The idea is something like that we sometimes both use and mention; SO "Galileo said that the Earth moves" might be analysed as a conjunct of "The Earth moves" and "Galileo said that", where the demonstrative "that" points to "The Earth moves", or even to Galileo's utterance of "The Earth moves". — Banno

The article doesn't seem to be readily available to me, though a number of criticisms of it are.

Sticking to the topic, then. This has to do with referential opacity or transparency. Correct? So do I take you to be saying that p in "Davidson said that p" may sometimes be used and sometimes be mentioned? I wouldn't resist that conclusion. I'm not sure that the same applies to belief.

In the case of belief, I think that substitutions are sometimes appropriate, even required, depending on the context of a) the believer's beliefs and b) my audience's beliefs. Specifically if the believer refers to an object in one way and the audience refers to the same object in a different way, substitution is needed to communicate accurately what the believer believes. (Roughly).

Around and around. Seems to me you talk as if the belief is something more than the behaviour, existing beyond that, until I push the point, then you agree with me that it isn't. — Banno

I think this is right. I think @Sam26 has confused an effect with a cause (link).

The scope of the belief statements surely makes explicit your quibble? — Banno

I'm going to let @Ludwig V take up your question about referential opacity, as I am somewhat pressed for time at the moment. I don't see Searle making any claims about the referential opacity of beliefs construed as first order relations, so I assume that's your thing.

And the quote form Searle seems to me to be making that point; that B(L,p) is somewhat inadequate, and that the belief is about the individual named "a" — Banno

Sure, I agree that Searle is saying that. I think I can see that better now.

What’s interesting to me is that Searle seems to be getting into the business of definitions and essences, much like Kit Fine in your other thread. To say that B(L,p) is inadequate is to say that there is some essence of belief that it misconstrues. Would you agree?

In your OP and elsewhere you seem to be implying that there is no real definition of belief, and formal logic merely models certain aspects of belief. This is on display in a recent comment:

It seems worth making the point that parsing natural languages into formal languages is not a game of finding the one, correct, interpretation. Rather one chooses a formalisation that suits one's purpose. — Banno

When Searle thinks of B(L,p) as inadequate he is then either claiming that it is an incorrect interpretation, or else that it does not suit his purpose. But I think he he saying the former. I think he is saying that the very nature of belief itself is obscured by B(L,p). But how can that be? Beliefs do involve a relation between the believer and a proposition. B(L,p) could easily be construed in a way such that it does not imply that the proposition is the object of the belief. In fact such a rendering would be quite useful if we are talking about beliefs from a strictly third-person vantage point, where we are concerned with the proposition rather than the object.* But according to Searle that rendering is itself inadequate and misleading. So it would seem that for Searle parsing natural language into formal languages really does involve finding the correct interpretation. Or more precisely, there are some interpretations that are more accurate than others, even when both interpretations are not false, and this implies an essence that underlies the inequality of the two interpretations.


* For example, when you say, "The statement sets out an aspect of the grammar of belief, as between an agent and a proposition" (), you are saying that this is a legitimate aspect of the grammar of belief, but at the same time you agree with Searle that presenting beliefs in this way tends to misrepresent them.

So I think you are saying that "I believe X but I do not know X" expresses a view about the certainty of, or evidence for, X - that certainty is less than complete, or that evidence is less than conclusive.

Is that something like what you meant? — Ludwig V

Yes, but this also implies something about the propositionality of the belief. When the certainty is less than complete or the evidence is less than conclusive, then the belief becomes more intentionally propositional.

For example, you made a distinction between a first order belief and a second order belief, where a second order belief "believes something of a proposition." Lack of certainty/evidence brings us towards a second order belief, although not in the highly abstract manner of Searle's example of Bernoulli's principle. Namely, the "object" of this sort of belief may be a proposition, unlike first order beliefs.

