Yes, to say that one knows X, is to be justified in believing X, and as such, one can claim it as a piece of knowledge, but the claim doesn't necessarily mean it is knowledge; which goes back to my point about the difference between a claim to knowledge, which isn't necessarily knowledge, as opposed to the definition of knowledge.

To be justified in believing X is varied, i.e., there are various language-games in which it is appropriate to to state that we are justified in believing X. We can be justified in various ways, viz., argument, inference, and proof; by the testimony of others; by linguistic training; and by sensory experience; to name a few.

And yes given the context of Moore's statement, it is not a piece of knowledge, which is Wittgenstein's point.

But @Janus rejects JTB; to know is to accept a proposition as a part of a web of other propositions one knows - a coherence definition of knowledge. And it seems that to doubt is not to know.

which goes back to my point about the difference between a claim to knowledge, which isn't necessarily knowledge, as opposed to the definition of knowledge. — Sam26

This comes about because there are untrue beliefs. I see.

It seems to me that @Sam26 and @Janus have in common the notion that a belief is justified in terms of other beliefs.

For my purposes in this thread I'd like to sort out what this justification might be. Sam suggests argument, inference, and proof as a start.

Will mere implication do? I think not, since any true proposition is implied by any other proposition, true or false.

Just because one claims that what they believe is a piece of knowledge, that surely isn't the end of the matter. And of course the claim that you know X, doesn't mean that you indeed do know X. We often make claims to knowledge that later turn out to be false (to your point). This is why there is a connection between saying that one knows X, and the doubt, the two are linked at the hip. Moreover, this is why Wittgenstein not only attacks Moore, but also attacks the skeptic, both are making the same linguistic mistake.

Yes, argument, inference, and proof is one of the ways we justify a belief, but keep in mind that there are other language-games that justify beliefs. This is where many people go astray with regard to knowledge claims, i.e., they limit the language-games, but the language-games of justification are much broader in scope than simply argument, inference, and proof (inductive and deductive arguments).

the language-games of justification are much broader in scope than simply argument, inference, and proof — Sam26

I'm being a curmudgeon here - why is waiving ones hand around and saying "here is a hand" one of those language games?

It isn't.

I understand that offering an ostensive definition is not part of the game - it's more like putting the pieces on the board.

And yet, putting the pieces on the board in the correct place is part of the game.

All Moore is doing is stating one of many bedrock beliefs. Similar to someone announcing that this is a bishop in a room full of chess players.

Suppose Jeff is anti-Semitic. He believes P where P is that Jews are evil. Would we be following your theory of belief to say that belief in P is the same as knowing how to behave in view of P? But where and when is Jeff? Is he in NYC? Jerusalem? 1940 Berlin?

There is no generic behavior here. It's setting dependent. Does your theory account for this?

I would say not, i.e., these beliefs can't be wrong in the epistemological sense. — Sam26

Why call them "beliefs" then, when the word 'belief' is usually understood to have a propositional sense, when beliefs are generally truth apt, and thus right or wrong? It seems all the more odd in that you have stated a few times that you don't like Wittgenstein's term "hinge proposition" for this very reason.

Why not call these "hinge propositions" or "bedrock beliefs" 'hinge understandings' or 'bedrock understandings'. I anticipate you might say that understandings can be wrong too; but I think generally it is more the case that they are adequate or inadequate, rather than right or wrong. The understanding that I have hands seems to be eminently useful and not at all inadequate.

I agree that animal behaviour might be explained without mentioning belief.

I made the point that belief implies a choice; it involves believing one thing rather than some other. Instinct does not involve choice. — Banno

I wonder is that is true. Since we do not know how deep into our psychology reaches, it might be that the same brain activity which keeps a dog going back to his bowl might be much the same mechanism by which we are similarly draw to things that we 'know' without a consciously acknowledgement.

So if I understand Janus, the correct grammar would be that if one knows, one is certain; when one doubts, one no longer knows nor is justified in believing. — Banno

You could put it that way, I suppose, but I prefer to leave the notion of certainty out of the picture, because when the idea of certainty comes into play belief and doubt follow.

