• creativesoul
    11.4k
    Historically speaking, philosophy proper has not drawn and maintained the irrevocable utterly crucial distinction between thought and belief and thinking about thought and belief. This is not so much a righteous indignation from myself towards academia, but rather it's more like a recognition and subsequent setting out of historical consequence(s). I touched on this a bit earlier with Sam.

    Academia found itself with the need to further discriminate between equally coherent(in terms of a lack of self-contradiction) but diametrically opposed positions and/or claims. Hence, JTB was 'born'. While this proved to be and yet still remains a very useful way to measure knowledge claims(despite Gettier), it also helps one to determine whether or not such claims warrant our assent. However, unfortunately it doesn't draw the aforementioned distinction between thought and belief and thinking about thought and belief. To be fair, that wasn't an obvious problem to people centuries ago, for it wasn't at all obvious that there was such a distinction. After-all, most still held hat humans were 'special' in their ability to reason, and this was one of the many distinctions historically drawn between humans and animals. Across the board there was and there remains overwhelming evidence to suggest that no philosopher from any camp ever drew this distinction. Rather, the evidence clearly shows that there are multitude of different positions that are built upon the conflation itself. These range from Berkeley through today, as far as I know.

    The result?

    It's simple. Comparing/contrasting different knowledge claims is nothing more than examining different statements of thought and belief. Further analysis renders belief content in terms of propositions, or believing that some statement/proposition or other is true; is the case; is the way things are;etc. All sorts of different ways, from oppositional groups even from Russel to Rorty, to arrive at the same conclusion... that all belief is propositional in content.

    That conclusion either sorely neglects the distinction, and or dubiously presupposes that there is no difference between belief statements(reports of belief) and belief. All of this actually underwrites Gettier as well. What gives his criticism a foothold is an utterly inadequate understanding of what it takes to believe a disjunction. His paper is nothing more than the consequence of a gross misunderstanding of thought and belief. That clearly shows by how he represents and/or takes an account of Smith's belief.

    To put this in proper context of the existential outline...

    If it is the case, as history has mistakenly held, that all belief is propositional in content, then it is also the case that belief is existentially dependent upon propositions. This has consequences...

    Either propositions exist prior to language(no one wants that justificatory burden), or there is no such thing as non-linguistic belief.

    Convention has obviously worked from the latter. That's part of how we've gotten to all the talk about mentalese, and absolute presuppositions, and all the other notions meant to take account of how we are able to invent and/or acquire language. It's also what Banno has been helping me with for quite some time now... all the different conventional notions of belief. Notably, the all-too-common one that belief is nothing more than an attitude towards some proposition.

    That's a perfect description of thinking about thought and belief, and it follows nicely from historical convention. Sincere speakers believe what they write. That is, they believe that what they're writing is true. What they're writing is statements/propositions. Here again, we're putting things in a way that supports the idea that belief content is propositional. This has the same consequence...

    There is no such thing as non-linguistic(ir prelinguistic) belief. At least, it cannot possibly be the same kind of belief that us - special - humans form and hold. It cannot possibly have the same 'structure'...

    Ah bullshit...

    Don't get me wrong here, the much more simplistic thoughts and beliefs that other creatures are capable of forming and/or holding pales in comparison to the sheer level of complexity that human thought and belief can acquire. These differences and/or 'degrees' of complexity are developed and/or actually determined solely by virtue of the complexity of the correlations themselves. This can be readily observed even within different groups of humans. It completely underscores the notion of "being refined" or "having a refined palate" or any other such continuum that places rudimentary simple talk on one end and purportedly complex and much more sophisticated talk on the other.

    This site offers a steady diet of just such things...

    My opinion?

    More often than not it's nothing more than unnecessarily overcomplicated language. I'll say nothing about the psychology of the users, for it varies tremendously in my experience.
  • Blue Lux
    581
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy's_law

    "In later publications appeared as everything that can happen will happen."

    I agree with this.

    But contrary to your seemingly involuntary opposing reaction... I said that this point was mostly irrelevant with regard to what I have said, because my previous point still remains.
  • Blue Lux
    581
    No... You have for the fourth time misinterpreted me... And this time I think it was deliberate.

    The discovery of carbon was an experience. The discovery of carbon is not, was not, and is/was in no way at all existentially dependent upon my birth. My birth was/is also an experience.creativesoul

    1. There was no discovery of Carbon. There was a discovery of a classification of things characterized to contain what it called Carbon. This is not 'experience' in the strict sense. This is a model.

    2. 'EXPERIENCE' itself aside from all deviations, demarcations, etc, in the strict sense is dependent on further experience, yet EXISTS (to be, to stand out from [etymologically]) prior to further experience. And death, the ultimate end of the line, renders experience nonexistent.

    3. Your constant straw man is getting a bit frustrating. How on Earth could you take what I am saying and mutate it into the following "the discovery of carbon is not dependent on my birth"?
  • Blue Lux
    581
    Maybe I can use other examples.