My point is that this introduces a new and rather large category of belief (i.e. beliefs for which we have a conscious lack of certainty or evidence). If we accept Searle's dichotomy between first order beliefs and highly abstract second order beliefs, then his conclusion that most beliefs are first order beliefs holds. I am wondering if we ought to question that dichotomy and introduce an intermediate category (or else question the proportion between the two halves of the dichotomy and note that the second category contains this other sort of belief, which in turn means that the second category contains more instances of belief than Searle had supposed).

https://eclass.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/PHS180/davidson_on_saying_that.pdf

It's obtuse, but he shows how to analyse "Galileo said that the Earth moves" into two sentences: "The Earth moves" and "Galileo said that." We can apply the same analysis to belief: "Galileo believes that the Earth moves" divides into two sentences: "The Earth moves" and "Galileo believes that."

For Davidson, this helps make clear the truth-functional structure of such propositional attitudes. His project was to interpret English into a first order language using by making use of t-sentence. For our purposes, this is another way of showing the incompleteness of the B(a,p) analysis and the opacity of "p".

To say that B(L,p) is inadequate is to say that there is some essence of belief that it misconstrues. Would you agree? — Leontiskos

No. Adding essence here doesn't make things clearer. It's just that there is an aspect that is shown better by other analysis. I don't see much point in thinking in terms of an "essence" of belief, but rather a family resemblance of uses around the word "belief" and various cognates.

What we are doing here is exploring some of those uses. I am not looking for an ultimate, correct and complete interpretation of belief in some formal language.

And I don't think Searle is, either.

As for how logic might best be understood, see the thread Logical Nihilism

No. Adding essence here doesn't make things clearer. It's just that there is an aspect that is shown better by other analysis. — Banno

If there is no essence, then what does it show better?

Remember your quote from Searle:

It is impossible to exaggerate the damage done to philosophy and cognitive science by the mistaken view that "believe" and other intentional verbs name relations between believers and propositions. — Searle, my bolding

If there is no essence, then what does it show better? — Leontiskos

The nature of belief... as a family resemblance.

To "It is impossible to exaggerate the damage done to philosophy and cognitive science by the mistaken view that "believe" and other intentional verbs name relations between believers and propositions" I might append "...in that they find themselves searching for that relation as if it were a thing in the mind, or worse, in the brain".

...it leads to the hypostatisation previously discussed.

It is legitimate to describe what belief does as a way of understanding what belief is. To describe an effect is not to describe the cause. That's the problem: ↪Sam26 says "beliefs are..." What he ought to say is, "the effects of beliefs are..." He is not talking about beliefs; he is talking about their effects. — Leontiskos

This is just a confusion as far as I can determine. The concept belief has various uses, one use is to say "Mary believes X" because Mary made the statement that she believed X. So what Mary believes is found in the expression of her statement. Another use of belief has to do with Mary's nonlinguistic actions. For example, we can conclude as Mary sits in a chair that she believes there is a chair available to sit in. So the meaning of the concept belief is tied to the various uses of the word in our everyday actions. Beliefs are tied to our actions (linguistic and nonlinguistic), which is how we determine what people believe.

There is no need to bring in any causal connection in this situation, and I haven't done so.

To "It is impossible to exaggerate the damage done to philosophy and cognitive science by the mistaken view that "believe" and other intentional verbs name relations between believers and propositions" I might append "...in that they find themselves searching for that relation as if it were a thing in the mind, or worse, in the brain". — Banno

But Searle isn't only saying, "That's bad." He is also saying, "This is better." Therein lies the trouble.

The nature of belief... — Banno

Then belief has a nature. From Jonathan Barnes:

Aristotle's essentialism has little in common with its modern homonym. Aristotelian essences are what John Locke called 'real' essences: the essence of a kind K is that characteristic, or set of characteristics, of members of K upon which any other properties they have as members of K depend. That there are essences of this sort is at worst a trivial truth (if all the properties of K turn out to be essential), and at best a plausible formulation of one of the fundamental assumptions of some branches of scientific inquiry: one of the things a chemist does when he investigates the nature of a stuff is to seek an explanation of its superficial properties and powers in terms of some underlying structure; one aim of the psychologist is to explain overt behaviour by means of covert states or dispositions. There is nothing archaic or 'metaphysical' about the doctrine of real essences: that doctrine merely supposes that among the properties of substances and stuffs some are explanatorily basic, others explanatorily derivative. I do not deny that there are difficulties with such a doctrine (it must at least answer the old rumblings of Locke); but I leave the reader to form his own opinion of their relevance and cogency. — Introduction to Posterior Analytics, by Jonathan Barnes, p. xiii

Presumably Searle is committed to the claim that his own construal of belief is more explanatorily basic than the one he repudiates, and that the superficiality of the construal he repudiates is inadequate to convey the nature of belief.