Say I see a car accident and look at my watch the instant it happens. Someone asks me later what time it happened, and I say it happened at precisely 3.04 by my watch, and I know this because I remember looking at my watch at the precise moment the accident occurred. It wouldn't seem right for me to say that I believe the accident occurred at 3.04 by my watch; that is something I might say if someone else had told me the accident occurred at that time.

If someone asks me if I am certain about it, then I might reflect and begin to doubt my memory. Maybe I looked at my watch a minute later and misremembered that I had looked at it at the very moment of the accident, or maybe I misremember the time displayed by the watch when I looked at it, and so on.

Generally, though, given that don't doubt my memory (since that is all I have to go on in regards to my own past experiences) it seems right to say that when i have seen something with my own eyes that I know it occurred. The old saying should be "seeing is knowing", not "seeing is believing". Hearing is believing. I have all sorts of beliefs about what occurred historically, or today on the other side of the world based on what I have heard or read from others. And even here we generally count this knowledge, given that we trust the testimony of others. It is all context dependent, but generally I will take what I have witnessed to be more reliable than any testimony from others.

I'm mostly just watching from the sidelines, but I think you slipped up a bit here Banno.

Will mere implication do? I think not, since any true proposition is implied by any other proposition, true or false.

A contextually relevant sense of implication might. I don't think it's so easy to substitute material implication into an arbitrary language game involving justification. Will give an example.

One of the things that hinted the energies of electrons in orbit around a nucleus came in discrete jumps was the mismatch between the Coulomb force law and empirical observation. Coulomb force predicts an elliptical orbit of electrons around a nucleus - since they're in an ellipse they're accelerating, and accelerating electrons were known to emit light. When they emit light, they lost energy, and thus were predicted to spiral towards the nucleus; thus all atoms would collapse. Scientists at the time had the theory of electromagnetism on one hand, and it predicted P="the electrons will spiral towards the atom", however they knew that ~P. If justification worked here like material implication, all scientists who knew the experimental results and the predictions of electromagnetism would have immediately believed everything through explosion*. Nevertheless, the scientists did not, despite accepting the general applicability of the Coulomb force law and the experimental results.

(1) B(P)
(2) B(~P)
(3) B(P)&B(~P)
(4)B(P&~P)
(5)B(P&~P->Q)
(6)B(Q)

I think, what is more likely, is that the scientists concluded that there was some flaw in the Coulomb law (and Maxwell's equations) despite being generally correct, since they trusted both the experimentation and the theory, but allowed the extent of their trust to dynamically limit the applicability - it was found to be an incomplete description, and thus beliefs in some predictions made by the theory (insofar as they contradicted experiment and good sense) were suspended. Until a more complete description, and a reason for the flaws, was found.

This is to say that the language game of justification and belief in science, at least at this point and in this topic, is poorly modelled by a doxastic logic featuring material implication. It is more a history of trust, flaw finding, and the discovery of scope-limitations of previously 'universal' laws.

edit: * assuming they are rational in the sense of a doxastic logic with material implication, which I'm making a reductio of here.

Why call them "beliefs" then, when the word 'belief' is usually understood to have a propositional sense, when beliefs are generally truth apt, and thus right or wrong? It seems all the more odd in that you have stated a few times that you don't like Wittgenstein's term "hinge proposition" for this very reason.

Why not call these "hinge propositions" or "bedrock beliefs" 'hinge understandings' or 'bedrock understandings'. I anticipate you might say that understandings can be wrong too; but I think generally it is more the case that they are adequate or inadequate, rather than right or wrong. The understanding that I have hands seems to be eminently useful and not at all inadequate. — Janus

It's true that we philosophers talk about beliefs in terms of language, and in terms of being either true or false. However, Wittgenstein's hinge-propositions are not propositions in the normal sense, he seems to be speaking of these kinds of propositions (basic beliefs) as outside our epistemological constructs. And he talks about these beliefs as being separate from language, which I think is important to the understanding of what they are. The reason I do not like Wittgenstein's term hinge-proposition, is that this term still carries with it the idea of being true or false (because proposition is still part of the name).

