if you think about "S knows that..." etc. In those cases, it is not about the level of credence of the subject, but about the level of credence of the speaker. When I report that "S knows that p", I am endorsing p as true; when I report that "S believes that p", I am refraining from any commitment; if I report that "S thinks that p", I am actually indicating that p is false. One can go further and report that S supposes that p, suggesting that p is absurd, or imagines that p, which classes p as a fantasy. First person uses are special because the speaker and the subject are the same.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Yes, the debates around the remote possibility that p might be false can indeed rather tiresome. I'm prepared to concede that philosophers and scientists might have stricter criteria for truth (and so for knowledge) than we apply in the rough and tumble of everyday life.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Yes, I think Frankfurt is right about that. However, I'm bewildered by your apparent belief that all beliefs are based on bullshit. That doesn't follow from anything that Frankfurt says, so far as I can see.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Yes. If we accept that there is no possibility of anything ever being certainly true, the distinction between knowledge and belief collapses. But I do think that there are a good many truths about the world, and it is useful not to confuse them with probabilities and assumptions.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
If you are talking about the first person use, then I agree with you that "I know/believe that p" is unhelpful - and that's not just a matter of what is persuasive. But I think that the third person is useful. It's an important moment in the development of children when they recognize that sometimes they may know something that someone else does not (and the possibility that someone else may know something that they do not). It would be impossible to deal with people if that were not possible.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
H'm. I think that depends on the context.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Well, I explained that difference by reference to the speaker's endorsement or not. It is true that people often do jump to conclusions on the basis of incomplete evidence. That can be useful when judiciously adopted. Decisions in practice are often make under pressure of time. The catch is that one is taking a risk, which may or may not pay off. But a lot of life is like that.
As for premise 1: Epistemically, belief and thought are identical.
This needs clarification. What is a belief? What is a thought?
As far as I can see you have stipulated that they are identical but have not given an argument as to why they are identical.
Once you tell us what they are then maybe we can proceed to argue about these topics.
One, they're premises. They don't need proof. You're right, I'm relying on the reader's own experience in using the terms and observing they're use. Are you saying you have no working grasp of the difference between think, believe, know, etc., or that your grasp of them is so different than mine that we're not referring to the same things with those terms? I'm not building a universal, iron-clad case here, just testing the limitations of a real-world observation.
I am saying that outside of ordinary use of these words, we have no technical definitions of "believing", "knowing" or "thinking". Unless you argue that knowledge is justified true belief, which is unconvincing.
Having said this, on ordinary usage, belief and thought are different. A belief may be true or false. It has a residue of faith to it as well.
A thought may be many things and need not correspond to anything external, as in thinking about a flying mountain, which whatever else it is, is hard to argue is a belief.
Hey dude, nice to discuss with someone who is actually thinking! :grin:
I find that this kind of glitch often results from the clash between categorical thinking and empirical thinking.
I'm working to understand what's going on with actual behavior from psychological and sociological perspectives, so it's really cool when I find a solid pattern that explains extant behavior. I'm aware of mainstream term definitions and categorizations, of course, but I don't approach experience (mine and others') through that filter, and I dispense with accepted definitions and categories if they don't fit what's really going on.
That's why I don't offer definitions. I want readers to use their own understandings/senses for the terms, because if I'm onto a legit pattern, it will hold for most or all people given their own unfunneled grasps of the terms. And if not, if someone introduces novel elements that don't fit the pattern, that's a find not a problem. Is it legit? What are the differences? Are they significant? Do they imply an important, different angle, etc?
I call this part of an exercise like this post a "sweep".
So, looking at people actually using those Part 2/prefixed terms, when they do and don't use them, what motivates their choice of term in different circumstances and to what end -- that's my study.
I'm interested in belief for reasons I've already explained on this post. Until a conversation I had with one of my sons a couple of years ago, I assumed belief/believing had a modicum of legitimacy and value. Since then I've had the suspicion that isn't true, so I've been digging into it. This post is the kind of thing I do as a last-chance, redeem-yourself-now-or-forever-hold-your-piece step (not really, always open to revision) before accepting my own confidence that it's true.
So, I put what everyone says, including philosophers, out of my head, observe what's really going on, find the patterns resident in actual behavior, and then I go about reconciling the differences with academic and mainstream thinking. I think this is important because, to the extant that our most respected and most predominate thinking are responsible for the FUBARs in the world that look like they're increasingly threatening our very existence, I think it behooves us to assess and fix their psycho-social and ideological causes.
Try approaching the syllogism (such as it is, it's not stellar, but you get the drift) and see where we come out.
So, do you get how there are two parts to the various think/believe/know/WHATEVER statements? "Epistemically identical" means that if you do exactly the same epistemic assessment on them (what warrants me considering P as true?) you come out with exactly the same results for all cases. Once I realized these statements have two parts and that the actual assertion part (P/"it's raining") for all forms is the exact same assertion, I realized that "epistemically identical" is an unnecessary qualification. They're the exact same. All that differs is the 2nd part that indicates the speaker's relationship to/attitude towards their assertion. I put it 2nd because it's far less important than the actual assertion. In fact, when you think about it, as far as the assertion goes, it's irrelevant. How I view the assertion and what relationship to it and confidence level I have in it makes no difference to whether it's true or not.
So, that begs the question why it's important to the speaker to prefix the assertion with an irrelevancy. That's kinda the first red flag that irrationality is involved. Why not simply say, "It's raining." ?? Part 2 (think/believe/know) is irrelevant to the rain and the question whether it's raining, but not irrelevant to the speaker.
I'll let you digest that and take another look at the post, then tell me if the reorientation helped.
Nice catch dude! You're right. I'm not at all interested in the 2nd or 3rd person cases because I'm not trying to build a theory here. I'm only interested in 1st person because my thinking (for me) and your thinking (for you) is at the root of all problems we have with thinking about others, so that's where we need to find the damage and fix it.
This post is how I'm trying to answer the question I have of myself, "Can I say that all belief is irrational?" This is how I stress test the hypothesis "All belief is irrational." It's an empirical way of doing philosophy (empirical in the sense that I'm getting real data from original sources, i.e., the best-effort thinking of other smart people.)
Quoting Ludwig V
Ahh... if only that were true. Justified True Belief is a prime example showing that their criteria tend to be pretty shitty. And philosophers don't dictate the views of the vast majority of people. They don't even influence them directly. The work of philosophers is the stuff that "leaders" cherry-pick to rationalize their agendas. It works, because you'd have to be a philosopher to debunk the crap some of these guys came up with. Philosophy has always served as a foundation for building "civilized societies" (when the power-crazed even bother trying to rationalize what they do.)
Quoting Ludwig V
It doesn't follow from Frankfurt. And no, lol, it's not a belief. For me, everything is provisional. I state hypotheticals that look like fully-believed assertions because that's exactly how hypotheticals are stated: as unquestionably true. This helps me understand the mentality of the person I'm talking with. If they take it as an authoritative statement of belief, they deal in the currency of authoritative belief. If they take it as a hypothesis to be falsified (and I make it so easy for them lol), then I'm dealing with someone who thinks scientifically, empirically. Guess which type I run into the most? :rofl:
Prefix: "I think/believe/know/WHATEVER"
Assertion: "it's raining" (P)
Once those two parts are clear, (along with the fact that P doesn't need prefixing in the first place,) the question becomes why the speaker chose the prefix they did. "I think" seems to be a simple admission that this is where the person is at. This is how they see it. I don't see much more implied. "I know" conveys that this isn't just how they see it -- they see it this way because they're thoroughly convinced it's this way, by whatever means they became convinced. So, if something doesn't just appear to be true (think) but we're sure/convinced/certain it's true (know), then why would a person choose "I believe"?
I'd like to hear what you think the answer to that question is. For example, why to people say, "I believe that God exists"? Why not, "I know God exists," or just, "God exists"? What's that hedging really about?
Quoting Ludwig V
Absolutely. Nice to meet someone who thinks about childhood development. Ever real Lloyd deMause? He showed quite irrefutably (as far as I can see) that all the most severe and widespread problems in the world trace back to the FUBARed psyches of "leaders" who have engineered them, thanks to traumatic childhood abuse.
Quoting Ludwig V
Well, I can't think of any exceptions. What can you come up with?
In [1], you seem to be suggesting that saying "I think X" is equivalent to saying "I believe X".
But then in [2], you seem to be implying the "I think X" and "I believe X" mean different things.
Then in [3], you're noting that when a person says "I think X" they're conveying a belief that is unwarranted.
