On Nov 17, 5:10 am, kedra marbun <[email protected]> wrote: > > $ gee, after i lay it like this, it's more like discovering belief / > bringing belief to consciousness, rather than producing
I'm not sure about how Plato should be interpreted, but it seems presumptuous to me that we should assume that 'beliefs' exist in an objective way. Take a dream for example. You can believe that you are late for a train when in fact there is no evidence, no memory, no perception, no testimony, etc. I think that belief is part of the phenomenology of cognition, just a relatively fixed semantic orientation from which thought can be projected out from. The belief in the dream train is implicit as your feelings of anxiety and thoughts of racing to catch it, disappointment in missing it, etc are the active sensorimotive experiences. To be able to read these words, for example, is a capacity borne not out of evidence and memory, it is a sensory experience which presents semantically coherence to the subject. We don't say 'ah yes, I remember learning that the word 'remember' looks like this and sounds like this and means this - rather we see and understand the meaning directly in our natural subjective language. We can infer that in fact we did at some point learn these associations, probably many times in many different ways, but this is a second order analysis of the phenomenon. It is injecting a narrative where none is necessary. Belief is the same way; it has causal properties which can be traced, but these are not indicative of what constitutes belief any more than a wavelength of electromagnetic radiation constitutes what a color looks like. Belief is passive sensory participation. Like 'potential energy', it's not really 'there', but rather can be deduced in hindsight. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Epistemology" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/epistemology?hl=en.