He has talked about these Moorean statements in many different ways. He is searching for a way to talk about them, which is why he talked about them as being bedrock, foundational, hinge, etc. Also I would not characterize them as understandings, for me at least, this does not capture Wittgenstein's intent.

I've talked before about the idea of these beliefs being prelinguistic, and Wittgenstein hints at this when says that they tend to be animalistic in their function (paraphrasing), which I take to be basic, and it is why my tendency is to think they are causally formed quite apart from reason or linguistics. They seem to be subsumed or absorbed as part of the functioning of our minds, i.e., in many cases we do not even think about it, we just find ourselves with the belief when the need arises. This comes out in my example of walking into a room and noticing pens, paper, clothing, etc., we do not even think about much of what we see, but our sensory impressions simply imprint (for lack of a better word) the information upon the mind. There seems to be a causal relationship between the world and the mind, which is linked by our sensory inputs. It is almost like a video camera which picks up information and then stores it on a disk or other device.

Wittgenstein characterized the use of "I know..." in terms of Moore's statements as "...[a] comfortable certainty, not the certainty that is still struggling (OC 357)." And still further he states, "Now I would like to regard this certainty, not as something akin to hastiness or superficiality, but as a form of life. But that means I want to conceive it as something that lies beyond being justified or unjustified [outside epistemology]; as it were, as something animal (OC 358, 359)"

Also I would not characterize them as understandings, for me at least, this does not capture Wittgenstein's intent. — Sam26

If they are not understanding, not beliefs (propositions) and not knowledge, then what can we say they are?

I think Wittgenstein's ideas of background and form of life are similar to Heidegger's notion of understanding, and if I remember correctly Heidegger's idea is that understanding is our pre-explicit or pre-thematic, and in a certain sense, even pre-linguistic, way of dealing with the world, which is prior to, and grounds, all interpretation and belief; it is simply our way of being in the world.

They are beliefs, they can be prelinguistic, which are shown in a form of life, viz., one's actions. Here I'm not just talking about prelinguistic man, i.e., they can have this prelinguistic form in us before they are stated. How? We open doors, we pick up objects, we put on clothes, we take showers, we do experiments, we do all sorts of things that show we believe certain things without ever stating the belief. However, when these basic beliefs are stated, in the Moorean sense, they play a different role than most beliefs, and that role is borne out in Wittgenstein's analysis of Moore's claims.

I don't know enough about Heidegger's philosophy to comment intelligently on what he was saying. Maybe one can say that these beliefs reflect a kind of understanding of the world, but I think, at least for me, they are better understood as bedrock, basic, or foundational. You're correct, "...it is simply our way of being in the world." These beliefs are like the chess board and pieces, the chess game is played with the board and pieces, which show our foundational beliefs about the game, viz., that we believe there is a board and pieces. We don't have to state our beliefs about the board and pieces, but our actions show our beliefs without ever taking on the form of a statement.

Note though, how weird it would be if we were playing a game of chess and I stated "This is a bishop," as if there could be a doubt in such a context. We don't doubt these kinds of beliefs generally because of their fundamental nature, and if we don't doubt them, then they are not pieces of knowledge. Doubt plays an important role within the language-game of knowing.

These beliefs do reflect our subjective certainty about the world though, but this certainty is not epistemological certainty.

They are beliefs, they can be prelinguistic, which are shown in a form of life, viz., one's actions. — Sam26

How would this differ from instinct, other than the fact that we commonly doubt our instincts, and there is an unsubstantiated claim that "hinge-propositions" are beyond doubt?

These beliefs do reflect our subjective certainty about the world though, but this certainty is not epistemological certainty. — Sam26

So, why not allow that such "subjective certainty", which "is not epistemological certainty", be subject to the skeptic's doubt?