But this means [4] applies exclusively to statements "I think X", and not necessarily to all expressions of belief. This makes your conclusion non-sequitur.
Independent of this analysis, I'll point out that your conclusion has an absurd implication: that all beliefs are equally irrational - and therefore all beliefs are equally arbitrary. That's prima facie absurd: it implies it's just as reasonable for a pedestrian at an intersection to walk straight into traffic as it is to wait for the light to change and oncoming traffic to stop.
So there can be warranted confidence in a belief - and that's what we ought to strive for.
There's an equivocation going on between two senses of "think":
Mary thinks the house is on fire.
Mary thinks, "The house is on fire."
The first usage is more or less synonymous with "believe." It refers to the content of a proposition. The second usage, however, is completely separate from the issue of belief. It refers to a mental event, a thought, that Mary is having at the moment. She may be having it for any number of reasons, some of which will have nothing to do with a particular blazing house. (Perhaps she's remembering a line in a poem she likes.). It is this usage that @Banno refers to when he says:
Quoting Banno
Mary, in the second usage, is "entertaining" the thought. Consider the different ways she would respond if you asked her, "Do you believe the house is on fire?"
Case 1: Yes, I do.
Case 2: What house? Oh, you misunderstood me. I had that thought for a completely unrelated reason, sorry. I was evaluating scary sentences, trying to decide how I felt about this one.
These two usages of "thought" and "think" are taken up in much more detail in the thread, "Can a Thought Cause Another Thought?".
It's just a confusion.
Sorry there appears to be so much ancillary concern/interpretation here. I understand where you are coming from. In fact, philosophy is littered with discussion of rational/irrational (or "emotional" as it is sometimes called). There may be some piling on that could be cleared up. Is a more accurate first premise to say: "To the degree that a belief is semantically and epistemically as rational as a thought..."?
It's only that there are at least three senses (versions/options) of belief:
One is as you say, interchangeable with a certain sense of thought--though as @Banno points out, there are a few versions of thought as well--but I think we would agree the one you are employing is the same as "I know" to the extent that it is a claim (to be knowledge). This would be the sense that, if you are overly "confident", and it is not "warranted" (it is not true), you will be arrogant (I have no idea what that is like though) or lose credibility (though you may not know it) as @Ludwig V points out.
Another is as a hypothesis, as in a guess. Which may be verified as correct, but does not put me in the same relationship to youI can guess with no justification because I am not making a claim to you that "I know" anything (true). "Is it raining?" "I believe it is." "Why?" ... and the next thing I say does not have to be verified or verifiable (though that it is raining can). A guess may be silly or crazy, but it is not judged as to whether it is "irrational" because it is not a claim to "truth beyond the limits of its epistemic warrant".
But I believe it is the third version of belief where we get all jumbled together: belief as something I am willing to stand behind (say, on principal), such as [My belief is that] everyone is created equal (A moral claim discussed here). Now this is not the same as a justified claim or a verifiable guess but is not without reasons ("irrational"), even if only what I will be responsible for, what I stake or promise my actions to reflect. This is a conviction, which is just not in the same ballpark as what you term "confidence".
Perhaps what we are hoping for is a certain definition of "rational", but I believe the hitch might be that in including the second and excluding the third as being "rational", you thus pile together what is "irrational".
All of that is to say that with a tweak or two to some premises, this is all well and good. Even to the extent, if made explicit, what it is that you feel/think is going on and how that justifies you to dispense with accepted definitions and categories if they don't fit what's really going on.
Unfortunately, without those tweaks, the relevance that you draw cannot apply outside a certain bubble, as "cannot" wishes to imply here:
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Now we could argue that "I wish you would...", or "You're an idiot to...", but, categorically, you cannot shift between think/belief as a claim or guess, and belief as a thing that creates nations. The leg we stand on is our consent to the social contract (even if implied). We are constituted in and by what we hold to be true--thus why countries don't speak of irrationality, or right or wrong, but treason. Now, if you want to talk political philosophy and about "authority and coercion", that is a timely matter, but, alas for all of us, not epistemological.
The following is my attempt to formalize your clarified argument. I hope it is reasonably accurate and valid. Some nuance is probably missed.
The Argument
(1) For any assertion p, the epistemic warrant for p is identical for any prefix ("I believe," "I think," "I know," etc.).
(2) If any prefix is chosen above another prefix for any assertion p is motivated by wanting to make p seem more warranted than it is, and the epistemic warrant for p remains identical, then the choice rhetorically overstates the epistemic warrant for p.
(3) For any assertion p, every use of the prefix "I believe" is a choice over the prefix "I think" and is motivated by wanting to make p seem more warranted than it is.
(C1) Thus, every use of the prefix "I believe" before any assertion p is a choice that rhetorically overstates the epistemic warrant for p.
(4) Making a choice that rhetorically overstates epistemic warrant is irrational.
(C2) Thus, every use of the prefix "I believe" before an assertion is irrational.
If this is what you're saying, then you avoid my earlier objections and the self-defeat worry levelled at your argument by @Banno and others. However, that comes at the cost of making the conclusion far more modest than it initially seemed. "All belief is irrational" is more provocative than (C2), which might have been your intention. Still, from what I understand, your line of argument only yields something akin to (C2). At most.
(3) seems dubious to me. Usage of "I believe" does not appear to be due to that motivation most of the time, at least based on my linguistic intuitions. Still, even if my intuition is very off, as long as there is one counter-example, the argument (as I reconstructed it, at least) is unsound. One could of course weaken (3) and (C2) to only concern "most" or "some" of the use of the prefix "I believe," but then the argument become even more modest.
Do you think this reconstruction is roughly right? Feel free to clarify or add further support to premises, if you want.
Can you explain as clearly and as succinctly as possible then please?
Normally, they wouldn't. That's why it seems to odd that you want to ignore "know". I know you explained that, but it seems to me a pragmatic reason, rather than anything to do with a philosophical understanding of these cognitive verbs.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Well, how about a group of people wanting to extract a vital document from a safe. But no-one knows the combination. Then someone says, "Oh, I know the combination?" What's they will focus on is not that that person knows it, but what the combination is. The first question will be "What is the combination", not "How do you know it?" Later on, when the police are trying to work out who stole the document, they will be more interested in how you know it.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
I believe that people who say that they know that God exists are keen to emphasize their certainty. I would expect them to be very keen to cite their grounds. People who say that they believe that God exists are not necessarily any less certain, but are more likely to recognize that their faith in God is not based on purely rational grounds. When we say we believe in someone or something, we are expressing faith and loyalty, not just a cognitive achievement. It's a wrinkle in the standard use.
Quoting Antony Nickles
I think that's a philosopher's narrow view. Most of what we know, we know on authority. Naturally, a good deal then hangs on the warrant for that authority, but it is not a marginal source for our knowledge. Of course, sadly, it is all to easy to misuse authority, once it is conceded, but that doesn't undermine its importance in practice.
Quoting J
That's one of the ways in which thinking, thought etc. are hideously complicated concepts. It covers not only the activity of thinking, but also its results. It covers actual activities that we would call thinking and situations where thinking is not an overt process, but happens, it would seem, unconsciously or at least without our conscious involvement.
I struggle to articulate the difference. It is tempting to say that they express different propositional attitudes. But I don't like propositional attitudes for reasons that don't matter for the moment. The "I know that p" is special, because speaker and subject are the same person. So that comes out as an emphatic assertion of "p" - pleonastic but expressing something nonetheless. "I believe" and "I think" come out as less emphatic assertions - normally.
But "S believes that p" is expresses S's evaluation of "p", of course, but is not contradicted if "p" is false. So it expresses the speaker's evaluation. Is that an illocutionary effect, possibly? Then there's the rest of the family - "think", "suppose", "imagine", "assume" etc.
Yes, fair point, but the question is: does it matter? If both work the same, it's all the same. Please explain how the distinction matters.
The first usage is really not synonymous with "believe" -- otherwise people would use them interchangeably, but they don't. "I think that P" and "I believe that P" are not totally different. P is the same. But "I think" and "I believe" are semantically different in specific, consistent ways that are important enough that common usage represents a clear pattern.
Consider:
"You're beautiful."
"I think you're beautiful."
"I believe you're beautiful."
"I know you're beautiful."
"I whatever you're beautiful."
You can see the differences, right?
Yeah, there's been some discussion here and much more on Reddit (/r/epistemology). What it's brought me to are:
That raises two questions. One regards the self-reference: what are the differences between think/believ/know/whatever and what's the motivation for and significance of choosing one or another?