For example, we can conclude as Mary sits in a chair that she believes there is a chair available to sit in. So the meaning of the concept belief is tied to the various uses of the word in our everyday language. — Sam26

But your analysis betrays you. You are inferring a cause (<Mary believes there is a chair available to sit in>) from an effect (<Mary sits in a chair>). The belief is not the effect, and our everyday language reflects this. If someone asks you, "Do you know any of Mary's beliefs?," you would not say, "Yes, one of Mary's beliefs is sitting in a chair." According to everyday language this response wouldn't make any sense. A belief can be inferred from an action, but a belief is not an action. A belief is a state of mind, or as Searle says, an intentional state.

You want to focus on this relation between beliefs and actions, but it seems that in the process you have actually conflated beliefs and actions.

Yes. Separating a belief from the behaviours it explains is the sort of hypostatisation I would reject.

But your analysis betrays you. You are inferring a cause (<Mary believes there is a chair available to sit in>) from an effect (<Mary sits in a chair>). The belief is not the effect, and our everyday language reflects this. If someone asks you, "Do you know any of Mary's beliefs?," you would not say, "Yes, one of Mary's beliefs is sitting in a chair." According to everyday language this response wouldn't make any sense. A belief can be inferred from an action, but a belief is not an action. A belief is a state of mind, or as Searle says, an intentional state.

You want to focus on this relation between beliefs and actions, but it seems that in the process you have actually conflated beliefs and actions. — Leontiskos

I'm a Wittgensteinian at least to a large extent when it comes to language. If we want to understand what a belief is, then we look at various uses of the word in our language. It's not a matter of cause and effect, it's a matter of learning the correct use of the word across a wide range of contexts.

I like the way you put words in my mouth. If someone was to ask "Do you know any of Mary's beliefs?" - I certainly wouldn't say "Yes, one of Mary's beliefs is sitting in a chair." Obviously this is nonsense. I would say that the action or act of sitting in a chair shows Mary's belief that there is a chair in the room. Just as the act of stating her belief is a reflection of what she believes. Both actions are ways of referring to beliefs in our language.

Beliefs are states of mind, but they come out in our actions, either linguistic or nonlinguistic. The only way to know a person's state of mind is by their actions.

:up:

I would say that the action or act of sitting in a chair shows Mary's belief... — Sam26

But the difficulty is that you appear to be vacillating. Elsewhere you seem to want to claim that beliefs just are actions:

Again, so the ontology of belief refers to those things minds do in the world that can be said to be beliefs. — Sam26

("Things minds do that can be said to be beliefs," i.e. action = belief)

However, I would go further, viz., beliefs are relations between individuals and certain types of actions. — Sam26

Of course I can assent to the proposition that <Beliefs of others are only known through linguistic or nonlinguistic actions>. This is a claim about the epistemology of beliefs, not their ontology. Such a proposition does not get me to the conclusion that a belief is nothing more than a relation between an individual and an action, or that the epistemology and the ontology collapse into one another.

I don't know what exactly Banno has in mind with the hypostatization idea, but if we are to take everyday language as our guide then surely beliefs do have some sort of hypostatization. For example:

We know [a belief is not its effect] because one belief can cause multiple effects, and therefore a belief and its effect are not the same thing (even when it comes to thinking). — Leontiskos

For example, that I believe Bonabo is a gorilla explains both why I keep my distance and why I feed him bamboo shoots. It is the single belief which explains both actions, and thus beliefs must be hypostatized at least beyond actions.

the essence of a kind K is that characteristic, or set of characteristics, of members of K upon which any other properties they have as members of K depend. — Introduction to Posterior Analytics, by Jonathan Barnes, p. xiii

This is all a long way from anything I might be tempted by.