Otherwise you have a foundation whose strength and stability is dependent on deception. The hinge-propositions cannot be doubted, because it is asserted that they cannot be doubted. And that is deception because in reality they are no better than instincts which ought to be doubted.

I agree with most of what you say here, I think our only point of disagreement is over whether these 'hinge propositions' are beliefs. What is it that makes something a belief? Analytical philosophy and/ or philosophy of language seems to be concerned with determining the meaning of terms by establishing consistency and coherency within a network of their actual usages.

Are there any other criteria that can be used to establish whether something is or is not a belief, beyond whether or not calling it a belief is consistent and coherent with common usage of the term 'belief'? If not, then I would say "hinge propositions" are not beliefs on account of the fact that the term is most commonly, perhaps even universally, used to refer to truth apt propositions. Perhaps you can offer some counterexamples of common usage to support your case for thinking that "the background" or "a form of life" consists in networks of beliefs, rather than in webs of understanding.

A belief is a relation between an individual and a proposition. — Banno

It only follows that there are no pre-linguistic and/or non-linguistic belief unless propositions existed prior to language. That alone is more than enough ground to warrant our dismissing the above belief statement, because there most certainly are such things.

It only follows that there are no pre-linguistic and/or non-linguistic belief unless propositions existed prior to language. That alone is more than enough ground to warrant our dismissing the above belief statement, because there most certainly are such things. — creativesoul

That depends on how we organise the semantic field, though. In an experimental set-up, for example, I could see "A belief is a relation between an individual and a proposition," as an operational definition derived from a theoretical definition - you'd need a well-founded theory of how the linguistic faculties connect to the pre-linguistic faculties of the mind. That is: we believe a lot of things we never formulate, but it is possible to formulate them and test them this way.

That there are different ways to organise the semantic field is a key problem in this thread. If we're interested in a semantic field that we might describe as "taking things for true", we may come up with different words: knowledge, belief, assumption... But even if we have the same words, they don't necessarily relate the same way in different people's usage.

JTB for example sees "knowledge" as a subtype of "belief", but it's equally possible to see them as distinct cognitive behaviour - two flags planted on a continuum so that one either knows or believes, even if there are cases where it's hard to tell which applies.

The more I read this thread and think about it, I lean towards a definition that keeps knowledge and belief separate and that has us generate "belief" to the extent that knowledge becomes problematic. What got me thinking more along these lines is ' specific example:

When I enter the room and see the pens and papers I know there are pens and papers. Once I start thinking in terms of belief, then doubt enters. — Janus

I tried to think about this in terms of 's diagram of JTB, and failed, precisely because of a basic difference in the way the terms are used. If we see "belief" and "knowledge" as distinct cognitive behaviour, with belief arising out of problematised knowledge, I think we need to broaden the context.

One of the things I think is important is the relationship between meaning, truth, reality, and motivation:

I walk into a room, and there's an apple on the table. It's not a fruit, but a wax-simulacrum. If I never found out that fact, did I "know" that there is an apple on the table. Rather, if I notice the apple in passing, but it's not in anyway relevant to me in the situation, then the proposition "There's an apple on the table," might be true on the abstraction level relevant to me: that is the differentiation between a fruit and the wax simulacrum of one is irrelevant to what the proposition means to me.

But that means that all knowledge, belief, and truth - as it occurs in the world - is context bound. And since contexts can change, truth is not a stable thing, and it gets complicated to figure out whether "There is an apple on the table," is true or not. Complicated, but not impossible. What we have is an intricate truth system attached to a proposition.

And this is where the linguistic nature of propositions come in: the sign body of the proposition "There is an apple on the table," remains a constant, even if context changes. In real life, we re-contextualise all the time. Socially, we negotiate meanings, and as our own motivational structure changes, so might the elements of the truth system "There's an apple on the table," that we pick out as relevant. That is a photographer might be fine with a wax simulacrum in a way a hungry person decidedly will not.