But here's the surprise (for me): Why interject the self-reference at all? Why add ego concerns to the mix? If the assertion is the message, why stick ourselves in there? Crassly, if the assertion is the important part, who cares whether I think/believe/know/speculate/guess/conjecture/SWAG (super-wild-assed-guess)/predict/prophesy/deduce/WHATEVER lol.
All the girl cares about is "You're beautiful." She's smart enough to know you think so, lol.
Yes, if a hypothesis were to be judged before being verified, authority (expertise) may put the odds in their favor, but they might not be privy to facts on the ground. But a claim to knowledge can be solely based on authority because it is transferable (in the sense of being aware of the answer). But in deciding what is the right thing to do (say, when we are at a loss), the authority is me, warranted or unwarranted, which does not hang on verification nor justification (it is not a necessity, categorically, but not thus irrational, as unintelligiblejust a different logic). The State has its (supposed) own authority.
This is our desire that everything be subject to the method and implications of science, which is the basis of its facts. If you follow its method, and I (competently) follow the method, we come to the same answerit doesnt matter about the person. We want what we do to not involve the personal (individual) nor the human at all. Knowledge can have this form, but not everything involves knowledge (although still rational, as having intelligible reasons). And I know does not only have that sense, as I know you are in pain is not to know their pain but to tell you I see your pain. I accept (or reject) you as a person in pain (in response to I am in pain).
NICE! Almost exactly, but far better job than I did. I suck at syllogisms, lol.
I'd say "instead of 'I think'" instead of "above another prefix". Also, sometimes the motivation is to embellish credibility unduly, but not necessarily. Sometimes it's an honest attempt to reflect one's internal level of credence and commitment to the assertion. Sometimes it's actually to downplay the issue, saying "I think" when the fact is that we're sure beyond reasonable doubt.
It's been pointed out that many alternatives to think/believe are available, and it turns out that they all work similarly: guess/speculate/conjecture/deduce/imagine/whatever. They're semantically different, but they perform the same function in "I _____ that P."
Yes, "All belief is irrational" was my "teaser headline".
C2 as you stated it is JUST PEACHY!
So, to the extent that thinking/stating/ascribing believe/belief to an assertion overshoots legit warrant, especially when illegitimately overshooting is the point, it doesn't make the assertion "believed" irrational, but it makes believing it irrational.
So, in that sense, under those conditions, all belief is, indeed, irrational.
What remains is to determine if you can involve belief without overshooting warrant. Yes, many people say "believe" when they mean think and everyone understands they mean think. However, I don't think our epistemics should accommodate that kind of sloppiness and confusion.
Consider:
"God exists."
"I think God exists."
"I believe God exists."
"I know God exists."
"I guess God exists."
"I infer God exists."
I could go on, of course. Each conveys something distinctly different. Where a lot of the confusion enters in (as became clear in this discussion and others elsewhere), the difference is irrelevant to the assertion "God exists". It's relevant only to the self-reference, "I _____" -- which is semantically irrelevant to the assertion, actually. That begs the question whether injecting an irrelevance is itself rational or not.
Of all those (and any others), "believe" is unusual. It's less firm/certain than merely "God exists" or "I know God exists," and yet it comes across as more firm/certain than "I think God exists."
And yet it's the same assertion, so the assertion itself can't be more or less true depending on the self-reference. So, how could the firmness/certainty change mere by changing the semantics of the self-reference? There's no semantic (let alone logically entailed) connection between them. So, the self-reference, rationally, reflects the state/relationship of the speaker in terms of certainty and commitment to the assertion, and doesn't reflect on or impact the assertion itself.
I was going to say more, but now I'm in exploratory territory and it turned into a brain dump, lol. I should probably write through it (it's how I think into new ideas) elsewhere and come back with something more intelligible than one of my meanderings.
What do you think so far?
Sure. Simply put, epistemics includes whatever we do to make sure that something we think is true actually is true (or find out it's not.) Especially when it comes to beliefs/believing, this often means we haven't done enough to say we know, but we want to say/feel more sure/certain than "I think".
Believing bridges the gap between what we've done to make sure we're right and the level of certainty/commitment to the idea where we want to be but haven't got the goods to show it's legit to be there, yet.
I guess epistemics is like a ladder. You can legitimately go as high as the ladder (warrant) is tall. If you want to act and feel more certain about it, it would take a leap. "I think" kind of indicates that you've got reason to assume Floor 5 is there, but your ladder only goes as far as Floor 2 at the moment, so "I know there's a Floor 5" really isn't justified.
But you could say, "I believe there's a Floor 5." The question then becomes: why say "believe" when you've got no more reason to believe than you do were you just to say "I think" ? Your ladder is exactly the same height both ways. Epistemically the same.
So, either you do the work to extend the ladder, or you say "believe".
And when you realize there's two important pieces, not just one, and that "believe/think" applies to only one of them, it changes how we usually talk about it.
"I ______" (think/believe/know) is a self-reference. It has nothing to do with "it's raining" in the statement "I _____ that it's raining." No matter what you fill the blank with, all versions are statements of the form, "I ______ that P" (P = "it's raining").
So, think/believe/know has nothing to do with P (whether it's raining). They indicate how sure/committed I am to the assertion. I'm implying but not saying how tall my ladder is.
Hope that helps.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
I'm not sure what you mean. They work quite differently, as I tried to show.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
It may not matter at all, for the points you want to cover. But as @Ludwig V has elaborated, any theses involving "think" and "thought" need to be carefully laid out so as to show which uses and concepts you mean to refer to.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Sure. But consider these:
I think it's raining.
I believe it's raining.
Wouldn't you agree they're nearly synonymous?
The point is, all these usages are linguistically dependent. They approach, or recede from, synonymy depending on context. And in another language, I'm sure the various usages would be different.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
They can be, and sometimes they aren't. Context again.
This takes us back to your OP premise:
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
I hope it's clear now why that's only true in the cases in which they are understood to be identical by language-speakers.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Well, yes -- when the use of "I think" means "I believe", that shift often takes place. It doesn't have to. Not to belabor the point, but we can think many things without necessarily believing them. We can also think them in ways such that they're not even possible candidates for belief (such as my Case 2, above).
I haven't ignored it since you first brought it up, and I've said so. After working it through, tho, I realized it doesn't matter.
We're dealing with exactly the same form of statement, "I ______ that P" regardless what you put in the blank. All these statements include an assertion P prefaced by a self-reference "I _____". P is identical in all cases, no matter if you fill the blank with think/believe/know/speculate/guess/conjecture/SWAG (super-wild-assed-guess)/predict/prophesy/deduce/WHATEVER lol. So the only thing that changes is the semantics of the self-reference, which has no epistemic bearing on the assertion.
That raises two questions. One regards the self-reference: what are the differences between think/believe/know/whatever and what's the motivation for and significance of choosing one or another?
But here's the surprise (for me): Why interject the self-reference at all? Why add ego concerns to the mix? If the assertion is the message, why stick ourselves in there? Crassly, if the assertion is the important part, who cares whether I think/believe/know/speculate/guess/conjecture/SWAG (super-wild-assed-guess)/predict/prophesy/deduce/WHATEVER lol.
All the girl cares about is "You're beautiful." She's smart enough to know you think so, lol.
Not really sure how to respond to the rest of your reply. Yes, we can think about it in ways that make it hideously complicated. That's what I'm trying to rectify. Setting it up as I described above simplifies it immensely. Much of the responses I've gotten here and elsewhere boil down to failing to recognize that think/believe/know have no logical bearing on the assertion being made. They're not really about the assertion -- they're about the person's subjective assessment about their relationship/attitude towards the assertion.
Does it follow that your OP and all of the posts you have written within this thread are irrational?
Quoting J
You showed the distinction, you didn't show how the distinction makes a difference to our topic.
Quoting J
In sloppy usage, sure. Are you saying that the difference is insignificant?
"I believe it's raining" is a rather trivial matter, and also easily checked empirically. "I believe the COVID vaccines are harmful" -- not so much. "Think" and "believe" mean something significantly different in that case.
Sure, I can see what you're saying. You're taking the position of a dissertation committee and faulting my weak defense attempts. Cool. My goal here was to evoke feedback that would clarify. "Not clear enough, there's more to it, you're vague here, here, and here" and the like are almost always valid, but rarely serve to clarify a topic. I'm not trying to build an airtight case here for the irrationality of beliefs/believing. I'm exploring horizons and limitations. I think I've gotten all I could hope to get from our discussion. Thanks, man.