To deal with this we would have to look into what sort of thing an essential property of a kind might be, with all the modal complications that involves, then look to whether we can maintain a distinction between real essences and mere nominal essences within that modal structure, then look to all the issues surrounding natural kinds. Not just one minefield, but a series of them.

I don't see this approach as being of help here. It's a quagmire.

I don't see this approach as being of help here. It's a quagmire. — Banno

I must say, I do find the last few posts very difficult to follow. That's probably my fault. But to comment would likely be unhelpful.

Thanks very much for the pdf. I shall be busy for a while. I'm hoping that I shall at least understand referential opacity better.

Cheers. Don't feel obligated to respond to the article. As mentioned above, Davidson was seeking to interpret a natural language, such as English, using first logical, and so there was reason for him to tackle difficult cases, providing examples of how his project might proceed. This essay is an example of the sorts of methods he used. His project faded, not before showing some interesting strategies for dealing with recalcitrant utterances.

Truth conditional semantics implies that beliefs don't exist, for beliefs are teleological entities.

The meaning of belief-behaviour isn't reducible to it's effects, for obvious causal reasons. Objectively, the meaning of an agent's "beliefs" can only refer to their stimulus-response disposition, which is in turn explained causally without appealing to teleology.

When an external observer interprets a performing agent as having beliefs, those "beliefs" only exist in the prejudiced mind of the external observer who interprets the agent using normative teleological principles.

I won't feel obligated to respond here. It would be off-topic.

That was an interesting and clarifying post.

---

I don't see this approach as being of help here. It's a quagmire. — Banno

It seems to me that those who attempt to reject the old-school Aristotelian approach are often already presupposing the very things they putatively reject, only without realizing it. Of course you are right that if we wish to try to fit real essences into the straightjacket of modal relations we will be hard pressed. But this does not circumvent essences in our present conversation. If Searle says, "A is a better X than B,"* then he is already committed to the entailment that there is some essence of X that can be approximated with more or less success. That entailment cannot be avoided by pointing to difficulties that arise in accounts of essences. The only way to avoid it in our present context is to revoke the claim that A is a better X than B (simpliciter). Some philosophers do attempt such a maneuver.

* In this case X is an interpretation of belief

---



Do you have something like this in mind?

What is the proof that the possible practical consequences of a concept constitute the sum total of the concept? The argument upon which I rested the maxim in my original paper was that belief consists mainly in being deliberately prepared to adopt the formula believed in as the guide to action.

If this be in truth the nature of belief, then undoubtedly the proposition believed in can itself be nothing but a maxim of conduct. That, I believe, is quite evident.

But how do we know that belief is nothing but the deliberate preparedness to act according to the formula believed?. . . — Charles Sanders Peirce, The Maxim of Pragmatism

By considering belief as, "the deliberate preparedness to act according to the formula believed," Peirce avoids the problems I am pointing to in your account, and yet he seems to retain much of the motivation of that account.

I'm contemplating a thread about Davidson's project. It would be a long one.

:eyes:
Do it!

Do it!

Do it!

Do it!

That was an interesting and clarifying post. — Leontiskos

Yeah, does that. There's more going on here, though, as Davidson's truth-conditional semantics explicitly deals with beliefs. We'd have to get how he does this clear before concluding that he was wrong; that would be a substantial bit of work.

It seems to me that those who attempt to reject the old-school Aristotelian approach are often already presupposing the very things they putatively reject, only without realizing it. — Leontiskos

Seems to me those with a background in Aristotelian logic tend to view things through essentialist glasses. So:

If Searle says, "A is a better X than B,"* then he is already committed to the entailment that there is some essence of X that can be approximated with more or less success. — Leontiskos

looks to presuppose essence. You seem to be making use of some as yet unstated transcendental argument, along the lines of the only way one account is better than another is if it is closer to the essence...