Now, as soon as we topicalise the proposition "There is an apple on the table," we enter the meta realm. We might be arguing just for the sake of being right, or we might have motivations that make it important that the proposition be true (e.g. I might win a game, if it is, and the rules haven't foreseen the ambiguity). That is: "belief" can, in situations like this, rescue a proposition from being false, by ordering the semantic field in a way that makes it true. (Side note: This is only hypocritical if the semantic field was ordered in a different way, not if you differentiate from an unspecified level of abstraction.)

So, basically, "belief" has two general meanings:

a) Belief that facilitates action in the face of uncertainty: Belief in P to interact with the reality that P represents, or

b) Belief that takes P as symbolic for some related goal: deciding the outcome of a game, group membership...

I think (a) can reasonably be pre-linguistic; (b) can't.

Are there any other criteria that can be used to establish whether something is or is not a belief, beyond whether or not calling it a belief is consistent and coherent with common usage of the term 'belief'? — Janus

Yes, there are other criteria, and I've been talking about it all along. It's our actions that show our beliefs quite apart from language. The simple act of opening a door shows your belief that there is a door there, and there are many actions like this that we do on a daily basis that show or demonstrate what we believe.

But I still want to object that considered in a non-propositional context these actions can better be accounted as simply showing what we expect, reflecting a basic understanding or orientation to the world, just as the actions of animals do in their case.

It only follows that there are no pre-linguistic and/or non-linguistic belief unless propositions existed prior to language. That alone is more than enough ground to warrant our dismissing the above belief statement, because there most certainly are such things. — creativesoul

That depends on how we organise the semantic field, though. — Dawnstorm

Well, we can say whatever we want. We can call things whatever we choose. We can define our terms...

I'm not sure what a 'semantic field' is supposed to be. I take it to mean something akin to a linguistic framework. A taxonomy, as it were...

To that notion, I'll say this...

Contrary to many, if not most, I most certainly believe that definitions can be wrong. Sensible, as in following from common usage, but wrong, as in mistakenly attributing meaning to that which is not existentially contingent upon our awareness of it's existence.

Belief is one such thing. Banno defines belief as follows...

A belief is a relation between an individual and a proposition.

So, he has set out the semantic field as such that belief is existentially dependent upon propositions.

Either...

Propositions require language. Thus, it follows that belief requires language. It further follows that there are no such thing as non-linguistic or pre-linguistic belief.

Or...

Propositions are prior to language and there are such relationships between non-linguistic creatures and non-linguistic propositions.

Neither is acceptable. The latter is indefensible. The former cannot admit of pre-linguistic belief. Thus, cannot admit that animals without language can believe anything at all...

That is wrong.

Are there any other criteria that can be used to establish whether something is or is not a belief, beyond whether or not calling it a belief is consistent and coherent with common usage of the term 'belief'? — Janus

Hey Janus...

It's all about the method of approach.

We can look at every example of belief and we will certainly find an agent that is drawing mental correlations between 'objects' of physiological sensory perception and/or itself. None are immune. The only variance is in the sheer complexity of the correlations. In fact, until an agent begins to doubt, there is no difference between their thought and their belief. That is, the only difference between thought and belief is that one can think about stuff without necessarily believing it, but only after having become aware of truth/falsity. Prior to that, there is no difference at all. Thus, it only follows that all belief(and thought too for that matter) consists entirely of such correlations...

The problem here is that I have some idea what "agents" and "mental correlations" could be as considered in a linguistic context, but outside that context I have no idea.

The problem here is that I have some idea what "agents" and "mental correlations" could be as considered in a linguistic context, but outside that context I have no idea. — Janus

Ummm. I'm not sure I understand the problem. Are you having trouble with the idea that neither agents nor mental correlations are existentially dependent upon language?

No I'm saying that considered outside of a linguistic context, I don't know what an agent or a mental correlation could be.

I do not see a problem.

There are non-linguistic agents. There are mental correlations drawn by such agents.

Do you agree?