I'm sorry I didn't notice. But disappointed that you think it doesn't matter. It depends what your project is, so I won't argue with you.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
In a sense the "I know" in "I know that it's raining" doesn't add anything to someone asserting "It's raining". The reason is simple. If you assert "It's raining" and I trust you, I can safely conclude that you know that it's raining. Equally, of course, if you assert "it's raining" and it's not raining, or I don't know whether it's raining, I can conclude that you believe it is raining.
It does not follow from the fact that it's raining that you know or believe that it's raining. So these implications are a bit odd. They follow from you asserting "it's raining".
But that's the strictly logical situation. Informally, when someone says "I know that p", they are borrowing the authority of knowing something, which, strictly speaking can only be given to by someone else. Why, because marking your own homework is meaningless. That's why, if you want to understand "know" and "believe" you need to think in the third person. The first person is a limiting case, not typical. Standard cases assume that speaker and subject are different people.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
They have no logical bearing in the sense that they are not grounds for, or evidence for, the assertion being made. But since "I know that p" is only true if "p" is true, they do have a bearing on "know". It's not quite the same with "believe", but anyone who says either "I know that p" or "I believe that p" is asserting that p, and that is part of the meaning of those two words.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
I don't really get the business about the ladder. It is true that if I have good, but not sufficient evidence for p, there is what one might call and evidentiary gap. People probably do sometimes leap over that gap and assert more than they really have evidence for. So what?
Yeah you hit the nail on the head. You're coming at this as an epistemologist would. That's why 3rd person is important for you. You're taking a bird's/God's/universal viewpoint to look at the totality of the question.
I'm only interested in the 1st person aspect because I'm not creating an epistemology/epistemological theory. That's why I use the term "epistemic". My sole interest is how an individual can, for themself, DO epistemic work, and I'm trying to figure out how and why we as individuals fail either to do it at all or do it poorly.
So, yeah -- different projects, because all epistemic work -- just like all science -- is done, fundamentally, in the 1st person.
In fact, I'm positively disinterested in the 3rd person angle, because it doesn't inform the 1st person issues. I'm not saying ignore the 3rd person, period. I'm saying that the 1st person issues determine how you're going to take on the 3rd person stuff, so first, let's get 1st person epistemics right.
Hope I'm making some sense to you here.
Cool.
The conclusion of the OP, that all belief is irrational, remains self-defeating.
Perfectly fair as this can allow room for creative thought. But if we're going to develop it into a coherent argument, we have to eventually come to definitions that accurately describe what's going on that all can agree on.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Yeah, its a realization some people eventually come to. "Hey, do I really know anything?" Descartes had this epiphany when he discovered that a triangle could exist that did not have a total of 180 degrees. Draw a triangle on a sphere for example, and the degrees are more than 180. So he began to doubt himself until he could come up with something he could not doubt, "I think therefore I am". So the question of, "Do I believe this, do I know this, can any of us know anything" is essentially the tradition of epistemology, or the study of knowledge.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
I am a big fan of first taking a fresh approach to problems and seeing what you come up with. That lets you approach the problem from your perspective instead of placing yourself into other people's perspective first. If you wish to read a few philosopher's perspectives, google "Epistemology" and see all the crazy stuff philosophers have come up with over the years. :)
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Fantastic. You came up with on your own what is largely considered the difference between knowledge, belief, and truth.
Truth is generally agreed to be "What is". What do I mean? "Its raining". Its either raining, or it isn't. It doesn't matter whether you or I know, believe, or disbelieve that its raining. It is! Its true no matter what we think about it.
So why are belief and knowledge important? A belief is an assertion of what you think is true, but of course it may not be true. And knowledge is an assertion of what you think is true, but of course it may not be true. The difference between belief an knowledge is that a belief does not need any rational thinking behind it, while knowledge does.
For example, I could believe that the moon is made of green cheese. Why? Well it looks like it. Its more of an emotional assertion about reality, and while it may be accurate, there's no reasoning behind it. Why do we care about reasoning? Because if something IS true, and we have all the information to ascertain that its true, then we could use reason with the information provided to come to that conclusion. So while being reasonable may lead to us knowing something, and that thing which we know is not true, its far more reasonable and likely to be a correct assertion of what is true then a mere belief. Someone might believe the moon is made of green cheese, but we know its not because we've been there and found it to be made of dirt.
The specifics of what separates a belief from knowledge are of course tricky, and pretty much what the entire study of epistemology is based on. I have written a nice summary intended for a thinker who does not need to know any history of epistemology or deep vocabulary if you want to read it. You might find it interesting. I'll link it again here. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14044/knowledge-and-induction-within-your-self-context/p1 Read it if you want, no worry if you don't. :)
I'm interested in your topic.
Essentially, the discussion revolves around the opposition between "I believe" and "I think"and, importantly, the unspoken priority of analyticity over the sensory. Logic is placed above the irrational, the rational above the intuitive. I'd like to contribute by adding an aesthetic and epistemological layer to the discussionthrough Alexander Baumgarten. In Baumgarten's time (the 18th century), the assertion "rational = good, sensory = nonsense" was not yet self-evident. On the contrary, he demonstrated that logical representation is formal perfection, but it is achieved at the cost of a loss of completeness. Sensory, "obscure" knowledge is the foundation of everything. It grasps the object in its entirety, immediately, in its concreteness and complexity.
Logical knowledge, on the other hand, is an extension, an abstraction, a rationalization, which impoverishes the original richness.
The more obscure the representation, the more complex, complete, and richer its attributes. The clearer it is, the poorer, but more structured it is.
For example: When we first meet a person, we grasp them sensorilya general impression, a "feeling." We can only recall their eye color or height.
With each new encounter, we rationalize more: their character, habits, voice, facial expressions. But the initial, irrational feeling doesn't disappear. It is enriched, becomes deeper, more precise.
It is not replaced by logicit feeds it.
This is the binary opposition: "holism" (sensory, holistic, primary) versus "analyticism" (logical, dissected, secondary).
Evaluating a statement using rationalism as the highest and only value is too impoverished an approach.
Faith is not a "hallucination," not a "psychosis," not a "thought defect."
It is holism, the first act of cognition, the foundation of action.
Without it, there is no trust, no society, no scienceafter all, a hypothesis begins with intuition, not proof.
Can the world be built on "I think" alone? - No.
Can it be built on "faith" alone? - Also no.
You remind me of Descartes and his project of universal doubt. But I think taking on everything at the same time, is unlikely to be fruitful. It would be like trying to map the earth from a satellite with the naked eye. It's not the word/concept "know" and "knowledge" that you should focus on but the different areas and kinds of knowledge.
Science and Mathematics are the (not unchallenged) gold standard in our culture. Philosophy of science and mathematics would give you a much more interesting take on that kind of knowledge. Other areas, Art, Ethics, Psychology, Sociology are more contested, but, again, you would learn more about what is and is not knowledge from looking directly at those, rather than a single, broad-brush concept.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Again, you remind me of Descartes. Like him, you have some sort of idea what a belief needs to have if it is to be legitimate and worth something. Like him, you are disappointed when you ask around. I would suggest, tentatively, that you think about the standards you have by which you assess beliefs. Where did they come from? What could make one belief more legitimate and valuable than another?
Thanks for the contribution. I don't subscribe to many of the categories you mentioned, let alone to their prioritization. For me, it's simple: Something's happening. I don't compartmentalize it before trying to understand it. Any categorization ought to map to the goings-on and add value to them. Otherwise, they're of no value to them or, more often, disruptive. In effect, I'm exploring the possibility that "belief" is a bogus category. Most of the pushback I get originates from, "But that's not what we were taught, and that's not how we're used to seeing things!", not from legit critique.
The likeness is legit to a point, except I fundamentally disagree with Descartes on his entire skeptical project. He sought to find a rock he could build on. That's cool, gotta start somewhere. His mistake was in thinking that once he found what seemed like rock, that was the end of the project. Wrong.
Jesus likened it to housebuilding, which is what I did for a while as a general contractor. What did he point out that Descartes missed? Rain and floods and wind. Empirical reality. Experiential reality. In short, embodied reality. How do you know you found rock you can build on? If the rain and floods and wind blow it down, it wasn't rock. So, you did deeper until you find firmer rock. Does that guarantee your house won't get knocked down again? No. If it doesn't, you found the firmest rock you need for that location. If it does, you dig deeper.
I've lived through 4 complete demolitions of my worldview houses: agnostic => believer => Bible cultist => no fucking clue what's really going on just gonna do the best I can => building on embodied truth and wisdom. That last includes a continual feedback/self-assessment loop that was exactly what Descartes wanted to escape.