And I don't think that works. But I will not pursue that here, not unless you are able to set out with much greater detail what sort of thing an essence might be. For my part, I'd more likely drop the term. Too much baggage.

I'm contemplating a thread about Davidson's project. It would be a long one. — Banno

Nagase is a great resource for Davidson. We'd be lucky if he had time to stop by.

Edit: I am now seeing that there are other threads on this topic, including a somewhat recent thread by Jamal. Perhaps I am just touching on something that has been discussed in detail. If so, I will try to read up on some of the older threads before commenting further.

You seem to be making use of some as yet unstated transcendental argument, along the lines of the only way one account is better than another is if it is closer to the essence... — Banno

How do you propose that we coherently claim that A is a better X than B if we have no determinate and normative notion of X? There is nothing "transcendental" here, only common sense.

But I will not pursue that here, not unless you are able to set out with much greater detail what sort of thing an essence might be. — Banno

The idea of essence is quite simple and intuitive. I don't think it is abstruse or "transcendental." Modern philosophers seem to think that if we don't have a crystal-clear conception of the essence of some thing then the notion of essence itself is a dead end. But I don't find this idea anywhere in Aristotle or his heirs such as Aquinas (i.e. they never believed that a nominal definition could perfectly capture the real definition or essence).

The basic idea is that there is a real essence, defined by a real definition, and the real definition is approximated by a nominal definition. So when someone says, "A is a better (definition) of X than B," they must be approximating some real essence with their nominal definition, A.

So if we take your interpretation of Searle then we get, "B(L, f(a)) is a better construal of belief than B(L,p)." Once we understand what a real definition and a nominal definition are, then this is just to claim that the nominal definition B(L, f(a)) better approximates the real definition of belief than the nominal definition B(L,p). If there is no real definition, then there can be no approximation or comparison.

Of course one might reply that there is no real definition of belief, and the meaning of the concept is purely stipulative. That might work in certain cases, but it won't suffice to uphold the final sentence of your quote from Searle:

It is impossible to exaggerate the damage done to philosophy and cognitive science by the mistaken view that "believe" and other intentional verbs name relations between believers and propositions. — Searle, my bolding

(This relates more directly to your thread on definitions, but I don't want to needlessly resurrect another thread.)

~~

The basic idea is that there is a real essence, defined by a real definition, and the real definition is approximated by a nominal definition. So when someone says, "A is a better (definition) of X than B," they must be approximating some real essence with their nominal definition, A. — Leontiskos

That's an extreme sort of realism. I don't see how you could maintain a differentiation between real and nominal definitions. Seems to me that all definitions are nominal; that is what definitions do.

As i said,

To "It is impossible to exaggerate the damage done to philosophy and cognitive science by the mistaken view that "believe" and other intentional verbs name relations between believers and propositions" I might append "...in that they find themselves searching for that relation as if it were a thing in the mind, or worse, in the brain". — Banno

I'm contemplating a thread about Davidson's project. It would be a long one. — Banno

I'm wondering whether the second sentence is a threat or a promise.

It would stretch my boundaries, but if one can't take risks here, where can one?

The article is interesting, but hard going.

For the thread, I would need to read slowly, so not too many pages at one go, please.

I'm contemplating a thread about Davidson's project. It would be a long one. — Banno

I encourage you and anyone else familiar with Davidson to do this.

I don't see how you could maintain a differentiation between real and nominal definitions. Seems to me that all definitions are nominal; that is what definitions do. — Banno

Yes, of course all material definitions are nominal. But if you don't admit the existence of real definitions (or at least essences) then you cannot say that A is a better X than B, and you are obviously committed to saying such a thing. That is, you cannot say that one nominal definition is better than another.

Or we could return to my original point and talk about essences, ditching the notion of real definitions. If you say there is no determinate and normative notion of X, then you cannot say that A is a better X than B. And if you say that there is a determinate and normative notion of X, then you are committed to an essence or nature of X. Whether or not you want to label this notion a real definition is not important.