Steve, Matt, Steve, you remake my point several times. (I wasn't suggesting you didn't understand Matt ? This is not personal. It's much more important than that.)
You keep talking about believing based on earlier experience, and ignorance of intervening events, not current experience. That's just NOT holding something to be true. All the person can really say is I'm sure I HAD the money in my pocket. (Whatever loose natural language they actually say in their heads or conversation.) (Those cases the "truth" clearly is changing anyway .... so the nature of the belief / truth relation is moot. Matt's use of the Bain's different nature of different propositions is closer to what is actually going on .... in the mind, as Matt reminds us .... I'd bring in Dennett's intentional work too, but this is not what I'm arguing about here ...) And it is not a matter of the "luxury" of pragmatic fuzziness Matt, it is a matter of which factors matter. It's the "goodness" of the "evidence" that matters, whether I call it belief or truth or not. I would like to refine the precision (quality of knowledge) here as much as you (I believe ;-) ) just don't want to waste the effort on the choice of individual words - thought experiments that are really word-games using the words truth and belief. (Spitting pedantic hairs here would indeed be language all the way down, etc ...) The distinction between belief and truth is real, just not "worth" it. (The angels on the head of that pin, those deckchairs on a large ocean-going means of transport ...) The meta-interest (amazement & crushing disappointment) for me is people still having these logical arguments about objects like $20 bills and pockets, instead of quality and value-based interactions .... surely we MoQists must have learned that precision is NOT achieved by logical objective arguments. Those arguments CHANGE the VALUES of the objects, their terminology and their logical relations during the process of arguing and inventing new word games. Come in Mr Hofstadter. (or Matt's poetics would do me just as well in this context.) Ian On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 10:04 PM, Matt Kundert <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi Ian, > > Ian said: > Believing Dave to be holding the Jack of Spades (with no particular > reasonable evidence) is hoping or guessing that something might be > true, not holding that something IS true. > > Matt: > Yes, one can distinguish between "believing" and "hoping or guessing" > in this way. However, for the purposes of those who follow Bain's > description of belief as a habit of action, this is not the case. "Belief" > in these cases becomes the propositional form of mental items. This > becomes hairy philosophy of mind, but the idea is that not all "mental > items" are beliefs, some are desires or hopes (for example), but all > desires and hopes can be explicated as beliefs ("I _believe that_ I > desire...") thus putting it into terms where we can discuss > propositional knowing-that. etc .... snipped. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