But you're wrong about the "you have some sort of idea what a belief needs to have if it is to be legitimate and worth something". Nope. I don't approach things that way. I feel no obligation to accommodate prior thinking when it represents a break from real-world functionality and sense. I start with embodied experience -- actions from communication to experiment -- take the findings, then analyze them. That method has revealed plenty of monkey business. I have no interest in redeeming beliefs or anything else -- that's what I mean by preexisting attachments. I trust that the way things happen is obviously functional (except when psychosis interferes) and follows established patterns, so I trust that when I find goings-on that rupture or resist those patterns, we have a problem.
You suggest what I've already done and am well into developing further. Happy to talk about it if you're interested. It does beg the question why you thought I might have neglected it.
"Belief is a fictitious category." I'm intrigued by how your proof will look. I hope there's a flaw in your perfect syllogism that can be criticized, otherwise I'll have to stop feeling anything for my wife, my family, my community, and God.
Not "perfect" by a long shot, lol. Plenty of valid criticisms have been raised, but the syllogism isn't the point. I posted it to provoke criticism to see if there are considerations I mistook or missed.
Beliefs (like thought, idea, ideology, knowledge, on and on) are concepts of human construction that, at best, refer to something in reality. At worst, they contribute to bullshit and gaslighting.
Feelings are a completely different kind of thing, far more immanent and psychologically deep than any concept or, for that matter, cognition itself. Cognition is connected to affective capacity, but psycho-therapeutic processes (and cults, for that matter) prove how difficult it is to revise affect on the basis of cognition. The flip side -- cognition warped by affect -- is incredibly easy, ubiquitous, and durable.
So your feelings toward your wife, your family, your community, and God are quite secure, I assure you. :blush:
You mean that Descartes was looking for, and thought he had found something permanent on which he could build a whole system of knowledge - permanent and final. It's a common enough mistake. I should have said that I didn't think you would like the house that he builds.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Yes, indeed. It wasn't enough for him that he was able to recognize and correct his errors. He wanted to be able to avoid making them in the first place. But that's not how our lives work.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
So are you saying that we shouldn't be looking for rock-like foundations, but only for foundations that are good enough for whatever purposes we have at hand?
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
It seems a bit over the top to dismiss all beliefs just because some of them are wrong. I would have thought that the challenge is to distinguish between those beliefs that refer to something in reality and the garbage. It seems a bit over the top to dismiss all beliefs just because some of them are wrong. (It's also a mistake that Descartes made, when he recognized that his senses sometimes deceived him and so decided he could not trust his senses at all. Sometimes our senses deceive us, sometimes they don't. The trick is, to know which is which.)
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
So is that your rock? Fair enough. Can you tell me more about the process of analysis?
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
So I'm thinking that feelings are the findings from embodied experience and action.
Not at all. I said we dig down -- under our biases, presuppositions, indoctrination, attachments, etc. -- until we find rock-hard foundations: hard enough we can't dig past them, same as Descartes. Where I differ is that I don't assume that seems hard is hard enough. I take the risk that Descartes wanted to avoid: build confident, but realistic that seems hard might not be hard enough, which translates into more caution, humility, less cut corners, less risk-taking. And then, when betrayal, overwhelming, "world-ending" events, etc., prove that the foundation was insufficient, the world doesn't end, and you dig it all up and dig deeper, this time.
This fable of once-for-all understanding, the Holy Grail of philosophy, is actually a hatred of wisdom, and it's a big reason why I've rejected the entire philosophical proposition as it's been pursued throughout history.
Quoting Ludwig V
I wouldn't say over the top. I'd say f*cking stupid -- which is something I don't do if I can help it -- and I have not done and do not do that in the discussions here.
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes, that's a common approach, but it presumes (without warrant) that valid beliefs must exist. What if they don't? And what if the desire for beliefs/believing itself turns out to be pathological, and the formulation of beliefs (i.e., believing itself, regardless of content and referential validity and accuracy) turns out to be a symptom of underlying irrationality? That's the question I raised here, so I'm sure you can see that responses based on the presumption that beliefs/believing itself must be rational in some form completely miss the point (unresponsive).
Quoting Ludwig V
No, that's the ground -- the data. It's the only stuff we've got to work with. We have to dig through it to find rock, no different than how science analyzes and theorizes from empirical data. Philosophically, the hardest rock I've been able to identify is, "It's happening." There's simply no way around or past that. But then you need to find out what "it" is and what "it" is doing/having done to it. That's not a philosophical process, because without experiential contact and the data it provides, there's nothing to philosophize about. By "embodied" I mean the entire spectrum of experience from sensory through to the extremes of the fantastic it might inspire. Limiting philosophy to cogitation is another big reason I've rejected its proposition. I do philosophy, but I don't confine myself to existing philosophical methods, obviously.
My process is thoroughly experimental and, in that sense, empirical. Subjective experience is our only way of contacting reality -- when people cry, "Anecdotal!" I just roll my eyes -- and thinking about it (hypothesis) and experimenting (test) which generates data (findings) and then making sense of it all (theory) is how we build a grounded understanding of things -- and then do it all over again and again, partly as a quality assurance method and (hopefully) to incorporate revisions based on new information. That's "my" method and it's best method I know. And guess what? Prior to the 20th century, not a philosopher I know of followed that method.
People think that the scientific method is a skeptical method, which just shows their understanding of it is superficial. One of the most imaginative and credulous things a person can do, short of becoming superstitious, is formulate a hypothesis. "It's raining." Stated as a fact. "God exists." Stated as a fact. And then, do the work to find out if and how much truth lies in the hypothesis, if any at all.
Notice that "belief" actually muddies all that. A belief is a hypotheses to which we have formed attachments prior to doing the work and, in most cases, specifically so that we can avoid doing the work. That's why "arguments" are so ubiquitous and notoriously interminable in philosophy.
In my experience and reading, beliefs are like nuts. When a person tells you they believe P, they're not just saying that they did the work and found P true. P is the kernel. In fact, they're often saying "believe" precisely because they're well aware that they didn't do sufficient work to call P true. But they're saying something in addition to that. They're saying, "Regardless what I did to become attached to P, even if I did nothing at all and have no idea why I'm attached to P, P is important to me -- so respect the fact that I'm attached to it."
That's the shell. If the kernel was the only thing that's important to them, they'd focus on the kernel and skip the shell.
Obviously, the fact that we're attached to an idea has shitall to do with ascertaining its truth. The shell isn't there to assure us that the kernel is ripe or rotten, nutritious or poisonous, or anything else of the sort. The shell has one and only one job: protect the kernel.
I just explained why it's so difficult to get believers to change their minds.
Since I'm dumping anyway, one more reason why I've rejected philosophy as we've known it, and this is probably the elephant. Philosophy has been compartmentalized from real life, both in the minds of philosophers and "laypeople". Even the best, most stellar philosophy ever done wasn't done with the intention of creating a reliable method for individuals to live their lives -- which is what I was after when I started my philo major in 1972. Boy, was I in for a shock. Philosophy's goal is to create an explanation/understanding which can be used to rationalize actions. That's at its best. More realistically, its goal has been to serve its patrons -- the parasitic "ruling" classes -- providing a basis for their rule, a pre-rationalization for what they want to do, and a post-rationalization for what they did and were dead-set on doing, regardless.
That's why philosophy has always taken a God's-eye-view for its cogitations. Phenomenologists tempered this somewhat, but only partly. Not only has most philosophy omitted but downright denigrated the individual's perspective as "subjective" -- another eye-roller, because the only knowledge there is resides in finite form within individuals who cannot in any way transcend the finiteness that limits them subjectively. No matter how far we extend those limits -- the subjective knowledge of 100 billion, trillion, quadrillion subjects never stops being limited and subjective.
The compartmentalization has led to a bizarre situation where sensemaking in philosophy is a completely different proposition than sensemaking in science, which is a completely different proposition than sensemaking in real life. Different goals, different standards, different expectations. One of the most frustrating things for me is how easily people write off irrationality in real life, as if "well, people are basically irrational" and then worship "science" like it's a religion and pooh-pooh philosophy as some strange mental affliction of a strange sort of nerds. It's bizarre.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
All of that is what we start with - the inheritance we are lumbered with. We do well to examine it closely. There are good things in it, however. The habit of asking questions, for example.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Do you mean that the suspicion of "once for all" is wisdom. I wouldn't argue with that.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
That's all right, then.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
I'm not sure it's a presumption. If one understands when a belief is invalid, then it follows that one understands when a belief is valid, don't you think? That's true even if one has never encountered a valid belief. I would say that that approach hopes, even expects, that there will be some true beliefs to be found. Proving that there are none is very hard, since you would have to examine every possible belief and discard them all. That's an endless task. As for your "what if", it is not a great worry - you'll never know for sure.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Presumptions may be found to be true or false. Good arguments are a different matter.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
That sounds very reasonable. However, the proof of any method is, in the end, the results it produces.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
I don't think that's bizarre at all. It's horses for courses. Philosophy, Science and everyday life are different environments and our different ways of making sense in each environment are, on the whole, pragmatically successful - mostly.
