Excellent! Serendipitously I just got through reading the article “Belief” in W. W. Quine’s QUIDDITIES: AN INTERMITTENTLY PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY! Let me see if I can properly apply it. “Belief” is basic to thought. “To believe is to think, in one very limited sense of the latter versatile verb.” One such ‘belief’ is the hypothesis which has two aspects: 1] the wager - “But this method is applicable only in cases where the believed proposition is one that can eventually be decided to the satisfaction of both parties, so that the bet can be settled.” 2] the “First Principle” “true of very theoretical beliefs, say, the expanding universe or elementary particles or the dawn of language . . . The turn that one gives to one’s research, the supporting evidence one marshals or the corollaries that one derives, are substantial indications that one holds the belief, THOUGH it be a belief on which a wager could NEVER be settled.” -x- “Beliefs grade off.” Why? Because “Believing is (supposed to be) a disposition. Thinking, apart from the contexts THAT and SO, is an activity however sedentary. We could tire ourselves out thinking, but believing takes no toll. We sit and think, but do we sit an believe?” Here, there are two fundamental distinctions: 1] belief as voluntary activity; 2] belief as pure disposition. For Alice’s White Queen belief is a purely arbitrary activity. They are not “dispositions”. “To believe so is to think so. The two verbs are thus interchangeable before THAT and SO, but they change elsewhere. We can think hard but we cannot believe hard. Can believe something, but we cannot think something.” I intrude with – a concept can only be a “thing” as a concept – we only know with words, signs, i.e., concepts – ergo the concrete “thing” we base the concept on is non-conceptual and nonverbal (this may be elementary to you), i.e., Peirce’s “brute action” or “force” that “gets our attention”. Phrases such as “I believe THAT is absolutely true” or “It is factually SO” try to make concepts into concrete objects. “God” can work as a purely intellectual principle theoretically, but to make that “principle” concrete, one must personify it thus committing an irrational “voluntary activity”. The same can apply to “self“. Hence your “this general person [God] is still not real independently of the believer’s belief". But such a belief is meaningless unless “this general person” is not actually “general” but rather as specific as the person typing these arbitrary alphabetic letters according to a rational set of rules called grammar and logic. -x- I would then question – but just question - the use of “this general person" since “person” necessarily means something concrete and specific. This would, however, put in question the casual phrase “A person normally . . .” This raises ghosts of, What is a normal person? How does one judge a person normal? Can there in fact be a cogent legal definition of “normal” versus “abnormal” person that is not culturally (and usually also subculturally) specific? The difference here between a “convention” clearly defined (even if not logically validated) by rules nudges off eventually into the pure arbitrary “voluntary activity” of the White Queen. Quine says: “But we may still ask whether beliefs are ever voluntary, for some dispositions are.” We “voluntarily” choose to memorize the multiplication table. But: “Belief, however, is not that kind of a disposition. To speak of simply deciding to believe something, independently of any evidence real or imagined, is to stretch the term ‘belief’ beyond belief.” This is true but thoroughly problematic. For one thing, the status of “evidence” is not only “logical relevance” but also “historical”. “Relevance” is determined by the “history” of the “evidence”. -x- Hercule Poirrot prays before bedtime, “I thank God I was born a Catholic.” This gives him a very fixed and stable set of conventional rules of how justice is supposed to operate (MURDER OIN THE ORIENT EXPRESS). The concept “justice” is set in the concrete stone of being born a Catholic from wince rational argument can THEN systematically define what just actions are. Poirrot knows precisely how to act in, and what to expect from, the world. He has a set of rules that, just as rules, are perfectly rational. And those conceptual rules are set on a solid concrete fact, that he was born a Catholic. Poirrot is NOT “a general person” or “a normal person” but is, in his mind, an archetypal Catholic. And yet upon this arbitrary ‘concreteness’, he can enunciate rational rules that at least make sense to everyone else even though they may want to make an exception. Ergo, if it is fundamental that “to believe is to think” AND “believing is a disposition”, then any “choosing to think” (as with memorizing the multiplication table) becomes - to some degree - an arbitrary “voluntary activity” as the White Queen believed. That is, “to some degree” which arbitrarily introduces the disposition of free will. Evidence is not the concept it justifies: the concept does not just “plop out” of the utterly neutral evidence. One “gathers” evidence” and then “applies” a rule to it. These, in normal parlance, are “voluntary activities”. The “concept” therefore, is in no way a necessary result of just the evidence but from the rules of evidence which rules are established by a hypothetical First Principle which is, as Quine says, “a belief on which a bet could never be settled.” -x- I am sure I have outstrained your patience. Gary C. Moore
On Monday, June 23, 2014 7:23 AM, Gary Fuhrman <[email protected]> wrote: Gary M, to answer your question about my previous post, where I wrote "But this general person [God] is still not real independently of the believer’s belief" — My point was that the pragmatic effects of belief in [a benign] God are real and observable only because the believers have actually produced them. It’s analogous to, say, a belief in Hamlet: he’s a real character for me because he has a virtual existence independent of my beliefs about him, or any actor’s performance of the role, etc. But that existence is dependent on his being created by Shakespeare. (Questions about a historical Hamlet are irrelevant to the reality of the character, of course.) It’s more paradoxical in the case of religious believers who have created the object of their belief by acting in accordance with its reality, because for the most part they have to believe not only that God’s reality is independent of their belief, but that they themselves are dependent on Him! (Unless their belief works something like the “controlled folly” of Carlos Castaneda … ) gary f. } You cannot see any thing until you are clear of it. [Thoreau] { www.gnusystems.ca/gnoxic.htm }{ gnoxics From:Gary Moore [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 22-Jun-14 3:45 PM to Gary Fuhrman: I agree with your comment, although I recognize the cultural pull (or intimidation) to recognize, even though it is just a pure intellectual principle", "God" as a "person". This might justly be considered "irrational" but it certainly is cultural and inbred into most languages, ergo an 'opportunity' to convert "connotational" intensional language into seeming "denotational" extensional language 'as if' pointing to something really present at hand. -x- Could you explain your sentence, "But this general person is still not real independently of the believer’s belief" which was not fully clear to me. Gary C. Moore ----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to [email protected] . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to [email protected] with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
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