    Life (its subsistence) is existentially dependent on life that is not yet and is prior to this not-yet life, for life already exists. If there were to be no more life that is not-yet then life would become nonexistent; therefore it is dependent on it.

    Experience is dependent on further experience, namely experiences that are not yet for that subject (whatever it may be or may not be) is prior to these subsequent experiences; and these further experiences are not subsidiary, I may add.

    Thought is dependent on more thought, namely thoughts that are not yet; perhaps, the potentiation of thought. If I think something, these thoughts only are if there are more that would be concatenated with THOSE thoughts, otherwise... What would they be? What would thinking be if there were no more thoughts and no more thinking? There would be nothing. Actually... There would be [nothing, no words]. There would not be NOTHING but a bracketed nothing; that is, [blank].

    Color would not be anything unless there were more colors. Notice a trend here? Existence is constantly moving?
    "Time is the moving image of eternity" Plato
  • Blue Lux
    581
    I think you need a further specification of "Nothing can be existentially dependent on that which it is prior to."

    Namely, the temporal domain (a posteriori) versus perhaps, what is a priori.
  • Blue Lux
    581
    But maybe our dialectical problem consists in a difference of epistemology. What would characterize your epistemology here?
  • Blue Lux
    581
    Here is an interesting one.

    My sexuality exists prior to the object of my sexuality (for it is indeed MINE) which determines it yet is existentially dependent on such an object that would be subsequent.

    Maybe what can be said is "What is indeterminate can not be existentially dependent on the determinant it is prior to."
  • creativesoul
    11.4k
    There was no discovery of Carbon.Blue Lux

    I've nothing further...
  • Blue Lux
    581
    And you divorce a sentence from its context time after time...
  • Blue Lux
    581
    Do you not know that an idea presents itself often not in one sentence within a paragraph but in the paragraph... Or, in some cases, in dozens or hundreds of paragraphs.
  • creativesoul
    11.4k


    Look, all you're doing is talking about stuff that makes sense in it's own context. Your mistake is not realizing that what you've put forth is not a problem for the existential outline.

    We can say that the concept of Experience includes any and all experience, and we can further discuss this notion. We do so by making sure that whatever we say about "Experience" is true of any and all experience. This notion of Experience would begin at the first and end at the last. So...

    It doesn't pose a problem for the outline, for if someone were to try to carve out some small bit of the whole Experience - say the very first experience - and then claim that the very first experience is existentially dependent upon the very last experience, then that person is guilty of self-contradiction at worst and/or equivocation at best. It is unacceptable to use the same term in the same argument in two different senses.

    We have "Experience" as a whole. That includes all individual particular cases of experience.
    We have individual particular cases of experience. These are all part of the whole.

    The claim in question is this...

    That which exists prior to something else cannot be existentially dependent upon it.

    You want to say that the very first experience is existentially dependent upon the very last experience because together they make up the whole "Experience". I would agree with that, for we're merely outlining the parameters of our speech. We would be defining our terms. Here's the problem...

    There are two variables in my claim. You're attempting to use three different values.
  • Blue Lux
    581
    For the 5th time, I am not talking about a specific experience... That is where you yourself are bringing in irrelevant variables to my ideas.

    Experience, or becoming, or phenomenality, or Dasein, or whatever synonymous idea is always dependent on that which it is not yet but is prior to this 'it not-yet'.
  • creativesoul
    11.4k
    I'm suddenly reminded of Davidson.

    Paraphrasing... if one knows what it would take for a claim to be true, then one knows what the claim means. The consequence here is that it would be quite possible for a listener(myself in this case) to better know what a speaker's words mean(Blue's purported counterexample in this case) than the speaker them self does.

    Odd. A bit uncomfortable. Seems to be the case though.
  • Blue Lux
    581
    I don't know what is so complicated.

    Experience, experiencing, the flux of events that is one's life, THE CONTINUUM, not the illusion of causality or segments. Lets call this X.

    Experiences, plural, constitute this experience. Lets call this Y. Each individual experience is something said to be apart from what it is a part of. I say, I have experienced such and such, but what I am really doing is premising the prereflective cognition; the realization that I am constantly in a new experience. This is the only truth with regard to experience. An experience is never isolated. This is only in theory.

    My life is of experience. This experience is prior to experiences that have not been to materialize yet. This experience of experience that is my life is prior to any experience(s) that have yet to come; and my experience's subsistence is existentially dependent on these experiences.

    X is existentially dependent on Y and X is prior to Y.
    Life is dependent on the life to come and is prior to this life to come.
  • creativesoul
    11.4k
    I already understood you just fine. You're now assigning a singular value(X and Y) to a plurality of different things, and some of these things are the same. You've also ran into a bit of self-contradiction and/or incoherence...

    Blather...

    I'm over it. Come up with something that makes sense.
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