I completely agree. That includes your belief that [admittedly hijacked and reworded liberally as] all knowledge/truth settlements start as belief. And, that includes my confidence that your belief is an expression of knowlege/truth.
Now why, if all belief is irrational, would I have a belief that knowledge/truth settlements start as belief? I don't believe that -- not because I believe the opposite, but because I don't rely on believing, period. In fact, I don't want anything to do with beliefs. For me, they're incoherent, unnecessary, and soiled. I go commando! :lol:
Beliefs are constructs. So is knowledge. They are categories of something far more basic we've manipulated into certain forms to fit those categories. Wittgenstein was right-on that philosophy reduces to word games, or we could call them map games. Map is not territory, the words are not what they signify. They are references which hopefully have referents, but manipulating references to the furthest extent possible does nothing to change the referents they refer to.
So, if you couch what I say in a framework where "belief" is both sensible and meaningful, you're talking about a whole different ball of wax than I am.
Quoting Ludwig V
Well, we're not born tabula rasa, but neither were we born with indoctrination, presuppositions, etc.
Since computer/Internet/AI analogies are all the rage, we could say we were born with an operating system. Within the constraints of brain morphology and the physics of neurology, it's self-assembling and self-coding, which we haven't achieved with digital tech yet. We could take a step nearer it by having two apps which rewrite each other based on what the other app just rewrote in them -- or make two AIs talk to each other and see what they come up with. But human beings actually rewire their own brains based on what they experience and what they make of the experiences. To some degree, experience (in the broadest sense, to include environmental exposure) impacts gene expression, if not gene mutation. So far as we currently know, this is an almost exclusively deterministic process, but nothing structural in the human make up (not that we know) prevents conscious interventions that could impact gene expression.
Short story, human psychology is the process of using a biological apparatus designed not only to change and adapt to external experience, but also to internal experience, even consciously-driven/directed internal experience (e.g., meditation, psychedelics etc.) We are self-changing biological engines by design. We don't seem to have an "Undo" key, though. It's more of an "Do-over-better" key. We literally process past experience and change our own makeup (within broad constraints) to handle future experience differently.
So, we're able to do examine the substrate elements that people who subscribe to "belief" build their beliefs atop -- which begs the question: Then why are believers so resistant to that examination? People like to talk about the human characteristic of resistance to change, as if it's innate to human nature. Pshaw. Up to a certain age, children show no signs of that but precisely the opposite. Until what I call the "My dad's stronger!" age when they develop identity attachments, they literally have no beliefs. They'll argue with each other about things -- but not because they "believe" them, because believing necessarily implies the possibility of disbelieving. They do neither, just like small fry who don't know what water is can't "believe" they're swimming in it. What kids know is, for them, all there is, so "It IS bigger!" isn't even the kind of thing that could be "believed" in the first place.
So, no -- change resistance isn't a structural, immutable characteristic of nature. Something induced it as we grew up. And it's just a symptom. Believers display resistance to the examination of their biases, presuppositions, indoctrination, attachments, etc. before the prospect of changing their beliefs even comes up -- not because they think examination would force them to change their beliefs, but merely because it has the potential to put them in a position where they might have to change them. They're not just resistant to changing, they're resistant to looking. So, in this way, children are smarter than they are. (Which is one reason why Jesus recommended we become like children, I'm sure.) [<-- So what's the difference between that and saying, "I believe" ? :grin: For me, they are not synonymous.)
Quoting Ludwig V
No, "once and for all" isn't suspicious in my view. It used to be, but I've resolved my suspicions. "Once and for all" is a fantasy, a Holy Grail, a delusion that arises from psychosis (when taken generically, not as defined currently in notorious psychiatric fashion as a quantum instead of an analog affair, i.e., a spectrum). A little hysteria that makes us misinterpret an obviously friendly gesture is still hysteria, for example. It still caused a minute break from reality. The motivation for hoping and searching for "once and for all" is contrary to every obvious aspect of existence because existence is continually changing, and we don't have a fucking clue to what extent it's capable of changing or even if there are any limits at all. I like to tell people that "absolute truth" isn't just impossible, it's incoherent, because it's not truth if it doesn't inform us about reality, and there is nothing immutable about reality other than that it's mutable. If everything absolutely stopped changing so that the truth about it were absolute, there would be no way to know if anything still existed for there to be a truth about. The truth is always changing, as far as we can tell. Ideas like "once and for all" actually have nothing to do with truth. They are vain attempts to resolve psychological dissonance by people who cannot bear the vagaries of mutability. I call them "codependents".
Quoting Ludwig V
I think you missed my point, partly my fault because of how I worded it. Saying, "If one understands when a belief is invalid, then it follows..." demonstrates presumption that there is a belief, whether valid or invalid. You can't determine anything at all about something unless it's there. So, "If one understands when a belief is invalid, then it follows..." presumes the existence of a belief which is coherent enough that evaluating its validity would, in turn, be coherent. If believing itself is incoherent, then all beliefs are the result of that incoherency. (I wonder, maybe the it would have been better to use "incoherent" instead of "irrational" in the OP?) That is the presumption I meant.
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes, but you need to consider the chronicity and timing here -- something that philosophers, in general, have been deplorably negligent in, given their obsession with freeze-framing the truth. At the point that it's a presumption, it cannot have been found true or false, because once it's found one way or the other, it's no longer a presumption. Problems arising from pretending that presumptions are self-evident or treating them like conclusions when no work was done to arrive at the conclusion can't be redeemed by "but maybe later we'll find out it's true or false".
Quoting Ludwig V
Of course, which is the only reason I'd have adopted it and stuck with it so far. Works great! :blush:
Quoting Ludwig V
That's simply not the case. Everyday life is primary. All of our fields of study are at best (when not compromised or fabricated) secondary processing efforts totally dependent on primary experience for their validity, meaning, and significance. The everyday life of a scientist in the lab or in the real-life "field" or at the telescope is the basis for all the science they generate. So, science is not something that's non-anecdotal like people pretend it is. We have merely exempted the primary experience of a person trained in processes and equipment, then recorded in lab notes, as something "more than" mere (pfft) subjective experience. It might be of a higher quality/caliber than the "everyday life" lived by untrained people, with respect to training/lack of training, but it is in no way different in kind with respect to subjectivity.
All that to say, no: everyday life is primary experience in specific real environments, but academic fields (whether done inside or outside academic institutions) are not just the same kind of things. Being secondary processing, they do not belong to the real-world environments that the data they process was obtained from. They aren't the same kind of thing, so it makes no sense to say they are "different environments" as if they were ontologically and epistemically similar.
What's more, the real world is not compartmentalized. We compartmentalized our processing of it. That doesn't mean our compartmentalization necessarily or best reflects reality, and it certainly doesn't impose itself on reality in any material way. Academic categories (or any other abstract compartmentalization) have no bearing on reality. They are just reflections (at best) which do not divide, shape, or alter phenomenaonly perception. Their only impact is through human mediaries that impose them on a naturally integrated world.
Besides, I wasn't making a philosophical statement there, I was making a historical one. The divisions between our fields have study have, in fact, caused plenty of problems that only recently we've taken steps towards rectifying. One example is "interdisciplinary studies". Well, we wouldn't have needed to reintegrate them if we hadn't compartmentalized them in the first place.
I was actually talking about the cognitive compartmentalization effected by all this. Except as a self-defense against horrific trauma, cognitive compartmentalization is always detrimental. A great example is how we presume violence on the part of government is ipso auctore virtuous, but violence on the part of non-governmental parties -- even if it's exactly the same actions in far less severe and detrimental degrees -- is considered "criminal". A Madoff is regarded as far less vile than the neighborhood racketeer.
I want to say thank you for this discussion, I'm enjoying it -- but especially, I appreciate your openness and honesty and effort to understand what I'm saying as opposed to what I usually get: reactions against whatever spooks were triggered in people's heads by what I said. It's really cool. Refreshing.
Knowledge and so called truth are constructions.
rational and irrational are too.
A so called "truth" is a settlement which mind arrives at following a dialectical process which takes place partially "unconsciously" i.e. before manifestation to aware-ing, and partially consciously, I.e. manifesting to aware-ing.
At the latter "stage" a "truth" is settled upon when that dialectical process reaches the point where the aware-ing body is triggered to [having] a certain real and natural feeling. There, the body, feeling appropriately, triggers the mind to [temporarily--because the cycle continues] stop the dialectic and manifest the "result" as "truth". That settlement or acceptance is never absolutely conclusive but rather, it is that mechanism, triggering the end of the struggle by way of a [settled] feeling, which we think of as belief. Sometimes the feeling and corresponding settlement are vague and subtle, sometimes, for example if based on a "solid" reasoning (also constructed) or an imprinting (input in childhood) the settlement is triggered by 'strong" feelings. But they are never actually absolutely verifiable Truth/Reality. Always constructed code, out of a process in mind, triggering as a conditioned response, a certain feeling in the real body aware-ing.
A truth for human minds is never an absolute truth, always a settlement started by (or ended by, depending upon where in time we are observing it) belief.
I'm very much enjoying your thoughts.
Quoting ENOAH
Kinda sorta. Knowledge is a construction: a collection of truths deemed reliable and operable. "Rational" and "irrational" are characterizations of constructions, not constructions themselves.
Truth can very often be a construction -- in which case it's better known as bullshit. For me, to qualify as truth, no matter if it's an idea or an experience or a feeling/sense/impression/intuition/premonition/gut feel/inspiration -- which kind of stuff I call "gutma" -- or a deliberated conclusion, it must be grounded by means of real work in space and time. Epistemic work. Otherwise I won't treat it as truth but as merely a somewhat convincing idea, even a greatly convincing idea, that might or might not be true. It could be true, it could be false, but if I've done nothing to find out which, I can't regard it as truth.
So, you can see why I rarely deal in "truth" other than as a point-in-time, provisional understanding that I must handle as true if I'm to be honest. No one, but no one, has figured out a way to get a guarantee that they're not wrong.
"But according to that, your 'truth' could in fact turn out to be false."
Exactly -- just like every other truth known to man. We rely on reflective analysis, subsequent experience, and the grace of the universe and our fellow humans and other conscious animals to clue us in about our mistakes. There is no coherent way I've ever seen to escape from that dependency, although many crap-thinking bullshitters pretend there is.
Quoting ENOAH
Exactly. And the "settlement" is a settling of relationship between a reference (the idea in question) to its referent (the reality it stands as the truth about).
Quoting ENOAH
Quoting ENOAH
I understand what you're saying, but it embodies precisely the same confusion I've been trying to parse, differentiate, and articulate (poorly so far). I agree that "belief" is commonly used similarly to how you use it here, but I'm convinced that it's sloppy use of the term driven by habit instead of the result of clear understanding of what the idea of "belief" entails. Check out what I said about lack of belief in children in my latest response to @Ludwig V at https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/1023823.
The more I think about and discuss this, the more I'm seeing the metaphor of a nut holds. The important part of a nut is its kernel. A belief is not the kernel. The kernel is what you're talking about here:
Quoting ENOAH
There's two parts to the kernel: the idea itself (content) and our "settled feeling" (our conviction/its credibility). No content, no kernel. No settlement, no kernel, although the content could be the beginnings of one. Settlement might be the result of a dialectical process, or it might precede it, ("settlement started by (or ended by, depending upon where in time we are observing it)") or both. The kernel might consist of gutma; or of inspiration, revelation, dream, epiphany or psychedelic experience, etc., which are too real and convincing to be dismissed or not taken as conveying truth; or of something resulting from a conscious process, such as a finding, a discovery, a conclusion, etc. All of these can leave us with a "this has gotta be/there's gotta be something to this" feeling of some convincing magnitude.
Those are not beliefs, although we're often very sloppy and say they are.
To arrive at a belief about those primal senses/experiences -- "about" signals relationship between TWO things, not one, a reference and a referent -- we must do something with them. What do we do? We put them in a shell. Putting a shell around a kernel makes a nut. The nut is the belief -- the actual content plus a protective barrier.
I'm not interested at this point in arguing whether "all beliefs" fit this structure. I'm far more interested in approaching it scientifically, quantitatively: of all the usages of "belief" and "believing", how many fit that structure and how many don't fit? Answer those questions and we'll know what the proportions are and, therefore, how much attention to give each and how much weight each carries.
People don't couch their cogni-affective "kernels" inside a "shell" until they've developed an attachment to them that warrants protection. A belief involves both parts, and I've yet to find someone who sees this with much clarity, much less anyone who has clearly explained it. I'm doing my best, haha, but I've still got a ways to go!
And was this kind of characterization, "characterization" itself, not a construction? And if not, did it pre-exist human mind/history? Who or what put it here? Is it built into Nature? The universe? Do you see it appearing anywhere outside of mind/history? We must be careful we are referring to real and actual displays of rational/irrational and not just our constructed, super imposed characterizations.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
The effort to find out if a thing is true or not already alienates the thing from its truth, displacing it with constructions. My statements here, no less. But its in mind's Nature to construct. It cant be helped. When the mind ceases constructing triggers out of representations, that's when the body [returns(it never left) to] Truth. It finally ceases becoming something out of empty nothing, and [just] is-ing (being). When I "regard" it as true or false, I am doing that. Looking at it through the image (code) which triggers the body's pleasant feeling which allows tge code: truth to manifest. At this moment, it is not a discovery of Truth, only a belief.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Yes, but to be clear, there is an unbridgeable gap between the reference and the referent ( the latter, qua Real). In human mind/history, that gap is artificially bridged by the mechanism (no less a reference) "belief."
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
To be clear, I'm with our regarding the illusory effect of belief. Ultimately belief doesn't "entail" because it is a settlement, a cork put into a bottle, or a dam to stop the flow of "ideas". It's gotta end somehow (before it recycles) so reason, or upbringing, mythology, desire etc lead the dialectic to end here. "Now, because if x then y, I believe you " What? Poor us, conceited apes.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Yes, the analogy to the brain as hardware which re-wires itself, so that its programming is based not just on external input, but on internal activity. But to be clear, there rewiring is the real being adapting to the program displacing its factory setting. The factory setting is not tabula rasa. There are drives, sensations, feelings, images. But man, does the programming change things. And we think (because thinking is part of the programing, not the hardware) the real being is the programing, belief being a mechanism in the software that allows us to accept that, or any conclusion the prog4aming dreams up.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Yes! A belief is only reflecting what "it/its user" dreams up about the kernel. The kernel (the Real) cannot be accessed by belief; it can only be accessed by being [the kernel etc. re any object, including the Real that "I" refers to]
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Yes! Being nature access the truth, not referring to it, no matter how functional the references are. And they are. We've manifested Mozart and the Eiffel tower with our references and belief. But to access the kernel, be the kernel, or, as you suggest, crack open the shell and eat it
Quoting ENOAH
No, in the same way that I'm one thing, my role as a father is another, and "6-0 tall" is another. I should have said "characterizations of constructions, not constructions themselves of the same kind as the constructions they characterize."
Quoting ENOAH
Your statement is jumbled. There are 3 things involved, but you don't keep them straight: 1. the thing; 2. the truth P about the thing iif P is true; 3. the settlement that determines P is true about the thing, making P the truth about the thing. The thing is not something that could be true or false, because it is the thing that is just itself, against which the its truth is determined. The thing is one entity, its truth is another. There is no way that the effort to determine the truth P about the thing could alienate P. I think you're trying to say something else.
Quoting ENOAH
The "kernel" is not the real, but an apprehension about the real. The kernel is the truth P that refers to the real. The entire nut (belief) is a conceptual construct, abstract not concrete (real), so it cannot contain the real.
Belief is a truth wrapped by a shell. The truth doesn't need a shell to protect it, but when our grasp on a truth is weak, flimsy, not implicitly reliable, we feel the need to protect it. Cognitively, nothing is apprehended through belief, since apprehension is what results in the kernel, which precedes the wrapping of the kernel, without which there is no belief. Belief occurs later, after apprehension has resulted in apparent truth, i.e., the kernel. The kernel can do just fine without the shell, if indeed it's true, because nothing exists to untrue it, although deluded people can pretend it's untrue.
We need to keep the different elements distinct and in both logical and chronological order.
Very possible. I acknowledge and apologize for my laziness and shortcomings, plus appreciate the value in presenting the thoughts logically.
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
You're right we aren't on the same page, and yet there is value. ... The shell is not to protect the truth. The shell emerged out of a biological process in a very sophisticated "engine" and consequently displaces the truth. It is neither malignant nor benign. It's what it is, human mind, displacing consciousness with representations etc. belief being a mechanism in that process. Humans want to access truth (kernel). But because this drive is displaced by a thinking, desiring mind they unavoidable take the route of knowing (the shell) truth. But because knowing is alienated from the truth (because the former is a construction/process and the latter is real) knowing can only bridge the gap by that final leap of faith: believing. No matter how simple clear and manifest the dialectic, like the one that nears its end with 1+1=2, to accept 2, is a belief. One believes in the legitimacy of the process, if you prefer.
Or, belief may be irrational, but it is inevitable, built-in to mind's process of manifesting to the body (real consciousness) and world (nature and the species)
Quoting ENOAH
You repeatedly reframe the matter in terms of belief, as if belief were foundational -- which is why I mentioned vindicating it. Actually, the first word that came to me was redeem. You seem quite attached in coaching epistemics In terms of basic belief. I wonder if we're using the same term to talk about two different things? I had a similar experience in working through the nature of authority. Most people are quite enamored with what they call good authority -- that of an expert or a parent or a stellar teacher. But when you look the start differences between the nature of coercive authority and so called good authority -- their intentions, their methods, their structure, and their outcomes -- it only makes you wonder why people would be so stuck on calling donkeys and horses by the same name. Or, closer to the destructive realities of course of authority, why you'd put arsenic in one jar and sugar in another and call them both "sweet stuff". It makes no sense Karma which is prima fascia evidence nonsense is motivating the confusion.
So if we were to dig into it, would we find out that what you and I each mean different realities that we refer to by "belief"? I'm starting to think so.
I'm also starting to think that the parallel between authority and belief isn't coincidental. I suspect that the reasons for the protective shell revolve around ego concerns that demand a level of authority to back them up. At least that's what it seems like when I bump into the shell of a person's belief: authority and ego.
As far as belief being inevitable, no, it isn't. I'm not saying that as a deduction, I'm saying that as a report of ongoing experience. Most human beings are codependent because we were raised, trained, and mindfucked to be exactly that. All human beings have codependent tendencies. In the world of codependence, you're 100% correct -- belief is inevitable.
Here's how I'd restate your statement: "Or, belief may be irrational, but it is inevitable among codependent people, mind-fucked into mental processes of manifesting to the body (real consciousness) and world (nature and the species) as diminished, dehumanized objects at the mercy of their situations and other more powerful beings."
The problem is that most people are just like small fry who ask each other "What the heck is water?" when the big fish asks them "How's the water, boys?" Most people have no clue what codependency is because they've never known anything else.
You are correct. I'm not referring to belief in its strictly conventional use, as in one believes in x or that y will occur. It's the same word with the same definition, applying--you are right--as the first/last* epitemic mechanism. *last step of the process of manifesting knowledge/first step before knowledge manifests.
But...
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
...ultimately are you not also? It is the same with this immediately preceding statement with which I agree.
Authority, clearly a construction, plays a role in that same epistemic process. Like reason, logic, desire, various emotions, authority can be the construct which contributes to or even triggers belief (again that final mechanism necessary for truth settlement).
I guess what I'm trying to say re "ultimately are you not also [dealing with belief as the epistemic mechanism]" is that when we are inclined (as critical thinkers irrespective of the vocation) to dismiss belief in arriving at so called truths, as though belief were a choice or a cop out, we ought to recognize that even the truths we arrive at through authority or Reason etc, are finally or first triggered by belief. Even when that mechanism is undetectable (as in 1+1
= 2).
Quoting Millard J Melnyk
Yes. For sure. (And sorry for the but) But none one born into history lives outside of that world. If we believe (ha!) the claims of Zen etc that one can silence the dialectical process and allow the being (sitting in Zazen) to sense a world [truth] before/beyond the process requiring belief, it is inevitably temporary and the sitting being finds themselves returning to the codependent world and relying upon belief.
Mind is codependency, hence you and I needing to reflect upon one another, our beliefs. We don't even really care who's ultimately so called correct. It is the codependency which is inevitable because we are humans born into a world where human history is input into our bodies like programming taking over the regulating of our experiences. And belief is an aspect of said programming
I have not seen any reason, let alone convincing argument, that establishes that claim. It continues as a baseless claim until someone can provide some reason to see it as something more. Crassly, say-so doesn't make so. I'm not saying that people can't or don't use "belief" referring to that unchosen recognition/apprehension/realization of truth. Of course they do. And I'm not "dismissing" belief: I'm calling it out. Exposing a fraud is not the same as dismissing it. I'm at the "I for the life of me cannot but see belief as a fraud" point. The next level is "I've looked at it more deeply and thoroughly than anyone I've ever known, and I can tell you -- it's a fraud, and what's more, you will fail when you try to demonstrate (not merely ipse dixit) that it's non-fraudulent." Notice the difference between that and "Belief is irrational/incoherent/a fraud" claimed as case-closed truth. No case is every "closed" as far as I'm concerned.
Quoting ENOAH
Sorry, but false -- unless you mean "no one born since history started being recorded, in which case I'd say partially true.
We're born into a codependence-inducing world now, but we have no clear, definitive evidence that all humans were born into such a world. Recent archaeology is rapidly disintegrating old, 17th/18th-century thinking like that. Hobbes is doubly dead, lol. The belief that codependence is the natural norm, inherent to human nature, and always has been, is at best wildly evidence-free. For many reasons -- psychologically, sociologically, and having studied cultism for the last 30+ years -- I consider it utterly false. Human children can, indeed, grow into mature, self-enabling adulthood. And those who grow up into codependence can -- I did -- extract themselves, escape it, and mature even though they're way late.
Even during the time of recorded history, though -- even today -- there are big differences between the codependence levels of various societies. Here's Copilot's comparison of two:
Yes I recognize that "we", especially philosophy as a discipline, require [a] reason(s) in order to establish a proposition as a truth.
For phiolosophy and science, Reason (tye process/tool) provides such reason(s). Isn't reason just a cause for belief? At some point some entity must be the arbiter of when such reason(s) may safely transport the thinker to the settlement called knowledge or truth. Is Reason itself that arbiter? Does Reason function in the Universe independently of human thinkers? Etc etc. Is it a case of convention? If the elite majority agrees that there is adequate reason to settle, we all settle?
Im not providing the proof. Perhaps I will need to master the tools, at which time I can provide the basis for convincing others. Perhaps someone who has mastered the tools might pick up on these "intuitions" and provide the basis. For now, though they are presented as propositions, they are actually questions.
The primary point from this side of the fence remains. With respect to any question or claim, any truth accepted by any or all, has arrived at that acceptance because belief has been triggered. Whether belief was triggered by something conventionally accepted as legitimate (reason, culture, etc) or not (fantasy, blind faith), it remains belief at the beginning/end.
By "no one born into 'history'" I mean that fictional line when Homo Sapiens presumably crossed over from sensing the world by its animal nature, to one governed/dominated/saturated by representational structures.
Note, you are genuinely right about the baselessness of my seeming "conclusions." But this too illustrates the process of mind. A thought is presented as a candidate for acceptance, a counter thought follows, and by a trial of thoughts, a qualified adversarial process, truths are settled upon. They are never uncovered. If you and I settle this for e.g., and were certain we have uncovered a truth, in two hundred years, or tomorrow, we might become unsettled by yet another counter thought, reigniting the process.
Quoting ENOAH
You're reframing what I said. I'm not talking about propositions and their truth values. I'm talking about real-world behaviors: how people think, speak, and act regarding "belief".
Quoting ENOAH
That tells me you still haven't grasped what I'm suggesting, but at this point to say more I'd just be repeating myself.
Quoting ENOAH
For me, the only arbiter there is, is the universe itself as I experience what little of it I can. No other person and not all the thinking of all other people together arbitrates my experience or what I make of it. They inform me, they do not judge or arbitrate. Their thinking is based on their experience of the same universe, much like mine, so no one's is privileged over anyone else's, including mine. The judgment others might use to arbitrate or judge my thinking rests on thinking equally vulnerable to my arbitration and judgment. When everyone is arbiter and judge of everyone else, no one is either.
Quoting ENOAH
That's why I like reading you so much. Me too. Except I'd say, "they are actually hypotheses". Hypotheses can be falsified, but never proven. That's why I like to point out "lack of proof". It really bothers absolutists, but it's their "narrow gate" into the realization that nothing can be proved.
Quoting ENOAH
OK, then I'm back to straight up "false" for the reasons I mentioned.
Thanks man, this has been a sweet discussion.